Black Mountain

by Venero Armanno

  The new don surveyed this empire he didn’t care for, and immediately tried to find the best means to divest himself of it. The task would take some doing; many other major families were also shrinking their landholdings or losing them altogether. The last Amati understood that an entire way of life was ending.

  Finally a deal was sealed. Domenico’s lawyer advised him that an Austrian buyer had signed the necessary contracts. His affairs were so simple that all he was required to do was leave.

  The final duty was to let everyone know.

  In the pavilion where all the workers gathered twice a week for communal meals, the facts were going to be laid out for all to hear, though of course the word had already gone around and this was little more than a formality. There were nearly forty families comprising at least two hundred souls, all present, all of different hierarchies in this working world of adults and children. I was at the back, listening to the rising muttering and grumbling. The mood was surly; any fool could see that it would take very little for things to take a bad turn.

  Flanked by his best foremen, including the most loyal and competent of them, Leo, our master spoke in a voice that neither commanded attention nor particularly sought it.

  ‘So let me tell you how things stand . . .’

  ‘Quiet!’ Leo’s voice boomed out at the assembly.

  These people who’d never known what to make of Domenico as their signor padrone, were still suspicious about whatever clouds floated in his head. No one was likely to forget the strange things he’d done through his youth and no one liked the way he’d locked himself inside his mansion until the ‘sweet spirit of Stella’ had decided to leave. Added to all this, easy as his so-called rule was, no one could respect a man so fundamentally disinterested in his own business affairs. They expected that this sale he’d engineered could only turn out well for him and badly for them. I could understand how his workers felt, because whatever Don Domenico did affected me too. I’d been sold and onsold all my life, and here my most benevolent master of all was doing exactly the same thing.

  Leo had to pound a tabletop to silence the voices of dissent.

  ‘Let him speak! Listen and you might learn something!’

  ‘This is the news,’ Don Domenico went on without fanfare. To hear him properly everyone had to quieten down, which they now did. ‘Each family will receive an endowment of two cows, three goats and a dozen chickens. Three acres of land will be placed in the name of each man over the age of twenty-one who is married. Each single man over the age of twenty-one will receive one acre. Every individual whether a man or woman, adult or infant, will receive a cash payment of one thousand lire to their name. Use it for education, your own crops, more animals or whatever interests you. Learn to be self-sufficient. The new owner has promised to honour our estate’s current work contracts and I believe he will. However my accountants inform me that even the contract with the longest term left will expire within eighteen months. Everyone here knows what evictions have been happening all over the island, so you can’t count on a new padrone taking care of you forever. I’ve given you as much as I can. Please use it,’ he said, then finished with the words: ‘Siate chi siete’. ‘Be who you are.’

  Everyone knew just how serious the economic problems of the island were, and everyone understood how unprecedented this man’s generosity was. Don Domenico’s father and his father before him had been like other landowners – gentle when times were good and brutal in everything else. Domenico was their opposite. Still, all around there remained nothing but unhappy faces. Some men stood holding their pitchforks and scythes; I had an awful image of them taking to the don and cutting him to shreds. None of these folk saw Domenico as symbolic of some gentler, kinder, more egalitarian new age. Instead he was a living emblem for both the weakness of the young and the corruption of the upper classes. They were terrified for their futures and the futures of their offspring. Despite what he’d just granted them, most found cause to complain even more loudly.

  ‘If you care about us so much open your house! We can live there!’

  ‘If you want us to live well then let’s profit equally!’

  ‘Why two cows each? Why not twenty? Why three acres? Why not three hundred? A thousand lire is an insult – squeeze yourself to a hundred thousand!’

  The socialist spirit had well and truly seeped into the Sicilian way of thinking and nothing the wealthy classes did was ever going to be allayed by throwing scraps. No man of the people, Don Domenico simply listened to the shouted admonishments with his hands clasped in front of him and an expression of almost complete disinterest in his face.

  And the truth is, I was shocked by what I saw, this indifference. He didn’t care. He didn’t care about any of us.

  People even started laughing and castigating him for the odd entreaty, Be who you are.

