Black Souls

by Gioacchino Criaco

  Every Thursday morning, right on time, we waited, cleanly shaven, by the bulletproof glass for the agent to summon us.

  We hadn’t spent so much time with our family in years. We hid our pain and carried on. Our sisters spoke to us about their work and, with ever-lessening embarrassment, about their love lives; they were entitled to their happiness, and it made us happy. They hadn’t chosen to be related to me, but as family they gave us all their affection, far more than we deserved.

  The preliminary hearing came less than a year after our arrest. Everything unfolded in a single day: we declared ourselves innocent and requested an expedited trial. The prosecutor denied it and scheduled our first trial hearing before a panel of judges for six months later. They cuffed us again and reattached the leash, then yanked us out of the defendants’ cage and out of the courtroom. They could have taken their time; we had no one waiting in the corridor for them to fend off, I thought.

  I was wrong. I saw that light gray raincoat, cinched at the waist with a belt. Even the officer was surprised. The woman, who softly asked if she could speak to me, was not the kind of person who would have approached a delinquent like me. The officer was dumbfounded, and Giulia took the opportunity to hug me.

  “You’ve lost weight,” she said.

  “You, too,” I replied.

  “I sent you a letter,” she added. “Read it.”

  The officer coughed, feigning embarrassment. “We have to go, miss.” He jerked me hard; the leash tensed and I trotted behind him like a dog.

  People’s eyes came to rest on our wrists as we were marched through the labyrinth of the courthouse, and we read in their souls their hate, pity, commiseration, indifference, joy. At first we felt humiliated, but after the first few times we stopped caring.

  A van waited in the courtyard to bring us back to our cell. The return was awful—as awful as our arrival had been. They kept us handcuffed and locked us in separate cages inside the armored Ducato. We couldn’t see outside. We arrived feeling dizziness and nausea that didn’t wear off until the evening. The officer who escorted us back to our block watched smugly as we staggered along.

  Among the various police units, the detention officers may have been the least depraved. They were certainly the most frustrated, and they suffered more than the others. Like us, they were always in prison; they endured and dished out insults, and they were ostracized and had no one but themselves to spend time with, even on the outside. It was a hard job. There were often more suicides among the officers than the prisoners; we would eventually get out, while they were serving a life sentence. They locked us up because they had to, not out of choice.

  They were officers of the law, but when they explained what they did, people would call them “jailers” before they could finish. It made them fume; they considered it an insult. We prisoners pejoratively referred to them as guards, and they secretly called us camosci, antelope, since we were beasts to be herded.

  Beatings were rare, as was any physical violence; the worst part was the boredom, the silence, and the jangling of keys. The lights were on day and night; there were eyes on you no matter what you did. The taps ran for a few seconds at a time before you had to press the button again. Touching the popcorn walls drew blood. Searches were conducted daily. Worst of all, you were confined to a ten-by-seven-foot cell for twenty hours each day.

  But man has an almost infinite capacity to adapt; without it, we would have been hanging from the bars in less than a week.

  A few days after our hearing, the letter arrived. Actually, there were two letters for me, and the usual five for Luciano. I waited impatiently as the agent opened them, removed their contents, and scanned the pages. I knew which one was Giulia’s before I saw the name of the sender; the paper smelled of her. At breakfast, she had a habit of slathering toast with wild honey, and it always ended up on her hands. She had written to me in the morning, before washing up. I liked to see her in the morning; she was more beautiful then, before she put on her makeup. After breakfast, she would come give me a kiss before locking herself in the bathroom. Her honeyed lips would adhere to mine, and when she pulled away, she left the sweet scent just under my nose.

  I gave Luciano the letters from my five sisters, who wrote more to him than to me, along with the other letter, also addressed to me, which had a strange stamp and whose sender’s name sounded fake. I locked myself in the bathroom to better feel Giulia’s presence and only emerged a long while later, content as I hadn’t been for some time.

  Luciano handed me the letter. It was from Yussuf, the boy who had been wounded on our mission in Germany. He had heard the news and was suffering with us.

  I could picture him in front of me, on the pier of Porto Empedocle, departing for Lebanon with that scarlet rose on his face.

  Someone on the outside still thought of us. “Maybe we didn’t only sow hatred,” I said aloud.

  Luciano looked at me. “Maybe,” he said, and went back to reading my sisters’ secrets.

  Outside it started to pour; the sky had darkened. The officer on duty, who was from Salerno, strode past our cell doors, slamming his keys against the bars. “Air!” he shouted, convinced no one would go down to the courtyard in that weather. At our cell, number seventeen, his keys escaped his grasp. When they hit the floor, the roar on the block overcame the sound of the rain. Everyone approached their bars to find out who the lucky cell was.

  “Seventeen!” the fucker roared.

  There was a belief among the convicts that dropped keys were a sign of freedom, and they hoped for it to happen every time an officer passed their cells. For the fall to count, it had to be an accident.

  The detention officer, Catiello Cecere, picked up the keys, saw we were ready to go outside, opened our cell, and smiled. “I did it on purpose. This is your freedom,” he said in Salentino, making himself heard throughout the block.

