The Sicilian (28 page)

When Silvio Ferra received this note he assumed it was another attempt to frighten him off, instigated by Don Croce. It did not matter. The Socialist party was on the march to victory, and he would not miss one of its great celebrations of the victory they had already won.

On May Day of 1948 the populace of the two towns of Piani dei Greci and San Giuseppe Jato rose early to start on their long march up mountain trails to the plain beyond the Portella della Ginestra. They were led by bands of musicians from Palermo especially hired for the occasion. Silvio Ferra, flanked by his wife and two children, was in the vanguard of the San Giuseppe Jato procession, proudly carrying one of the huge red flags. Dazzlingly painted carts, with their horses in special red plumes and colorful tasseled blankets, were loaded with cooking pots, huge wooden boxes of spaghetti, enormous wooden bowls for salads. There was a special cart for the jugs of wine. Another cart fitted with blocks of ice carried wheels of cheese, great salami logs and the dough and ovens to bake fresh bread.

Children danced and kicked soccer balls along the column. Men on horseback tested their steeds for the sprint races that were to be a highlight of the afternoon games.

As Silvio Ferra led his townspeople toward the narrow mountain pass called the Portella della Ginestra, the people of Piani dei Greci converged from the other road, holding their red flags and Socialist party standards high. The two crowds mixed, exchanging exuberant greetings as they walked on, gossiping about the latest scandals in their villages and speculating on what their victory in the election would bring, what dangers lay ahead. Despite rumors that there would be trouble on this May Day they were by no means afraid. Rome they despised, the Mafia they feared, but not to submission. After all they had defied both in the last election and nothing had happened.

By noontime more than three thousand people had spread out over the plain. The women started the portable ovens to boil water for pasta, the children were flying kites over which flew the tiny red hawks of Sicily. The Communist Senator, Lo Causi, was going over his notes for the speech he was to deliver; a group of men led by Silvio Ferra was putting together the wooden platform which would hold him and prominent citizens of the two towns. The men helping him were also advising him to keep his introduction of the Senator short—the children were getting hungry.

At that moment there were light popping sounds in the mountain air. Some of the children must have brought firecrackers, Silvio Ferra thought. He turned to look.

On that same morning but much earlier, indeed before the smoky Sicilian sun had risen, two squads of twelve men each had made the march from Guiliano’s headquarters in the mountains above Montelepre down to the mountain range which held the Portella della Ginestra. One squad was commanded by Passatempo and the other by Terranova. Each squad carried a heavy machine gun. Passatempo led his men high up on the slopes of Monte Cumeta and carefully supervised the emplacement of his machine gun. Four men were detailed to service and fire it. The remaining men were spread out on the slope with their rifles and
lupare
to protect them from any attack.

Terranova and his men occupied the slopes of Monte Pizzuta on the other side of the Portella della Ginestra. From this vantage point, the arid plain and the villages below were under the barrels of his machine gun and the rifles of his men. This was to prevent any surprise by the
carabinieri
if they should venture out from their barracks.

From both mountain slopes men of the Guiliano band watched the townspeople from Piani dei Greci and San Giuseppe Jato make their long marches to the tabletop plain. A few of the men had relatives in these processions, but they felt no twinge of conscience. For Guiliano’s instructions had been explicit. The machine guns were to be fired over the heads of crowds until they dispersed and fled back to their villages. Nobody was to be hurt.

Guiliano had planned to go with this expedition and command it personally, but seven days before May Day, Aspanu Pisciotta’s weak chest had finally succumbed to a hemorrhage. He had been running up the side of the mountain to the band’s headquarters when blood spurted out of his mouth and he collapsed to the ground. His body started rolling downhill. Guiliano, climbing behind him, thought it was one of his cousin’s pranks. He stopped the body with his foot and then saw the front of Pisciotta’s shirt covered with blood. At first he thought Aspanu had been hit by a sniper and he had missed the sound of the shot. He took Pisciotta in his arms and carried him uphill. Pisciotta was still conscious and kept murmuring, “Put me down, put me down.” And Guiliano knew it could not be a bullet. The voice betrayed the weariness of an inner breakage, not the savage trauma of a body violated by metal.

