Илья Франк - Английский язык с Крестным Отцом

vendettas or had also emigrated, either to America, Brazil or to some other province on

the Italian mainland. He was to learn later that this small poverty-stricken town had the

highest murder rate of any place in the world.

Michael was installed as a guest in the home of a bachelor uncle of the capo-mafioso.

The uncle, in his seventies, was also the doctor for the district. The capo-mafioso was a

man in his late fifties named Don Tommasino and he operated as the gabbellotto for a

huge estate belonging to one of Sicily's most noble families. The gabbellotto, a sort of

overseer to the estates of the rich, also guaranteed that the poor would not try to claim

land not being cultivated, would not try to encroach (вторгаться, покушаться на чужие

права) in any way on the estate, by poaching (to poach – браконьерствовать;

незаконно вторгаться в чужие владения) or trying to farm it as squatters

(поселившийся незаконно на незанятой земле; to squat – сидеть на корточках). In

short, the gabbellotto was a mafioso who for a certain sum of money protected the real

estate of the rich from all claims made on it by the poor, legal or illegal. When any poor

peasant tried to implement (выполнять, осуществлять, обеспечивать выполнение)

the law which permitted him to buy uncultivated land, the gabbellotto frightened him off

with threats of bodily harm or death. It was that simple.

Мультиязыковой проект Ильи Франка www.franklang.ru

Don Tommasino also controlled the water rights in the area and vetoed the local

building of any new dams by the Roman government. Such dams would ruin the

149

lucrative business of selling water from the artesian wells he controlled, make water too

cheap, ruin the whole important water economy so laboriously built up over hundreds of

years. However, Don Tommasino was an old-fashioned Mafia chief and would have

nothing to do with dope traffic or prostitution. In this Don Tommasino was at odds with

the new breed of Mafia leaders springing up in big cities like Palermo, new men who,

influenced by American gangsters deported to Italy, had no such scruples.

The Mafia chief was an extremely portly (полный, дородный; представительный)

man, a "man with a belly," literally as well as in the figurative sense that meant a man

able to inspire fear in his fellow men. Under his protection, Michael had nothing to fear,

yet it was considered necessary to keep the fugitive's identity a secret. And so Michael

was restricted to the walled estate of Dr. Taza, the Don's uncle.

Dr. Taza was tall for a Sicilian, almost six feet, and had ruddy cheeks and snow-white

hair. Though in his seventies, he went every week to Palermo to pay his respects to the

younger prostitutes of that city, the younger the better. Dr. Taza's other vice was

reading. He read everything and talked about what he read to his fellow townsmen,

patients who were illiterate peasants, the estate shepherds, and this gave him a local

reputation for foolishness. What did books have to do with them?

In the evenings Dr. Taza, Don Tommasino and Michael sat in the huge garden

populated with those marble statues that on this island seemed to grow out of the

garden as magically as the black heady grapes. Dr. Taza loved to tell stories about the

Mafia and its exploits over the centuries and in Michael Corleone he had a fascinated

listener. There were times when even Don Tommasino would be carried away by the

balmy air, the fruity, intoxicating wine, the elegant and quiet comfort of the garden, and

tell a story from his own practical experience. The doctor was the legend, the Don the

reality.

In this antique garden, Michael Corleone learned about the roots from which his father

grew. That the word "Mafia" had originally meant place of refuge. Then it became the

name for the secret organization that sprang up to fight against the rulers who had

crushed the country and its people for centuries. Sicily was a land that had been more

cruelly raped than any other in history. The Inquisition had tortured rich and poor alike.

The landowning barons and the princes of the Catholic Church exercised absolute

power over the shepherds and farmers. The police were the instruments of their power

Мультиязыковой проект Ильи Франка www.franklang.ru

150

and so identified with them that to be called a policeman is the foulest insult one Sicilian

can hurl (бросать, швырять) at another.

Faced with the savagery of this absolute power, the suffering people learned never to

betray their anger and their hatred for fear of being crushed. They learned never to

make themselves vulnerable by uttering any sort of threat since giving such a warning

insured a quick reprisal (репрессалия). They learned that society was their enemy and

so when they sought redress for their wrongs they went to the rebel underground the

Mafia. And the Mafia cemented its power by originating the law of silence, the omerta.

In the countryside of Sicily a stranger asking directions to the nearest town will not even

receive the courtesy of an answer. And the greatest crime any member of the Mafia

could commit would be to tell the police the name of the man who had just shot him or

done him any kind of injury. Omerta became the religion of the people. A woman whose

husband has been murdered would not tell the police the name of her husband's

murderer, not even of her child's murderer, her daughter's raper.

Justice had never been forthcoming (предстоящий, грядущий; ожидаемый) from the

authorities and so the people had always gone to the Robin Hood Mafia. And to some

extent the Mafia still fulfilled this role. People turned to their local capo-mafioso for help

in every emergency. He was their social worker, their district captain ready with a

basket of food and a job, their protector.

But what Dr. Taza did not add, what Michael learned on his own in the months that

followed, was that the Mafia in Sicily had become the illegal arm of the rich and even

the auxiliary police of the legal and political structure. It had become a degenerate

capitalist structure, anti-communist, anti-liberal, placing its own taxes on every form of

business endeavor no matter how small.

Michael Corleone understood for the first time why men like his father chose to

become thieves and murderers rather than members of the legal society. The poverty

and fear and degradation were too awful to be acceptable to any man of spirit. And in

America some emigrating Sicilians had assumed there would be an equally cruel

authority.

Dr. Taza offered to take Michael into Palermo with him on his weekly visit to the

bordello but Michael refused. His flight to Sicily had prevented him from getting proper

medical treatment for his smashed jaw and he now carried a memento from Captain

McCluskey on the left side of his face. The bones had knitted badly, throwing his profile

askew (криво, косо), giving him the appearance of depravity (порочность,

развращенность [dı'prжvıtı]) when viewed from that side. He had always been vain

Мультиязыковой проект Ильи Франка www.franklang.ru

151

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.

Мультиязыковой проект Ильи Франка www.franklang.ru

His two shepherd bodyguards always carried their luparas with them when

accompanying Michael on his walks. The deadly Sicilian shotgun was the favorite

152

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

Мультиязыковой проект Ильи Франка www.franklang.ru

153

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