‘Go on, Giovanni,’ Salvatore said to my master. ‘See what you can do.’
Giovanni hesitated, then he looked at his shotgun. It was loaded and ready for shooting but quite useless at this distance. He made sure the safety catch was set, cracked it in two and unloaded its two bright red cartridges. He slipped these into the pocket of his overcoat, then handed the gun to me.
Salvatore passed him the rifle, and Giovanni looked around then sighted across Luisa’s back for support. He concentrated hard, but as he fired I saw my master shut both eyes. Just as Angelino had no heart for being shot, Giovanni had no heart for being a murderer. In that moment, in all ridiculousness, I felt a strange welling of love for the man. He was a miner, a tough, unhappy, unlucky rodent of the earth, with little knowledge of or interest in caring for two boys like Natale and me, but he wasn’t a killer. He acted the tough-guy role for the men around him, just as he’d done in front of Gozzi, but now I understood he was cut from finer cloth than any of them.
My master’s shot missed by some considerable margin. We saw a puff of dust raise up. For Angelino of course the miss was little comfort. He was still out in the open with nowhere to escape and nothing to hide behind. I thought it would take him at least another five or six minutes to get down off that terrible hillside and into cover.
Salvatore half-laughed and half-sighed. ‘Goddamit but I forgot my glasses, so there’s no point me trying to shoot him from here. Let’s get closer. But we better not waste any more of the day chasing him.’
Pino let go of Luisa’s reins and he proffered his open palms. ‘Permesso?’ he said. ‘With your permission?’
A little surprised, Salvatore now offered the rifle to him. Pino spat onto his right thumb, then wiped the end sight with it. He raised the rifle to his eye and drew aim, not needing Luisa’s back for guidance. He kept perfectly still then eased the trigger. With a terrible crack, Angelino half spun to the right then tumbled away.
As Pino returned the rifle, Salvatore said, ‘Giovanni, do you mind if we send your boys? My stomach’s rumbling.’
‘All right,’ my master nodded. ‘Go get him and bring him back,’ he said to Natale and me.
We set out as Salvatore was making himself comfortable and unpacking smoked, dried meats.
The boy was broken across some rocks. There was no life in him; the way he was lying made it look as if there’d never been any life in him to start with. We stood over his body and took him in. In many ways he looked just like us, though an even more decrepit version. The boy was a smaller skeleton than Natale and me, and when we rolled him over we saw that he had the wizened face of a one hundred-year-old man. His existence with Salvatore must have been much worse than ours with Giovanni, though it was hard to understand how that could have been possible.
The bullet had hit Angelino in the neck, going in one side and coming out the other, taking a thick lump of flesh with it. There was a great deal of blood. I don’t know why I did it, but despite the freezing cold I took off my outer shirt and bandaged the torn flesh, then I helped Natale get the body onto his back. He carried him a short distance then I carried the still-warm body the rest of the way.
We set Angelino down gently by the group. No one had lit a fire. They didn’t intend to camp. The men were eating the thick, dry meat from Salvatore’s pack and as our reward for being good hunting dogs, Salvatore threw Natale and me half a salami, which we shared, the best food we’d had in months. Giovanni was sitting a little further away, almost alone.
Salvatore and Pino were smoking. Our master stood, stretched, then went and crouched beside the corpse. He unwrapped the shirt, putting it aside for me, bloody as it was. Then he said to Salvatore, ‘Well, you’ve lost one boy. I guess I can let you have my two for the price of one.’
‘Don’t give up heart,’ Salvatore told him.
‘It’s not a case of giving up heart,’ Giovanni replied, though the expression in his face said that this was exactly the situation. ‘My lease isn’t any good. I can’t afford to try a new one. It’s like my life is cursed.’ He continued to look at the dead boy as Salvatore turned his gaze toward me.
‘How strong is he, really?’
‘You saw him carrying this poor beggar,’ Giovanni gave my defence. ‘He gets the job done. Half price.’
And so again I was sold, and yet again it was at a discounted rate.