  ‘Who else would we be, American movie stars?’

  ‘Maybe we could be princes and kings!’

  ‘No! We’ll be like you Domenico! Rich – but maybe not so mad!’

  ‘So let’s take what we want before this new family of bastards comes in and takes everything from us!’

  This was the moment the trouble flared. A field hand I knew only as Giacomo overturned his table, pushed forward, and made – I think – to tear the shirt off Domenico’s back. Leo smashed him in the face with an elbow. A roar went up, now turned against Leo and the other foremen along with Domenico.

  Despite my anger and hurt at the way he’d simply divested himself of all of us, the way a patruni might divest himself of a herd of unwanted cattle, I was now terrified at what a mob might do to Domenico. I pushed forward through the throng, avoiding the raised fists. Food was being thrown, bottles of wine were being smashed. I saw naked flames and a torch. Leo and his men were fighting off their own friends and workmates, protecting Domenico – who, I saw, found a way to withdraw.

  It took an effort to squeeze through the sudden, fierce rabble. More tables were upturned, chairs smashed; men and women were shouting to be heard and children screamed and cried. It was as if a madness had entered the pavilion and was now raging to be set free. Next, the manor itself would have to be invaded, stripped bare, set alight.

  And if they got their hands on the don . . .

  When I was finally able to stumble outside, I caught sight of Domenico on a Spanish-bred gelding he’d named Esperanto. The don was no longer indifferent. Perhaps he never had been. His features were strained and his face was white. The horse galloped past me and toward the hills. I asked the mistress of all our housekeepers, Donna Francesca, who had also managed to find her way out of the wooden pavilion and into the open air, where he was going. Her hairy chin quivered, tears of rage running down her face.

  ‘To hell I hope, where his whole family’s burning! He sold me with the house! He thinks I can stay on to serve the new master!’ She shook a fist at the night. ‘No heart! No heart!’

  I didn’t know if I’d be able to catch up with Don Domenico, or even if I should, but I went to the stables and saddled the most powerful mare we had, Estella, a half-Arabian beauty named for the deceased young sister. I didn’t even know if this mare belonged to Don Domenico anymore.

  It was a long ride into the hills above these plains of misery, but I found my master’s horse where I thought it would be, at one of Domenico’s favourite places of solitude. I tethered Estella’s reins to Esperanto’s, and then I heard a mumbling, a blathering, a long outpouring of words that had no meaning.

  The night hummed to his tuneless song. I sat on a rock and watched my master, who was spread out on the flat rocks as if prostrate to some divinity. The endless plains spread before us but he was facing the sky, arms and legs outstretched, his feet kicking and his palms slapping. His fingers scrabbled for nothing but stones. His satan’s face was a rictus. He grumbled, he cried, he moaned – and he spoke in
a hoarse tongue that wasn’t Italian, or of any Latin derivative I could imagine.

  Nor, I thought, was it anything of this earth.

  Watching, I was sick to my stomach. Here was my saviour and master; this was the man who’d determined the fate of almost two hundred lives, including my own.

  Then he stopped, the wordless syllables dying on his lips. His body relaxed. Slowly he came to himself. There was quiet. I didn’t see why I should hide my presence, and I approached cautiously. The rocky ground and my halting walk probably accentuated the nature of my limp, which, even in the darkness, Don Domenico immediately recognised. He sat up and turned, half-glazed eyes taking in my approach. I didn’t know what I expected him to say, but it certainly wasn’t this:

  ‘Sette, your leg remains a problem we can do something about. Before you come to the country house you’ll have to visit Doctor Vliegan. He lives in Bologna. I’ll have Signora Rosa take you.’

  Then his eyes showed their whites and he slumped sideways, dead to this world, but perhaps not to all others.

  White Book

  From time to time I’d travelled with Don Domenico on the Sicilian ferrovia, which took passengers to small villages close to the volcano, and completed a panoramic circuit of Mount Etna, but small-gauge rails were nothing compared to the miracle of real trains. The smoke, the cabins with their open windows and plush seats, the dream-inducing steady rocking of the journey, and Signora Rosa beside me in her best clothes, her hair up and protected with lace, and her gloves and boots – all this combined to make my first trip to Bologna quite unforgettable.

