Black Souls

by Gioacchino Criaco

  She insinuated that Tavilla was a snitch, and the idea soon took root in other minds darkened by misery and ignorance.

  When he received an invitation to another feast, the man’s eyes brightened in anticipation, given his memory of the previous ones; his meager legacy had certainly not made him a wealthy man.

  Because guests usually made a contribution, Peppe asked the man bearing the invitation what he could bring. “We’re running low on salt in the mountains,” the latter replied.

  Peppe happily set off for the feast with a bag full of salt. But instead of a banquet, he found himself faced with seven sharp blades that carved him up alive. The thieves sprinkled salt on his freshly opened wounds to heighten his agony.

  Poor Peppe. A victim, like so many others, of a dissatisfied whore.

  The victims also included the seven murderers, who paid for their crime with decades of hard jail time, following a trial that revealed their victim’s innocence.

  The trial generated so much uproar that to avoid unrest and lynching attempts they decided to move it from the criminal court of Calabria to the Tribunal of Catanzaro. Wherever people from my village went, they were denied even a glass of water if they revealed their origins: “The Salters, God forbid!”

  One of the seven Salters was still alive and could be found sitting out on the benches of the square in the middle of our new village.

  After the clerk ran off, our conversation died and we resigned ourselves to sleeping until we arrived in the city. We got off the train and boarded a bus that brought us back to the village. Back in the hollow, we slipped into Minna Bonasira’s house, opened Patti’s bag, and discovered that the mighty Calabrian gonads had gifted us with sixty-three million lire, in addition to Natalia’s share of twenty-one million. Minna slipped the cash we gave her between her breasts and took her rugrats shopping in the village. We hid the bag full of money in the armoire in Minna’s bedroom under lock and key and went back home to wash up. A few hours later, we reconvened and celebrated with Minna late into the night.

  Minna’s home was our lair in the Aurora. Her real name was Mina, the diminutive of Girolama, but the mountains that protruded from her chest had earned her the additional “n,” which spelled out “breast” in our Calabrese dialect, and she had accepted the name from everyone in the hollow without protest.

  Minna was not from the village, but she appeared one day and occupied a house abandoned by a family that had gone off in search of fortune. She had come to the hollow with an engineer who worked for a company that ran phone cables along the coast. Scarcely more than a girl, she arrived in the village with her belly already swollen, and by the time the engineer disappeared when the company contract finished just a year later, Minna’s belly had grown again. Nobody in the hollow ever asked about her private life. They accepted her, and she remained with her two tots. She got by taking little jobs in the fields or in the homes of the wealthy, finding acceptance in the Aurora. When the city brothels lost their luster, we took our turns in her bed, starting with Luigi. And her house became a refuge for our weapons and plunder.

  After our train hit, we waited quietly for spring to arrive, and cut back on our visits to the Valenciano. We didn’t miss any more school, we were good students, and spring took us by surprise one Sunday in the woods.

  To announce it were the amorous effusions from the jaybirds, treacherous mountain spies. A gossipy bunch, perennially alert and inevitably the first to notice anything, they notified one another of every human or animal presence with their croaking.

  The impetuous streams had quieted, and we were ready. At the end of March, Sante loaded us into his car and we presented ourselves at an appointment we hadn’t been invited to.

  The flatlands of northern Italy were still immersed in winter, and a thick fog accompanied us into the Po Valley countryside. Behind a beautiful, recently-restored farmhouse, the dogs, naive as their masters, licked our gun-gripping hands, and escorted us tranquilly to an illuminated set of French doors.

  One kick was enough to break them in. Minutes later, we had gathered the quiet little family in the living room, including the nanny, since the northerners employed foreigners to raise their children. The mother cooperated and helped to calm her two splendid teenage daughters.

  Despite the monstrosity of what we were doing, we still had some principles left, and instead of going for this easy prey we patiently waited for the head of the household to arrive.

  He came up the stairs from the garage. He was a handsome man, about fifty, tall and slim, sporting a suit and tie. He wore a gold watch on his wrist and a Tincati cashmere coat. He was a hot-shot manager in Milan who had been among the first to prosper before the city entered its roaring ’80s.

  He calmly registered the situation. He made sure everyone was okay, hugged his daughters, dispensed a series of recommendations, and left with us almost as if he had a business appointment that required his presence elsewhere. The most important thing for him was to keep them safe. He let us handcuff him and waited as we locked up his girls, perfectly unharmed, in the bathroom on the second floor. Relieved, he allowed himself to be blindfolded and, with his eyes and ears covered, he was transported away from his kingdom prostrate in the backseat of our car, by four foreigners who had arrived from another world.

  Thirty minutes later, the car slid into the garage of an anonymous terraced house identical to thousands of others around it. The hostage was moved from his backseat to the bed of the house’s laundry room, four-by-ten-foot and completely covered in polystyrene panels.

  Sante and I left Luciano and Luigi to guard the swine. An hour later, the car was belching large bubbles as it disappeared into the murky brown waters of a canal.

  That same night I was already on my way home in a stale, smoke-filled carriage on the national railroad.

