After a healthy nap, we’d forage for the mushrooms that popped up like clockwork after every summer rain. We collected them gingerly, placing them in wicker baskets so they could release their spores onto the ground, allowing more to grow—the delectable Caesar’s mushrooms, which sprouted like ripe persimmons among the mountain stones, and the parasol mushrooms, with their nutty flavor.
At dusk we waited for the hares and wild boars to come out to feed, then we would grill them when the hunt was fruitful, and in the middle of the night we’d walk arm in arm, howling at the wolves that were out hunting wild goats. In those times we could feel how much we needed each other. We loved one another dearly, and Luciano gave me proof of this his whole life, since I was the only person he had in this world—besides his poor mother, who would soon abandon him.
At night we hunted dormice, illuminated on the oaks under our large gas lamps, cleaned them with ash, and threw them in the ragù for our spaghetti.
We could survive months in the woods without wanting for a single thing.
When the heat became unbearable we’d spend our afternoons asleep in our spaceship. At the foot of the mountains, there was a fork produced by the confluence of two streams; just where the torrents met there was a huge white stone that the water had brought to the surface and molded over the centuries, the base of which was made of a rock blade that the streams had sharpened from either side; above the blade, which served as a pedestal, the rock widened to form a kind of cube, at the center of which was a hole; inside was something like a room, a small one, open on two sides parallel to the current, where part of the boulder formed the shape of a table. This rough-hewn catafalque was crowned with the vague figure of a lion.
During the month of August, this was the coolest place that existed, even when the sun was at its zenith. After some time inside, you had to cover yourself: a constant chill ran through the cave like breeze from a fan, perpetually blowing.
The bed in the rock fit all three of us at the same time. We sat on it and, refreshed from the cool air, we’d look down where the landscape opened up to the sea in the distance. It seemed to float in the sky.
It was a place of indescribable fascination that, to an untrained eye, could have appeared man-made; but anyone who knew about the architectural ability of water would have known that the stone had been carved by the river.
The place emanated magic, and we often had interesting encounters there.
Every now and then some local scholar, convinced that the past had descended from those mountains and that they had housed great civilizations, would appear with a group of other scholars whom the former had managed to persuade to visit the rock; the group would arrive full of enthusiasm and, after a quick glance at the artifact of interest, be taken in by the savage beauty of the surrounding nature and lose all interest in archaeology. Then they would take advantage of their local guide, who saw signs of ancient splendor all around them, by having him escort them around on what would become a wonderful holiday at the expense of some institution or university.
One of these expeditions surprised all three of us out of our deep slumber on the stone table. Luckily, our tent with all our gear was well camouflaged in a nearby gorge. The committee, which had come from a university in Rome, seemed pleasant enough, so we tagged along. Luciano followed behind the archaeologists, eager to impart his already vast wealth of knowledge, while Luigi and I stuck by an older, savvy geologist, whom we led around to study the local nature.
After a week Luciano had absorbed all their Roman knowledge, the geologist had gorged herself on natural wonders, and we said goodbye, all happy and satisfied with the wonderful holiday. The only disappointed one was the local scientist, whose supposedly incredible discoveries had been rejected.
My father and I had explored every corner of that land, and aside from some interesting finds from the previous century pertaining to the old brigands or World War II paraphernalia, we’d never seen anything truly ancient or immediately identifiable, though in reality there were a lot of strange things off the easily accessible trails, in places that only the shepherds knew.
Luciano told us all about his discoveries; he was a born storyteller, and when the mood struck, he would launch into a tale. Even Luigi, who was only attracted to material and practical things, would become enthralled.
Luciano always began by posing questions that he went on to answer himself: “What does your father get from goat’s milk? Cheese and ricotta, same as the primordial shepherds. How many different wines did our farmers make? One red that would knock you out after one sip. What do our craftsmen do with heather? They tie the tufts together to clean pans and make little spoons with the root.”
He’d provide us with examples ad infinitum: every type of mushroom and plant we ate, the possible uses of this or that. Then he would conclude: “We are at the dawn of history, we are in the butthole of the world and we think we’re at the center, no one has ever passed through here but some lost jerk.” Other times he’d conclude that our land had been inhabited by a great people who died with their swords in hand, leaving behind only those who surrendered—the worst kind of people—and we are their descendants.
I didn’t wonder much about the past, but I had learned something from that unforgettable Roman geologist, who had explained to me that in antiquity, all those mountains had formed a vast and fertile plateau, inhabited by an indigenous Oscan people with subtle traces of Greek. It had been the epicenter of many great natural catastrophes—only some of which had been documented, such as the terrible earthquake of 365 BC that destroyed entire Mediterranean cities—that fractured the land, leaving it in its current state. Other floods, epidemics, and earthquakes followed in 1683, 1703, and 1908. The only certain and historically documented inhabitants were the Basilian monks, ancient missionaries of Christ who taught a little agriculture and the gospel to the vulgar pagan populations. As was plain in the etymology of our names, we were at most the progeny of bellicose and uncivilizable Oscan hunters and shepherds.