Pisciotta was put on a stretcher and Guiliano led a band of ten men to a doctor in Monreale. The doctor was often used by the band to treat gunshot wounds and could be counted on to keep secrets. But this doctor reported Pisciotta’s illness to Don Croce as he had all the other transactions with Guiliano. For the doctor hoped to be appointed head of a Palermo hospital and he knew this would be impossible without Don Croce’s blessing.

The doctor brought Pisciotta to the Monreale hospital for further tests and asked Guiliano to remain to wait for the results.

“I’ll come back in the morning,” Guiliano told the doctor. He detailed four of his men to guard Pisciotta in the hospital and with his other men he went to the home of one of his band to hide.

The next day the doctor told him that Pisciotta needed a drug called streptomycin that could only be obtained in the United States. Guiliano thought about this. He would ask his father and Stefan Andolini to write Don Corleone in America and ask that some be sent. He told the doctor this and asked if Pisciotta could be released from the hospital. The doctor said yes, but only if he rested in bed for several weeks.

So it was that Guiliano was in Monreale taking care of Pisciotta, arranging a house for him to recuperate in, as the attack was made at the Portella della Ginestra.

When Silvio Ferra turned to the sound of the firecrackers, three things registered simultaneously on his mind. The first was the sight of a small boy holding up his arm in astonishment. At the end of it, instead of a hand holding a kite, was a bloody horrible stump, the kite sailing off to the sky above the slopes of Monte Cumeta. The second was his shock of recognition—the firecrackers were machine-gun fire. The third was a great black horse plunging wildly through the crowd, riderless, its flanks streaming blood. Then Silvio Ferra was running through the crowd, searching for his wife and children.

On the slopes of Monte Pizzuta, Terranova watched the scene through his field glasses. At first he thought people were falling to the ground out of terror, and then he saw motionless bodies sprawled with that peculiar abandon of death and he struck the machine gunner away from his weapon. But as his machine gun fell silent, he could still hear the gun on Monte Cumeta chattering. Terranova thought Passatempo had not yet seen that the gunfire had been aimed too low and people were being massacred. After a few minutes the other gun stopped and an awful stillness filled the Portella della Ginestra. Then floating up to the twin mountain peaks came the wails of the living, the shrieks of the wounded and the dying. Terranova signaled his men to gather close, had them dismantle the machine gun, and then led them away around the other side of the mountain to make their escape. As they did so he was pondering whether he should return to Guiliano to report this tragedy. He was afraid Guiliano might execute him and his men out of hand. Yet he was sure Guiliano would give him a fair hearing, and he and his men could truly swear that they had elevated their fire. He would return to headquarters and report. He wondered if Passatempo would do the same.

By the time Silvio Ferra found his wife and children, the machine guns had stopped. His family was unhurt and were starting to rise from the ground. He flung them down again and made them stay prone for another fifteen minutes. He saw a man on a horse galloping toward Piani dei Greci to get help from the
carabinieri
barracks, and when the man was not shot off his horse he knew the attack was over. He got up.

From the tabletop of the plain that crowned the Portella della Ginestra, thousands of people were streaming back to their villages at the bottom of the mountains. And on the ground were the dead and wounded, their families crouched over them weeping. The proud banners they had carried that morning were lying in the dust, their dark golds, brilliant greens and solitary reds startlingly bright in the noon sun. Silvio Ferra left his family to help the wounded. He stopped some of the fleeing men and made them serve as stretcher bearers. He saw with horror that some of the dead were children, and some were women. He felt the tears come to his eyes. All his teachers were wrong, those believers in political action. Voters would never change Sicily. It was all foolishness. They would have to murder to get their rights.

It was Hector Adonis who brought the news to Guiliano at Pisciotta’s bedside. Guiliano immediately went to his mountain headquarters, leaving Pisciotta to recover without his personal protection.

There on the cliffs above Montelepre, he summoned Passatempo and Terranova.

“Let me warn you before you speak,” Guiliano began. “Whoever is responsible will be found out no matter how long it takes. And the longer it takes the more severe the punishment. If it was an honest mistake, confess now and I promise you won’t suffer death.”

Passatempo and Terranova had never seen such fury in Guiliano before. They stood rigid, not daring to move as Guiliano interrogated them. They swore their guns had been elevated to fire over the heads of the crowd, and when they had observed the people being hit, they had halted the guns.