  It hadn’t gone as I’d expected. Until then I’d only seen a swine in chains, pathetic creatures stinking of urine, sweat, and fear, like babies whimpering at a medicine they didn’t want to take.

  Irritating, not moving.

  This time I had entered his home, been among his things. I had smelled the swine’s intimacies, sensed his feelings. I had violated his affections.

  This time had been different, painfully so.

  The swine, despite living too well, according to our sources, didn’t live a life of excessive luxury. The house was clean, welcoming, happy.

  He had thought of his family and not of himself. He had not begged for mercy. His daughters kept photos beside their beds; their clothing comfortable, not extravagant. They had looked at us with hatred, not with contempt.

  What right had we to enter their home? Why should they have to share their belongings with us? Why were we stealing their father and husband? Was it their fault that we were who we had become?

  In the morning, as usual, all doubt and remorse had vanished. I got off the train and went home. I happily shared the news with my father: the swine was ours.

  He showed no enthusiasm.

  He had changed lately. I saw it in his silent reproaches, in his insistence that the family subside on his small but reliable government salary. The money I’d recently brought home was safe in a big glass jar buried in the garden. Even the queens had stopped begging for their presents. They had grown up and were beginning to understand. Everyone disapproved of us now.

  Luciano and I were convinced we had saved them. We loved them immensely, he as much as I, and we were happy to have afforded them an easier life and, above all, the freedom to feel as they pleased. One day they would come to appreciate us.

  We had protected my sisters—they would not share the fate of so many sweet village girls. They would not be spirited away, tearfully waving from the passenger seat of a roaring Fiat 124 special-T with a stupid fluffy dog by their side, by some ciaonè fleeing back to the North.

  They would not meet the end o
f so many other southern girls who fell for skinny kids from the North, friends of emigrant factory workers who came down for the summer holidays. Every August, the sorry souls would arrive in shiny new Fiats bought on loan, spinning miraculous tales in Italian—the only language they spoke—about their wonderful lives in the city: how they went out for pizza every Saturday and spent Sundays at the cinema. Not to mention the occasional weekend jaunt. They would ensnare the splendid and naïve village girls and marry them after flash engagements, claiming they had many commitments and no time to waste. In the process, they avoided having to reveal too much about themselves.

  During these syncopated periods of courtships, we’d see swarms of girls on the arms of the most improbable lovers, promenading with their fabulous finds; and yes, maybe he wasn’t much to look at, but what an extraordinary life he could offer his future wife.

  They greeted everyone with a flippant ciao né, which was where they got their nickname. In reality, the men broke their backs working six days a week in the factories and stayed home on Sundays to wash their own clothes. They were preposterous to modern and savvy city girls, so instead they chased after our girls, claiming that they were looking for the kind of seriousness in a woman that one could only find in the South. As a token of appreciation, they would bring chocolates and candies for the kids. They would spend a summer month with their factory friends, who would take them around to relatives, singing the praises of these boys who had a permanent job, and some unlucky girl would always fall for it.

  We kids hated them, the ciaonè. Shockingly ugly, they would go off with the most beautiful girls in the village. After a few years, the girls would come home for the summer alone, without their ciaonè—who always stayed home to work overtime—sagging from childbearing and fatigue, pale and weather-beaten from damp houses in ghettos on the industrialized outskirts of the city.

  The poor girls didn’t have the courage to leave, and could only whisper through tears to the other girls who received new marriage proposals that it was “better to be a spinster at home.” No, my sisters would avoid that misfortune, they would not end up wringing out the underwear of some metalworker, raising his snot-nosed kids. Nor would they be crammed into public housing with a pair of brats clinging to their skirts, after warming up the meal and the bed of some northern engineer, like Minna Bonasira had.

  If only the cursed Milanese councilman had shown up twenty years earlier to bring jobs to the Aurora.

  My father had resigned himself to losing me since my birth, when he had heard the midwife announce five times that I was a girl, her stubborn attempt to avert the Evil Eye she was certain had been fixed on me. Each time, he bit back his bitterness and replied, “as long as she’s healthy.” What else could he say?

  After I told him the kidnapping had been successful, he was tormented all night.

  He’d spoken to Sante and, with a heavy heart, he did what he had to do.

  We would pay the price for all the evil we had done and were about to do. My father would suffer irreparably. Luciano’s punishment would be harsh. Luigi, in keeping with his weak nature, would chose to save himself and sell human flesh.

  But the one responsible for everything that had already happened and that was yet to come, its instigator and true author, was me.

  Convinced I was saving them, I led them to perdition.

  Based on his prior experience, Sante was convinced that the right time to move the hostage was one week after the kidnapping.

  Sante explained that once the alarm was sounded, the police would develop three possible scenarios: the hostage would be sent to the Aspromonte, to Tuscany, or he would stay in the area. In case the first hypothesis was the correct one, the police would monitor all the Calabrian junctions; the second, those of Tuscany; and the third, they’d visit all the previous offenders in the area. If the first phase was unsuccessful, they’d change tack around the one-month mark. They’d pretend to ease up on their inspections, hoping that if the hostage hadn’t already been moved, his captors would use the chance to move him to less agitated waters. We had to avoid the first week after capture and the end of the month, but they couldn’t check millions of people and vehicles. They’d have to limit themselves to highway exits and activate their army of informants.

