In the Wolf's Mouth (2 page)

Angilù squinted out over the hills. No one. Nothing. He stared into the blue and pink distances and looked for figures. Nothing. The world was only just creeping awake. His mule quivered its flanks to shake off the first flies. Angilù really needed to pee now and there was no way to get his hands round to the front of his body. He could try lying back with his knife under him but surely someone would come soon. He kicked himself back into the shade of his hut, found a dry area the spilled water hadn’t soaked and lay still.

He woke up with one image roaring in his mind – a stream exploding over a rock. There was no choice now. He wrestled his knife out of his belt, gripped it with the blade upright against the rope and lay back over it. He rocked from side to side, crushing his fingers, feeling the blade bite into the rope, its tip
sting against his back. He pushed with his heels so all his weight came down on it, and when it was almost through he rolled onto his face and pulled his arms apart as hard as he could. After three exertions his arms flew apart and he used them to drag himself out of the hut. He fell on his side, pulled open his trousers and let himself go in a long, loud stream that rolled over the ground as thick as a sheet of glass.

The sun was well past its highest point. They had forgotten him. Angilù shouted as loudly as he could, separating each syllable, ‘Motherfuckers!’

He crawled back inside his wet, disordered hut and took the knife to cut the rope at his ankles. His arms were weak. His fingers trembled inaccurately. He saw that the dirt floor was churned, marked with the tracks of his struggle. He pushed the stopper back into the flaccid skin and picked it up. He collected his gun and left to ride his sombre, patient mule back to the estate to report the stolen sheep to the man who had ordered the theft.

Climbing onto his mule, he felt a hot fluttering pain in the small of his back. He checked with his fingertips: fine wet lines where his knife had cut him. He kicked the beast forwards, patting its strong neck as it collected itself under his weight and lunged.

Sant’Attilio appeared by stages, sliding behind slopes, emerging at other angles. From one ridge, Angilù saw the landlord’s separate house, close to the palace, its outer walls and olive trees. From another, the whole of Sant’Attilio was disclosed – cubes of flaking yellow and grey, red roofs, the white church tower, the empty stripe of the roadway, the palace large on its outskirts.
Everything he knew was down there, every name, every person, every secret.

He rode straight to the landlord’s house to do it quickly and get it over with. He got down from his mule at the gate and led it by the bridle between the hissing silver leaves of his beloved olive trees. He walked up to the front door and pulled the bell. He heard the sound of shaken brass pass through the house and frightened himself by imagining the landlord’s presence moving in response through the interior darkness and no way of knowing how close he was, shifting closer and closer. The door opened. The landlord, smoking, looked down at him from the step then out over the top of his head. A clean white shirt and braces. Angilù thought of the dust in his hair, the dirt on his clothes, his shirt plastered to the small of his back with stiff dried blood.
Best for your reputation
.

Angilù began, ‘Sir, last night …’

Cirò Albanese seemed bored. He raised a languid upturned palm and curled his fingers to summon the story he already knew out of Angilù.

‘Last night,’ Angilù began again. ‘Bandits. The sheep. They took most of my sheep.’

‘How many?’

‘I don’t …’ Angilù didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t say,
I didn’t count them because I thought they’d tell you
. He said, ‘I didn’t count.’

‘You didn’t count.’

‘No.’

‘Mother of God. All right. You go straight back up. Don’t talk to anyone in the village. You understand
me? I’ll let the Prince know next time I see him.’ The landlord leaned backwards and closed the door.

Angilù wanted to go and see his mother, to wash, to eat, to be comforted, to get a new saint for the string around his neck because he was worried that the one he had on was losing power. But he’d been told. He climbed back onto his mule and kicked its belly with his heels, kicked again and again until it bounced up into a trot and carried him up and away, the heavy pull of his unvisited home dragging at his back. It carried him up to many days of heat and silence, the noon sun pressing the colours flat to the ground, nights of stars and the sharp points of the returning moon. He drove the remaining sheep on with a whirling whip and they stumbled before him, nervous, thick-skulled, reeking. When he paused they stopped where they were, haggard, and stared down at their own shadows as if wanting to crawl into them. Angilù drove them on past his place of faces in the ground. He looked across and felt a surge of communication from them. He couldn’t say what it was they were telling him. The impulse was dark, opaque, but it was commanding. It felt as though they recognised him and what it was had something to do with his shame, trussed up and helpless, forgotten by the world. He should … what? He touched the weakening saint on his collarbone and said a prayer.