  We arrived alone in the courtyard, took off our wool hats, and began to walk back and forth in our fresh air under the deluge. We were visible from the windows of our section and those of the two upper floors.

  Dozens of eyes were on us, including those of the other children of the forest in chains. Some of the inmates hated us, others secretly cheered us on and often slipped us notes with greetings and encouragement. When the prison guard was a friend, they would secretly slip us food from our land.

  We paced in the rain. A demon still burned inside of us. We would make it swallow its hatred.

  Black

  Souls

  Of the tales that poor Bino used to tell us on those winter evenings, his face transfigured by the flames of the fire, the one about Kyria was perhaps the most far-fetched. And often, at night, it filled my dreams with pagan altars that still dripped with the blood of the beasts offered to the gods, the smoking ashes and the great sacrificial fires that had once burned throughout the night.

  Kyria was the people’s Meddix and the greatest Oscan warrior that had ever lived. He was just over forty years old, and had managed to keep his people alive for more than twenty years. Now he was tired. Their ranks had been decimated by disease and famine—and, above all, by the wickedness of men. They had fought and won their wars against the Etruscans, the Opici, the Aurunci, the Samnites, and the Romans. Kyria had a dream, which was to see his people at peace, herding animals and hunting boar.

  He invoked the gods: “Fathers, put an end to this massacre.” Then, a sign: the roar of hooves echoed throughout the valley. A herd of small wild cows appeared. They marched past the huts as they crossed the village. The herd was headed south.

  Kyria instantly knew they were marching in the direction of a new life.

  The Oscans followed the cows into springtime, crossing mountains whose woods grew intricate and impenetrable. Beeches, firs, pines, all impeded their view of the landscape; all they could see was the ground, which was still covered by a dazzling white carpet of sno
w.

  On their descent they came to a halt. The landscape unfolded into a vast plain with a mighty river that branched off into countless gentle streams. The Oscans finally saw springtime; Kyria had achieved his dream of leading his people to a fertile valley.

  Now they could admire the majesty of the mountain they’d descended: it gave origin to the river and life, and they called it the Atioca. Kyria ordered the village to be built on a hillside overlooking the valley.

  Long years of peace descended upon the fierce warriors and softened their habits and their lives. The gods had chosen them. Kyria grew convinced that he would not die in battle and abandoned his sword.

  Then there arrived a band of Greek scouts, who found an unarmed people. That night the Greeks returned in full force, attacking the unarmed Oscans, who by then were shadows of the warriors they’d once been. Kyria awoke with a searing pain in his chest and, to the astonishment of the soldier who had pierced his heart with a dagger, he leapt up and ran outside, where he witnessed his entire dream in flames.

  Only then did he realize that the blade had killed him before he’d even gotten out of bed. He collapsed at the feet of his assassin.

  A few Oscans managed to flee the massacre and take refuge by the Atioca. Meanwhile, the Greeks began to enjoy Kyria’s paradise, however fleetingly.

  The earth trembled from the wrath of the gods. Long minutes of convulsions followed one after the other. They lasted throughout the night until dawn. The sun opened its eyes on a different world. The valley had almost completely disappeared. It was sunken, veined with immense faults. The mountainsides overlooking the valley had crumbled. The only thing still intact, and even more impressive than before, was the Atioca. The river, which until that day had flowed sweetly into streams, had condensed into a single, impetuous torrent, pouring into one of the deepest canyons that had opened on the plain before winding back on itself in a semicircle. The few Greeks who survived the earthquake were massacred by the surviving Oscans, who had immediately recalled their warrior past. And what remained of Kyria’s victorious people went to settle on the Atioca. They resumed hunting and grazing flocks, renouncing all their comforts, determined to isolate themselves from the world forever.

  The valley, which had once been kind, had transformed into a cluster of hostile and impenetrable mountains.

  For years, no one dared to cross the river that the gods had created to protect the Oscans. That river was called Apo-Osci-Potamos and for the children of the forest, its waters represented the line between good and evil.

  I could hear Bino telling me the story again in my dream before I was awoken by the evening news.

  It was 8 p.m.; I always watched thirty minutes of the evening news before going to bed. For a year and a half, each day had insisted on being the same as the one before it.

  We listened to their lead story, Luciano stretched out on the lower bunk and I perched on the metal slab bolted to the wall, which served as a table. Most of the airtime was dedicated to one of the recurring pan-Arabian peace conferences. Rome had offered to host the most recent one; delegates had come from all the Arab countries to draft a peace plan for the tormented lands of Palestine.

  The broadcast ended with an exclusive interview with the head delegate from one of the participating countries. The overly excited journalist posed obvious questions, prompting a saccharine monologue by the delegate, a man dressed in black and white who spoke good Italian. Taking a pious tone, he implored his Palestinian brothers to lay down their arms and engage in a dialogue with their life-long enemy so that they could enjoy a peaceful future together.

  His face was smooth, perfectly shaven, and his appearance was neat and affable. But these elements hardly managed to conceal the soldier lurking behind his businesslike facade. His words extolled goodness, but he emanated evil and death. His eyes were hypnotic, demanding attention. I was struck with a feeling I couldn’t name.

