There were two ways men became shadows: either because there were pending matters with the law or because of a problem to be settled with other private parties. If blood was then spilled, the shadow became either a “black soul” or a tingiùto, blacklisted, depending on whether they were expected to emerge from the conflict as victors, in the first case, or as victims.
Of the shadows who stayed with us during the war, I can remember two in particular: a tingiùto called Donato Porcino and a black soul by the name of Sante Motta.
Poor Donato’s father had refused to grant his daughter’s hand in marriage to a local crook, a malandrino, and the latter expressed his grievances by taking the woman by force and killing his would-be father-in-law. Donato swore revenge and was a tingiùto from that day forth.
He found doors were closed to him, even at the houses of friends and close relatives. Knowing that his father had been my mother’s godfather, he appeared at our house one night. We hid him in the mountains for months, unbeknownst to anyone, while trying to convince him to leave the region for a time; we wanted to send him to our friend in the North, another shadow. He insisted on going to his godfather in a neighboring village, a respectable person who would surely help him. We led him through the mountains and, when he was in sight of his godfather’s fold, he hugged us and thanked us with sincerity. I tried to plead with him one last time, offering to travel with him, but he replied that a man doesn’t bring trouble to his friends.
He was never seen again, thanks to his godfather.
The other shadow, Sante Motta, was the illegitimate son of an old malandrino who had lived a blessed life, with legitimate children born of his Christian marriage whom he dressed in expensive cotton clothes and sent off to school, sparing only what was left over for Sante. When times changed, and new and more ruthless godfathers came to replace the fat and lazy men of honor, Don Santoro got his lead bullet and met the prince of darkness. His legitimate heirs sold everything and moved far away to enjoy the fruits of the old man’s thirty years of dirty dealings. Only Sante heard the calling of the blood, and by force of gunfire he assumed his father’s place.
For years Sante led an almost hermetic life, trusting few. During his time in hiding, in addition to sowing death, he accumulated a great deal of wealth, being among the first to discover what could be had from drug money.
From Sante we inherited many things, good and bad: the AK-47 and the CZ-75, the Russian submachine gun and the pistol from the Czechoslovakian army, ultramodern weapons for that time and place, where the most anyone had ever seen was a Beretta or Franchi 12-gauge double-barrel; he opened our eyes to the malandrini and marred our souls by teaching us to kill. His mother, war widow of a foreign shepherd, lived in the country of her late husband in a land that overlooked the sea opposite ours and had five sons with five different men; she was the elder sister of my father, who had never forgiven her for her conduct—a product of poverty—and who had withdrawn his sympathies, bad blood he carried to his grave.
But Sante came to us because we were his blood. On account of his sister, my father was not, nor could he have ever become, a malandrino himself; at most he’d provide his services to the mafia.
Older folks referred to illegitimate children as mules, and said that God made them physically identical to their natural fathers to expose their sin to the world, that these children spent their lives proving they were better and more worthy of affection than legitimate children. And so it was.
But contrary to what everyone believed, Sante told us that his father had sent for him often, had been affectionate with him, and had shared all his wisdom, more than with his other children. The old boss knew he could be killed anytime. He told Sante, “If they get me, do something about it only if you want, and only do what you can do yourself without help. When you hit you have to do it before they know you’re coming; once you’ve gone down that road there is no return, because sooner or later an orphan will appear in your path, unless you have the courage to wean them from their mother’s milk. If you need to hide out, go to people who are considered to be of little value, they’ll feel ennobled and will never betray you. Avoid the malandrini, today they represent the cancer of our land. In their discussions you’ll find them wise, honorable, loyal, but in reality from the top down they are almost always cheaters, traitors, informants, and tragediatori.”
And Sante explained what a tragediatore was, according to his father’s definition: when a malandrino had an enemy he didn’t consider to be dangerous, he’d shoot him and do nothing to hide it. If his enemy was dangerous, he needed to be eliminated without consequences; it was therefore necessary to find someone else who would pull the trigger or who could take the blame. The malandrino would wait, sometimes for years, until the victim in question had a fresh conflict, during which he’d immediately strike; the relatives, blinded by grief, would unleash their hatred on the most recent enemy, forgetting the old grudges of the deceased, and then all remaining parties would annihilate each other, to the delight of the tragediatore. When this sort of scenario wasn’t possible, the tragediatore would circulate some bait, and when it found the right subject, the latter would make the hit; some unlucky dupe, convinced he’d freed the world of a crook, would find himself with a smoking gun in his hand and naturally take the fall.
With those teachings in mind, Sante hid his hatred and pain when his father died, even skipping his funeral, playing the part of an abandoned mule. He went on with his usual life for a time; then, with the excuse that he was off to seek his fortune, he said goodbye to everyone—including his father’s murderers—and left.
A few years later he returned, armed with a machine gun, and made four hits in a single day, another the next day, and one more the day after that. Within a month his ten targets were gone. He returned quietly and safely to the North, where he made his money, and every two or three months he’d come back to refresh the memory of his potential enemies.
