After a year, Luigi and I had decidedly lost it all.
We sublet two other rooms for no small price in the same student dorm and continued to make withdrawals from the jar. After another year, I had managed to pass one more exam, Luigi passed none, while Luciano doubled his total from the year before.
We had fifteen million lire left. A trafficker claimed eight to educate Luigi, who, having passed no exams, succumbed to the unrelenting call to arms. Having passed another exam, I managed to postpone suspension for a year.
After two years we had seven million lire left and among the three of us had passed a total of sixteen exams.
Other students enjoyed this university period; they were adaptable and happy to do all kinds of odd jobs; it was normal, a fun experience for them.
We, on the other hand, with pasts in our pockets that were even heavier than our futures, what were we supposed to do? Get jobs at a bar serving customers with big trays of drinks and wait for the day some punk showed up to tell us who we were, to remind us of our sins? Were we supposed to whistle like Totò the Blade as we closed the bar?
Luciano immersed himself in the tortuous tangles of law. To avoid distractions, he’d gotten himself a steady girlfriend like the Milanese did. Meanwhile, Luigi and I began to keep ourselves occupied.
We were spoiled for choice on how to make money. We knew everyone in that seaport, their vices included.
We started dealing weed, and kids started to show up at our rooms to buy. We had a mule who would go down on the train once a month to visit our growers in the village. But it was just a little here and there to get by.
Self-destruction was in vogue at the time in Milan—the yuppy takeover was still a few years off. People wanted to escape life, not live it intensely. Kids were begging for heroin, that’s where the real business was; everyone just wanted to sleep and we started to help them.
I went to see the Sicilian I’d met with Sante in Milan and introduced myself again.
“Meat in mouth and there’s no problem,” he said.
I didn’t understand the expression.
“Cash up front,” he said in dialect.
I returned to him with one bag and left with a different one. In six months we went from selling a hundred grams a week to a kilo. Cash started to roll in. We’d moved up from the junkies to the small-time pushers. And then came the turning point. A pusher came looking for us.
Khaled—a Syrian student, a political refugee, a robust, athletic, and gregarious guy—began to seek me out. He didn’t look Middle Eastern or speak with the inflection of the Arabs. He clung to me like a tick, and he did so much business with us he became our partner and our brother. After a few months of hanging around us, he even began to speak our dialect. We introduced him as our paesano, our friend from home, and everyone found him irresistible.
We’d see Luciano every few weeks or so, but he wouldn’t even open the door for us when we called on him, busy with his woman and his books. So Luigi and I spent all our time with Khaled, whom we began to call Salvatore, or Sasà for short.
When Luciano found out we were trafficking, his infatuation with the straight life suddenly vanished. “I gave up women and school. What are you up to?”
“This,” said Luigi, pressing a hundred grams of horse into his hand.
Luciano had seen Sasà around but hadn’t realized how close we’d all become. Now he understood, and the four of us were inseparable.
After a few months, Luciano took me aside to talk about Sasà. “I don’t know,” he said. “He’s growing on me, but I have a funny feeling about him.”
I told him he might be right, that maybe we’d gone too fast, but he was just hanging out with us. He was sharp, useful—he didn’t make a fuss about whose job it was to do what.
“Maybe you’re just jealous!” I said, giving him a jab. We laughed it off and forgot about it.
Sasà was always laughing; you could hear his laughter before you saw him. Sometimes Luciano would even scold him when he seemed to be making fun of people.
At one point, he went away for a few weeks to see his relatives, refugees in Germany. When he returned he spoke to us in a serious tone, without laughing.
“Do you want to move even more dope?” he asked us.
Not long after, we were handling monthly shipments of a ton each, working directly with the Gray Wolves, the Turkish paramilitaries.
We would play a fundamental role in the Milan of the roaring ’80s, the Milan of judicial ruins. Countless people would come to us from Calabria, Sicily, Naples—policemen, entrepreneurs, politicians, and magistrates.
