Black Mountain

by Venero Armanno

  The truth of exactly where we were and who was holding us, and the real reason for Angelino’s sad attempt at escape, plus the fact of his one hundred-year-old face, made itself known on the Sunday night before we were to resume our labour in the mine.

  Hours after we’d gone to sleep the hut’s door slammed open.

  I was instantly awake. Salvatore’s great bulk was framed in the archway, the wintry wind blowing his bushy hair. He came inside with a clump and a clatter. The man had been drinking, and heavily. He had a swaying list as if this was a boat and the waves were tossing. I could smell the whisky on him. Unlike our previous master, Giovanni, who sang and screamed while he was drunk, Salvatore was completely silent. He went to Natale’s bunk and looked down, then his heavy step came to my bedside and he looked down at me. My eyes met his veined, bulging eyes and beneath his red moustache his fat lips were wet. Though I had no idea what thoughts were in his head or why he was here like this, some instinct told me to maintain the eye contact, to not look away, to not blink or allow myself to reveal the slightest trepidation.

  Salvatore decided he didn’t like what he saw, and he swayed back toward Natale’s bunk. He shoved him until he was awake. It was like rousing a corpse. He made the boy get up and pushed him outside, then locked the quarters as he left. I didn’t quite understand why but I was relieved to be still incarcerated there.

  By morning Natale hadn’t returned. Salvatore unlocked my door at roughly the usual hour and this time he threw me a chunk of sour bread with a wedge of hard cheese. I drank a quart of goat’s milk as I followed him to the mine. My master was in good enough spirits, though his head was obviously sore, but I felt that all it would take was one awkward or impertinent question or comment from me for those spirits to darken. We worked that day at the usual rate or, if anything, at perhaps one fraction more slowly, and at the middle of the day Salvatore even remembered to feed me a little more. It was the same repast – sour bread and hard cheese, delicious.

  Later, as I came in for the evening, Natale was there curled up in his cot. He wouldn’t speak. He couldn’t utter a word or sound, and kept his head under the covers. I don’t know if he slept or not. I did, like the dead, thoroughly spent. In the morning as we prepared for our work day, Natale still wouldn’t meet my eye and refused to utter even the most basic conversation. I did notice him glancing at himself in the stained mirror la signora had left us. Salvatore unlocked the front door but he didn’t want Natale in the mine. He took him by the shirt and shoved him toward the larger cabin.

  ‘Get it all clean and arrange things so it’s not a pigpen. Sweep, dust, shake everything out. And make some food for tonight.’

  With eyes downcast Natale tottered away. In the space of only two days Salvatore had turned Natale into his woman. I was glad to be working down in the sulphurous hole.

  Evening came and there was something warm and disgusting to eat that the boy had concocted. I choked it down but murmured how tasty it was. Salvatore slapped the back of my head and sent me on my way. Later, Natale didn’t return to his bunk. I slept alone another night, then another, then a week passed, then Natale vanished completely. Salvatore burst into the room in the morning.

  ‘Have you seen that little prick?’ He was already checking his rifle and arranging his ammunition strip over his shoulder. ‘If he told you which way he was headed, now’s the time to speak or I’ll put a hole in your stupid skull, too.’

  He pushed me out into the morning’s ice and I fell onto my knees. I had the feeling he was going to shoot me in the back of the head anyway. The wind had picked up and scattered flakes and flurries of snow. Even I knew the boy wouldn’t get very far. At least the previous runaway, Angelino, had sense enough to try to leave in pleasant weather.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘He didn’t tell me anything.’

  Instead of a gunshot he gave me a kick in the back that sent me sprawling forward, my face hitting the cold, hard-packed earth. Salvatore was already striding away.

  ‘Let me come with you! You can’t hurt him!’

  Infuriated, Salvatore returned and dragged me up and bodily threw me back inside the cabin. He put his boot into my right leg, making me howl. Then he locked me in, but not before I saw the ice that had formed at his nostrils and in the corners of his mouth. Specks of frost nestled in his plentiful eyebrows too. I didn’t know who would constitute the hunting party, but it was clear Natale’s fate was decided. The boy didn’t stand a chance: the elements or the bullet.

