There would be three victims in total. They were traveling in an armored off-road vehicle. Our cars would cut it off, preventing its escape, and gunfire from six powerful Famas would take care of the armor in no time.
The faint buzzing of two-way radios alerted all eight of us to the target’s arrival. Luigi expertly pulled in front of the heavy Range Rover, which was respecting the speed limit, proceeding at the pace of a man on foot. Yussuf closed off the rear. With our six assault rifles, we opened fire on the armored windows, which put up a brief resistance. The bullets breached the cabin and shredded the flesh, bones, and organs of its occupants.
In that deafening din, no one heard the crackle of the two-way radios.
It took us a few seconds to notice that someone was firing on us.
Two men had appeared out of nowhere. We reacted in a flash and riddled the two bodyguards with bullets. But the cost had been steep. Luigi and Yussuf were motionless in their cars. Sasà and one other man had been saved by their bulletproof vests.
The information we’d been given was wrong—the off-road vehicle had not been traveling alone, but was trailed by a spare car.
My heart was in my mouth as we poured out of the customs kiosks. I ran to Luigi, who was stunned. The bullet had hit him in the chest, compressing his thorax. His vest had done its job. He’d only sustained one injury—to his ankle; he was safe.
Yussuf, on the other hand, had a monstrous hole in his left cheek. He was bleeding from his nose and mouth, and the red was flecked with white. He’d been shot point-blank, so the gunpowder had finished combusting on his face, burning his skin and hair. The very short distance didn’t allow the projectile to acquire maximum speed and penetration, there was no leakage of brain matter, the wound was not deep, but he was suffocating in his own blood. He opened his eyes and stared at me. He was lost. He didn’t want to die, not so far from his desert. He was too young.
We had to decide, and quickly. Leave him there to die and find safety for ourselves immediately, or risk it.
We pulled Yussuf out of the car. We laid him down in the backseat of one of the other two cars we’d brought, and his breathing improved. Luigi joined us without help, hopping on one foot and settling in the passenger seat. I got behind the wheel; the other five got into the second car. We drove a hundred kilometers south and stopped in an empty parking lot. We had to get to Milan to try to save the boy. The shortest way was through Switzerland, and the risk was high.
We took off our weapons and vests, cleaned ourselves up as best we could, and sped off, leaving the three Arabs, who were perfectly able to fend for themselves, even in that situation. Sasà and Luciano drove ahead of us; I followed them with the injured parties.
At the last service area before the border, we bought toll stickers and glued them to our windshields. We crossed the border into Basel, where the customs officers glanced at us only long enough to check for the sticker.
We ran out of luck in Chiasso. The Swiss remained locked in their booths, but four or five Italian customs officers were checking a dozen cars, arranged in two parallel lines.
Sasà lined up in the left row and I by his side, on the right. We had no weapons with us and an escape would have been impossible.
Operations were slow; the military was requesting that the occupants show their documents and open their trunks. There were two cars ahead of us, and I braced myself for the worst. The end of the road. My heart sank.
Improvising, Sasà lowered his window and began to rant in a distorted, drunken voice. He went to step out of the car and the customs officers instantly surrounded him. They motioned to everyone, including me, to keep moving.
They’d taken the bait.
The last I saw of Sasà, he was wriggling as if he’d fallen prey to an epileptic seizure. I arrived in Milan in the middle of the night and tore Natalia out of her bed. She woke the doctor and picked up the phone. A small, fully equipped operating room had been installed in their villa, with an adjoining recovery room.
As he waited for his team, the doctor gave Luigi a painkiller. In less than half an hour, an anesthesiologist, a maxillofacial surgeon, and a specialist nurse had arrived. They took Yussuf inside and emerged four hours later. Then it was Luigi’s turn; in twenty minutes, they had applied some sutures and a light cast.
Natalia dismissed the medical team with three checks for one hundred million lire each. I offered to repay her many times, but she never accepted.
After a night in jail, Luciano and Sasà showed up the next day a bit worse for the wear. They’d received a few good kicks and a ticket for resisting arrest and insulting a public official. Or rather, Luciano and Sasà had endured the kicks, but the court summonses would turn out to have been issued to an incredulous Mr. Marzio Ripa, a postal clerk, and an Alfredo Rizzo, a bartender at Milan’s central station.
