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about his looks and this upset him more than he thought possible. The pain that came
and went he didn't mind at all, Dr. Taza gave him some pills that deadened it. Taza
offered to treat his face but Michael refused. He had been there long enough to learn
that Dr. Taza was perhaps the worst physician in Sicily. Dr. Taza read everything but his
medical literature, which he admitted he could not understand. He had passed his
medical exams through the good offices of the most important Mafia chief in Sicily who
had made a special trip to Palermo to confer with Taza's professors about what grades
they should give him. And this too showed how the Mafia in Sicily was cancerous to the
society it inhabited. Merit (заслуга, достоинство) meant nothing. Talent meant nothing.
Work meant nothing. The Mafia Godfather gave you your profession as a gift.
Michael had plenty of time to think things out. During the day he took walks in the
countryside, always accompanied by two of the shepherds attached to Don
Tommasino's estate. The shepherds of the island were often recruited to act as the
Mafia's hired killers and did their job simply to earn money to live. Michael thought about
his father's organization. If it continued to prosper it would grow into what had happened
here on this island, so cancerous that it would destroy the whole country. Sicily was
already a land of ghosts, its men emigrating to every other country on earth to be able
to earn their bread, or simply to escape being murdered for exercising their political and
economic freedoms.
On his long walks the most striking thing in Michael's eyes was the magnificent beauty
of the country; he walked through the orange orchards that formed shady deep caverns
through the countryside with their ancient conduits (трубопровод; акведук ['kondıt])
splashing water out of the fanged (fang – клык) mouths of great snake stones carved
before Christ. Houses built like ancient Roman villas, with huge marble portals and
great vaulted (vault [vo:lt] – свод) rooms, falling into ruins or inhabited by stray
(заблудившееся или отбившееся от стада животное) sheep. On the horizon the
bony hills shone like picked bleached (to bleach – белить, отбеливать; побелеть)
bones piled high. Gardens and fields, sparkly green, decorated the desert landscape
like bright emerald necklaces. And sometimes he walked as far as the town of Corleone,
its eighteen thousand people strung out (to string out – растягивать вереницей) in
dwellings that pitted the side of the nearest mountain, the mean hovels (лачуга,
хибарка ['hov∂l]) built out of black rock quarried (to quarry – добывать камень /из
карьера/; quarry – каменоломня) from that mountain. In the last year there had been
over sixty murders in Corleone and it seemed that death shadowed the town. Further on,
the wood of Ficuzza broke the savage monotony of arable (пахотный ['жr∂bl]) plain.
His two shepherd bodyguards always carried their luparas with them when
accompanying Michael on his walks. The deadly Sicilian shotgun was the favorite
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weapon of the Mafia. Indeed the police chief sent by Mussolini to clean the Mafia out of
Sicily had, as one of his first steps, ordered all stone walls in Sicily to be knocked down
to not more than three feet in height so that murderers with their luparas could not use
the walls as ambush points for their assassinations. This didn't help much and the
police minister solved his problem by arresting and deporting to penal colonies any
male suspected of being a mafioso.
When the island of Sicily was liberated by the Allied Armies, the American military
government officials believed that anyone imprisoned by the Fascist regime was a
democrat and many of these mafiosi were appointed as mayors of villages or
interpreters to the military government. This good fortune enabled the Mafia to
reconstitute itself and become more formidable than ever before.
The long walks, a bottle of strong wine at night with a heavy plate of pasta and meat,
enabled Michael to sleep. There were books in Italian in Dr. Taza's library and though
Michael spoke dialect Italian and had taken some college courses in Italian, his reading
of these books took a great deal of effort and time. His speech became almost
accentless and, though he could never pass as a native of the district, it would be
believed that he was one of those strange Italians from the far north of Italy bordering
the Swiss and Germans.
The distortion of the left side of his face made him more native. It was the kind of
disfigurement common in Sicily because of the lack of medical care. The little injury that
cannot be patched up simply for lack of money. Many children, many men, bore
disfigurements that in America would have been repaired by minor surgery or
sophisticated medical treatments.
Michael often thought of Kay, of her smile, her body, and always felt a twinge of
conscience at leaving her so brutally without a word of farewell. Oddly enough his
conscience was never troubled by the two men he had murdered; Sollozzo had tried to
kill his father, Captain McCluskey had disfigured him for life.
Dr. Taza always kept after him about getting surgery done for his lopsided face,
especially when Michael asked him for pain-killing drugs, the pain getting worse as time
went on, and more frequent. Taza explained that there was a facial nerve below the eye
from which radiated a whole complex of nerves. Indeed, this was the favorite spot for
Mafia torturers, who searched it out on the cheeks of their victims with the needle-fine
point of an ice pick. That particular nerve in Michael's face had been injured or perhaps
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there was a splinter of bone lanced into it. Simple surgery in a Palermo hospital would
permanently relieve the pain.
Michael refused. When the doctor asked why, Michael grinned and said, "It's
something from home."
And he really didn't mind the pain, which was more an ache, a small throbbing in his
skull, like a motored apparatus running in liquid to purify it.
It was nearly seven months of leisurely rustic (сельский, деревенский; простой,
грубый [‘rΛstık]) living before Michael felt real boredom. At about this time Don
Tommasino became very busy and was seldom seen at the villa. He was having his
troubles with the "new Mafia" springing up in Palermo, young men who were making a
fortune out of the postwar construction boom in that city. With this wealth they were
trying to encroach on the country fiefs of old-time Mafia leaders whom they
contemptuously labeled Moustache Petes. Don Tommasino was kept busy defending
his domain. And so Michael was deprived of the old man's company and had to be
content with Dr. Taza's stories, which were beginning to repeat themselves.
One morning Michael decided to take a long hike to the mountains beyond Corleone.
He was, naturally, accompanied by the two shepherd bodyguards. This was not really a
protection against enemies of the Corleone Family. It was simply too dangerous for
anyone not a native to go wandering about by himself. It was dangerous enough for a
native. The region was loaded with bandits, with Mafia partisans fighting against each
other and endangering everybody else in the process. He might also be mistaken for a
pagliaio thief.