Black Mountain

by Venero Armanno

  A door swung wide and a latecomer entered. Gozzi looked up: ‘Giovanni?’

  This man, who was in his late thirties or early forties, replied, ‘Signore.’ He looked at me, a skeleton standing there. ‘Is this a joke?’

  ‘It doesn’t pay not to be punctual,’ Gozzi said without interest.

  I saw a frown deepen in Giovanni’s forehead. He looked around. ‘It’s tough work where we’re going. Get him to lift that barrel and bring it here.’

  It was half-full and would have tested any man. I went and grunted and strained until I had it in my arms, then I delivered it to his feet, water sloshing.

  Half-impressed, he stepped around it and came close to me. ‘Are you obedient?’

  I replied, ‘What sort of work am I supposed to do?’

  Giovanni raised his hand and slapped the side of my face.

  I said, ‘I am obedient, sir.’

  ‘Cut your asking price in two, Don Gozzi. It looks like you’re trying to sell me your problems.’

  The men started to sign the necessary papers.

  My life in the world of making beautiful and desirable tiles, ceramics and porcelain, was already over.

  So there is a hell on earth, friend, and Giovanni took me there in his horse-drawn cart with another boy he’d purchased.

  It was the sulphur mines thirty or forty kilometres from Caltanissetta, past the hilly region by the Salso River. For as far as the eye could see, the natural vegetation of the area had been burned into black stick and charcoal. I learned that the poisonous, billowing smoke and vapour from the smelters were responsible for this abomination, and the ground and undulating hills looked as if they had all been scorched by some great fire-breathing beast.

  The boy with me was named Natale, and he’d been working with a gravedigger for so long that he was confused as to whether that was his first or family name. On that day we rode into the sulphur fields and watched the spread of our new home and workplace with the dawning realisation of what we were in for.

  Natale was maybe a year or two younger than me, and said he’d been sold after he turned seven. His grave-digging mentor disliked him so much that he often threatened to inter the boy alive with the corpses they buried. One day Natale had the pleasure of burying his master himself – he dropped dead of a heart attack – but freedom hadn’t followed. Instead, through a local agent and proxy, his family simply had the boy onsold, and he’d arrived here.

  We were given bowls of tepid water with what might have been pieces of potato in it for our evening meal, then shown the shed where we would sleep. It was a night of a full moon. We heard the padlock in the door snap shut as Giovanni locked us in for the night. I scrambled to a window to watch the light bathing the devastated earth of our home. The vista was almost beautiful in its macabre way, but Natale was silently weeping. Tears glistened on his thin and dirty cheeks.

  ‘I want to go home, I want to see my mother,’ he repeated. ‘You’ll come with me, we’ll run away.’ Then he huddled in his cot, pulling the empty sacks that were meant to be bedclothes over him.

  I didn’t shed any tears. The difference between us was that I knew no better, and he’d been sold after living a childhood in his family home. Eight brothers and sisters, he told me: far too many mouths to feed when a father and mother received almost no income from whatever type of unskilled peasant labour they performed.

  Natale and I, and all the carusi – the boys in the mines – we were minute cogs in a system that was a slave trade in all but name. I was fortunate in a way. I had no memories to make me yearn for home and family. Natale never stopped weeping, he never stopped longing for the family that had seen fit to profit from his tears.

  Giovanni worked a single tunnel and I never heard what happened to his previous helpers.

  The tunnel was a sulphurous hole in the earth, and it twisted and burrowed into the dark hot depths. The burn in the atmosphere stung our eyes and noses, even our skin. At every step it felt as if suffocation would come next. This particularly affected Natale, whose eyes never stopped coursing with tears that were now involuntary, and whose nostrils dripped constantly. Even his skin developed red, raw rashes. He itched and he scratched and he bled.

