How to Stir a Feeling
Once the Don and I went to a small hotel where the owner had just finished a refurbishment. He walked us along the corridors and talked about money. How much the new windows had cost. How they’d waited six months for the craftsmen. How he’d argued with the contractor over the tiles. I was waiting for a chance to put in a word about the laundry.
The Don listened in silence. Then he stopped by the window in the lobby and asked just one thing. “Who was the first to see it all finished?”
The owner went quiet. Then he smiled. He had. Early one morning, when the workmen had gone and the guests hadn’t yet arrived. He’d stood here alone, by this window, and for half an hour he couldn’t bring himself to leave. After that we talked about his father, who had built the hotel, about the sea, about his son, who didn’t want to take it on. Not a word about the price of laundry. He signed the contract a week later.
Afterwards I asked the Don why he’d needed to know that. The Don shrugged. “I didn’t. He had something to tell and nobody to listen. Everybody talked to him about the windows. Nobody asked him about that morning.”
The Don didn’t guess for the owner or put words in his mouth. He asked a dry question about a fact and fell silent. The owner brought out all the rest himself. A man remembers his own better than anyone else’s.
The Riddle with the Graveyard
The same door can be opened the other way too. Gambetta writes about a man in Sicily who was thought too curious. Someone phoned him and, without any preamble, asked whether he happened to know where the church of the Madonna del Riposo was. He politely said he didn’t. And then, in a panic, he found out that the church stood in the town cemetery. The “rest” in its name meant eternal rest.
Nobody threatened him. Not a word about death. He drew in the threat himself and was more frightened than any direct sentence could have made him.
Gambetta also cites objects. A metal heart, the kind given to churches in thanks for an answered prayer, was left on people at least twice in the 1980s. Both times the heart had been shot through with bullets. Salvatore Catania, who found one left at his back door, survived and told the story. Pasquale Gramaglia was killed a few days later.
Gambetta explains why such signs are convenient. They frighten more, and the sender risks less. No voice, no handwriting, nobody to overhear, no traces. A dark sign leaves an empty space. And the man fills it himself with the most frightening thing he has.
A Skull Is Faster Than a Word
At the beginning of the twentieth century the residents of New York’s Little Italy received letters demanding money. Dash describes how the demands were backed up with drawings. Skulls, revolvers, knives dripping with blood, pierced hearts. And a raised hand, drawn in thick black ink. It was after that hand that a journalist on the New York Herald christened the extortionists the Black Hand.
I think the drawing worked faster than the text. A man who could barely make out a letter understood a skull at once. A picture doesn’t ask to be read to the end. It goes straight to where fear lives.
Living with the Thing
Pictures can be peaceful too, and then they sell. In the early 1980s American psychologists went door to door offering cable television. Some people were simply told what was good about it. Others were asked to imagine themselves watching it at home. Then they counted who signed up. Among those who only listened, roughly one in five. Among those who imagined, nearly one in two. A man who has once lived with a thing in his imagination has half bought it already.
A Feeling for the Whole Street
Saviano tells of an evening they still remember in San Cipriano. He was small at the time, but his cousins swear they saw it all with their own eyes. At about six in the evening a dozen or so cars of the Schiavone clan drove slowly through the streets, past their rivals’ houses. Men sat right up on the car doors, with submachine guns, faces uncovered. They would stop and shout: “Come down, you bastards! Come out into the street if you’ve got the balls!” Nobody stopped them. The shutters of the shops and bars came down. “This ‘curfew’ stretched over two days.” People didn’t even go out for bread.
The shouting was aimed at the rivals. But the whole street became afraid. A feeling stirred in front of witnesses goes to every witness.
The rule works in the bright direction too. Once at a banquet our people ruined a restaurant owner’s tablecloth. The Don paid him right there in the dining room, in front of the guests, though he could have done it the next day. Forty people saw that the Family pays for its mistakes. That year we had no better advertising.
The Bottom Line
Done honestly, it looks like this. Ask a man what he’s proud of, and fall silent. Paint him only what will really be there; then he’ll finish the picture himself and won’t be disappointed.
Now how to tell when it’s you being stirred. If you suddenly see very vividly how happy you’ll be with this thing, and the seller is silent and smiling, check who painted that picture for you. And if instead of plain words you’re set a riddle, remember: it isn’t the caller who frightens you, it’s what you’ve drawn in yourself. Ask straight out what was meant. A riddle rarely survives a straight question.