We passed through places whose names randomly imprinted on my mind as they appeared on the road signs. La Certosa di Pavia, Zeccone, Stradella, San Martino, Siziano, Bascapè, Vellezzo Bellini. One day, I’d learn to love those plains, which emanated a sad sweetness on foggy days like no other place in the world.
We conducted the necessary visits and a few days later we left in the car. Kidnapping season was coming to an end, as Sante said, and we were going to close it with a job all our own.
Heading south toward Calabria, I came to know our country in its entire expanse for the first time looking out the window of a car.
The Boys
of the Aurora
When we entered the Aurora on our way home from Milan, no one came out to greet us. As I stepped through the door of my house, loaded with presents, my five sisters, the little queens, didn’t jump all over me like they usually did when I brought packages for them.
There had been two funerals in the village during the same week I had been away.
Totò the Blade’s cronies had brought him home, after all those years; he arrived in a luxurious walnut box, in a shiny hearse that drove him to a monumental funeral chapel of white marble, a testament to the fortune he’d made.
And Luciano’s mother had been buried too, carried on the shoulders of neighbors from the Aurora, followed by almost everyone from the rest of the village. But she, unlike Totò, had found a place in the bare earth, next to her husband.
Poor woman. Confined to widowhood in black for almost twenty years, she seemed to have been blossoming again in recent days, shedding her drab attire in favor of more youthful clothes that made her look as vibrant as a virgin just before her wedding day. And now she was dead.
According to tradition, the mourning period continued for eight days after the funeral to allow everyone to participate in the grieving, to keep the next of kin company and alleviate their suffering. No matter who had died, for the entire eight days every television or radio in the village would be switched off; meanwhile, close relatives of the deceased deprived themselves of such entertainment for the whole of the first year. The houses with black rags hanging from their doors became meeting places for the villagers, and as often happens, the tragedy transformed into a farce. Mourning became a party. Visitors were required to bring food to fortify the mourners, and a competition ensued over who brought the most and the best. There was a constant stream of trays of milk, coffee, and pastries of every kind, which comforted those who came to visit and reminisce about the departed’s best qualities. We spent entire days sharing fond memories and funny stories, the perfect setting for anyone who needed to be filled in on the events of the last fifty years, and there was always more laughter than tears. A lost woodsman would have thought he had stumbled upon a wedding banquet rather than a funeral.
After three days of bacchanalia, Luciano was unable to bear any more, and shut out his mother’s admirers, who he hadn’t known were so numerous. He was alone in his mourning and alone in the world.
For the Christmas holidays, Anna came down to see Sante and brought a couple from Milan with her. They stayed in Luciano’s empty house.
We spent Christmas according to tradition, in the mountains for the slaughter of the pig—a celebration within a celebration. Two days of incredible food and drink—back then, not even the women were concerned with dieting or cholesterol.
On the first day we killed the beast, laid it out on a bench, and skinned it with boiling water. As it hung upside down, we gutted and quartered it, selecting cuts for capicolli, bacon, ribs and salted lard. Then we deboned the meat for sausages and soppressata.
Once the meat was divided, it was given to the women to be cleaned of waste. They also washed out the intestines, which would be used for the sausage casings, and then left everything to rest for twenty-four hours.
Having finished our duties, we men gathered by the hearth and took turns recounting our incredible adventures over the continuous clink of glasses, slices of goat’s cheese, and hunks of fatty roasted meat.
What a spectacle, my mother orchestrating the women in their chaotic work, the Calabrian-Milanese group comprising Sante’s guests, my sisters, and a couple of girls from the Aurora who had come up the mountain to help us and have a good time. Miraculously, between all the gossip and laughter that persisted late into the evening, they managed to complete their tasks.
The following day, when the meat had been dried to perfection, the women stuffed the sausages, wrapped the capicolli, rolled up the bacon, and salted and peppered the ribs and the lard, which were hung from the rafters to age in the smoke and the cold for at least twenty-five days. The remaining meat filled an entire pot, and in the late evening, after it had been cooking on oak embers for eight hours, it was ready to be eaten. The wine began to flow, and with clinking glasses and rhyming poetry we greeted the sunrise.