  It was the elements.

  Salvatore returned as darkness fell. He hadn’t found Natale. It was too cold for him to camp out and he’d left unprepared anyway. When he unlocked my door and let me out I went to break the covering of ice in the trough outside, which had stopped me being able to pump running water all day. There the boy was, sitting beside the wooden trough, huddled into himself, frozen into his own block of ice.

  Only one eye was open and it had the flinty quality of the dull ore we’d hauled out of the mine. Shaking, I sat by him. Natale was like some sculpture made by the cold and snow, and when I put my hand over his all I sensed was the same empty contact you receive from rock. As with Angelino before him, there was no life left, but worse, no sense that there’d ever been life in him at all.

  Salvatore came around the corner to see what was taking me so long. When he saw Natale’s frozen body his thick lips pursed but it wasn’t with sadness, only annoyance. My master picked Natale’s body up and bore him to the cart. He found some sacks and swathed the frozen corpse. As Salvatore lifted the cart by the handles and made to push off, I said, ‘You’ll bury him?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Salvatore shoved off into the wind and I noticed that there wasn’t a shovel or a pick in the cart with the body. There was no graveyard that I knew of anywhere in this place. Natale and I had often suspected that dead carusi were thrown into the smelter’s main furnace. Better-connected miners who came to a sudden end were sent back to their families, but the poorer men, and of course we chattels, suffered the fate of dead animals and broken tools.

  Blue Book

  Without Natale’s help the work was more arduous than ever. It would always be backbreaking, but now the danger was double. The boy wasn’t there to guide me along, to hold me steady when my bad leg faltered in those twisting tunnels. Now when the footing moved beneath me, I sometimes lost balance and fell backwards, losing the load and tumbling helplessly down irregular stone steps, risking more broken bones.

  At least Salvatore’s digging revealed brighter prospects, and so his mood was improved. Some days he was positively buoyant. The giant would sing and whistle, completely ignoring me, and despite my problems I managed to keep up. Pino would come by with Luisa and his cart, take note of the quantity, then nod his head, almost impressed.

  ‘A leg like a chicken’s and look what you can do.’ He’d inspect my palms and hands to see how much I was tearing them up, then look into my eyes and ask me to open my mouth to show him my tongue and teeth. ‘Clean your teeth once a week. Keep to good hygiene. Make him feed you more and use your spare time to sleep.’

  Meanwhile I’d caress Luisa’s fur and stroke her head. She always made an appreciative lowing grumble and would press her forehead into my chest. The beast was as close to a friend as I had – and, I thought, might ever have.

  Pino was correct in what he said about sleep. I wouldn’t have believed it possible, but as the weeks bled on and I continued to serve my master on my own, my exhaustion deepened until there were days I couldn’t differentiate sleep from wakefulness. I hauled ore with my eyes open and my eyes shut, while awake and while daydreaming and while snuffling in my bunk. I yearned for longer sleep more than I yearned for food, more than I yearned for the drafts to stop whistling through the tunnel to freeze me every time I came up dripping sweat from the furnace below.

  Som
e nights I was certain Salvatore stood drunkenly swaying at the door, those bulging eyes taking in my huddled shape in the bunk, but I was always too tired to raise my head. Then he’d leave, something unresolved twisting through his head, and I wouldn’t care, just so long as I could keep my eyes closed.

  Things took a turn for the worse when my master stopped whistling and singing during his labours. I don’t think he was unhappy with what we were producing, it was simply that he’d pushed himself hard on this very plentiful and profitable seam, and even his own powerful body was reaching its point of exhaustion. He should have employed another miner or two to help him, and of course more carusi like me, but it was clear that he didn’t want to make the expenditure – his intention was to accumulate as much money as he could for the smallest possible outlay, and return to his wife in whatever part of the country they came from.