Guiliano next questioned the men in the squads and the men on the machine guns. He pieced the scene together. Terranova’s machine gun had fired about five minutes before being halted. Passatempo’s about ten minutes. The gunners swore they had fired above the heads of the crowds. None of them would admit they had possibly made an error or depressed the angle of the guns in any way.

After he dismissed them, Guiliano sat alone. He felt, for the first time since he had become a bandit, a sense of intolerable shame. In more than four years as an outlaw he could boast that he had never harmed the poor. That boast was no longer true. He had massacred them. In his innermost heart he could no longer think of himself as a hero. Then he thought over the possibilities. It could have been a mistake: His band was fine with
lupare
, but the heavy machine guns were not too familiar to them. Firing downward, it was possible they had misjudged the angle. He could not believe that Terranova or Passatempo had played him false, but there was always the awful possibility that one or both had been bribed to commit the massacre. Also, it had occurred to him the moment he heard the news that there might have been a third ambush party.

But surely, if it had been deliberate, more people would have been shot. Surely it would have been a far more terrible slaughter. Unless, Guiliano thought, the aim of the massacre had been to disgrace the name of Guiliano. And whose idea had it been, the attack on the Portella della Ginestra? The coincidence was too much for him to swallow.

The inevitable and humiliating truth was that he had been outwitted by Don Croce.

CHAPTER 21

T
HE MASSACRE AT
the Portella della Ginestra shocked all of Italy. Newspapers screamed in glaring headlines the slaughter of innocent men, women and children. There were fifteen dead and over fifty wounded. At first there was speculation that the Mafia had committed the massacre, and indeed Silvio Ferra gave speeches laying the deed at the feet of Don Croce. But the Don had been prepared for this. Secret members of the Friends of the Friends swore before magistrates that they had seen Passatempo and Terranova set their ambush. The people of Sicily wondered why Guiliano did not deny this outrageous charge in one of his famous letters to the newspapers. He was uncharacteristically silent.

Two weeks before the national election, Silvio Ferra rode on his bicycle from San Giuseppe Jato to the town of Piani dei Greci. He cycled along the river Jato and skirted the base of the mountain. On the road he passed two men who shouted at him to stop, but he cycled on swiftly. Looking back he saw the two men trudging after patiently but he soon outdistanced them and left them far behind. By the time he entered the village of Piani dei Greci, they were no longer in sight.

Ferra spent the next three hours in the Socialist community house with other party leaders from the surrounding area. When they were done it was twilight, and he was anxious to get home before dark. He walked his bicycle through the central square, greeting cheerily some of the villagers he knew. Suddenly four men surrounded him. Silvio Ferra recognized one of them as the Mafia chief of Montelepre, and he felt a sense of relief. He had known Quintana as a child, and Ferra also knew that the Mafia was very careful in this corner of Sicily not to irritate Guiliano or break his rules about “insults to the poor.” And so he greeted Quintana with a smile and said, “You’re a long way from home.”

Quintana said, “Hello, my friend. We’ll walk along with you for a bit. Don’t make a fuss and you won’t be hurt. We just want to reason with you.”

“Reason with me here,” Silvio Ferra said. He felt the first thrill of fear, the same fear that he felt on the battlegrounds of war, a fear he knew he could master. And so now he restrained himself from doing something foolish. Two of the men arranged themselves alongside him and gripped his arms. They propelled him gently across the square. The bicycle rolled free, then toppled over on its side.

Ferra saw the people of the village sitting outside their homes become aware of what was happening. Surely they would come to his aid. But the massacre at the Portella della Ginestra, the general reign of terror, had broken their spirits. Not one of them raised an outcry. Silvio Ferra dug his heels into the ground and tried to turn back to the community house. Even this far away he could see some of his fellow party workers framed in the doorway. Couldn’t they see he was in trouble? But nobody left the frame of light. He called out, “Help me.” There was no movement in the village and Silvio Ferra felt a deep sense of shame for them.

Quintana pushed him forward roughly. “Don’t be a fool,” he said. “We only want to talk. Now come with us without making an uproar. Don’t get your friends hurt.”

It was almost dark, the moon was already up. He felt a gun being jabbed into his back and he knew they would kill him in the square if they really meant to kill him. And then they would kill any friends who decided to help. He started walking with Quintana to the end of the village. There was a chance they did not mean to kill him; there were too many witnesses and some had surely recognized Quintana. If he struggled now they might panic and fire their guns. Better to wait and listen.

