Our changes were radical. We divided the room in two; we raised the walls, adapting them to the needs of the modern homo erectus; we covered the sleeping corner with chestnut boards and set up beds with mattresses; we opened an alcove in the wall to form a kind of bay, positioning the hearth practically outside; we outfitted it with pot racks, built a tool shed, and piped in water with a 750-yard-long rubber hose.
We renovated that place until it was almost worthy of the Middle Ages. And my father, happier than ever before, said to me, “I spent my money well sending you to school.”
We also found a more permanent and practical arrangement for our weapons. Using the donkey, we began to hide them, keeping them a considerable distance from the fold. With a barbed wire fence as our reference, we started from the bottom of the hill and worked our way up the slope, digging oblong holes every hundred steps. Inside each hole we placed a plastic pipe containing a pair of firearms and their corresponding ammunition. We inserted the weapons, slathered in military grease, into inner tubes tightly bound on both sides, and then placed them inside larger pipes used for drainage. Before we buried them, we sealed the containers with rubber caps coated in hydraulic glue. This system guaranteed their perfect conservation for years to come.
Malandrini and shepherds, on the other hand, hid their weapons by wrapping them in cloth, then an endless number of plastic bags, and stashing them in hollowed tree trunks or dry stone walls, only to find the cloth was wet and the weapons rusty; they failed to realize this was the result of the small amount of air that got trapped inside the bundles, which immediately condensed onto the cloths and moistened the weapons.
For those who carried arms for reasons other than lugging around extra weight, it was essential that they were in perfect condition. As Sante always warned us, “When the time comes you can’t just say, ‘Hang on, let me fix this one thing.’”
We finished burying the arms at dusk. Luciano hadn’t lifted a finger, as usual; he always dodged physical labor, which was tougher than he was. He was good at everything, but he had no stamina.
Luciano’s stint at the Forestry Department, a public agency that hired seasonal labor to do reclamation work in the mountains, had become the stuff of legend in the region. Seven hundred thousand lire for two months. Luciano’s mother, concerned about her son’s apathy, and to get his nose out of his books, put him up for the job without telling him. Her son reported to work to appease her, but only for that season.
It was hard work, eight hours under the sun and 140 kilometers of travel a day, round trip. Unlucky, he found himself building dry stone walls to stop landslides, working on a team under the most feared supervisor on site, Leo Spanna, an SS sniper type, just over five feet tall, who compensated for his height by wearing a pair of tall muck boots, puffing out his chest, and walking on his toes. Everyone called him the Blowhard, and he put on airs of being a real gangster, though at his height he could have only qualified as half a gangster at most. In reality he wasn’t even that; he just tyrannized everyone, held them under the whip and used the power of the pen to reduce their working hours when they needed a bathroom break.
Like all the new blood, Luciano was used as a mule. He was tasked with bringing stones for the wall from the top of the hill to the master builders at the bottom in a basket on his shoulders. He was to descend with the loads, then go back up, again and again, all day long. On his third trip it occurred to him that it might be easier to roll the stones than to carry them on his shoulders. And so he did.
This triggered a frantic flight at the bottom of the hill, and an intervention from the Blowhard; upon hearing Luciano’s explanation, he began to think the boy had a screw loose. So he took pity and gave him a less strenuous task. Luciano now set off with two large buckets to be filled with drinking water for the others who were laboring under the sun. After some time passed, when their throats were parched and the Blowhard was on the verge of exploding with unspeakable threats, the water-carrier finally appeared, holding only the handles of the buckets.
For Leo Spanna this was the proof that the student was off his rocker.
To avoid disruption at the construction site, the Blowhard, who became unexpectedly tender—defender of imbeciles that he was—brought poor Luciano into a grove of young pines that had just been planted several years before, took a small ax, and with gestures and plenty of examples, explained how to prune the trees’ lower branches to make them grow faster. The supervisor departed, his heart aching, leaving his protégé to prune the pines.
At the end of the day, the Blowhard, whistling, strolled by to check Luciano’s progress. His screams were so loud that everyone feared the worst. What terrible misfortune could have transpired?
The workers and supervisors came running to find Luciano laughing at the top of his lungs in a massacre of pines, all of which he had felled, and the Blowhard cussing out every saint on the calendar.
Later, after everyone had calmed down, Luciano explained that he was just fixing an ugly sight. The Blowhard didn’t read between the lines at first, and approached Luciano to comfort him, at which point Luciano could no longer hold back his laughter. Then the wannabe gangster finally got the joke and blew a gasket; the only thing that saved Luciano was the ax in his hand and the intervention of the two real gangsters who had been hiding in the bushes enjoying the scene.
For months, the other supervisors would mock Spanna—the other laborers didn’t dare—by shouting to him: “Do you have a good pruner you can send me?”
That was Luciano’s first and only work experience, because after that his mother went to the employment office and removed him from the roster of jobseekers.
