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

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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,