  So in the late afternoon of the seventh day after the crime, a large truck belonging to a shipping company near Linate airport took the west ring road to the motorway heading south, loaded with nothing more than furniture and vestments destined for a church in Catania, or so said the bill of lading. Three people sat on a hard bench at the back of the trailer like passengers on a train. One wore a black woolen hood that covered his face.

  The riders in question were Luciano, Luigi, and the businessman.

  The driver in the cab was an elderly Sicilian man on the verge of retirement. He drove calmly, careful never to exceed the speed limits on that particular trip.

  Without having faced a single setback in ten hours, he stopped for a few seconds at a rest stop on the Salerno-Reggio Calabria highway and let off three passengers, his heaviest load. Thus unburdened, he would go on his way to Catania.

  Who would have ever imagined kidnappers would walk forty miles through the woods?

  There were no brigands anymore. The cops didn’t even contemplate the scenario and instead were snoozing in the fields near the highway exits.

  The hostage was lucky, he had a tender swineherd—my father—who had built him a clean, decent shelter, completely different from the usual pigsties. He was chained up just the same, but he had a gas heater, a camping lamp during the day, books, a mattress on a cot, and lots of soft, clean blankets. He had water and plenty of food.

  It wasn’t as comfortable as state-run prisons like Asinara or Pianosa where we wayward shepherds often ended up, but all in all he couldn’t complain.

  After our nighttime walk, we went down to the village. We would return to the mountains in high summer.

  First, like the other students, we faced our exams, sweaty and pale. Luciano took care of the written exams for everyone. For our orals Luigi and I depended on the good hearts of the committee members. Luciano, as usual, outdid himself. The skeptical committee chairman, who had a degree in physics, saw the high marks the Institute had awarded the boy and felt it necessary to ask him about an obscure theorem. To the astonishment of the external committee, and the pride of our late Professor Augusto Mammì, Luciano not only cited the theorem, but wrote out the proof in three pages. When the chairman recovered, a few months later, he wrote an extremely humble and moving letter imploring Luciano to go study physics, even suggesting a famous teacher to approach, whom the chairman himself had already contacted. This demonstrates what good people worked in our schools back then, how they placed the welfare of the students before everything, even themselves.

  We managed scores of a low sixty, an unexpected fifty, and an encouraging thirty-six. We received our diplomas and left for a happy holiday in the mountains, our last for many years.

  We found a party that we never could have imagined, considering that my father and Bino had never been celebratory types. One man required half an hour to reproduce his own stunted signature; the other made do with a cross he could scratch out in half a second. And now, go figure, they had three high school graduate sons, since both considered themselves fathers to all three of us.

  They had slaughtered a goat, the most beautiful wether, the pride of the herd, and we could already smell its aroma. Pleased and slightly bewildered, we let ourselves celebrate and went to bed happy and astounded. My father even brought a nice full plate to the swine; I saw him sneak off, lighthearted, in the direction of the pigsty where he kept the hostage.

  Bino was so happy that after years of reticence he finally emptied his shriveled goiter. He told us about the great shit-smearing of 1935 and why he had resigned from the honorable society, retiring in good order.

/>   Everyone knew the society of pungiuti had been an invention of the immoral Bourbons who had ruled Naples in the eighteenth century. The shrewd Spaniards understood that to shore up their power and contain the riotous peoples dispersed over hundreds of tiny mountain villages, the people of the forest, they would need more than just their bayonets; they would need to rely on natives to control their own people.

  So they sent Spanish knights, mystic guardians of ancient codes, to prick fingers and found brotherhoods around the Kingdom, secret brotherhoods of honorable men who patrolled their own villages and kept their own people in line. Every subsequent regime would rediscover the usefulness of this system, invoking the secret societies as a form of invisible control. The Kaiser of Predappio was the first to stop the practice, since fascism imposes consensus with a whip, or worse. During the twenty years of Mussolini’s regime, it was common to witness beatings of malandrini, who tasted the truncheon and confinement as often as their heroic dissident companions.

  One iron rule of the brotherhood was that the honorable members modeled honorable behavior, and that they avoided bringing shame upon the society by tolerating unfaithful mothers, sisters, and daughters. When a forbidden affair in the village was revealed, as long as the cuckold was a common man, pranksters would hang a nice pair of goat horns on the unfortunate victim’s door. He in turn would stay up all night waiting for the event, in order to make the horns disappear as quickly as possible.

  If an honorable member had been cuckolded, however, or if a relative of his had been, the society would immediately strip him of his duties, which was tantamount to an immediate dismissal. The ensuing ritual required a senior malandrino to confront the cuckolded brother in a public street, in broad daylight, and smear a fistful of manure in his face, declaring him no longer worthy of belonging to the honorable society. The shit-smeared member would accept, wash himself of the disgrace with blood or, when this was impossible, with a long rehabilitation period, after which he was readmitted to the secret rites.