After Sante, Luigi and I had buried the weapons, we finally realized Luciano had passed the time lying on a carpet of green ferns, beaming. “Let’s hope you did a good job,” he said, noticing our accusatory looks. As soon as he opened his mouth, our hands automatically reached down to grab our sweaty groins, a gesture to ward off bad luck, since that wouldn’t have been the first time Luciano had jinxed us with his comments.
Sante and Luciano were both good by nature, the kind of people who go through life needing the stimulus of a mission to accomplish, because otherwise they’d have succumbed to the bottle, a needle, or a speeding train. Sensitive souls with lightning minds, they each found a cause that could silence their screaming consciences: for Sante, it was dutiful vengeance in the name of his father; for Luciano, it was the pursuit of my economic prosperity, and that of my family and our wrinkle.
They were caught up in a destiny that wanted to devour them both. Sante had started to wise up, but Luciano was totally absorbed in his pursuit of my well-being. Both of them were not just the executioners but the victims of whatever they did. They were like all idealists: immersed in shit of their own making, yet somehow still candid and immaculate as lilies.
Paradoxically good and evil souls, superior minds who had followed deceptive masters because of a congenital fragility, Sante chased after his father and Luciano pursued me. They would have traveled through hell for the affection they craved, bereaved children that they were.
Those who are intrinsically good become unstoppable, like bullet trains, when they know they are right. They were like that.
Luigi wasn’t. He was a cynic by nature, the runt of a sizeable litter, fighting to beat the others to the trough. His life was a race to the whey, to food, driven by an insatiable hunger. We didn’t know it back then, but we were his Trojan horse. We came first in his order of affections, even above the mother who bore him, but he wouldn’t have given up his food for us either. Woe to anyone who releases their hold on a bridle they once held tight.
Sante wanted to make us strong, so he invited us along on a bloody mission and we eagerly followed. We passed that last threshold of human compassion, interrupting a lively card game and leaving the two picciotti on the ground, taking with us the smell of gunpowder a
nd the taste of the blood that had spattered our faces. In the distance we could hear the torment of their mothers and sisters, pursuing us down a road with no return.
After that, we saw no ghosts. None of us woke up screaming in the middle of the night. On the contrary, we passed blissfully into another dimension; we felt as if we were on a plane above everyone else, masters of their destinies. And a few months after the summer that changed everything, I repeated the experience, alone this time.
Contrary to what he’d told Don Peppino Zacco’s picciotti who had come to demand the return of the weapons we’d stolen, Sante did not have a newborn son. In fact, his son was turning eighteen in November, and Sante had invited me to celebrate. This is how I found myself alone at the central train station in Milan. Following Sante’s instructions, I took tram number thirty and got off at Porta Ticinese. Luigi had told us that in Milan people got around on these things called trams, little trains that moved on rails. It had already been decided that the following year, after graduation, we would go live there. This is also why I had gone, to get to know the city.
I found Sante’s house on the Navigli and was swept up in the preparations for the party. I met his wife, a Milanese blonde who was a social worker for the city. His son, the spitting image of his mother, didn’t speak Calabrese but only Italian and with a curious “r” sound that I heard for the first time.
They made me feel like family and took me shopping at Standa, at Rinascente, at Peck for goat meat. I returned home so drunk, dizzy, and loaded with gifts that it felt as if the party had been for me.
They seemed like a happy family, and I was happy with them. It was nice to eat with them, along with all their friends, including the little girlfriend of Santoro Motta, the birthday boy. Everyone tried to make sure I was comfortable.
Sante’s friends were nice; they talked about legal systems, universal problems, politics. They ranted about our wasteful consumerist society, which could have saved thousands of human lives with what it was throwing out. They tried to involve me in their debates. I nodded and lowered my eyes. How removed they were from our world, I thought.
The day after my arrival, we went out alone, Sante and I, reverting to the mountaineers we’d always been, speaking dialect and back to our usual shit, which we were still unable to smell.
There were times in my life when I was full of doubt, and that’s when I’d stop to observe people I met, the ones who seemed normal to me, and wish with all my heart that I could have their same thoughts, their small problems, their lives. These moments, however, were like the shadows of passing clouds, and I’d immediately get back on my bullet train. I was fulfilling the plans I’d made for myself.
I’d gone up to Milan for several reasons.
The man who’d killed Luciano’s father was Antonio Sbarra, also known as Totò the Blade, after his habit of carrying a knife everywhere, which everyone in the village knew about.
Luciano’s father, a staunch socialist, former secretary of the local section of the United Socialist Party of Italy, had managed to get himself hired with the help of the party as a municipal messenger in a village close to ours. When he wasn’t working, he dedicated himself to the small farm he’d received as his new wife’s dowry.
And it was near that very place that his pregnant wife found him on a warm August evening, belly up, eyes to the sky, the flies and ravens already making a meal of him. He had been on the ground in a puddle of his own blood since morning.
The assassins had been particularly attentive to the poor man’s nether regions, to the extent that people began to whisper that there must have been an affair. They gave the mother-to-be compassionate looks, even if everyone did their speculating behind closed doors.