Finally they reached a hollow full of prickly pears and the sheep hurried towards them, their tatty rumps swaying as they ran. This was now the far west of the estate, the dangerous edge. Bandits here were not the friends of
friends. They would be stealing to sell or even eat. He would have to sleep lightly in the day and try to keep watch at night, his gun close at hand.

He was up there for days before anything happened, more days than it would take for him to be seen and word to spread so he was past his fear when they came, having assumed that no one cared. He’d even started sleeping at night for hours at a time, a decision he made collecting snails one day. He detached their light bodies from a rock, dropped them into his bag, then lay down in the shade and drifted into sleep. When he awoke he found his little prisoners crawling out again in laborious escape. Their long grey feet fully extended, their tiny eyes circling on their stalks, they strived forwards as quickly as they could. He laughed as he picked them up again, unsuckering them from the stones, and kept on laughing, finding it hilarious, and that laughter rinsed right through him, made him careless and light-hearted. He laughed at the thought of himself up in the hills, picturing the top of his head from above as God might see it and whatever, fuck it, whatever would happen would happen. He wiped tears from his cheeks.

They came early so he’d only just fallen asleep. He saw their grey shapes moving in the moonlight. He shouted, ‘I have only thirteen sheep! The others were stolen! They’re not worth taking.’ There was a yellow flash, a jump in the dirt near his feet and he fell away onto his face, his hands over the back of his head. ‘Don’t shoot! I won’t do anything! Don’t shoot!’ They fired again. He could still see the ghost of the muzzle flash smeared across the darkness when he
heard his mule growl and stagger and fall hard onto its knees. To the rhythm of its heart, blood was pumping out of the poor beast, masses of blood, a sound like a fountain or like a basin emptied over and over onto the ground. The mule wheezed, snarling and snoring, and struggled to stay upright. Angilù saw its head flail down onto one side as the blood continued to gush. ‘Why did you?’ he shouted and reached for his gun. Another shot thumped into the ground right by him. Angilù aimed at one of the hurrying grey shapes and fired. A twisting fall. He’d hit him. There were curses, two more shots from different places, running feet. Angilù fired again. He saw the men, heads low, arms half raised, racing down into the darkness and disappearing.

Then Angilù was alone with the man he’d shot and had to listen to him dying. Angilù was cursed, forgotten, all his luck gone. His saint was painted tin. In the moonlight he could see the man lying on the ground by a dark irregular shape of blood, his loose legs and outflung arms like a dropped puppet’s. The man chattered to himself and cried. Angilù didn’t know what to do. He sang to drown out the sound. He thought of the man lying there, was suddenly himself inside the dark cave of his dying mind, hearing the man who’d killed him singing. It was terrible. But what else could he do? After a while he sensed silence beyond the sound of his voice and stopped. Stillness. The bandits gone. The shape of the mountains and the moon. His dead mule. A dead man.

Everything had ended. It was all over. And there was nothing Angilù could do, no way to alter one thing. All the time there had been death, he’d heard
gunshots and stories, but he’d always been apart, hidden in the hills, in his gleaming good fortune. Now he was himself forced to eat death. Now he was taking part. His life was over. He felt tiny sitting there in the dark, his head hanging forwards, the round bones of his neck exposed to the wind. The world had its huge thumb on the back of his neck. It pressed down. It would never release him.

In the faint, frayed light of dawn, Angilù went over to look at the body to see if he recognised the man. He didn’t. The shape of the man’s skull was distinctive, tall and narrow and accented along the jaw with tufts of beard. His eyes had already sunk under the ridge of bone. His mouth was open showing yellow teeth, surprisingly long, like a sheep’s. Angilù crossed himself. The son of some mother, some woman who would beat her head with open hands when she knew, who would clasp her rosary and howl, held up by her daughters. Probably word had already reached her.

Angilù had to go and tell someone. He had, at the very least, to be away from there so that the bandit’s people could climb up and collect the body. He picked up his gun and bag and whip and scared the sheep into a huddle and drove them past the fallen body of the mule towards the village. Leaving now, not stopping, they could be back by nightfall.