It took Giovanni less than two days to organise his affairs and clear out. He sold his tools to the other miners and our last errands for him were to deliver these odds and ends to workers at their mine camps. It was the first time we’d been allowed to range so far and wide on our own, and it was liberating, even if what we traversed were burning circles of hell.
As Natale and I returned to Giovanni’s camp, where we’d now lived and slaved for more than a year, I knew what the chances were of either of us ever leaving. We mined what must have been one of the most horrible substances in the world, sulphur. Used for the gunpowder that kills, it was once called brimstone, which – more than appropriately enough – fed the eternal fires of Hades. We’d been told that most of the sulphur mines in Sicily had been closed before the start of our century, putting tens of thousands of men and boys out of work, but ours was still a profitable enterprise and might well go on for decades. This was the life we’d been sold into, and we had to accept the fact. The only logical escape route was by way of Father Death – and that grim master’s presence was always very close indeed.
Our sulphur was also meant for the better tasks of smelting copper and making bronze, but these fine substances meant nothing to boys like Natale and me, who tried to live in the fumes and felt it setting fire to our lungs, our eyes, even the spit in our mouths. Distributing Giovanni’s tools gave us our first real contact with the other miners and their boys camped in this scorched valley. We discovered that everyone looked and sounded the same as we did. The boys were just as pale, thin and dead-eyed, and over us all worked the smelter, which belched poison into the world.
Seeing all of this close-up and firsthand, I prepared questions that I wanted to ask Giovanni before he disappeared: What do we have to do to earn our freedom? Why don’t you take us with you and we’ll be your willing servants and errand boys?
But when we returned to our camp it was already deserted. Giovanni had used the cash from the sale of his chattels, including Natale and me, to purchase an old nag with very few hiking and riding days left in her. Away he’d galloped, without sentiment for the boys he left behind. Or maybe stealing away like that made it easier on his conscience: he knew exactly who and what he was leaving us to.
We stared across the plains. Clouds of dust and smoke shrouded the encampments. Both Natale and I must have been wondering the same thing: if we were to take off now, how long would it be before our new master Salvatore set out after us, how far would we get? But wouldn’t it be preferable to run right now, to run for kilometres into the sweet scents of meadows and trees, even if it meant stopping a bullet there? At least our last gasps would be of good clean forest air, untainted by smoke and sulphur.
Natale looked at me and I looked at him.
We didn’t run. We didn’t even discuss the possibility. Instead we turned and left this place we’d called our home, and trudged toward Salvatore’s camp before he decided to give us a hiding for being so tardy.
At first it was as if the luck that had eluded us all our young lives had finally arrived, because Salvatore’s wife was in the kitchen of their large wooden and corrugated iron hut, and she was making herself very useful indeed. Salvatore had us sit outside on a rough-hewn bench beneath the kitchen window, and as she cooked and hummed our bellies grumbled and growled with the ache of near starvation. We were moved to tears at how beautiful the scents from her stove were.
Soon she passed out two bowls of soup, her mannish hands through those windows looking like t
hose of an angel reaching out to us. The soup was rich and red, and there was tender meat in it, and soft sweet potato, and greens that looked like string bean and broccoli. She also gave us chunks of sour bread she had baked herself. We ate quickly. No more came. It didn’t matter. With food like that in our bellies we decided we could haul and dig each shift without tiring, and finally sleep soundly – some nights it wasn’t so much the exhaustion and aching bones and the sound of wintry winds that awakened us, but hunger itself, the sheer need for sustenance to quell the never-ending ache in our bellies.
So yes, if food like this was going to come out of our new master’s kitchen, we felt as if there’d be nothing we couldn’t do for him, and probably with songs in our hearts too. What had Angelino had to complain about? Why had his body been so emaciated, his face so wizened? Our spirits lifted and we were full of renewed hope. We started working for Salvatore at the same dawn hour we were so used to with Giovanni, but this new miner was more powerful, and picks and shovels and chisels looked like toys in his meaty palms, and his tunnel was deeper and more dangerous than the last.