Quintana was speaking to him in a reasonable voice. “We want to persuade you to stop all your Communist foolishness. We have forgiven your attack on the Friends of the Friends when you accused them of the Ginestra affair. But our patience was not rewarded and it grows short. Do you think it’s wise? If you continue you will force us to leave your children without a father.”

By this time they were out of the village and starting up a rocky path that would lead finally to Monte Cumeta. Silvio Ferra looked back despairingly but saw no one following. He said to Quintana, “Would you kill the father of a family over a small thing like politics?”

Quintana laughed harshly, “I’ve killed men for spitting on my shoe,” he said. The men holding his arms disengaged themselves and at that moment Silvio Ferra knew his fate. He whirled and started to run down the rocky moonlit path.

The villagers heard the gunfire and one of the Socialist party leaders went to the
carabinieri
. The next morning Silvio Ferra’s body was found thrown into a mountain crevice. When the police questioned villagers, nobody admitted to seeing what had happened. Nobody mentioned the four men, nobody admitted to having recognized Guido Quintana. Rebellious as they might be, they were Sicilians and would not break the law of
omerta
. But some told what they had seen to one of Guiliano’s band.

Many things combined to win the elections for the Christian Democrats. Don Croce and the Friends of the Friends had done their work well. The massacre at the Portella della Ginestra had shocked all Italy, but it had done more than that to Sicilians—it had traumatized them. The Catholic Church, electioneering under the banner of Christ, had been more careful with its charity. The murder of Silvio Ferra was the finishing blow. The Christian Democratic party won an overwhelming victory in Sicily in 1948, and that helped carry all of Italy. It was clear that they were to rule long into the foreseeable future. Don Croce was the master of Sicily, the Catholic Church would be the national religion and the odds were good that Minister Trezza, not for some years but also not too late, would someday be the Premier of Italy.

In the end Pisciotta was proved right. Don Croce sent word through Hector Adonis that the Christian Democratic party could not get the amnesty for Guiliano and his men because of the massacre at the Portella della Ginestra. It would be too much of a scandal; the charges that it had been politically inspired would flare up again. The newspapers would go berserk and there would be violent strikes all over Italy. Don Croce said that naturally Minister Trezza’s hands were tied, that the Cardinal of Palermo could no longer help a man who was thought to have massacred innocent women and children; but that he, Don Croce, would continue to work for amnesty. However, he advised Guiliano that it would be better to emigrate to Brazil or the United States, and in that endeavor, he, Don Croce, would help in any way.

Guiliano’s men were astonished that he showed no emotion at this betrayal, that he seemed to accept it as a matter of course. He took his men further into the mountains and told his chiefs to make their camps near his own so he could assemble them all at a moment’s notice. As the days passed, he seemed to retire more and more deeply into his own private world. Weeks went by as his chiefs waited impatiently for his orders.

One morning he wandered deep into the mountains by himself without bodyguards. He returned in darkness and stood in the light of the campfires.

“Aspanu,” he said, “summon all the chiefs.”

Prince Ollorto had an estate of hundreds of thousands of acres on which he grew everything that had made Sicily the breadbasket of Italy for a thousand years—lemons and oranges, grains, bamboo, olive trees which provided wells of oil, grapes for wine, oceans of tomatoes, green peppers, eggplants of the most royal purple as big as a carter’s head. Part of this land was leased to the peasants on a fifty-fifty basis, but Prince Ollorto like most landowners would first skim off the top—fees for machinery used, seed supplied and transportation provided, all with interest. The peasant was fortunate to keep twenty-five percent of the treasures he had grown with the sweat of his brow. And yet he was well off compared with those who had to hire themselves out on a daily basis and accept starvation wages.

The land was rich, but unfortunately the nobles kept a good portion of their estates uncultivated and going to waste. As long ago as 1860 the great Garibaldi had promised the peasants they would own their own land. Yet even now Prince Ollorto had a hundred thousand acres that lay fallow. So did the other nobles who used their land as a cash reserve, selling off pieces to indulge their follies.

In the last election all the parties, including the Christian Democratic party, had promised to strengthen and enforce the sharing-of-land laws. These laws stated that the uncultivated lands of large estates could be claimed by peasant farmers on payment of a nominal sum.