We thought we were sharpshooters, the straightest of them all; we had plunged ourselves into darkness to make room for a bright future. In actuality, we’d voluntarily enlisted in someone else’s war. We were selling death and someone else was making money on it. But we knew what we were doing. We had been arming ourselves since we were young in order to be free. Now we were still armed but had become all too similar to those we had originally set out to fight.
We didn’t go seeking the Turkish drug connection; the drugs had come looking for us. By the time I understood why, it was too late. Luciano had guessed the truth—he’d warned me but I hadn’t believed him, and as usual I dragged him into it along with me.
We thought we were shining stars. In truth we were angels of darkness.
Shadows
in Light
Sasà would often disappear for a few days at a time, returning as if nothing had happened, as if he had been studying the whole time. On one of these occasions I went to his room to pay him a visit.
We chatted a little, then he picked up an envelope and pulled out a sheet of paper. “Do you know Vincenzo Sparta?” he asked.
Don Vincenzo’s door was only half-closed. The huge hall, its air heavy with ancient odors, was dimly illuminated by wall lamps.
I crossed the floor and started up the stairs under the sad gaze of Donna Agata, Sparta’s late wife, who scrutinized me severely from a portrait on the wall. It was said Donna Agata had died a virgin, that her husband, the most authoritative godfather in all Calabria, had been impotent—that she had adored her husband so much she had taken the blame for his lack of heirs. I looked down and didn’t look up again until I’d reached the landing. There was a room in front of me, its door open wide, and at the far end, a large window opened onto a narrow veranda choked with bougainvillea. A cool breeze redolent with wet jasmine caressed my face.
It smelled of peace—the kind that follows a bloody battle.
The ancient man sat halfway between the veranda and me, hunched over his desk. He was over ninety years old and never spent more than a few months as a revered guest in a federal penitentiary, despite his many crimes; he had sidestepped major legal imbroglios by keeping lawyers and senators in his pocket for half a century. He represented the history and myth of my land. Now, in his old age, he had become fixated on writing, and spent entire days hunched over his desk. It seemed as though he would die of old age without paying for the evil he’d done.
My rubber billy club sank mercifully into the patriarch’s nape, and his chin drooped into his writing as if he had fallen into a sudden sleep, as the elderly are wont to do.
I glanced at his writings: brief, concise thoughts, little more than notes. His calligraphy was elegant, almost solemn.
Quickly, I gathered up the boss’s manuscript and pen, substituting them with replacements I had brought with me. I lifted him and propped his head against the back of the chair.
I climbed over the balcony railing and my feet found the rungs of the ladder that Luciano had already positioned against the wall.
I took the sawed-off Bernardelli shotgun from my bag and pulled both triggers together, joylessly. Eighteen pellets of buckshot sprayed the face of Don Vincenzo, nearly beheading him and returning him to his Creator on that cool and fragrant
summer evening.
In less than an hour, we were on the highway heading north. I drove, and Luciano sat next to me with a flashlight, reading the old man’s memoirs. I had promised Sasà that I would destroy everything without reading it, and in fact I never read a word. We sped along, Luciano enjoying the company of a deceased boss, while I enjoyed a very much alive rock-and-roll boss, as “Born to Run” blared over the radio.
On nights like these, the highway was full of children of the forest—thousands of people from our town and many other towns like ours, towns that had once sat on the summits of the Aspromonte, only to have been rebuilt in the foothills or by the sea. We filled the lanes with our powerful cars, crisscrossing the peninsula and the continent. We were all the same, moving at a breakneck speed, like birds of prey freed from our mountain cages. We invaded the service areas, groups of young people buying one another coffee, embracing, and exchanging addresses. We thoughtlessly risked tragedy, convinced we would conquer the world. Instead, we were robbing ourselves of a future.
