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Black Souls

Page 19

by Gioacchino Criaco

Rosario was from the mountains, too, mountains far from the Aspromonte but not so different. He was the only one who had fought fair and who hadn’t seen his opponents as beasts; he’d performed that last act out of duty.

  Rosario had worn the uniform of the Benemérita with pride his entire life, but that day his clothes felt fetid and heavy, and he wanted to shed them right then and there.

  Kyria stood opposite him. “It didn’t hurt,” he said, and then his gaze grew distant.

  He saw a splendid valley, a placid body of water at the foot of a proud hill, thriving cattle and goats at pasture. Paradise.

  And then he saw them.

  First old Bino, then his father, then Sante and little Santoro. And behind them, an ancient and familiar warrior, Kyria. They’d all shared the same dream.

  His muscles went slack and he collapsed into Rosario’s arms.

  About the Author

  Gioacchino Criaco was born in Africo, a small town on the Ionian coast of Calabria. The son of Aspromonte shepherds, Criaco graduated from the University of Bologna with a degree in law and practiced as a lawyer in Milan until 2008, when his debut novel, Anime Nere (Black Souls), was published to great international acclaim. Since then, Criaco has published five other novels and overseen the adaptation of Black Souls into a prize-winning film. He divides his time between Milan and Calabria.

  Editor’s Notes

  PART I

  “Wrinkle of humanity . . .” (13): In 1951, the people of Africo, the town where Gioacchino Criaco was born, were relocated from high in the Aspromonte massif, a secluded densely forested area described as a seven hours’ march from the next nearest town. The reason for the removal of the population was, ostensibly, the people’s safety, as the “old town” had suffered several disastrous floods. However, there is much more to the story, as Africo had become a political bugaboo; in 1948, L’Europeo journalist Tommaso Besozzi had profiled the city as being an “emblem of desperation,” Africo became a poster child of Southern Italian poverty.

  The residents of Africo, who numbered about three thousand, had been living in that harsh, inaccessible, and idyllic mountain forest for more than a thousand years. The evacuated population was relocated to a “new city” that was carved out of Bianco, an existing municipality by the coast, but through various bureaucratic delays and political setbacks the new city by the sea was not ready for the Africoti until 1963. During the twelve years between evacuation and resettlement, the people of Africo lived in temporary refugee structures around Reggio Calabria—dispossessed of their homes, their millennium-old way of life, their mountains. In this period of turmoil, many young men resorted to emigration or to organized crime for their livelihood.

  Criaco himself was born in the new city by the sea after the evacuation. Like many Africoti, Criaco describes a yearning for the mountain home he never knew, and his characters divide their time between the coastal new city and their clandestine excursions to the mountains they were supposed to have left behind. The narrator uses the term “the wrinkle,” la ruga in the original Italian, to refer to the urban block he grows up in in his city by the sea, in contrast to his father’s fold in the mountains, where the sons of goatherds find refuge in the remnants of a lifestyle from which they have been torn away.

  “In those years, in addition to the infamous kidnappings . . .” (15): In the 1970s, the ’Ndrangehta, which had largely managed to keep a much lower profile than Italy’s other mafias, started to make national and international news on a daily basis through a series of kidnappings. One of the most famous instances was the kidnapping of John Paul Getty III, the teenage heir of the Getty oil business, who was kidnapped in 1973 and held for five months, during which time he almost died. But there were many other instances of brutal and occasionally fatal kidnappings.

  Tingiùto (17): Literally, tinged; darkened by coal.

  “Of the shadows who stayed with us during the war . . .” (18): The First ’Ndrangheta War, as it has been labeled, was a bloody internal war that lasted from 1974–1976 and resulted in the deaths of at least 233 made men.

  Malandrino/i (17): Literally, crook. Criaco uses the word to refer to a member of a local ’ndrina (as ’Ndrangheta cells are called).

  “On account of his sister, my father was not, nor could he ever have become, a malandrino himself . . .” (19): Since the 1920s, the ’Ndrangheta has had very strict rules about membership. A man cannot join if a woman in his immediate family has ever been a prostitute; other sexual purity laws, which the narrative addresses later, require exclusion of men who have been cuckolded or who are the product of cuckolding. Nor can a man join if any member of his immediate family has ever been on a police force.

  picciotto/i (37): Literally “young guys,” or as John Dickie has translated, “lads with attitude.” The entry-level ranking in the ’Ndrangheta once a young man has gone through the blood oath ceremony; an equivalent in other mafias would be a soldier.

  “Tell my friend Peppino I had a son who I named after his late friend . . .” (37): When Santino says “his late friend,” he is referencing his own murdered father. His intent is clear because of Calabrese naming conventions that dictate a man names his son after his own father (the child’s paternal grandfather). Santino’s statement also clearly implies that he knows Don Peppino was involved in his father’s murder.

  “If he wants to honor us with his presence . . .” (37): ’Ndrangheta protocol historically insisted on politeness and formal language, even in a case like this one, where Sante is threatening Don Peppino via a lowly messenger.

