Outside of the village, my friends and I represented all the children of the forest; among the villagers, Luigi, Luciano, and I were distinguished by the wrinkle we lived in, the Aurora. The wrinkle was a rectangle of road across which two buildings faced each other, eight apartments on two floors on one side and the same on the other. To the people in the village, the three of us were known as the boys of the Aurora.
When the Milanese left, Luigi, Luciano, and I stayed in the mountains for another week on our own, under Bino’s watch.
We missed our new friends, and tried to distract ourselves.
I happened to notice very fresh cow tracks in the part of the pasture that my father reserved for the harshest period of winter. The cows were feral, wandering free without masters, in groups of ten or twenty, accompanied by a single bull. They were small, native beasts, their color ranging from gray to black. They lived quietly, undisturbed, and always kept their distance from people. When someone got too close, they would burst into a wild gallop whose echo would fill the mountain. Minutes later, they could be seen peacefully grazing on a distant ridge.
Their minute size allowed them to adapt to their unforgiving habitat. Heftier beasts would have ended up at the bottom of a ravine, or dead from starvation. The type of grazing offered by the Aspromonte wouldn’t have been enough to fill the stomachs of larger cows.
I’d always perceived the fear and reverence that the villagers felt toward the cows, but the explanations I’d heard for their presence were muddled and contorted. I came to the bold conclusion that we hid behind our myths about the cows because we’d been so unsuccessful at hunting them.
I had sometimes observed the herds from afar with binoculars. The beasts walked like a small army, with one of the two oldest cows at the head of the herd and the other at the tail. When they came out of the woods to graze in an open space, the leader would arrive first, crossing the entire pasture, sniffing at the air, and only when she lowered her head to graze all the others would emerge. After a time the rearguard would join them.
The cows grazed in a circle, inside of which the calves played. At the exact center of the formation was the sire.
The two elder cows always remained at a distance; it was hard to get them within firing range, and even if that were possible, their old meat would have only been good for boiling. Their society was matriarchal, directed by the females in order of age. They chose the bull from among the best males and chased away their other sons.
When we found the cow prints in my father’s pasture, Bino tried to dissuade me from going after them. I didn’t listen.
I grabbed the rifle, loaded the cartridge, and at dawn I squatted at the edge of the clearing and waited for the cows to come graze. My limbs were already numb from the cold and from holding my position when the sentry finally made her entrance. She spread her nostrils and blew hard. She looked in every direction, including mine, but did not see me. Then she quietly lowered her head to plunder the grass that belonged to my goats. A moment later, from the woods, the playful group emerged.
The females of this herd had outdone themselves. As I had already observed from my binoculars, they had raised themselves a huge sire, twice their size, with a short, silky coat, black and shining. It was feminine greed that led to the bull’s demise. Their protective circle proved to be a useless defense. No matter how small the beast made itself, its head and shoulders still rose above the circular trench of horns.
The shot was sudden. The thunderous bang had the effect of a stone in a placid pond. The circle drifted, the animals carried away in waves. The bull seemed surprised, as if he had been caught naked. For an eternal instant, he stood frozen.
Alone. In the middle of the deserted clearing.
I found myself on my feet without realizing I had moved. Target detected.
I had been sure I’d hit the bull, but the opposite seemed true.
I waited, lucid and stiff, for death to take me, my chest ready to embrace the blow.
The bull came to a halt ten yards away from me. I could read his thoughts for a moment. He had a gruesome hole between his eyes, from which an incredible stream of blood and yellow matter emerged. His eyes were pointed toward me but not looking at me. They were staring at something or someone not of this world.
The animal had already been dead a few seconds. He just didn’t know it, or didn’t want to believe it.
A vaporous rush of urine sprayed from his huge penis, signaling the release of his muscles, his loss of control. He collapsed.
Soon Luciano and Luigi arrived with their large military backpacks. They knew I’d never missed a shot as a hunter. This time, however, there wasn’t the usual lighthearted scene with our constant jokes. We quartered the beast, selecting only the best cuts. We took as much meat as we could carry.
We found the heavy Brenneke slug inside its ribcage. It had devastated the mighty animal, traveling three feet inside its body, through its head and neck, and down into its white lungs.
We carried the heavy load to the fold. It was a dull day. We tended to the goats in silence and retired early without eating.
That night was harrowing. I thought I could hear a mournful bellowing. I saw the bull’s head staring at me with that terrible, dripping, artificial eye in the middle of his forehead. Suddenly the image changed and the bull took on the appearance of Totò the Blade. An immense pain overtook me, I was aware I was trapped in a nightmare. I tried to wake up and couldn’t, I got up and fell back down, and only when the pain had traveled to my core could I shake myself awake.
I found myself sitting up in the dark. Bino tenderly pressed a cup of hot coffee into my hands. “Did you hear them?”
I looked at him, dumbfounded.