The bushy-headed, red-bearded, goggle-eyed Salvatore was easily twice the worker of our previous master, and it was so hot in his mine that we had to work almost naked. Natale’s skinny frame and my stronger back were constantly bowed under the enormous weights Salvatore had us carry to the surface. His dark skin gleaming with sweat, his broad, long back and buttocks rippling with thick muscle, the man was like the engine of a train, ceaselessly driving forward with unimaginable reserves of power. His arms and shoulders looked like they could have uprooted and snapped trees, and his mood was infinitely fouler than Giovanni’s had ever been, for he gave us great clouts and kicks whenever he was displeased or whenever he felt like it, which was often.
He grunted and cursed as he attacked this rock he needed to dominate, and we grunted and cursed with the exertion of carrying his product out of that unforgiving hole in the ground. On the third day in our new workplace Natale fell with exhaustion and was asleep before he hit the ground. Salvatore put the spike of his pick hard between the boy’s exposed ribs. The boy let out a long sigh of pain but didn’t move. Our master picked up an oil lantern and pressed it to the sole of Natale’s bare foot. He screamed and moved. We resumed our labours.
In no better mood the next day, Salvatore kicked me hard for not moving quickly enough when he told me to bring him the iron file for sharpening his axe head. Unluckily for me, I was standing at the crest of a long rocky downward passageway that would have benefitted from a stepladder. The kick tumbled me backwards into space. I landed heavily on my side, but the ground gave way and I fell to the rocky level below, and felt my right leg snap and crack beneath me. Pain of a quality I’d never experienced seared through my body and into my skull.
Salvatore came down screaming curses: the Virgin’s a whore; what a beast our Lord is; to hell with all the saints and their stupid faces. None of these curses were new of course, but I’d never heard them uttered with such murderous vehemence, as if he would literally strangle me for my utter stupidity.
Blood stained the hot stones around me: my head was cracked. Salvatore lifted me up like a rag doll and my ruined leg untwisted. I didn’t pass out, which was a pity. A white bone protruded from the torn skin and meat just below the knee, and another one had split the ankle. I was faint, swooning. When I pressed my hand to my mouth it came away with more blood. I realised my nose was also bleeding; so were my tongue and lips.
Salvatore dragged me to the surface and to this day I am certain that he meant to drag me to the smelter and simply fling my useless body into the great fire. However, his wife was at the mouth of the tunnel, dutifully delivering food and wine for his lunch. She must have read what was in this man’s mind because she spoke with even more authority than he ever did. I was to be deposited at their hut, she would do the rest.
And she did.
Only not so well.
There was no inclination to take me to a hospital or even to call someone with real medical experience. Salvatore’s wife, whom I discovered was named Annunziata, did her best, but she proved she was no nurse. The woman attended to my broken bones and straightened and stitched my leg herself. She bandaged me from ankle to hip and made sure the wrapping was always clean. Pain never ceased, and week after week was a red haze spent mostly in a daze or unconscious.
I spent my time on a pallet under the kitchen window and, when the weather was foul, which was ninety percent of the time, she either dragged it herself, or had her husband drag it, into shelter. All this time of course, Natale had to contend with Salvatore’s demands without me. I rarely saw him; often I was convinced my only companion was already dead. Then he’d appear out of nowhere, white as a sheet, exhausted and aged horribly, a mirror-image of the one hundred-year-old-face of the dead boy, Angelino.
When I could finally walk a little my left leg seemed as strong as ever, but the right remained bent and wouldn’t straighten. I limped, I shuffled, I held back tears and knew I was useless. There was still no reason for Salvatore not to throw me into a fire. I was surprised he hadn’t already made a journey to find a replacement. It could only be a matter of time before my master decided to take things into his own hands, no matter the protestations of his wife.
That day finally came. I lay on my pallet and watched a litter dragged by two beautiful chestnut-coloured mares come and collect La Signora Annunziata, and take her away, take away the source of the only hope I or Natale had known in this place.
