The Godfather

 “The Godfather” By Mario Puzo
 
276
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 in dwellings that pitted the side of the nearest mountain, the 
mean hovels built out of black rock quarried 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 plain. 
His two shepherd bodyguards always carried their luparas with them when 
accompanying Michael on his walks. The deadly Sicilian shotgun was the favorite 
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 
accentiess 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 lie 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 o 
conscience at leaving her so brutally without a word of farewell. Oddly enough his 

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