During the period of public mourning, the police were delicate, presenting themselves to search her house, informing her that she was entitled to appoint a coroner for the impending autopsy. After that, the state and the police disappeared, leaving the widow to chastely await her eternal reunion with her husband.
Some time after the fact, Totò, the man rumored to have been the executioner, moved to Turin, where he was said to have made a great deal of money on numerous kidnappings.
At my secret behest, Sante traced him.
Totò had a nice bar in the Porta Palazzo area. Sante and I passed by it a couple of times, and then he waited for me in the car. At closing time the employees said goodbye and quickly escaped the cold of winter by climbing onto packed commuter buses.
A stocky, middle-aged man lowered the shutter, calm as he could be. He lit a cigarette and walked away. He gave off an air of satisfaction. I knew a lot about him. He lived in a nice house near the bar; his sons were attending university and doing well. From his wife, a quiet woman from the South, he required no more than food on the table, obedience, and freshly-laundered clothes. And she, brought up to comply, fulfilled her husband’s wishes, which she considered just. Diversions between the sheets were another matter for Totò, who procured them from a Turinese woman whom he kept in an elegant apartment on Corso Francia. A warm bed always awaited him after dinner.
Totò the Blade blissfully strolled home, taking his usual route, believing that everyone had forgotten about the nobody he’d left on the ground with his stomach ripped open so many years before.
I walked slowly in front of him. He passed me, whistling, then stopped short: crooks can always sniff each other out. He turned around, knife in hand, and understood that it would be useless. Without altering his demeanor, he said: “Did you go to the trouble of leaving the Aurora just for me?”
“It was no trouble, I had other things to do,” I replied.
“They told me you had grown, Luciano,” he said.
“I’m not Luciano, but it’s all the same,” I said through my teeth.
He was not afraid and died with a bullet from a 357 Magnum between his eyes. The other four bullets devastated his crotch. I put my hand in my pocket, pulled out a handful of peanuts, and sprinkled them over his body.
I read the regret in his eyes: “Now, after so much effort, now that I’m no longer a pauper.” His plate and bed were growing cold. Totò would be late that evening.
I left him there, a son of the Aspromonte, to stain the sidewalks of the North.
They called us the “children of the forest,” we descendants of the people who had inhabited the woods of the Calabrian massif for millennia, we who’d transformed it into a place of evil, we who’d given up the Aspromonte to conquer another world.
“Our kidnapping work is about to end,” Sante told me after we were back in Milan.
The state could no longer bear the idea of its rich taxpayers visiting our mountains and fattening up the malandrini and shepherds on their ransoms. Instead, the state was offering the children of the Aspromonte new and easier ways to make money. Soon, all the shepherds’ children would move to the North to sell drugs. Our fathers had driven away an entire generation of entrepreneurs, economic pioneers who might have effected a shift in the country, urbanizing masses of peasants, generating prosperity and modernity, and allowing us to glimpse a different future. The fruit of their labor had been yielding a more liberated population of former ditch-diggers and budding proletarians.
Those northern entrepreneurs, however, overestimated themselves, and we, the presumed beneficiaries of their economic revolution, who were much more determined and focused, forced them under their own yoke, imprisoned them in the mountains, and took them for all they were worth.
“Our fathers stopped them,” Sante said. “We’re going to use their own money to burn down their children’s future . . . And ours, too.”
Sante stopped talking and showed me the work he’d been doing lately.
He counted out six million lire on the kitchen table, put it in a paper bag, and we left. At the bar we drank a coffee—sludge compared to the coffee I made in the mountains, he admitted
. Sante waited for a table to free up and went to sit with a Sicilian, exchanged a few words, left the bag, and walked away with an envelope. We took the tram and went into another bar. Sante sat down, I drank another coffee, and we left with a different envelope. Then, at his house, on the kitchen table, he counted out nine million lire. These were the Milanese heists that the Calabrians were about to monopolize, he explained, adding that “the Slavs and the blacks bring in women to comfort the same guys from Milan we used to imprison in the mountains; except now, with the help of the Turks, we deal them brown sugar instead,” he said.
After that lesson, we devoted ourselves to one of the other reasons I’d come to Milan. He drove me out of town, toward the paddy fields near Pavia, and I felt lost. How could they live on that endless plain? How did they know where they were going? Without even a bump in the ground to anchor our view, or a single point of reference, we traveled for hours through frost-covered fields interrupted by rows of perfectly spaced poplars. What strange beings lived here? They could have been raising millions of beasts on their land—not goats, which would immediately flee to a higher altitude, but stupid and productive sheep. Instead they devastated the landscape with smoky factories.
I remembered the stories of our elders, who had begun to refer to all northerners as Piedmontese after Garibaldi came through, back when they still occupied the mountains. They repeated the stories of their grandparents, who swore they saw the giant Piedmontese making a game of tossing around the granite stones from the village mills—stones that weighed half a ton.
I scanned the gates of the many farmhouses dotting the plains, fearing I might see a Piedmontese giant emerge from one.
Black Souls Page 4