  I was on my last legs, and it was hotter than ever in the mine. A breaking point seemed to loom when Salvatore decided to shift his vat of whisky down into the pit with him. He sat it on top of the barrel of water all miners keep close at hand during their digging, and as he took a deep draught from the water he would follow it with a quick swallow from the vat. He sweated more, his breathing came in gasps, and by the afternoons he would swing his pick with less accuracy. Sometimes he inadvertently broke the axe handle and would need me to go up to get a new one, or try to find a way to repair an older one.

  It wasn’t long before he broke his last remaining pick handle by smashing blindly at a new face of ore and missing completely. The handle cracked clean in two. None of his older stocks were in any condition to be repaired one more time. Shouting in anger, he called me to run to the next mine and beg, borrow or steal a replacement. By the fury in his eyes I knew that if I came back empty-handed I would pay dearly. I shuffled up through the tunnel as quickly as I could and climbed out of the stinking hole. Pino was there with Luisa and the cart.

  When I explained the problem to him he pointed to a site about a kilometre away. ‘That’s Franco. He’s a friend of your master’s, better try him first.’

  I limped and trotted through the sulphurous mist, and here out of the tunnel I understood what a cripple I’d truly become. My gait was awkward and I traversed the scorched ground far more slowly than I wanted. Even though it was deep in the worst days of this Sicilian winter, one that seemed never-ending, the sweat poured off my face. When I found Franco I made sure to keep my eyes downturned, the only way someone of my standing could speak to someone of his. My bad leg was burning in a way I hadn’t felt for some time. Though it had healed, I’d noticed that a certain pain had started to creep back during my labours, and, strangely, it was becoming harder than ever to straighten.

  ‘Tell him to be more careful. And tell him to stop drinking.’

  Franco gave me three new pick handles and I hurried back across the burned terrain, though this time I didn’t run. The sky had already darkened in the early afternoon, and eddies of snow swirled to the whipping wind. In the distance, the smelter poured black death into the day and scores of fires were burning around it. My face was frozen, but my lungs were filled with acrid, hot ash. It was almost a relief to find our tunnel and descend once more, getting away from the sleet and cold. The deeper I descended the more the heat intensified. It thawed me quickly, and not in a pleasant way. A coughing fit wracked through my chest and I had to lean against a wall of rock. That wall seared my back and shoulders, but the coughing burned far worse. A great wave of nausea rose up from my belly and I felt myself starting to tumble forward.

  Splayed on the ground, the temperature was unbearable, but the trembling of my limbs only increased, as if a spell had been cast over me, one made to shake a boy’s arms and legs from his body.

  I knew it had to be the start of some sickness. My face burned, this time from the inside. My vision lost focus, blurred completely. The pick handles had clattered out of my reach. I kept telling myself, Get up, don’t let him find you now, just get up. If Salvatore saw me like this he would likely decide I’d reached the end of my usefulness, bludgeon me with one of those very handles, and pitch my body into the smelter.

  I didn’t know much about the symptoms of pneumonia or tuberculosis, but on Gozzi’s property I’d witnessed boys dying while spitting blood or thrashing with fever. Still, whatever the disease, it hardly mattered. The result would soon be the same.

  So this is how I finish, I thought.

  So.

  Something remarkable then occurred. My vision cleared and the worst of the illness passed, almost as quickly as it had hit me. A new strength surged through my body, as if some important reserve of energy had been discovered. The change happened more quickly than a turn in the weather. I picked myself up and stood uncertainly for a moment, but my legs were quite strong and my head wasn’t spinning. The fire in my chest had been replaced by a warmth that was almost pleasant.

  Of course I didn’t know what to make of this, but had no time to think about it either. I continued down and down and down, the three new pick handles over my shoulder, and found my master slumped where he should have been digging. He’d taken the vat of whisky off the water barrel and was holding it in his lap. His chin rested against his chest. Even though he was completely naked, he was propped with his back against a wall. He didn’t seem to feel the pain, but I knew his tough hide would have to be burning.