The guests were thrilled. They’d never imagined that the people from the Aspromonte could be such fun. We were surprised in turn—what strange people, the Milanese, encountering everything with a childlike spirit, without reservations or prejudices.
After their work was done, the women returned to the village to bake cakes for the feast of San Silvestro, while the men continued their party on the mountain. Even Anna’s friend refused to be torn away. The group was also joined by one of my father’s elderly cousins, Beniamino, to whom God had not granted children. He lived in the Aurora, and having recently been widowed, he had become part of our family, like an old grandfather. Bino, as everyone called him, was the historian of those mountains, the greatest connoisseur of goats and brigands. If you put a kid goat in front of him he could guess its parents without fail: “They’re like people, and the children always look like their parents,” he said. He called the beasts by ancient names according to their colors, the patterns of their coats, and their physical characteristics.
He’d been a gangster as a young man and had tried his luck in America. He’d had some kind of racket going for a few years in Broccolino and, after a stint in jail, was kicked out of town. Back in the village he married, retired in good order, and dedicated himself to the goats. After his third glass of wine, he would always interject an English “Dat’s awright” and recount his American adventures. His best one was a true story about Joe Petrosino. He claimed to have met all the big shots in person in America, including the hit men hired by Vito Cascieferru—as he called him, mangling Don Vito’s name—to kill the gangster. The most dangerous of the crew were two of our own boys from Savignana, a nearby village. Bino claimed that the two picciotti, under the pretext of returning to Italy to see their families, went all the way to Palermo to make the hit. “One of them died here and I was the one to offer condolences to their next of kin,” he said. At that point we’d tell him he was full of it, and Bino, invoking the Madonna of the Mountain, said, “I can say it now, no one here knew them, and in any case they’re dead now and the bill was never paid.” And then he’d say, “Their names were Tano Misiti and Rocco Tripepi. Just say the word and I’ll take you to Savignana. Tripepi’s granddaughter is alive and well and has photos of her nonno with Cascieferru.”
Then he’d continue his story: “In the fifties, the Malupassu caves were the refuge of wanted men, known in those days as brigands. One year there were fifty-six of them, all from the surrounding villages. No one, cop or otherwise, could get anywhere near the caves, since the brigands were armed. I was the only one who managed to climb to the top of the mountain and feast with them. They had a party up there every day. And every night, the brigands would take turns going down to the sea in small raiding groups to capture animals and men. Their enclosures were always full of beasts to be either resold or eaten, and there were always hostages in the caves, rich landowners or noblemen. During the flood of ’51 that devastated half of the Aspromonte villages and forced us to abandon the mountain for the putrid swamp where we live now, the brigands prey
ed on so many people that the state, perturbed by their fame, sent a large army to disperse them. They didn’t manage to capture a single one, and when the brigands all scattered there was no pasture or house in the Aspromonte that didn’t welcome them. The Military Engineers mined most of the caves and ended the party at Malupassu.”
It was true that in the place Bino named, inside caves hidden by vegetation, it was not uncommon to find cowhides with old guns and other objects sewn inside of them.
But the story I liked most was the one about the wolf, and if there were willing hands to pour wine and stoke the fire, Bino would go on without a break.