  “Because my friend,” he said, “is cursed by the evil eye” (38): As Peppino and Santino gift each other with goat horns—cornetti, which are widely used in Calabria to protect against the evil eye, including in effigy as horn-shaped gold charms worn on chains—they are also mutually insulting each other, since a cornutto, or a “horned one,” is Calabrese slang for a cuckold.

  carabiniere (76): Italy has several major police forces. The carabinieri are a federal force, a branch of the military, but are responsible for local beat cop work. To prevent corruption, carabinieri are never stationed in the region of Italy they are from. Rosario Palamita, a native Sicilian, is the long-standing carabinieri assigned to the narrator’s region of the Aspromonte.

  “That wouldn’t have been the first time Luciano had jinxed us with his comments . . .” (48): The Italian original calls Luciano “grillo parlante,” or talking cricket, an allusion to the talking cricket in Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio. In the story, the talking cricket is killed by Pinocchio for offering him unwanted advice, then later comes back as a ghost to continue to offer advice Pinocchio ignores.

  “They called us the ‘children of the forest,’ we descendants of the people who had inhabited the woods of the Calabrian massif for millennia . . .” (53): Africo was not the only Aspromonte town that was evacuated to the coast during the 20th century. Two of the most famous, both of them now tourist attractions as ghost towns, are Pentedattilo, from the Greek for “Five Fingers,” which was abandoned in the 1960s, and Roghudi, which was abandoned in 1973. But the peaks and washes of the Aspromonte massif are dotted with empty villages.

  “Who had begun to refer to all northerners as Piedmontese after Garibaldi came through . . .” (56): In August 1962, Giuseppe Garibaldi, hero general of Italian unification, led an army of two thousand volunteers into the Aspromonte on a march that was meant to take them from Sicily to Rome to challenge the Pope’s rule of the Papal States, which Garibaldi believed should be incorporated in Italy. However, Garibaldi was mistaken in thinking the Kingdom of Italy government supported this endeavor, and his volunteers were stopped in the mountains by royal troops.

  PART II

  “The feast of San Silvestro” (64): December 31. The feast day of Saint Sylvester, an early 4th century pope, is celebrated throughout Italy, but the saint is especially revered in Calabria, where he is said
to have traveled, including in some traditions in the company of the Emperor Constantine.

  “We were retracing the steps of the Saint, the protector . . .” (70): Although Criaco never names the saint in question here, the text is referring to Saint Leo of Bova, the saint dearest to Africo and several other Aspromonte villages (although not, it should be noted, the town’s patron saint, who is Saint Rocco). Saint Leo is an obscure saint whose legacy has been almost entirely lost. He was born in the ninth or tenth century in Bova, and after joining the ascetic Basilian monastic order, came deep into the Aspromonte to pray in the icy waters near Africo. He arrived during a period of famine and presented the starving locals with pine pitch, which miraculously transformed into bread when they took it home. His feast day is still celebrated with an annual pilgrimage up to his church in abandoned Africo Vecchio.

  “Whom we began to call Salvatore, or Sasà for short” (116): The name Salvatore, literally “savior,” can be found throughout Italy but is most concentrated in the South. Here, in addition to the implications of its definition, the boys are christening him with a tongue-in-cheek honorary for someone from their region, similar, in the US, to calling him an all-American Joe or Tom, but with the added regional layer of a Huck or a Tucker.

  Part III

  “We filled the lanes with our powerful cars, crisscrossing the peninsula and the continent . . .” (123): Calabria has been one of the regions of Italy hardest hit by emigration. Due to a combination of factors—abject poverty, feudal exploitation, predatory landlordism, oppressive taxes on regional industries (particularly goats, which are so important in Black Souls), and uneven industrial development in the North—millions of Calabrians have departed their home in search of work, temporarily or permanently, in the Americas, Australia, Germany, France, and the cities of northern Italy.

  Part IV

  “the saint-burners” (169): Made men of the ’Ndrangheta; ’Ndranghetisti. Part of the ’Ndrangheta initiation rite includes holding a burning image of a saint in your hand until it is ash while repeating the initiation formulas.

  “the Gozzini law” (174): In 1986, a prison reform law was passed. It included holiday leave for prisoners and the opportunity to reduce sentences in the event of good behavior.

  “Sirens accompanied us all the way to the Fatebenefratelli . . .” (194): Fatebenefratelli, in actuality the name of a large Milan hospital, is here used as Milanese slang for central booking.

  Part V

  “We were happy with our black bread . . .” (224): In 1928, when the journalist and social activist Umberto Zanotti Bianco visited Africo, he was horrified to see the impoverished residents lived off an unwholesome (in his opinion) bread made of lentils and acorns. The black bread of the Aspromonte became one of the symbols of Africo’s poverty, which later caused it to be labeled “the poorest, the saddest” village in Calabria by Tommaso Besozzi.

  “Saffino was promoted and transferred so he could bring order to Valle d’Aosta . . .” (252): A cushy transfer to one of Italy’s wealthiest and least populated regions.

 

 

 


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