One misty winter’s morning, when Sante was already famous in those lands and both my father and I were experts in our respective activities, he appeared at our fold with a Kalashnikov on one shoulder and a caliber 9 in his belt. He said, “Uncle, I need to stay here for a few days.” My father offered him some warm ricotta and made up the bed. And not out of fear.
Every two or three months Sante would come, don his work clothes and work hard, maybe harder than my father. He spoke little, stayed the week, took care of business, and left; as soon as we heard he’d arrived, Luciano, Luigi, and I would promptly set aside our schooling and looting for a trip to the mountains. Sante had become our God.
He always set us straight, pointing out how much the lives of our malandrino friends had improved, as new cars started to circulate and the first big buildings went up, while they did nothing but complain. Meanwhile the shepherds who helped them were beginning to get a taste of life in prison on Asinara.
Our love for our “friends” vanished and gave way to a bitter hatred. With Sante by our side, we found the strength to distance ourselves from the mafia.
Slowly, slowly, my father began to break away. Those guys tried to draw us back in with their tall tales, but they reluctantly understood the party was over, absorbed the blow and, with rancor in their bodies, moved on to other goat pastures. Still, their stench had invaded our homes, our beds, our hearts; Sante promised us that when the time was right, he’d give us a big job to do. My father went back to his goats, and we left his mountain retreat and returned to town.
We should have been more cautious: our old friends were watching us now that we had given them the boot. We’d learned that protecting ourselves against them was more important than watching out for the police; their livelihood depended on their control over us, as if it were a function they’d been granted by law. Every crime they learned about and which they hadn’t committed themselves was swiftly connected to a guilty party.
We took care—especi
ally with Luigi, who was a talker by nature—to keep our business hidden. We stopped going into town. But in spite of my and Luciano’s efforts, someone caught on. We had recently paid a visit to a nice watchmaker, and Luigi had insisted on keeping what we’d believed was a very simple watch, promising us that he would never wear it in public. But he couldn’t resist.
Luigi came home late one evening as I was going to bed; he was wound up—and wearing his watch, I noticed—about some card game at the bar.
“You were at the bar? Were you wearing your watch?”
“I’ll explain later, this is too important.”
He’d been playing cards, he said, and had gotten up to go to the bathroom. As he was coming out, he ran into the director of the post office, accountant Turi D’Ascola, who was a great gambler, womanizer, and judge of character—or so they said. The accountant, cursing his bad luck in the game, was in a rage so blind he nearly didn’t see Luigi. He let it slip that if he weren’t such an honest state official he’d go home, get the keys to the post office, and swipe from the safe those hundred million lire that were awaiting transport the following day.
We’d always been careful never to do any jobs in our town, but in those days, and for three eighteen-year-old kids, that kind of opportunity was irresistable. So we found ourselves camped out behind a hedge waiting for the return of the accountant, who, without too much resistance—albeit at gunpoint—led us inside his house to retrieve the keys to the post office.
Luigi and Luciano stayed back to keep the accountant’s wife and daughter company. I left by car with Turi D’Ascola. In half an hour I was back with the accountant and the money. We closed the hostages in the bathroom and, happy and incredulous at our easy luck, we sped away.
We hid the loot and in the morning went to school as usual. We tried to reproach Luigi for having gone against our recommendations but were too pleased with ourselves; and so, in the end, we went to the Valenciano to celebrate.
In the city, there were two places to lose your virginity, in the Baracche district or at the Valenciano. The Baracche district was a shantytown where the mature and foul-mouthed women worked; in a tangle of cats and sewers in the open air boys became men with whores who carried on heated arguments with their pimps and regulars while they worked. You were always left wondering whether the soggy thing you’d felt had been part of the female anatomy or, more likely, their torn stockings, which they often neglected to remove.
Five thousand lire—which included a case of the clap—and people went home happy.
The Valenciano, on the other hand, was a legendary hotel where well-heeled locals made love to exotic and beautiful foreign women. Twenty thousand lire a shot, a gentleman’s price.
When our pockets were full, we’d present ourselves to the concierge, who was used to seeing us and often granted us an encore. Even the women seemed happy to be with three handsome boys instead of the vicious old men and their noisy hernias.
When our euphoria wore off we told Luigi not to change his habits for a while and to continue to frequent the bar, as it turned out he’d been doing, we discovered, for months.
In the evening the countryside was in turmoil. A big hit, professional stuff, hundreds of millions of lire, those were the rumors. The malandrini chewed salt and cursed the Madonna of the Mountain.
It was also said that poor accountant D’Ascola, due to the fright of having six guns pointed at his head—because three bandits had held down his house and three more had dragged him to the post office—had fallen ill and was in a feverish state of confusion. After such an incredible trauma it was doubtful he would be able to return to work, given that he was already so old and close to retirement.