After a few weeks, Yussuf had regained enough strength to leave the small hospital at the villa. Sasà wanted to take him away, but I convinced him to let Yussuf stay a few more days at my place.
I showed him around Milan, loaded him up with presents, took him to the stadium, to the nicest clubs; he’d never been so happy in his life. We all coddled him like a little brother, spending time together at my house, even spending the night.
We boys of the Aurora were like these Arabs, soldiers of an ancient war. The difference was that an entire people shared in their war, while Luciano, Luigi, and I were waging a private battle to no one’s benefit but our own. Ultimately, we were risk-takers, and we liked to fight. We couldn’t have accepted a normal existence; in the absence of ideals, we would have invented some.
One evening at dinnertime, the national channel broadcast an investigative documentary. The first episode featured an Arab leader who was well known in the West. At the end of the interview, Luigi expressed his unconditional appreciation for the character, in the hopes of pleasing Sasà and Yussuf. “What a legend,” he said.
“He’s a sell-out,” Luciano shot back. “And the favors this country has done for him have brought nothing but grief and pain to Italian mothers.”
The room froze for a few seconds.
Sasà laughed. “You must have been born in the Pentagon, Luciano. You always know everything,” he said, restoring the lightheartedness that characterized our time together.
That’s how Luciano was; in any field, whatever the subject, he’d suddenly declare a searing truth, almost always hard to dispute. He sometimes seemed like the shaman of an ancient tribe, so accurately did he predict the future.
But this time was different; Luciano hadn’t come to his own conclusion, and Sasà had caught him. What he knew about this particular man, Luciano had gleaned from the memoirs of Vincenzo Sparta, who knew what was true because he had either heard about it personally or made it happen himself, and not just in matters related to the mafia.
A few days into December, Sasà became adamant about Yussuf’s departure. We decided we could close up shop and drove him down to Sicily, weighted down with presents and padded pockets. We watched as he despairingly boarded a fishing boat docked at Porto Empedocle, on his way back to his own country. He couldn’t be seen in Europe with that embroidery on his face.
We decided to spend the Christmas holidays in the village, and from Sicily we went directly to my house.
My father had always lived in the same house in the wrinkle. To avoid burying the cash we’d sent him, he’d used it to build another house, a big one, but he never lived in it. That’s where the four of us settled, washing up and changing our clothes before going to my parents’ for dinner. Only my mother and brother were there. My father and old Bino were still in the mountains, and my five sisters had been living in Rome for years, where they had moved to study and work.
The Aurora had changed; it was nearly empty. We cruised around the village and along the coastal villages, where new houses were being constructed
everywhere. A sort of competition had begun for who could build the biggest structure. The wrinkles we’d grown up in had been relegated to the silence of abandonment; they’d become like the shriveled breasts of an old wet nurse. The womb of the Aurora’s yellowish barracks would no longer produce life or labor.
The children of the forest rarely missed a holiday in the town of their birth, whether it was Easter, Christmas, or summer vacation. They came back to display their wealth, their beautiful cars; they gave expensive gifts, and brought important friends to show off.
No one tried to hide the nature of his business activities. Despite the sinful origins of the wealth, everyone was happy to enjoy it. Even we weren’t immune to that logic. No one could compete with us in either riches or friendships, although we took the precaution not to overdo it. We limited our ostentation so as not to humiliate the proud villagers, since doing so could have proved fatal.
We stayed in the village for a few days, reveling in the respect we’d won, greeting all the returning boys. We sent many of them back to Milan to close pending accounts while we went off into the mountains.