That evening Luciano and I didn’t stop at the service areas to greet the other boys. We couldn’t allow ourselves to be seen. We had never taken that trip. We didn’t even stop for gas; we filled our tank with cans we’d stored in the trunk.
Lost in my own thoughts, I drove without noticing the time. Just as we passed the sign for Attigliano, the gas light came on.
As I pulled over, Luciano clutched my shoulder, his nails digging into my skin. I looked at him for the first time since we’d been in the car and froze: he was pale, sweating.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
He ripped three strips of paper from the manuscript and got out of the car. He filled up the tank, doused the notebooks with the remaining gasoline, and set them on fire. When he got back in the car, I could see he wasn’t sick, he was terrified.
“We’re fucked,” he said. “We should turn this car around and disappear into our mountains. Forget this ever happened.”
I set off again, then slowed down to take the next exit before changing my mind and putting my foot back on the accelerator. Luciano slouched down in the passenger seat and slept soundly until we reached Milan.
Back in the city, we went to bed. The next afternoon we met with Luigi and Sasà. We took a stroll around the city center and in the evening we dined at the Frassino, one of the most luxurious local restaurants. We stayed up late and went home happy, as we always were when we were together.
Before we went to bed, Sasà mentioned that he would be gone for a few days.
“You’ve heard all the news,” Luigi said.
But there was more news, because the next morning Sasà came to wake me. He gave me forged documents by which I became Luca Marra, and he, Xavier Ordonnez. A car, which had a Spanish license plate from Almeria, was waiting for us under a chestnut tree on viale Romagna.
For the first time in my life, I crossed the Italian border. Actually, I crossed two borders on a single journey.
We arrived in Spain and went south, through Girona, Barcelona, Tarragona, Castellón, Valencia, Murcia, and Almería. I was as excited as a kid at an amusement park. In Badora, we left the highway and drove into the Sierra Nevada, whose peaks were well above ten thousand feet.
How I wished Luciano were with me.
We arrived later that evening in Larcal, a small village of shepherds located at the top of a rocky ridge at an altitude of almost seven thousand feet. “Xavier” confidently navigated the narrow streets of the village and parked behind a small white house on the edge of the town. He proceeded to open the car door and loudly called out, “Alberto!” A light flicked on and a little man came out to meet us. He hugged Xavier tightly, then shook my hand. We declined his offer of food and we all went to bed.
I felt like I had only just closed my eyes when the smiling shepherd appeared at the door holding a tray with coffee. As soon as we tasted it, I opened my backpack and retrieved my Italian percolator and coffee.
That day we would climb up to our host’s sheepfold, eat in the mountains, and return in the evening. I heaved the backpack with the necessary supplies for the day onto my shoulders and we went out into the darkness of the Sierra. We began to climb a trail that I immediately intuited was treacherous. I saw the smile on Alberto’s face and understood. He was playing a game with us that I had played dozens of times in the Aspromonte, a favorite of lonely mountain folk when they thought they were in the company of inexperienced city people. It consisted of walking at a brisk pace, too brisk for even a mountaineer, for about half a mile. The guide would chat and joke around as if the gait were a leisurely walk while the victim tried to prove himself, clenching his teeth and losing his footing. Inevitably, he would start gasping, his legs would seize up, and the walk would become an ordeal. At that point, the mountaineer would resume his normal gait, but the hierarchies would be established.
Alberto launched himself ahead of us, whistling happily. He looked straight ahead, waiting for us to fall far behind him and beg for mercy. He never had to turn around, though, because his acute mountain senses told him that I was right on his tail. When we reached that half-mile mark when the game should have ended, he gritted his teeth and continued, chuckling to himself. When we had gone another few hundred feet, he whirled around and looked at me. “What mountains are you from?” he demanded. We hugged each other and resumed at a more merciful pace.
It grew lighter, and I began to observe the landscape, which was beautiful, though the trees didn’t tower gigantically and the brush only came up to our ankles. The climb was hard but the ground was smooth; despite their altitude, these were easy mountains.