  ‘Help me up,’ he grumbled, uninterested in the fact that I’d completed my errand. Despite being weak and helpless as a kitten only moments before, I placed my shoulder under his arm. Lifting him was like trying to raise a fallen oak tree. My master stank of old sweat and sour alcohol. His lips were wet and there was dirt and perspiration in his moustache and eyebrows. I managed to get him to his feet.

  ‘My clothes.’

  I found a tattered pair of shorts and a checked shirt that was torn all over. He pulled them on, sometimes swaying, as if he couldn’t decide what part of his clothes to put his foot or hand through next. I turned away, not wanting to be compelled to dress him, and when I turned back he had a heavy gaze upon me.

  We took his lantern, but left everything else, and I helped him make a staggering journey to the surface of his burning world.

  In his cabin, Salvatore dragged on more and more clothes against the cold. Everything was in disarray, and I couldn’t help remembering how neatly turned out he’d been in the days when his wife had been here. He eased himself down into a chair at the table with some wine, which he poured straight into his mouth from a dirty bottle. I stoked the fire and added lumps of wood, and put water into a pot to boil on the stove. I thought he needed something warm to drink. I did too. I found some chicory, but as I broke it into the water I heard my master’s chair pushed backwards abruptly, then he came to me, his heavy hands hard on my shoulders and his wet mouth pressed to my neck.

  ‘Don’t fight,’ he grunted, and pushed my face down onto the kitchen bench in front of me. One hand tore the trousers down from my legs and tried to spread them apart. The saucepan was on the stove beside me, and then I had its handle in my fist and the heavy pot bounced off the side of Salvatore’s head, warm water spraying around the room.

  His thick matted hair absorbed and blunted the blow, so I lifted the pot again and hit him as hard as I could. His head rocked backward but he was still standing, and a third blow opened a jagged seam across his forehead and down his brow. Salvatore dropped as if the bones had been taken out of his legs. His skull bounced off the floor and he was still as a rock. For a minute I stood over him, frozen as surely as Natale had been, and I thought I’d killed him. Then he gasped.

  Salvatore’s chest rose and fell, but his eyes didn’t open. He coughed up a gob of dirty green mucous. Blood was over his face and in his hair and on the floor. I turned and looked out the window, breathing hard. Through the frosted panes I could see that even though there wasn’t a thick snowfall,
sporadic flurries were being whipped by the wind.

  There couldn’t be any turning back; I had to run if I wanted to survive. But look where running had gotten Angelino, look what escape had done to Natale. My hands were trembling. My face had gone dead cold. That great lump of a man on the floor had the power of life and death over me, so I opened a drawer and found a serrated blade, and for the long minutes I sat on the floor and watched him I tried to tell myself that I had the power of life and death too.

  As soon as he started to mutter I tore open Salvatore’s shirt and pressed the point of the blade into the thick red hair over his heart, and pressed down, ready to stab him all the way through. At the first bubble of blood I stopped and flung the blade away and thought, You bastard, I’ll show you what I’m made of, I’ll show you what I can do.

  There was plenty of rope and twine in the cabin, so I found good lengths of both and rolled his heavy body over, tying his hands at the wrists behind his back, then tying his feet together and lashing them to the stubby legs of the heavy iron stove. I dragged him and sat him up, and ran another rope under his bushy, foetid armpits and around and around his chest, then tied him upright to a timber post in the middle of the room. I lifted his chin and used an old shirt to make a gag that went into his mouth and was tied tight and firm behind his head. Blood still dripped from the deep wound in his skull. I picked up a rag and started to dab at it, but another lever seemed to be pulled inside me, and just like that the cold outside was in my bones.

  With a shudder I felt myself drop to the floor.

  When I opened my eyes the cabin was dark. The fire in the belly of the stove had almost expired. The room was cold and Salvatore was staring at me, a glaze in his eyes. I picked myself up and added wood to the stove, stirring the somnolent ashes with the metal poker. They started to flare. My chest was too hot inside, and even my good leg was weak. My miraculous recovery must have been only a slight reprieve. I thought my master was in much better condition than me, and couldn’t help wondering if Father Death was going to get me long before Salvatore did.