We were shadows in the light. None of us was yet aware of how ridiculous we had become and the disaster we were bringing to our land. Ancient roots that had taken hold a thousand years earlier, defended for centuries, were ripped from the ground and condemned to die. The older generation had reduced itself to parading around in Corneliani suits and Loro Piana cashmere, gold watches and rings. They were parodies of the old shepherds who after years of sweat and emigration hadn’t obtained more than a crust of bread for their children, defrauded by pride and the authority of their fathers. The mothers no longer resembled the ones we’d known; they’d loosened their braids, abandoned their traditional clothes; they bought their bread from the baker and had their hair done at the hairdresser’s. Sisters and daughters, in garish make-up, sunglasses, and fur coats that were improbable in these warm latitudes, traveled nonstop along the Ionian roads to fulfill who knows what commitments, driving cars with foreign plates sent to them by relatives who walked the streets of Central Europe. Brothers and children dreamed of imitating us one day.
Our ancient world had begun to disappear as soon as our village was transferred from the heart of the Aspromonte to the shores of an Ionian Sea. These celebrations were its funeral, which everyone had mistaken for a party.
The only ones not to rejoice at this happy disaster were the bourgeoisies of old. The peasant masses who had cultivated their land and looked after their beasts, whom the bourgeoisie had exploited and humiliated for centuries, had suddenly been swept out from under their feet. The peasants had attained their own wealth. The former rural masters were now locked in their living rooms, spitting venom and plotting revenge. They sent their children to study law, they enlisted them in law enforcement, they sent them into politics, all in preparation for a comeback. Sooner or later they would put the shackles back on those stinking goatherds and crush their crooked revolt.
When Luciano became possessed by his sociological demon he would say, “We’re responsible for the evil we do, we have no alibi, we are our own worst enemies. We can choose how to direct our energy, and we’ve chosen to take a shortcut to our individual well-being, but if these country dictators hadn’t held the reins so tightly for all those centuries, we’d be better behaved and less desperate today. Our local ruling class, with the help of the Blood Brothers, has kept a firm hold on all the wealth. Lawyers are sons of lawyers and nephews of lawyers, and it’s the same with judges and doctors. They’re better off than we are because they’ve had more thieving, cunning forebears than we did. They are to blame for everything we children of the forest have done and will continue to do. And now that we don’t revere them, we don’t ask them for advice, we don’t give them the kid goat at Christmas, we don’t bring our women into their big beds, and they can’t rape them while they work in their fields and homes, they can’t stand it, and they’re preparing their children for the reconquest, concealing their rancid rage behind their fake ethical principles.”
“Those smirking cops,” he once commented to me at one of the Socialist undersecretary’s parties. “Tonino’s trial was enough to reveal who they really are, sons of bourgeoisie. A poor man would never smile at the pain of others, he knows suffering all too well.” Then he gestured to the undersecretary. “Socialists are a little like the children of the forest, they’re not elitists, they open their doors to the masses, they look for a piece of heaven and usher in as many people as possible. They love power, but they have the need to flaunt it and they enjoy it with friends. If they manage to get rid of the socialists, that will be the end of us, too, and if we fall, it won’t be long until they do.”
During that holiday at my father’s place, we managed to forget Milan, its dealings, its nonstop pace, and we enjoyed our mountains. Bino came to spend the night with us, leaving my father to return to the Aurora alone. The old goatherd tagged along behind Sasà, in disbelief that he was a foreigner, since he only spoke in our dialect, and with no accent.
Sasà had that gift. He was a chameleon. Looking at him, it was impossible to tell if he was twenty, thirty, or forty years old. I had witnessed him become Spanish, German, Greek, Turkish, Italian, Calabrian. He had an infinite variety of characters that he could adapt according to the environment and his interlocutor. But he had only one, very fixed personality. He was good, happy, of the same breed as Luciano and Sante, and he loved us deeply, there was no faking that.
But Sante, Luciano, and I would have sacrificed everything for our group. We were our own mission. Sasà and Luigi had their limits: one was dedicated to his cause, the other to himself alone.
We spent the long, frigid mountain evenings in front of the hearth inside the house at the fold, with full bellies and a few extra glasses of wine. When a new guest appeared, Bino gave the best of himself, as usual. He would pour some of the local negrello and entertain until dawn, telling stories that he swore were true.
One evening he dove right into the story of the Crocco, a famous brigand who wreaked havoc on the foothills the century before.
