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 thecarabinieribarracks, 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 withlupare,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
The 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 thecarabinieri.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 ofomerta.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.