The Godfather

 “The Godfather” By Mario Puzo
 
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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, 
giving him the appearance of depravity when viewed from that side. He had always 
been vain 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 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 splashing water out of the fanged 
mouths of great snake stones carved before Christ. Houses built like ancient Roman 
villas, with huge marble portals and great vaulted rooms, falling into ruins or inhabited by 
stray sheep. On the horizon the bony hills shone like picked bleached bones piled high. 

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