“Hunger was so widespread here, and inevitably every decade produced its own brigand who terrorized the masters with raids and violence for a few years before he was found hanging from a tree, rotting in the sun or rain, left as a message to potential copycats. That’s how it went for Vincenzo Monteleone, a son of this land and its poor peasants who, as a young man, had the unusual idea of feeding himself with his master’s beasts. His excessively good health and small paunch, which seemed to appear suddenly, were lost just as quickly. Don Alfonso Barresi, the master, gave him a hard lashing. Then, not yet satisfied, he had the constables escort Vincenzo in chains to the court of Capace, where the presiding judge was the Honorable Don Giovanni Andrea Barresi, the master’s cousin and the biggest landowner in the area. The good-natured judge estimated that two years in shackles would be sufficient for Vincenzo’s social reform, and that upon his release from jail he would likely take up his hoe and thicken his hands instead of his waistline. His therapy must have been insufficient, however, because once it was over, Vincenzo neglected his hoe in favor of a double-barrel shotgun, and began his life of crime. Once he acquired the necessary arrogance and courage, he went to see Don Alfonso and left him to die in agony, hanging from the crook of a tree, known in dialect as the crocco. After the landowner’s death, Vincenzo became known far and wide as the Crocco. Destiny had it that Don Alfonso’s estate, in the absence of heirs, would supplement the already extensive assets of the Honorable Judge who had sentenced the brigand. Meanwhile the Crocco went unchallenged, ravaging those hungry but very fertile lands for years. It happened eventually that another local gentleman’s soul communed with God as he gazed upside down at his beautiful lands, with an ankle firmly lodged in the robust crocco of an olive tree. Never having found a partner worthy of him, he too died a bachelor and entirely bereft of heirs. The peas
ants, who for years had worked that thriving red earth, deluded themselves into thinking that they could claim the estate. But another pack of wolves, more ravenous ones, were preparing to snatch the juicy morsel. Through one of his tenants, Don Giovanni Andrea Barresi secretly contacted the brigand, and coaxed him with promises of certain grace and a generous reward. The Crocco, overestimating his abilities, took the bait. To the tune of gunshots sounding off the mountains, he annihilated the claims of the peasants and forced them to testify in support of the Honorable Judge’s petition for the possession of the assets. The judge wanted to personally reward the brigand by arranging a nocturnal meeting at the old convent of Artarusa. The Crocco arrived happy, believing that his times of suffering were over, and looking forward to becoming a gentleman, too, like his illustrious friend. Instead he was met with the constables, who thanked him for his services rendered, and for a month his head remained stuck on a post at a crossroads near the convent. The effective administration of justice always produces excellent results, declared the high magistrate, publicly complimenting the Royal Army, which had freed the people from another bloodthirsty bandit.”
The moral of the story, according to old Bino, was that in these lands, both sides had been ruled by brigands for centuries. And so it remained.
“It’s all lies, Uncle Bino,” Luigi would tease him.
The old man would usually fly into a tizzy, pretending to fall for our provocations, but this time he said to Luigi in a quiet voice, “You bought that diploma of yours.” Then he turned to Sasà. “Ask Luciano if you want to know the truth, he’s the only one with any brains around here. I don’t understand how anyone can spend time with those people. The Barresi family still owns all these lands and runs the court.”
Luciano nodded, a gesture that made the old man proud. He didn’t hesitate to launch into one of his long-winded speeches, which we’d heard so many times before. He was about to say that there was and would always be a Barresi behind the injustices that suffocated the land, a story I’d grown tired of hearing. I preferred the frost on a starry night and went out to the enclosure to inhale the bitter heather and the breath of the goats, who knew how to live well, with good masters and fragrant grass to eat. They walked along a marked path without a care, and when the end of the journey arrived, it came as the pinch of a compassionate blade that slipped under their necks, carrying away their consciousness and pain and returning their blood to the earth. A quiver of the nostrils and it was over; they found themselves in the eternal prairies of the paradise made by the children of the forest. And if any of them wished to avoid that fate, they could simply cross the river to another pasture, hide on one of the many impossible-to-reach granite peaks, and so long to fences, milking, and knives.
Black Souls Page 11