  On the other hand, except for the strain of the heat and the pungent stinging in my eyes, I found I could complete the work Giovanni demanded without my body wanting to collapse. Whenever we were away from our master, when we were hauling sacks and cane baskets of ore up through the tunnel, I often accounted for Natale’s load as well. We managed to make progress like this, me acting as the pack mule and Natale leading as the guide, squinting through the water in his eyes.

  In the hut where we slept we tried to get rid of any signs of Giovanni’s previous boys. We had two beds out of ten. Most of these looked as if they’d never been used, or hadn’t been needed for a long time, but there were etchings and scratches in the walls; days counted off, abandoned, taken up again; stick figures.

  Natale and I spoke about how our predecessors must now be enjoying a wonderful freedom off somewhere with their families, and we painted pretty pictures of clear fields and open plains, and pure fresh air to breathe. But at night when we lay falling into the sleep that always came quickly, I was certain that Natale and I shared the same vision: of boys suffocating in the tunnel, or of falling dead under a load, or of having the life beaten out of them for infractions we couldn’t imagine. The emptiness of those extra beds in our shed spoke the most eloquent truth of all, and though we tried we couldn’t quite fool ourselves about what our real prospects were.

  As a miner Giovanni worked the depths, digging out ore that was transported to the smelter at the edge of this vast plain of desolation. There, the sulphur was extracted and he was paid by the amount of crude he could bring to the surface. Sometimes he had us dig and scrape away at the rock walls with him, using a variety of handheld tools such as chisels, picks and shovels, or the brute force of a hammer, but mostly our job was to carry his valuable rubble through the baking twists and turns up to the surface, where we deposited it all into large neat mounds.

  Every four or five days the carrier from the smelter came by in his cart, which was drawn by a single, sad mule. The carrier would record the breadth and depth of the pile we made, then Natale and I would shovel and haul the rock onto the cart before descending back into hell in order to start the process all over again. At least out in the open there was some respite; Natale’s eyes and nose would dry, the cooler temperature would make us feel half alive; but there was nothing around worth looking at, nothing that lifted the spirit, and the air itself remained as acrid as ever.

  At night we spoke about escaping. We thought that if we could somehow break out of the shed soon after Giovanni locked us in for the night then we would have all the hours until dawn before he’d discover we were gone. Not that Natale or I had very much idea about where we could escape to – we thought we could lose ourselves in some big city, though we’d never even been in one and had no idea how to get to one or how we’d survive there. Or maybe we’d stow away on a ship or ferry bound for the mainland. This was an even greater fantasy, for what was ‘the mainland’? What were the people there like?

  Each night we were too deadened by our exertions to follow our thoughts to some logical conclusion. The word simply went through our heads like an idiot’s prayer: Escape. Escape. Escape.

  Giovanni’s tunnel wasn’t the only hole into the pits of hell. There must have been another twenty or thirty just like ours, and in each of them there worked one or two miners with their own carusi to help them. The number of these boys varied depending on how productive the site was, and the miners kept mostly to themselves and the boys never mixed. The only contact Natale and I had with someone other than Giovanni was the cart driver from the smelter. His name was Pino and his mule was Luisa, and that long-faced, sad-eyed creature was often m
ore friendly than anyone or anything we’d ever known, standing waiting with her head bowed, receiving out pats and neck rubs, her eyes closing gratefully at the small kindnesses we offered.

  As Pino measured the quantity of ore piled up, we would offer Luisa a pail of water, which her rough tongue lapped with a gentility and grace at odds with the harsh service expected of her. Sometimes Pino would laugh at the fruit of our labours and tell us things that turned our blood cold: ‘Giacomo and his brother over there have only got one boy, and he gets twice your haul’; ‘Last week Pasquale up at number five got tired of his carusi eating too much and he put a pick into the biggest one’s eye’; ‘Keep this sort of work up and pretty soon Giovanni will realise how useless you two are’; and finally, ‘A cry-baby and a skeleton, you know your master must be mad?’