  I envied Rosa’s sons for their mother. She was a woman of nothing but benevolence and her manner told you that everything was going to be all right, even if there was so much proof to the contrary.

  She had bread, cheese and meat wrapped in wax paper, but more than anything she had that smile, as if my every action, whether voluntary or involuntary, gave her pleasure. I daydreamed she was my own mother. Some terrible calamity had forced me to be taken away from her, and something prevented her from revealing the truth, a mysterious secret, good enough to occupy the novels in Don Domenico’s library.

  When we stopped at major stations she gave me the coins necessary to buy cold drinks from the concession stands. We overnighted in a good hotel, and in its dining room full of civilised people she ordered seafood and pasta coloured with squid ink, and my first glass of champagne. She liked the fact that I’d learned to eat properly and could carry myself like a young gentleman.

  ‘How old do you think you are?’ she asked. I had to admit that I didn’t really know. ‘Sixteen? Seventeen? What about your birthday?’ I told her that was a mystery too. ‘You’ll have to agree a date with Domenico. You need your own day.’

  There was a time in the recent past when I had nothing at all of my own, and no prospects for the situation ever changing, yet delicious food was now in front of me and I was drinking champagne with a woman I wished was my mother. Rosa caught the look in my face. I’m sure her sons were able to get away with nothing at all.

  ‘Your new life is a little confusing, isn’t it?’

  I wanted to tell her about the boys left behind at Gozzi’s plant, and all the carusi in the Amati sulphur mines. Most of those boys would be dead now, or close enough. New underage workers would arrive to replace them then more again to replace those. Yet I was here.

  ‘Believe it or not, Italy and even the rest of the world is against this type of slavery. In America they changed the way they were allowed to treat the black race and abolished slavery completely, but here we’re too smart. The children aren’t called slaves. They’re supposedly doing work that will benefit their families.’

  ‘But that’s all lies,’ I said. ‘And obvious ones.’

  ‘Of course. Therefore many people work against it.’

  ‘Including you?’

  ‘Women can be very effective in this regard,’ she smiled. ‘Forty years ago a Catholic priest named Father Luigi Sturzo started the movement to stop child labour. Some great successes, yes, but real and absolute change always comes slowly. The sulphur pits are the hardest to conquer – though nature has been kindly lending a hand. People estimate the mines will be almost completely useless within a decade. But that’s a decade too long.’ She put her hand over mine. ‘All you need to worry about is our life ahead. Leave the inequities of the world to we do-gooders. I promise you this evil will end within our lifetime.’

  We travelled on to Bologna, and while I enjoyed this cross-country journey I also found myself wanting to be back with Don Domenico. Since that night of his announcement to his workers, after I’d found him suffering in the hills, I felt more protective of him than ever. He hadn’t sold me. He’d never even thought to abandon me.

  Domenico Amati wasn’t a god-like figure, nor was he even what I believed a strong upright father might be. He was simply a person I might be able to help as much as he’d helped me. So when the moment came when we started across the Straits of Messina on the ferry, I felt no inclination to slip from Rosa’s eye and disappear into Italy and beyond. For better or worse my place was in Sicily with Don Domenico, a master who wasn’t a master, a father who was anything but.

  We arrived in Bologna, and spent an initial night in the sort of hotel I was getting used to. Signora Rosa said she would stay with me for the duration of my procedures with Doctor Vliegan. I had very little idea what these procedures would be or why she would choose to be my companion while her family were again left to cope without her. I had no hope of understanding – Don Domenico hadn’t told me the truth of what he knew about me, and hadn’t explained the full reality of this world I’d been rescued into.

  Signora Rosa and I had one day to spend as tourists in a wonderful city. Of all the churches and ornate porticos we wandered through, plus boat rides along the river and coach rides through the old quarters, my favourite visit was to the university. Doctor Vliegan greeted us and told me this was the oldest such institution in the world. He showed us around the medical school and I stood inside a wood-panelled sixteenth century anatomical theatre as if in another type of church. Here various sciences came together and were researched, taught, studied and practised – the culmination of which would do something special to make my leg a little less the burden it was.