“Ancient goatherds loved the wolf and considered it a faithful companion and friend, unlike modern shepherds, who see it as a ravenous predator and persecute it with shotguns, traps, and poison—and selfishly so, because to save a few heads they make the entire herd suffer. The ancient shepherd didn’t consider himself the exclusive owner of the flock, knowing he had an invisible partner in the wolf. Only in modern times do domestic dogs have a place in an Aspromonte fold; it didn’t used to be that way. Contrary to common belief, the Calabrian wolf didn’t hunt in a pack. It was a skittish and solitary animal that sought out others of its kind only to howl and reproduce. Each animal would choose a pasture, a shepherd, a flock, and become a part of it. It would follow the flock to pasture and scare off the foxes and the eagles that would descend after their prolonged acrobatics to go after the newborns; they would chase off the boars and devour their offspring, who destroyed the pastures. Every now and then the wolf would satiate its hunger for days by picking off a single goat. It waited for the beasts to graze and chose only one, taking care to always target the oldest and feeblest, contributing to genetic selection by ensuring that the best beasts survived. The lost beasts were soon replaced by newborns. Back before the days of veterinarians it was rare to see such splendid herds outside of the Aspromonte. Today’s shepherd wants to keep everything for himself, and so the old and sick beasts end up at the butcher’s and in the stomachs of duped customers. The persecuted wolves are forced to hunt in packs and visit all the folds, and if they manage to penetrate one or find an unguarded herd, the shepherd finds himself without a flock, having lost a thousand sheep to save twenty. The elders say that when there was still a king in Naples, a pious goatherd found shelter for his goats inside an old hunting lodge, instead of the typical enclosure. As usual, on Christmas Eve, he fulfilled his vow to the Madonna of the Mountain and returned to the village to attend the celebration of the birth of baby Jesus. After herding the beasts into the shelter and closing them in, he set out under a starry sky to witness the sacred mystery. The joyous event was marked by a sudden, dense snowfall that made the replica saint look almost like the real thing. By dawn, the blanket of snow had reached disproportionate heights, the creeks were spilling over, and the pious herdsman was trapped in the village for that day, then the next, and every day after that until the feast of San Silvestro. If they had been in their enclosure, the goats could have climbed over the snow to hop the fence and find something to eat, even if it had only been the tops of trees. But they were trapped in the lodge. When death was near and the beasts were gnashing at each other’s coats, mournfully bleating, a wolf dug a tunnel, first through the snow and then between the door and the earth, and led the herd out of their mortal trap in single file. The pious goatherd, having risked his life to get back to his herd, found the goats grazing peacefully on the tops of the holm oaks as if they were low-lying bushes. From that day forth the goats would only enter the hunting lodge if he pulled them in by force, and while the goatherd certainly never saw the wolf, he did see the tunnel and all the paw prints encircling the lodge, as if every wolf on the mountain had gathered there.”
Sante and Anna’s friend was a city councilman and well-known professional in Milan—a liberal socialist of the old guard, not one of those bigoted moralists. Of course we never had any suspect conversations, we never showed our weapons, but he certainly wasn’t stupid and must have noticed that we weren’t making enough cheese to sustain our standard of living which, if not luxurious, was dignified enough. He had a free spirit and enjoyed the holiday to its fullest. By now, he explained, Calabrians made up a substantial part of the Milanese electorate and a healthy curiosity had prompted him to get to know his constituents. We took him to explore the mountain, with Luciano pegged to his side, happy to have found a sponge like himself who was onto the next question before you could answer the first.
Nothing escaped the man, like how we placed one stone atop a heap of stones in our path. The third time he saw us do this, he stopped us and asked. The repetition of the gesture, deprived of such an explanation, made the man wonder if it was conditioned, a product of habit devoid of rationale. He insisted that Luciano explain its meaning, if it had one.
It was not a conditioned gesture: each change in the mountain slope was marked with an ordered mound of stones. The pagans used to add a stone to the top of the heap as a gift, to appease the spirits of the woods and secure protection for the traveler. The size of the mound indicated the number of devotees who had passed through. From the moss that had accumulated on a pile, which was topped by a few clean stones, it was clear that this form of worship was limited to a few stubborn followers. Despite being covered in moss, the pagan simulacra on that path had a particular value—based on the size of the heap of stones, they were watching over the oldest paths on the whole mountain. We were retracing the steps of the Saint, the protector, along with the pagan gods of the shepherds, and of those lands. In our worship we allowed no room for irony; we were as observant as our early predecessors.