It wasn’t much of an explanation for why we lived the way we did, but back then it was enough for me. My interests were directed elsewhere.
At the end of the summer leading up to our last year of school, Sante reappeared, in need of rifles, which we went about procuring in the usual way.
Every now and then the mountain would flood with hordes of barbarian destroyers: from August to November came the mushroom foragers, first for the Caesar’s mushrooms and then for the black porcini of the oaks, the white ones of the pines, and the yellow ones of the holm oaks. Big vans would arrive, packed with men and women who filled plastic bags that they emptied into crates, and when they were done foraging they would stuff themselves with the food they’d brought and set off for the markets to sell their precious goods. They left all sorts of trash behind: plastic bags, empty bottles, paper. From April to July the fishermen arrived, almost never with fishing rods, but with bags of yew, cyanide tablets, hand-made bombs, and electrodes with generators. They poisoned the streams with the cyanide and the yew, which was a mortal toxin when dried and cut into thin strips. They took the biggest trout, letting the others float downstream to the sea, belly up. They placed bombs in the deepest pools of water, causing landslides; they immersed the electrodes in the smaller puddles, which immediately brought every form of life contained therein to the surface. From September to January, the hunters made their bold entrance, with filled cartridge cases that they discarded in the woods as they emptied, shooting anything that moved—including goats, cows, pigs, and sometimes even their own companions—then bragging about their exceptional bounty back in the city.
In addition to sullying the nature, this circus of characters, with the rare addition of guardians of public order and politicians, would slip off the trails and get lost in the most unexpected places, to the exasperation of those who lived in the mountains. The punishment that we normally inflicted on m
ushroom foragers and fishermen was to arrange it so that when they returned with the prey they had carried for miles, they would find their vehicles perched atop four pine logs.
The hunters, our favorite prey, descended from the mountain having been lightened of their rifle cartridges and wallets. When Sante made his request for rifles, we happily repeated our exploits, though on a much grander scale this time, visiting a dozen groups and hauling away more than twenty guns on our donkey’s back. We’d gone too far, but it couldn’t be undone.
The next morning, with the others safe in the thick of the woods, my father and I curded the cheese as we waited for the arrival of the men from the state. They presented themselves on time, but instead of the usual ironic face of Marshal Palamita, the assiduous patroller of goat pastures, we were met with the hard expressions of two of Don Peppino Zacco’s soldiers.
The young thugs were arrogant in addressing my father, whom they informed that Don Peppino wanted him to know we weren’t the masters of the mountain who could do whatever we pleased, that there had been important people among the hunters who’d been robbed, so we had to help the cops get the rifles back, and fast.
“Why don’t you offer some ricotta to our friends, Uncle?” said Sante, appearing behind us.
The two picciotti grew pale, took their seats, and ate in silence.
“Tell my friend Peppino I’ve had a son who I named after his late friend. We’re celebrating him here at my uncle’s tomorrow. If he wants to honor us with his presence we’ll kill a goat,” Sante said, dismissing them before they’d finished their ricotta. They left without saying a word.
The next day we killed the goat, a large, meaty wether, left it to boil, and waited for the arrival of Don Peppino. In his place came a picciotto, hardly older than a boy, bearing his friend’s apologies to Sante. By mere coincidence, that very morning the cops had served Zacco with a surveillance warrant which would prevent him from leaving the village for a couple of years. Zacco also had the picciotto tell us that we had done well to disarm those nosy hunters who went around without asking permission. And not only that, but he sent a necklace with two golden horns to protect the child from bad luck.
Sante sent his appreciation and gave the boy a sack containing the horns of the goat, “because my friend Peppino,” he said, “is cursed by the evil eye.”
Just after the boy left, the marshal of the carabinieri, Rosario Palamita, appeared at the sheepfold. He sat down at the table and helped himself to food, enjoying his lunch and conversing with my father about livestock and mountains. His father and his father’s father had both been shepherds in Agrigento. All the while, he spoke with a wistful expression on his face.
Palamita represented the good-natured side of the state, which rarely veered out of bounds; he was prodigious with his sound advice, a good family man whose eye never wandered, but woe to anyone who exchanged conniving winks with him, lest he turn back into a carabiniere.
As the elders always said, “Carabinieri eat and drink but never sleep.”
He left, grateful for lunch, and when he was a distance away he turned back to offer Sante his best wishes for the child. Then he got into his jeep and disappeared.
“That’s the second toad they’ll have to swallow,” my father said, worried. He wasn’t referring to the police.
To cheer him up, Sante and Luciano conducted a memorable sociology lesson based on Sante’s father’s teachings and his experience in the field, and on Luciano’s study of books and newspapers, plus his intuition and direct knowledge about some of the characters.
Their theories coincided perfectly and enriched each other.