But these laws had always been thwarted by the nobility’s practice of hiring Mafia chiefs to intimidate would-be claimers of land. On the day for the claiming of the lands a Mafia chief had only to ride his horse up and down the borders of the estate and no peasant would dare to make a claim. The few who chose to do so would invariably be marked down for assassination and the male members of his family with him. This had gone on for a century, and every Sicilian knew the rule. If an estate had a Mafia chief as its protector, no lands would be claimed from it. Rome could pass a hundred laws, those laws had no significance. As Don Croce once put it to Minister Trezza in an unguarded moment, “What do your laws have to do with us?”

Shortly after the election, the day came when Prince Ollorto’s lands could be claimed from those parts of his estate that had not been cultivated. All one hundred thousand acres had been designated by the government, tongue in cheek. Left-wing party leaders urged the people on to make their claims. When the day arrived almost five thousand peasants congregated outside the gate of Prince Ollorto’s palace. Government officials waited in a huge tent on the property furnished with tables and chairs and other official apparatus to formally register their claims. Some of the peasants were from the town of Montelepre.

Prince Ollorto, following the advice of Don Croce, had hired six Mafia chiefs as his
gabelloti
. And so on that bright morning, the smoky Sicilian sun making them sweat, the six Mafia chiefs rode their horses up and down along the wall surrounding Prince Ollorto’s estate. The assembled peasants, under olive trees older than Christ, watched these six men, famous all over Sicily for their ferocity. They waited as if hoping for some miracle, too fearful to move forward.

But that miracle would not be the forces of law. Minister Trezza had sent direct orders to the Maresciallo commanding them that
carabinieri
were to be confined to their barracks. On that day, there was not a uniformed member of the National Police to be seen in the whole province of Palermo.

The multitude outside the wall of Prince Ollorto’s estate waited. The six Mafia chiefs rode their horses up and down as consistent as metronomes, their faces impassive, their guns sheathed in rifle holsters,
lupare
on shoulder straps, pistols tucked in their belts hidden by jackets. They made no menacing signs toward the crowd—indeed they ignored them; they simply rode in silence back and forth. The peasants, as if hoping the horses would tire or carry these guardian dragons away, opened their food sacks and uncorked their wine bottles. They were mostly men, only a few women, and among these was the girl Justina with her mother and father. They had come to show their defiance for the murderers of Silvio Ferra. And yet none of them dared pass the line of slowly moving horses, dared to claim the land that was theirs by right of law.

It was not only fear that restrained them; these riders were “men of respect” who were in fact the lawgivers of the towns they lived in. The Friends of the Friends had established their own shadowy government that functioned more effectively than the government in Rome. Was there a thief or cattle rustler stealing a peasant’s cattle and sheep? If the victim reported the crime to the
carabinieri
, he would never recover his goods. But if he went to see these Mafia chiefs and paid a twenty percent fee, the lost stock would be found and he would receive a guarantee that it would not happen again. If a hot-tempered bully murdered some innocent workman over a glass of wine, the government could rarely convict because of perjured testimony and the law of
omerta
. But if the victim’s family went to one of these six men of respect, then vengeance and justice could be had.

Chronic petty thieves in poor neighborhoods would be executed, feuds settled with honor, a quarrel over land boundaries resolved without the expense of lawyers. These six men were judges whose opinions could not be appealed or ignored, whose punishments were severe and could not be evaded except by emigration. These six men had power in Sicily that not even the Premier of Italy could exercise. And so the crowd remained outside Prince Ollorto’s walls.

The six Mafia chiefs did not ride close together; that would have been a sign of weakness. They rode separately, like independent kings, each carrying his own particular brand of terror. The most feared, riding a mottled gray horse, was Don Siano from the town of Bisacquino. He was now over sixty years of age and his face was as gray and as mottled as the hide of his horse. He had become a legend at the age of twenty-six when he had assassinated the Mafia chief preceding him. The man had murdered Don Siano’s father when the Don himself had been a child of twelve and Siano had waited fourteen years for his revenge. Then one day he had dropped from a tree onto the victim and his horse and, clasping the man from behind, had forced him to ride through the main street of the town. As they rode in front of the people, Siano had slashed his victim to pieces, cutting off his nose, his lips, his ears and his genitals, and then holding the bloody corpse in his arms had paraded the horse in front of the victim’s house. Afterward he had ruled his province with a bloody and iron hand.