After the thick, surging colours of sunrise, two little birds joined them, wagtails, hunting the insects that whirred up where the sheep trod. They twitched their yellow tails and emitted their one bright, repetitive note. They kept flying a foot or two in the air and landing again, maintaining a precise distance from
Angilù and the animals. Where they landed was the exact midpoint between their hunger and their fear.

Cirò Albanese rode to a nearby town to talk to somebody, a large stationary man who sat with a boulder of stomach resting on his thighs. This man, Alvaro Zuffo, modestly dressed and inconspicuous as he was, made a centre wherever he sat. Any chair enthroned him. Cirò found him in the clean-cut rectangle of shade cast by the awning of a particular bar on the square. This man had a surprisingly delicate way of smoking. He puffed, the cigarette held low in an open hand of evenly spread fingers. The man talked elliptically but to the point. Birds. Barking dogs. Stones. Fishermen. He spoke in proverbs. Only when Cirò mentioned the posters around the town did he speak directly, with rage. His anger was so large and powerful it seemed to tire him like an illness. He half closed his eyes. That mule-jawed, cuckolded son of a whore had appointed a Fascist governor to Sicily, as Cirò knew, and now disappearances, torture, order destroyed. So the decision Cirò was making was very wise. Cirò didn’t know he had made a decision. He thought, rather, that he had come for advice. The man told Cirò where to go. There was a coffin maker down in the harbour who arranged things. Cirò shouldn’t say one word to anyone, not even his wife, just slip away there and go.

Angilù pulled hard at the bell of the landlord’s house. The jangling faded. He rang again. Silence solidified on the other side of the door. He was relieved, for
the moment. He was alone. Nothing was happening. He walked back through the olive trees to the pillared gate. Beyond it he saw a motor car, dark green, its gleaming polish filmed with road dust. Beside it there was a tall man in a brown suit wearing bright shoes of two different colours of leather.

The tall man saw him. Their eyes met. Angilù wished that hadn’t happened. He should have just hidden. He had no wish to meet any unknown friends of the landlord. He hung his head down between his shoulders, an insignificant peasant, and pushed through the gate.

The tall man said, in good Italian, ‘He isn’t here?’

Angilù answered, as he had to, in Sicilian. ‘No one answered.’ He tried to walk away.

‘What business do you have with him?’ The tall man bent down towards Angilù. His face was composed of neat triangles, a clipped beard and moustache, a sharp nose and arched eyebrows. He put his hands in the soft checkered fabric of his pockets, leaning forwards.

‘I … I have to talk to him, to tell him, about my flock.’

‘But as he’s not here, why don’t you tell me?’

‘I should go now, sir, and …’

‘He’s not here. Tell me instead.’

‘I’m sorry, sir.’ Angilù scratched his head. ‘I need to speak …’

‘What do you do?’ The man kept his eyes on Angilù’s face, stepping with him as he tried to shift away, preventing him.

‘I’m a shepherd, here on the estate.’

‘I see.’ The man smiled. ‘And do you know who I am?’

‘No, sir. I can’t say I do.’

‘That’s my fault,’ the man said, producing a gold pocket watch as smooth as a river pebble from his waistcoat pocket. He checked it and flipped shut its thin gold door. ‘But that will change. I’m your Prince, you see. You work for me.’

‘I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t … I saw you once as a child, at harvest …’

‘My fault, as I say. Spending all my time away in Palermo like every other fool. What was it you had to tell Albanese?’

‘I was in the hills last night with the sheep. West part of the hills, your hills, and bandits came to steal them and shot my mule and tried to shoot me and I defended myself, as I had to, Lord Jesus Christ forgive me, and I fired in the darkness and shot one who lies dead there now. The others ran away. I’ve penned the sheep above the village.’

‘You shot one?’

‘God forgive me, I did. He’s up there. He’s dead.’ The long teeth in the half-light. The shadowed eyes. Flies up there now. The mother.

‘I see. It’s what you should have done. You’ve been brave. How old are you? Still a boy, really.’ He put a clean hand on Angilù’s shoulder. ‘Why don’t you come with me? I’d like to talk to you some more.’