We crossed a clearing covered with seedlings that I identified with horror as oregano. It had no aroma and was one-fifth as tall as ours. In our dialect, everything that was smaller, or less beautiful, or less difficult than what we were accustomed to, we referred to as malgioglio. After taking it in all day, I defined the entire Sierra Nevada as malgioglio.
When we arrived at the fold, I was not surprised to find a flock of sheep; this was no place for goats. I enjoyed myself all the same, helping Alberto milk the beasts, curd the cheese, and cook ricotta.
Men in camouflage, some twenty in all, began to emerge from the forest in pairs; they hugged Sasà, exchanged a few words in Arabic, and greeted me with a slight bow. They were all young, between the ages of twenty and thirty, except for one bearded man in his forties. They were armed with guns that I identified from their kicks as Llama 9x19 mm Parabellums and heavy French assault rifles, Famas 223-caliber Remingtons.
We sat down together to eat milk and ricotta. They joked around with Sasà, who answered their questions through fits of laughter. After we finished breakfast, Sasà left with the eldest of the group, and the others, having overcome their shyness, began to bombard me with questions. Some spoke Italian and acted as interpreters for the rest. They had a thousand curiosities, starting with football, then followed by women, cinema, fashion. They were simple, warm people, but also soldiers in top physical form.
My understanding with Alberto was perfect; he left to take the flock to the pasture, leaving me to be master of the kitchen. I sacrificed a young lamb to fill our many mouths. The boys looked at me curiously while I quickly killed, skinned, and butchered the lamb, which ended up in a large pot. Two tomatoes, two peppers, some onions, basil, salt, and oil. After forty-five minutes over the fire, the meat was done.
We had a happy lunch and a happy day, and that evening we regretfully took our leave. I gave the boys my backpack full of pasta, coffee, sugar, peeled tomatoes and other Italian products. They stayed behind in the woods, waving us off.
We were euphoric upon our return to Milan, bearing the news everyone had been waiting to hear. Sasà explained that most of the work was done; the two of us had to take one last trip together, while Luciano and Luigi would start contacting all our boys from back home to secure their
availability. We would start in a few weeks.
Using another set of forged documents, we landed at Heraklion Airport after a stopover in Athens. We rented a small off-road vehicle and headed toward Sitia, in the eastern part of Crete. We drove up to Olos, another village of shepherds. We climbed a narrow dirt road that ended in another fold, this time with goats.
The goatherd’s name was Dimitri, but he was actually an Arab, too. He and Sasà conversed for a few hours and were visibly satisfied when they said their goodbyes.
“Now all we have to do is wait,” Sasà told me in the car.
We returned to Italy by ferry and reached Milan by train. We rented two apartments under borrowed names, one in the Corvetto area and one near Corso Sempione. And we waited.
Sasà would occasionally make a few calls from the public payphone; Luciano, Luigi, and I would wait in a line in front until he would silently step out. The children of the forest who came to ask us for news became increasingly disappointed each day we waved them off.
In those days, everyone wanted heroin, the “dark stuff.” There were thousands of kids hanging around who were trying to annihilate themselves. The heroin market was divided into a thousand streams, with the biggest dealers moving twenty, thirty kilos a month at most. They were all supplied by small Turkish traffickers who, as Sasà explained, were actually Kurds with Turkish passports. They charged prices of fifty, fifty-five million lire a kilo on the first pass. The goods were often of low quality, and the supply wasn’t continuous. If we could provide quality, price, and continuity, we would be able to control everything.
And in the end, the dark stuff arrived; after twenty days the great moment came. This time, when Sasà stepped out of the phone booth, we could barely keep up with him.
We rented a van with more false documents and bought a dozen enormous bags. The next day the four of us entered a shed belonging to a small engineering company in Brianza. We came out with two hundred kilos of dark stuff of a quality that, we later discovered, had never been seen before on the market.
Black Souls Page 9