  After I was brought into the hospital and I made the transition from being a normal person with an affliction to being a surgical patient, I learned why Signora Rosa’s family should have to be without her, and I had to be in her care. The knives of Doctor Vliegan and his associates cut me, their saws rendered bone, muscle and flesh, their science sent me into wracking screams that no anaesthetics could quell. I had to be strapped to beds and gurneys. I was never left alone. My fingers scrabbled at locked windows and I broke my nails on iron bars. Every day I cursed Doctor Vliegan and his surgeons and assistants. I spat at the nurses then pleaded with them. I begged Rosa to get me out of there.

  No one listened. The procedures continued.

  Long months later, my master waited for me at Catania’s central station. Signora Rosa had needed to leave me at the hospital during the last stages of my recovery and rehabilitation, and now I disembarked alone. Domenico turned my face this way and that, pleased to see me again. I was pleased to see him too, even if I remained a little resentful. The truth that I had to admit, however, was that my leg was healing very well. Though the long lines of scarring still caused pain, I was already walking more freely.

  Don Domenico tipped my hat off my head and mussed my carefully brilliantined hair.

  ‘Look at you. That stride brings out your natural nobility. Don’t you think the boy “Sette” has finally gone?’

  We were moving away from the main platform, each of us carrying a suitcase. They were stuffed full of good and fashionable clothes purchased for me by Rosa on his account. To my surprise, the don had go
t himself a motor vehicle. It was a dark green Fiat 501 Torpedo, top-down, more beautiful than a work of art in a museum. We put my bags into the back seats.

  ‘So what will we call you?’ Don Domenico cranked the 1460cc engine. ‘You’re reborn, so let’s make the process complete. Your profile’s always so Roman to me, like an emperor. No less than Caesar maybe. “Cesare”. Do you like it?’

  He could give me any name. I didn’t care – I simply wanted to be someone new. Before I’d met this man I was nothing, now I wanted the new start he offered and I wanted the transition to be complete. Domenico opened the side door for me and as I climbed up he watched.

  ‘Hurts?’

  ‘I’ve been off the crutches for a month and the bandages have been off almost as long, but Doctor Vliegan gave me exercises —’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ My master nodded with rare impatience. ‘I know exactly what will help.’

  What he had in mind was simple: long treks through quiet, undulating countryside. I saw these rolled in abundance from the small, private manor he now called home.

  We arrived and there was no one around for tens of kilometres. The fields that surrounded this place were full of meadows and flowers. Nothing had been tamed by women or men. At his new house Domenico had no staff, no cook or gardener, no handyman or field hands. He had so completely given up his previous life that he might as well have given himself a new name. Instead of the past trappings of a padrone he now had a car, a truck with a smoking, rattling engine and a wooden tray, two horses, one of which was the half-Arabian mare, the other the Spanish hothead, a small number of pigs and goats, and several good cultivations of vegetables. There were also shaded groves of orange, lemon and olive trees, plus the manor itself – small by the standards of the previous Amati home, but, I thought, much more beautiful with its stucco rendering and red-tiled roof.

  It contained a single fireplace and chimney, and rooms with pleasing dimensions: none was monstrously large, none was too small. Two cool bedrooms and a nice-sized kitchen. The heart of the place was a study that had been fashioned by removing walls from a previous dining room and library. This was the don’s sanctuary, a large and comfortable room lined with shelves of books and furnished with deep armchairs and an overstuffed couch. Its rugs and sideboard, the upright piano moved in from the Amati mansion, and most especially the overcrowded writing desk and comfortable chair gave my master an obvious satisfaction. It was the sort of sensual pleasure that I imagined other men took in lovemaking and drink – but Don Domenico experienced it most strongly when he was in here, alone. Something told me that if I ever had the chance, this aspect of his life might be one I’d like to emulate.