Free The Sicilian by Mario Puzo Page B

golden brown, and when they were averted they seemed ordinary. But when he looked at you directly the lids came halfway down like the lids carved in statues and the whole face took on a quiet masklike serenity.
    While Pisciotta kept Maria Lombardo amused, Turi Guiliano went upstairs to his bedroom to prepare himself for the journey he was about to make. Specifically to get the pistol he kept hidden there. Remembering the humiliation of the previous night, he was determined to go armed on the job he had ahead this day. He knew how to shoot, for his father took him hunting often.
    In the kitchen, his mother was waiting alone for him to say goodbye. She embraced him and felt the pistol he had in his waistband.
    “Turi, be careful,” she said, alarmed. “Don’t quarrel with the
carabinieri
. If they stop you, give up what you have.”
    Guiliano reassured her. “They can take the goods,” he said. “But I won’t let them beat me or take me to prison.”
    She understood this. And in her own fierce Sicilian pride was proud of him. Many years ago her own pride, her anger at her poverty, had led her to persuade her husband to try a new life in America. She had been a dreamer, she had believed in justice and her own rightful place in the world. She had saved a fortune in America, and that same pride had made her decide to return to Sicily to live like a queen. And then everything had turned to ashes. The lira became worthless in wartime, and she was poor again. She was resigned to her fate but hoped for her children. And she was happy when Turi showed the same spirit that had possessed her. But she dreaded the day when he must come into conflict with the stone-hard realities of life in Sicily.
    She watched him go out into the cobbled street of the Via Bella to greet Aspanu Pisciotta. Her son, Turi, walked like a huge cat, his chest so broad, his arms and legs so muscular he made Aspanu seem no more than a stalk of sisal grass. Aspanu had the hard cunning that her son lacked, the cruelty in his courage. Aspanu would guard Turi against the treacherous world they all had to live in. And she had a weakness for Aspanu’s olive-skinned prettiness, though she believed her son more handsome.
    She watched them go up the Via Bella to where it led out of town toward the Castellammare plain. Her son, Turi Guiliano, and her sister’s son, Gaspare Pisciotta. Two young men just barely twenty years old, and seeming younger than their years. She loved them both and she feared for them both.
    Finally the two men and their donkey vanished over a rise in the street, but she kept watching and finally they appeared again, high above the town of Montelepre, entering the range of mountains that surrounded the town. Maria Lombardo Guiliano kept watching, as if she would never see them again, until they disappeared in the late morning mist around the mountaintop. They were vanishing into the beginning of their myth.

CHAPTER 4

    I N S ICILY THIS September of 1943, people could only exist by trading in the black market. Strict rationing of foodstuffs still carried over from the war, and farmers had to turn in their produce to central government storehouses at fixed prices and for paper money that was almost worthless. In turn the government was supposed to sell and distribute these foodstuffs at low prices to the people. Under this system everybody would get enough to remain alive. In reality, the farmers hid what they could because what they turned in to the government storehouses was appropriated by Don Croce Malo and his mayors to be sold on the black market. The people themselves then had to buy on the black market and break smuggling laws merely to exist. If they were caught doing this they were prosecuted and sent to jail. What good was it that a democratic government had been established in Rome? They would be able to vote as they starved.
    Turi Guiliano and Aspanu Pisciotta, with the lightest of hearts, were in the process of breaking these