  I went to bed hoping to find my way back to Bino’s tales, but instead I entered a nightmare. I saw Kyria on the ground with the gash in his chest; the soldier who had killed him smiled wickedly and his face took on the features of the Arab delegate. And then I finally recognized him: he was the bearded leader of the Arabs I’d met in the Sierra Nevada.

  The vision jolted me awake.

  For the children of the forest, evil always came from the east. The last time Sasà and I had met that Arab, it was to inform him that we would be closing our trafficking operation to work on another project. That time, we’d met him in a town in France that had been founded a few millennia earlier by the Romans. He embraced us and bid us goodbye, with the promise that he would pray to God for us and our dream. But his eyes had not been as kind as his words.

  And in fact, what had happened to us couldn’t have been entirely the work of Don Peppino Zacco’s picciotti thugs, who were more adept at weaponry than details. The hits on Santoro and Natalia had been executed by perfectionists, artists of death. Zacco dealt in buckshot, not barbiturates and car accidents.

  I pushed the thoughts out of my mind, closed my eyes, and tried to get back to Bino’s stories.

  “Kyria, Kyria . . .” Sweet Atéa shook the corpse of the Meddix. Her tears rained down on Kyria’s face and pooled in his open eyes before descending the sides of his nose in rivulets, mixing with the blood on his chest.

  “Kyria.”

  I started awake. It was Luciano. Only he called me Kyria. I’d been named according to tradition; the first-born male in a goatherd family was always named after his paternal grandfather. So I, like my grandfather, had been named Kyria after the father of the Oscans.

  “Get up. They’re coming for us,” he said. It was the morning of our first hearing. After a year and a half, we would finally meet the judges on the panel that would decide our fate.

  If accused of the offense in article 416b of the Criminal Code, or in articles 74, 73, and 80 of Presidential Decree 309/90, all violations related to drugs and organized crime, you could wait up to ten years before receiving a final sentence. Although constitutionally innocent, you remained in pre-trial detention, because alternative measures to prison weren’t provided for under the law. You ended up in separate, high-security blocks, which meant twenty hours locked in a cell, no cultural or sporting activities, and no penitentiary benefits. At dawn, you were awakened by the infernal noise of an iron rod slamming against each bar of your cell. You went out for air, you were searched, you returned to your cell, you were searched again. Family visiting hours, search, lawyer interview, search. Trial, search. A few officers appeared in your cell: search, pants to the floor, flex. You came back to your cell from the fresh air to find all of your things on the floor. You spent the day tidying up, you went to take a shower, then returned to find everything on the floor again.

  Only the severely twisted could hope to survive.

  On the outside, everyone assumed that anyone who was doing time must have done something wrong. On the inside, we always said that only the innocent ended up in jail. Both were true. The cops made their arrests in certain environments where purer souls ran scarce. They picked up the kind of people who had committed every possible crime, but often not the one they’d been accused of.

  The guilty didn’t complain about the treatment they received; the innocent were tormented by having to pay for something they hadn’t done, especially when they had done so many other things.

  When someone first ends up in prison, they don’t feel like a prisoner; they’re still waiting for a miracle. After five or six years, the brain begins its decline and they lose interest in everything. Only poison remains.

  We were caged like animals at the zoo—though they had done nothing wrong apart from being wild animals. The hardship was greatest for prisoners from the South, especially if you were Calabrian, and worst of all if you were from Locride. No justification could influence the stubborn morals of the judges, prosecuto
rs, and policemen. We were the scum of humanity, immoral and amoral beasts, and we existed only to be taken down. Guys who returned from their trials with sentences of less than twenty years would celebrate. With early parole they could be out in fifteen and, naturally, go back to committing more crimes.

  The prisoners belonged to one of two categories: the consciously bad and the unconsciously bad. The latter could be rehabilitated; they’d done wrong as a result of emulation, marginalization, misery, or by force. They weren’t aware of the evil they were doing or its consequences. Four or five years on the inside would have sufficed to make them as docile as lambs. Burying them under decades of prison time, however, made monsters of them. The consciously bad always understood the gravity of what they were doing and its consequences. They didn’t accept rules and limits; they simulated docility but in reality they were true monsters, and they wouldn’t stop until someone killed them.

  Thus, wolves and lambs were held together in the same pen under the pretense of improving society.

  When the agents arrived, we were waiting at the bars. They made us undress. After the search, we went down to the holding cells. The escort arrived; he searched us; we got into the armored car. We were left in our transit cages in the basement of the courthouse. We were searched again and led to the defendants’ cage in the courtroom.

  They took off our handcuffs and leashes and we looked our judges in the eyes.

  Two other cases were heard before ours began. Luciano waved to our two young defenders, who had been assigned to us after we’d been renounced by our supposedly indisposed luminary. They arrived in front of the cage. They seemed sharp enough, or so Luciano said after a long conversation with them, little of which I grasped. They took their seats with an air of satisfaction, and after a few hours had passed, our case was called.