  We couldn’t know if the things he said were true or if he was merely satisfying a sadistic streak, but the words had their effect: we worked as hard as we possibly could, and Giovanni seemed satisfied enough with our progress that he never beat us, not even once.

  There were women in these sulphur fields too, and they must have been the wives or the concubines of the luckier miners, though we rarely saw their faces and had never witnessed their hair flowing free. They covered themselves with coats, shawls and scarves, trying to keep the heat and pestilent odours at bay, but probably also understanding just how lonely and desperate most of these single men and boys were. Worse, they probably knew all about the all-pervading lawlessness in this place, and would have heard the same rumours we did: of fights that ended with knives and blood; of bare-knuckle contests that didn’t end when an opponent was knocked down; of men’s bodies dumped into forgotten tunnels, their goods and chattels looted and anything that remained being burned in rusted barrels or dumped into the smelter itself.

  Natale and I daydreamed about Giovanni one day taking a wife, about what it would be like to have a woman who could act as a mother to us, who would cook us decent meals and wash and darn our clothes. We wondered if one day a woman’s face might bestow us with kindly smiles, if she would caress our cheeks and make our daily descent into hell just that little bit easier to swallow.

  On occasion, Giovanni had to leave us to work the tunnel on our own. These were the times when he went into Caltanissetta or some other town on an errand or for supplies. Often we’d see him returning across the wasteland, a wisp of a figure taking shape out of the smoke and steam, pushing his cart loaded with another week or two’s necessities. Then we’d pray that among his chattels was something entirely new, a bride, but it never happened.

  During his daytime excursions we were free to do our work unsupervised, and though we usually hauled a little more lackadaisically, and dug half-heartedly, we never took these occasions as opportunities to escape. For all the others were in the fields; two boys scurrying across the scorched plains would be immediately recognised for what they were. We’d be dragged back, our only gain the ritualised beating we’d seen from afar being meted out on other carusi who attempted escape. To his credit, however, Giovanni never complained about our slower pace when he was away and, as I mentioned, he never beat us – then again, he never needed to, for we followed his every word like obedient dogs. After that first time in Gozzi’s warehouse when he’d struck me across the face, Giovanni didn’t show the slightest inclination to strike me again. Sometimes I even thought that, at heart, he might be a kind man, a good soul.

  A good soul in hell.

  The biggest problem he had was that his seam into the earth was dwindling in its usefulness, and much less sulphur-producing ore was capable of being extracted. As his fortunes decreased, his drinking increased. Every night we continued to be padlocked in our shed, and we began to overhear Giovanni in his quarters drunkenly ranting about the paucity of the earth’s providence and his overall bad luck in life. Other times he simply howled wordlessly like some beast looking down into damnation.

  Then we learned just what sort of damnation we ourselves were in, and the price of escape.

  We were dead asleep when there was a commotion outside. Soon we heard men coming to our shed and the padlock being fumbled open. The door swung wide to the wintry chill of approaching winter. Giovanni swayed in the doorway, his mouth rotten with cheap wine, and behind him was a group of men carrying oil lanterns.

  ‘The boy Angelino who works for Don Salvatore here has run away. You two know anything about it?’

  Natale huddled to me and whimpered, believing he was about to suffer for something he was completely ignorant of. Not only did we know nothing about this escape, but we didn’t even know who some boy named Angelino was. As for this miner we were confronted with, the one called ‘Salvatore’, we’d never seen him before either.

  Giovanni seemed to have forgotten how closely he’d guarded us against contact with others, and Salvatore himself now stepped into our shed. Holding his lamp high, he seemed to fill the space. The man had great bushy red moustaches and bulging eyes. His boots were very fine indeed, and very clean, and his trousers and shirt were neat and without holes. This man had a woman, no doubt about it, and she must have been a good one. He must also have had a lease on a very productive tunnel, or tunnels, because not one ghost of the death in our master’s face was in his.

  ‘What do you know?’ Salvatore demanded. ‘Tell me. If there was a conspiracy to free Angelino then speak. If you do then I’ll buy your freedom tonight. If you don’t speak, well, it can only go badly.’