The next day we read the extensive report by the local correspondent in the Gazzetta del Sud: the morning before the event, the van used to distribute pension cash had suffered a mechanical failure at the start of its route. They couldn’t repair it right away, so they decided to leave the money in the safe at the post office under D’Ascola’s direction, postponing the remaining deliveries until the following day. Investigative sources had expressed their doubts, to no small degree, about the coincidence of the breakdown; the theory held that disloyal employees at the central office had plotted with the bandits, in league, of course, with the local underworld. The crushing loss amounted to one hundred and fifty million lire.
Now we were the ones chewing salt, because I was sure I had taken everything in that safe, but we were fifty million short of the figure cited in the paper.
We soon figured it out. Turi D’Ascola had a diabolical mind.
The accountant never went back to work, but retired early. With his leaving bonus he bought a vineyard to which he devoted himself entirely; he began to appear at the bar in the evenings again, but he no longer played cards, claiming he couldn’t concentrate and contenting himself with watching the others play instead.
He ran into Luigi by the bathroom again, looked at him with a spark in his eye and asked the time, leaving Luigi so uncertain as to how to interpret the question that the accountant flashed his own silver pocket watch, a gift from the state for his forty years of service.
To top it off, D’Ascola whispered, “Your father must have saved hard to buy you that Rolex on your wrist.”
Devil of an accountant, he had studied Luigi for months, how he dressed, how much he lost at cards, and when the Lord broke the delivery van he took it as a sign and immediately made his move; he brought fifty million lire to his house, cast the bait and waited for us in front of the garden, sure as the sunrise that we would show. And he secured for himself a more serene retirement.
Our old friends scratched their heads for months and eventually gave up, convincing themselves that it had been the work of out-of-towners.
In fact, they’d been duped on their own turf by three kids and an old scammer.
We widened the house. I now shared an entire room with only my little brother. The girls wept with joy when they found themselves sleeping in a room with five neat beds all in a row and a huge wardrobe where my mother began to store their clothes. This is basically all we’d wanted, a life of human beings and not of beasts. The girls wept harder when they saw the steaming water shoot from the showerhead and a shelf full of perfumed toiletries; we could say goodbye to the zinc tub. They were so happy that all five of them took our little brother and groomed him like a pig at Christmastime. In the evening they pampered my father and competed to see who could cut his nails, which were deformed by fifty years of hard work. He looked at me for an eternal instant before letting himself be kissed by the girls. I could have died in that moment with the certainty that my life had meant something. And, with the money from our small jobs, he made life better for that whole wrinkle where we three friends had been raised, two yellow barracks opposite each other with space for sixteen families.
The hit on the post office became an instant legend throughout the region and represented a turning point in our criminal careers. Until then we’d been poor boys trying to escape misery, believing that we had a right to a different future. Anything could have gotten in our way. From that day on, however, we had the conviction that we would be able to build our own destiny; at first, all we wanted was some cash, but from that point onward we aspired to be downright rich. We were destined to reach unimaginable heights, but if we’d known what else was in store for us, we never would have pursued them.
We were just entering our final year of high school, and that million-lire heist had shattered our inhibitions. We became voracious birds of prey. Our monthly hits became weekly, and the pressure was mounting. We needed to collect as much money as possible so we could enroll in university and move to Milan; we wanted to arrive in comfort, not as peasants.
During our graduation year we spent every Sunday in the mountains at my father’s fold, which had become a paradise now that the malandrini were gone. I loved to milk th
e goats, to feel the tickle of their tails on my face. I was becoming like my father—I knew every part of the mountain, I took endless walks. Ever since our livelihood had ceased to depend on milk and meat, the mountains had become beautiful to me.
The countryside was a vast expanse of territory, all mountains. The migrations had swept up most of the shepherds, who took blue-collar jobs in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Turin, or Milan. There were fewer and fewer families of breeders, the pastures were ample and the mountains free, abandoned by the landowners.
Each shepherd chose his pasture in agreement with the others, and this became his kingdom. My father had two folds, the summer fold at the highest peak and the winter fold in the most protected valley in the foothills. One was at a height of 6500 feet above sea level, the other zero, though it was a good distance from the coast. He had woods of firs, oaks, beeches, wild pear trees; he had pinewoods, expanses of broom, fields of heather, tangles of holm oaks and brambles.
And now that our pockets were full, in the absence of anxiety I regarded those mountains with joy and even found pleasure in them.
In the summer we took backpacks, tents, sleeping bags, shotguns, and fishing rods, loaded up food, and roamed everywhere. It was like a long party, starting in the morning with fishing, when we’d fill the plastic containers with crickets to use for bait and place them at the edges of the waterfalls, casting long lines into the ponds that formed at the foot of the deep cliffs, and filling our baskets with huge brown and rainbow trout.
After fishing, we’d plunge into the frigid water completely naked, bake under the sun and shoot the shit, sparing ourselves any hard topics.
As always, Luciano took care of the cooking, preparing sauce with flaked trout and tomatoes, more trout roasted on the grill, and bruschetta with oil, tomatoes, garlic, and chili peppers. We ate and drank until we were stuffed. Coffee was my specialty.
Black Souls Page 2