“No, they weren’t in your head, they always do that when they lose a friend. They walk in circles all night around the body and let out frightful moans. Sometimes they go on like that for months, some even let themselves die. The ancients said the cows belong to the spirits of the woods. I’ve never experienced it myself, but I’ve seen shepherds as proud as you wake up in the morning destroyed and watch the darkness fall with terror. We are a part of the mountains, not their masters. Sometimes practicing evil is necessary to survive. Taking a life is always wrong. But if you don’t give your conscience an alibi or a decoy, it will scream at you every night. Come, we have to appease them.”
We went out into the night. We laid the meat on the piles of stones along the path of the Saint.
My young mind soon muffled my throbbing heart, and the episode went off to languish in a dark corner of my psyche.
When we returned to the village, our friends had already left for Milan. We would encounter the councilman again in Milan, before he plunged into the abyss.
Sante had advised my father to get ready for spring. One last job, a kidnapping of our own.
Before he left, the councilman had met with some party friends in the city and extended a precious gift to my father and others in the wrinkle: a hiring letter from the Forestry Agency, offering a permanent, long-term contract. It meant a fixed salary, however modest. Something my father could have only dreamed of. That money, even if it came late—too late for me—restored my father’s dignity and his role as head of the household.
The most incredible thing to him was his job title. They had hired him as a forest ranger. So now they were paying him to do what he had always done for free, as a natural call of duty: defend his mountain.
Luciano, Luigi, and I devoted ourselves almost exclusively to our books. That year was fundamental for us; we had to prepare for graduation and we did so with purpose, like everything else we did. We had good teachers, capable people who helped everyone, especially us, the children of the forest. They never wrote us up, never called our parents. They simply shared their love of books and culture. They had taught us how to be with others and feel included. In the end, we didn’t
become who we had because of them, or because society was dirty, ugly, and bad. There were very few dirty, ugly, and bad men. But their culture was dominant. And the misery was oppressive. There was no door in the Locride, our patch of Reggio Calabria, that hadn’t seen the boots of the military police on its threshold; the carabinieri were the only faces of the state we knew in our part of the world.
The only person of good repute that the Locride had produced in decades was Corrado Alvaro. Either the inhabitants were genetically predisposed to crime or there was an interest, historically perpetuated, in the reproduction of generations of criminals.
If mountain boys like us had strayed from our roots, perhaps it was because we had been forced to choose between a life of service or our own demise—unless we chose self-defense.
We had chosen to live freely but armed, ready to defend or attack, whether our enemies were gangsters or cops.
Our money was running out. Luciano’s only inheritance from his mother had been a funeral to pay for. He’d lent me some money, and I repaid what little I could. He had never kept his share from our raids for himself. Everything we collected we divided into three, and most of his share would invariably end up spent on members of my family and others in the Aurora.
It’s still a mystery how Luigi managed to burn through his cash without leaving anything at home or offering charity around the Aurora aside from a few coins here and there. The fact is that every time we divided our funds, he would appear shortly thereafter to beg for more.
So Luciano and I, in the black, would apply ourselves to our books, and Luigi would sneak off to find money, which had become his specialty. He had a nose for opportunity like he had for beautiful women, and sometimes he combined the two. When he told us about an idea for a hit, we were fascinated by his vision.
He had been working on it in secret for four years, he confided to us. The thought had come to him the night we became men. While Luciano and I, red in the face, confronted the memorable and frightful undertaking, he was already running the numbers.
The Valenciano hotel—who would have ever dreamed it up?
We had gone about twice a month over the last few years just to fuck. But Luigi had been working overtime. In addition to making love, he secretly met up with some of the girls to work on the hit, or just passed by the Valenciano to see what was going on. He was sure now that his plan was ready.
We all knew the Valenciano’s owner and pimp, Vittorio Patti, a fat Sicilian pig. We almost always saw him at the hotel. Luigi had learned everything else we’d need to know.
The pimp had a permanent cohort of five or six girls, most of them foreign. The girls spent a few months satisfying Calabrian cravings, then disappeared overnight, only to be replaced by new ones. Professionals in the trade knew that fresh goods were necessary to fuel desire.
Vittorio Patti had an associate in Milan who sent him girls. Before he parted with the new merchandise, however, the said associate wanted his half of the earnings, and the pimp, as trusting as a convict before his executioner, would deliver it to him personally. Now and then, he would suddenly disappear from circulation along with the booty.
Calculating that the girls brought in at least two million a day—or sixty million a month—minus twenty percent, deducting for the ladies’ room and board, minus the ten percent kickback the Blood Brothers took, the pimp’s purse must have contained anywhere from sixty to one hundred million lire on his periodic travels to Milan.
Where he kept the money, when and how he traveled, and with what or whom remained a mystery for years.
Vittorio Patti, besides all his other sins, which were many, was a known sex fiend, and every night the women would work overtime for him, stopping by his house in shifts. Many times the fat Sicilian had seemed to be on the verge of giving up his secrets to the girls Luigi had engaged, but he would always manage to exhaust his desires a moment before making the fatal disclosure.