When the Basilian monks arrived around the year one thousand, the mountain populations were succumbing to the miseries and diseases that had decimated the natives. The last of the mountain people didn’t have the strength to repel the strangers as they had done for centuries, and surrendered to the army of God, who gave them the means of their survival. This particular order, the Basilians, were made up of literate peasants; they constructed churches and introduced agriculture, transforming shepherds into tillers of the soil. All the monks were saints. But the agricultural science at the time could not overcome all the challenges, and crops refused to grow in the highest mountains where the toughest shepherds lived. The Saint left his brothers to their ministries in the lower mountains and ascended to save our ancestors from the path we were treading. Crossing the pass to the highest mountain, he worked for months. Armed with an ax, he skinned pines and extracted the pitch, which he molded into balls, and then placed the balls on the bare rocks. He went on this way, unflagging. From the forest, our forebears fearfully watched the stranger, believing him to be an evil spirit that had come to destroy their woods. But the man’s meekness gradually prevailed over their mistrust and fear. The Saint became familiar to the shepherds, who would approach him in groups. The pine pitch balls transformed to bread, and all the shepherds fed on it. To thank the Saint, the people of the forest sacrificed their biggest fir tree and made him a wooden throne so his tired limbs could rest. When, after countless years of hard dedication to the poor, the Saint returned to his Heavenly General, the shepherds placed him in a pine coffin and walked in reverse along the path the monk had taken to reach them. They walked for miles, and when the fatigue overpowered them, they stopped. In that spot, they buried the Saint and built his church. At each crossroads on the path created by their benefactor, the shepherds would build their pagan heaps to enshrine the fusion of two worlds, the old and the older. In those who still honor the ancients, that union lives on.
After Luciano’s explanation, we continued on the path, passing more heaps. We kept climbing. With the last summit in view, we crossed a river over a footbridge of bound logs. On the other side, at the foot of the summit, we came across a huge log on the ground that looked like a wooden seat.
The man’s legs began to tremble.
We urged him onward, to the to
p of the mountain, where I pointed to a spot straight ahead of us, miles away in the foothills where the Saint’s church rose up, and placed the binoculars in his hands.
He was overcome, his knees buckled, and only his socialist atheism kept him from crossing himself. To reassure him, each one of us, even Sante, took out the goatskin pouch we carried everywhere. Each contained a little picture depicting the Saint with the ax in one hand and a ball of pitch in the other, all tolerated by the Holy Mother Church which, though it had never officially canonized the man, had never quashed his following. This was the nature of the Aspromonte: even the holiest things were profane, the most beautiful flower possessed a thorn, and the most righteous man a rifle hidden somewhere in the woods.
In addition to the little pictures, our pouches contained a precise number of pebbles, depending on the meaning that each person assigned to the number, picked from the debris that formed at the foot of the pagan altars.
Saints and the spirits of the woods, equally sacred, were one and the same, and we wouldn’t have traveled a step without them to guard our path.
We celebrated the New Year together. The first of January was a memorable day. The Milanese got tanned—drunks were known as “tanners” in our parts—and by late evening, when it was time for him to go, he had to steady himself to say his goodbye. We all hugged, and old Bino almost cried; the councilman left handfuls of business cards, making it known that he was “at the disposal of our friends.”
After a few days being our guests, they went down to the village to stay at Luciano’s house. The Aurora, our wrinkle, was our kingdom, as much so as the part of the mountain where my father grazed his flock.
After the flood in the fifties, our village had been rebuilt several miles from the old mountain home, halfway between the sea and the foothills, in a fetid swamp that they called the malaria fields. The people of the forest had been moved from the peaks of the Aspromonte all the way down to the sea because of floods, real or presumed. Dozens of yellowish barracks had sprung up on an area of half a square mile to welcome the mountain refugees. The new town wasn’t even a town but an enclave in the territory of another municipality, far from the mountains that our people had populated for millennia, and far from everything we had called our own. We were a confused populace who could no longer hunt or graze our flocks, and who would perhaps never learn to fish.
Black Souls Page 5