  I wished that I did know something. I would have spoken up immediately and grabbed the slightest chance to get away from this place. Instead I could only tell him the truth.

  ‘We don’t know him. We don’t know you. We don’t even know which mine is yours. The only person we know other than our master is Pino with the smelter’s cart.’

  Pino was standing there in the group. I could see his long face in the flickering light. Funny, but every day he seemed to more and more resemble his mule. It was one of the few things that Natale and I could tell each other to keep ourselves amused.

  Our master Giovanni shook off his stupor. ‘He’s telling the truth.’

  ‘Then get your shotgun and bring your boys,’ he told our master. ‘Let them learn what happens.’

  Salvatore strode out of the shed and the other men gathered around him outside. Giovanni looked none too pleased to be pressed into their service. I thought that had less to do with the expedition and its nature, and more to do with the wintry cold, the loss of bedtime, and the subsequent loss of a day’s digging or more.

  ‘You heard him,’ Giovanni said. ‘Get dressed. And better wrap your feet as well as you can.’

  There were three groups that went hunting beyond the black plains into the hills, and our group came upon the boy Angelino as an orange dawn bled through the sky. The best thing about the hunt was that for a few hours Natale and I travelled out of that sulphur mine into land that was as beautiful as any that God has handed His children. The air was sweet, the hills were green, and vibrant meadows filled the valley. Even with winter’s terrible cold only weeks away, here the world was as new as on the first day. We saw deer running. Our master raised his lupara – the traditional sawn-off shotgun used by Sicilian hunters – to bring a hare home for the pot, but Salvatore stopped him. Why let the running boy know where we were?

  Our particular group was Giovanni, Salvatore, Pino and his mule, and Natale and me. I thought we would have to trek over and through these hills for days, if not weeks, which was a heartening thought. Keep running and hiding, Angelino, I prayed, I’ll do my best not to find you. The journey filled me with a vitality I hadn’t felt before. Natale’s cheeks were red, his face full of colour instead of its usual grey. Even poor Luisa came to life. I was amazed by the way her hoofs trotted so adroitly over the rocks, her tail swishing as it had never done before, ears straight and alert.

  Then came the
worst thing: Pino spied the boy coming down the side of a treacherous hill. It looked as if Angelino had decided to go off in the sort of direction any tracker might least have expected, which was a good idea, but his route must have proved to be impassable. He was struggling to get back down onto a reasonable track. The boy was far away and hadn’t seen us, but it was clearly going to take him some time to negotiate that hill.

  ‘Let’s get closer,’ Salvatore said, his voice flat. The thrill of the hunt was already over and what lay ahead was the brutal necessity of what had to come next. I knew the boy would be captured, chained, punished without mercy, then he would just go back into the pits, probably to haul even greater weights and quantities than before.

  When he was satisfied that we’d come close enough, Salvatore stopped the group.

  Now I saw the terrible, straining expression in Angelino’s face. The air was cold, he hardly wore anything, and he had no shoes or sandals. The rocks would have been cutting the soles of his feet to shreds. And it looked like his descent had only brought him into even more troublesome terrain.

  Salvatore pulled off his gloves and put the index finger of each hand to his tongue. His whistle was long and almost friendly, like a country hiker who sees a paisan, a countryman, in the distance. It took a moment for the whistle to reach Angelino’s ears, then the boy looked up and around, startled out of his concentration. Salvatore raised his arm and waved in a grandiloquent gesture. Angelino spied us. What would he do? Surprisingly, even comically, he waved back. But he redoubled his efforts, scrambling along a treacherous decline of stones and gravel, much of which tumbled away. Larger rocks gathered speed and crashed to the flat ground below.

  I could sense Angelino’s terror. How, with so much open terrain all around, such hillsides and meadows, and those mountains that looked so perfect to escape into, had this frightened boy gone so completely wrong?