Things continued this way until Natalia, the gypsy from Andalusia, appeared at the Valenciano. It wasn’t because of her looks, which were rather average, that the pig sang for her, but because she was guardian of many secrets pertaining to the art of love.
Luigi had the chance to be one of the very first customers to enjoy her esoterics. The gypsy immediately signed on to his plan. To the great disappointment of the many enthusiasts who were eager to reconfirm the Andalusian woman’s talents, she grew stingy in distributing her pleasures, including to her pimp.
When she was convinced that he had been baited long enough, Natalia dusted off her skills and left Patti so stunned that he asked her to move in with him. He had never known such a mantis, as he would confide in anyone.
Like the time we robbed the post office, Luigi appeared at my house in the middle of the night to announce that the moment had arrived. Even in his cooked state, the pimp had been cautious enough not to tell Natalia of his departure until the last minute, so she barely had time to prepare the suitcases. They would be traveling together, doves on their honeymoon, in a sleeper cabin on the 1 a.m. Syracuse-Milan express train.
We didn’t require bags, so we jumped in the car and got ourselves onto the fast train, having discreetly boarded one stop after the couple.
In order not to raise suspicions about the sly Spaniard, we needed to make our hit as far as possible from the city.
Natalia and Luigi had agreed on a signal. When, a few minutes before we arrived in Naples, the Spaniard opened the door for us, we found the maniac in such a state of bliss that he didn’t even hear the wood cracking between his head and neck. His faithful concubine defended the luggage tooth and nail, and could only be overpowered by a direct hit that left an evident bruise.
We got off the train quietly and left the suitcases in the baggage deposit, happily ducking into the alleyways of the kingdom’s ancient capital.
By the time the lovebirds came to, they were well on their way to Rome.
Why would Patti report the heist? To be ridiculed for the rest of his days? In Naples even the clumsiest villains carried a knife to fend off the inevitable thieves. Rather, he had been lucky to have gotten away with his carelessness so many times before. From then on he would always travel accompanied by two picciotti.
With what money his wise Spanish companion had hidden in her intimate regions—the only part of the cabin that hadn’t been plundered by the voracious thieves—they visited Rome. Patti consoled his lover with an unusual tenderness and, after an unforgettable night in a hotel, they traveled back to the toe of the boot.
When they got back to the Valenciano, Natalia gradually returned to her ordinary intimate duties and, a few months later, Patti sent her back to Milan without much of a thought. There, she was her own boss, and secured a dignified salary for herself with the help of her crotch. With the fat man’s money and her savings, she invested in a business that would become a place of leisure for the stressed go-getter Milanese.
We would meet again.
After the robbery we explored the length and breadth of Naples, from the monstrous suburbs to the elegant salons in the city center, and in the evening we collected the luggage in anticipation of a pleasant return journey, which it was.
We took seats in a compartment already occupied by a young, off-duty auxiliary carabiniere who got off at Paola, and an elderly couple who were returning to Catanzaro after visiting their children in the North.
We told them we were headed to the extreme south of the peninsula, not specifying the location, and claimed we were exhausted after having endured the difficult entry tests for government jobs. We conversed cheerfully, as was customary on the rancid carriages of the oil trains.
The retired old man, who had served the state as a clerk at the capital’s Tribunal for forty years, held court. He had known misfortunes and recounted many.
After a few hours of conversation, when confidence had loosened the grip of our ir
onclad Calabrian discretion, the former quasi-magistrate asked us the name of our town. Before we could stop him, Luigi blurted it out.
The old man choked on a gasp. “The Salters!” he cried. He grabbed his terrified companion and dragged her and their suitcases to another carriage, leaving us all with our mouths agape, including the cop.
We knew the history of the salters well. Our grandparents had been known by that name in the forties. The incident had happened just before the new Caesar dragged us into the second war, back when the village was still high in the mountains.
A group of hungry thieves from the countryside had raided animals that were the property of a wealthy doctor in Lica, a nearby village, then hid away the animals in the less accessible mountain pastures. Every so often they invited groups of friends to gorge themselves on the stolen loot. One of the occasional guests, a certain Peppe Tavilla, had been spotted on the road to Lica, where the beasts had grazed peacefully before they had been spirited up to the mountains.
The poor man, in fact, was on his way to meet with a lawyer; Lica was the county seat of the magistrate’s court, and the nearest place to find one. He had been made the beneficiary of a small inheritance from a late relative who had emigrated to America, and given the misery of those days, he met with the expert jurist three times, fearfully and covertly, to sort out the necessary paperwork.
A hateful gossipmonger, a childless woman—a zire, as they called women who couldn’t reproduce—used the time on her hands to keep abundant watch over her neighbors. The snake lived in a miserable hovel that faced the road connecting the two villages, and had thrice seen a wary Peppe Tavilla plodding toward Lica.
Black Souls Page 6