This was more or less the story: there were only one or two true malandrini in each region whose identities were known to the public. Perfectly anonymous in the beginning, they became known and feared in small communities because they were subject to continuous inspections by the responsible authorities. They were often protagonists in the accounts of the local journalists, who pointed to them as possible authors of terrible crimes, and they could be seen passing through the streets of the town with their house arrest travel permits, on their way to sign themselves in on the register of individuals under surveillance. They would get arrested, but only for a few days or months, and were then banned from traveling for a time. And with all that, they suddenly found themselves enjoying the fear and consideration of everyone on a level that was out of proportion with the real danger they posed—with a criminal reputation that was induced, suggestive, constructed, in good or bad faith. These characters would go on to co-opt young men, taking care to pick the most impressionable ones.
A close look at the personal stories of the most famous malandrini revealed that they had ruled their small territories for decades. They enjoyed comfortable lives, spending a year or two in bed with the wives and daughters of naïve associates, another year or two in their local prisons, tended to and venerated by young recruits who, betrayed by lowlifes and informers, spent decades locked up with their lips sealed, faithful to the blood oath they’d taken with conviction. And in the end, after having lived the best possible lives permitted by their environment and abilities, and having grown too old to perform their roles and functions, they would disappear from the scene, either deliberately or not. With a bang, finished off by their successor’s lead bullet, or condemned by a prosecutor intent on ensuring that evildoers spent their twilight years in jail.
It was seldom that these characters were succeeded by their own offspring, because their children grew up wearing cotton and were more inclined to become quiet and respected professionals. Acolytes were chosen from the most marginalized environments, outcasts who possessed a rebellious spirit and a need for attention. Once they had spilled their initiation blood into the circle, the unripe picciotti underwent a transformation, including a physical one, becoming in their speech and manner wise sixty-year-old men, and provoking the derision of savvier soldiers. They dedicated themselves entirely to serving their boss, who was an expert at life, pandering to each picciotto’s inclinations and abilities.
The real malandrini were ruthless, and although they cloaked themselves in completely amoral and falsely benevolent principles, their souls, which they had sold to the devil or whomever else, had fetched a steep price. Each one represented another opportunity to steal and exploit, even their own. Among their followers, the ones with no street smarts lost their lives or freedom, the slightly more astute retired in good order, and the wisest changed their lives and moved on.
But the godfathers certainly weren’t stupid, and they knew their army was as strong as paper. When one troublemaker rebelled, the old foxes were merciless, but they showed restraint when the stray dogs were more numerous and consolidated, and instead surreptitiously plotted a tragedy, which they carried in their genetic design.
To feel secure, the bosses had to know everything. Every incident had a guilty party, not necessarily a responsible one, that was the rule, and the new affiliates had to report to the barracks before the blood from their initiation ceremony had dried on the blade that pierced their finger.
In short, the only dangerous malandrini were the bosses, who played with two decks of cards; they represented the anti-state while remaining at the service of someone who worked for the state. Which is why, as long as we were united, strong, and careful, we were untouchable. One moment of weakness, real or apparent, would have destroyed us.
When Sante and Luciano had concluded this lesson, I poured another round of my famous coffee. My father went to attend to the goats in their fold, and we hid the weapons we’d taken from the hunters.
The fold was governed according to ancient rules and in Spartan style. There was a cottage, a pigsty, and a fence. The cottage was a low stone structure covered with small Roman tiles. It opened into a single room for cooking, eating, and sleeping. The ceiling height didn’t exceed five and a half feet, and a few centuries earlier
could have accommodated people standing upright, or almost; even modern shepherds were still as crooked as tree trunks. The single room had a hearth in a corner, the earthen floor of which was staked out with two forked poles in the ground that supported a pot for milk called a caccamo. On the floor there was a bed of broom, and from the support beam there hung ladles, curd breaking sticks, perforated boards and woven reed baskets for straining cheese, and all the other tools of a shepherd.
The cottage was surrounded by a fence to keep out the animals.
The pigsty was built at the bottom of a slope with beams stuck horizontally into the earth and supported at their loose ends by forked poles. The three sides that were not made of earth were closed in by dry stone walls with a single central door. Above, to cover the roof, they dumped humus from the undergrowth, which became impermeable when compressed. In front of the door stood a trough, which was filled with whey and stale bread every morning. A pig’s diet was enriched with acorns and chestnuts just before slaughter; once a day it would emerge to eat and go back inside when satisfied.
The enclosure for the goats was fenced in by a succession of half-buried stakes, tied together; within the enclosure was a shelter built following the same method used for the pigsty.
The shepherds never built near a spring, their need for water being limited, as the beasts drank when grazing and their keeper with them. The goatherd never washed up; it was sufficient to wipe the inside of the crockery with whey, using tufts of heather in the winter and bunches of fern in the summer.
Shepherds hated comfort and modernity; they lived at the dawn of the world, without a care for the likes of Galileo, Leonardo, Marconi, the Savoys or the Bourbons, or even il Duce.
Against my father’s resistance, we managed to modify the cottage; but my father did not let us touch the pigsty, and especially not the goat enclosure. In its former state, the cottage hadn’t allowed us to stand up straight, and at night you had to decide whether to stay inside with the fleas and ticks and asphyxiate yourself with the smoke, or go out in the cold and count the stars with the goats until dawn; either misery was only bearable by continuously alternating it with the other.
Black Souls Page 3