As soon as she was gone, Salvatore appeared around a corner and looked at me.
‘Stand up,’ he ordered, as if I was God’s greatest criminal and malingerer.
I found my feet as quickly as I could. The bandages were gone and the long, thick, puckered scar ran the length of my right leg. The wound was ugly as sin, but it had healed remarkably quickly and there was no more pain, all of which was baffling. Even Annunziata had seemed taken aback at her skills.
‘Your beautiful holiday is over,’ my master said, and he shoved me towards the mine by the back of my neck. I hobbled as quickly as I could and Natale met us at the mouth of the tunnel. The boy wept with relief to see me, though it appeared his eyes could no longer produce tears. He hugged me and held me hard. I whispered that everything would be all right, he could count on me to do the hardest work again.
Annoyed by all this sentiment, Salvatore boxed our ears and sent us downward.
While his wife had been in attendance she’d kept the workers’ quarters clean and had even hooked a stained mirror onto the wall. Natale had been there all by himself during my recuperation and I discovered that Annunziata had even persuaded her husband to repair a spout operated by a hand pump. So that gave us running water. That water was tainted with sulphur and therefore not good for drinking, but to have water to wash with actually inside our hut was a luxury almost beyond comprehension.
The next day, Salvatore gave us leftover stew to eat for breakfast, but that was as good as things were to be because we received no more food at all, not even the slightest scrap into nightfall when we were unceremoniously locked into our hut. My right leg had been holding up surprisingly well and even though Salvatore meted out his usual slaps and kicks, he had no particular need to admonish me for my shuffling limp. A shuffle was the best any of us could achieve in those tunnels anyway, especially when weighed down by sacks or baskets of ore and tools, not to mention the stifling heat. So I was back to work in almost the same condition as before, but now as a crooked boy with a crooked leg.
A long and bleak winter had set in, and the days were spent alternating between the sweltering heat deep down inside Salvatore’s slice of hell, and the swirling cold drafts whistling through the mouth and upper reaches of the tunnel. There, the sweat that normally dripped off our bodies turned to ice and made us shiver uncontrollably. Outside the winds might have been freezing, y
et down in the hole we still worked almost naked. The only result of all this privation, as far as I could see, would have to be sickness – pneumonia, tuberculosis or the simple loss of will. Whichever it would be, Father Death was on hand.
Subsequent weeks proved no better, and Don Salvatore often didn’t remember to give us food until the afternoons, by which time Natale and I would be faint with hunger and alternately chilled to the bone or cooked like meat. We trembled and shivered with distress while our master, who had suddenly struck a richer vein, took to singing loudly and with gusto, his voice a baritone that boomed along the tunnels like some tuneless angel-song sent to make our labours sweeter.
It’s hard for me now to believe we actually survived that first period of work for this mad master, but Salvatore was satisfied with the results and he gave us a Saturday and Sunday to do nothing but what we pleased. What pleased us was to lie in our beds with the windows and the door sealed against the wind. We slept endless hours under as many filthy covers as we could find, and when we raised ourselves up we were allowed to enter the main house and help ourselves to food from the kitchen. Sometimes Salvatore was there, huddled in a great coat or in a blanket, sitting at his kitchen table tallying his accounts, writing letters, or chopping vegetables for the evening’s stew. Other times he was absent, his home completely empty.
On those occasions we moved meek as mice and touched only those things we absolutely needed to. We didn’t go near his stack of ledgers, didn’t breathe upon the vat of whisky, and didn’t look into the rows of hessian sacks we knew contained nuts, chickpeas, lentils, dried beans and dried fruits. We barely helped ourselves to anything more than the bare necessities, always terrified of his whip and thick leather belt. Not to mention his hands like bear paws. Mice would have eaten more crumbs, would have lapped at more goat’s milk. Always we withdrew with the respect boys would have accorded God’s own secret rooms, and then we’d go outside and make-up a simple game until our master returned.
Black Mountain Page 5