"Well," Joseph said, settling back into the chair, "where do I begin?"
He turned the cognac once in his hand as if searching for the answer in the colour of it.
"We were delivered to Xanthos in the middle of the night. No papers. No explanation. No doctor waiting at a desk pretending to be civilised. My father's men handed us over to the guards as one hands over luggage too heavy to keep carrying."
He smiled without amusement.
"That was my first clue that the place was not what its name claimed."
"The guards took Vitelli and me through a corridor that smelled of bleach, rust, stale sweat, and something older underneath all of it — the sour persistence of human fear. Then they opened a set of iron doors and led us into a hall so large that, at first, I thought I was looking at the nave of some ruined industrial cathedral."
"There were no rooms."
"No visible cells."
"No private wards, no curtains, no medical partitions, nothing that could flatter the place with the word treatment."
"The entire population of the institution was kept in that one enormous hall."
"Men lay chained along the walls and in rows facing each other so closely that if one of them fully extended his legs he would have struck the prisoner opposite. Some were awake. Some were muttering. Some simply stared as if staring had become their last intact possession. Rats moved freely through the corners and occasionally through the open floor itself with the confidence of creatures who knew they belonged there."
"Vitelli and I were chained side by side."
"At that stage," Joseph said, "we still didn't know what we had been delivered into. A prison? A private hospital? A military facility? A place our enemies had arranged for us? We knew only that we had been taken from home and put somewhere designed to break certainty before it broke the body."
"About twenty minutes after we arrived, a second group of men entered."
"Without a word they unchained us and stripped us naked there in front of everyone. Nobody watched. Or rather: nobody watched because there was nothing left in that place that still deserved the surprise of humiliation. It was routine. A ritual of entry."
"They shaved our heads first," Joseph said. "Then our beards. Then our eyebrows."
He paused.
"Then the eyelashes."
I looked at him.
"Yes," he said quietly. "The eyelashes."
"Then the hair inside the nostrils. Then the chest, back, arms, legs, groin — every visible trace of hair removed until the body no longer appeared to belong to itself but to some cleaner, cruder category of animal."
"What was the science of that?" I asked.
Joseph smiled faintly.
"There may have been one. If so, no one thought to share it with us. In that moment it felt less like science than liturgy. A way of erasing the person before the treatment began."
"Afterwards they dressed us in orange boiler suits and chained us back in place."
"There must have been close to two hundred men there," Joseph went on. "Perhaps more. I never counted them properly. Counting requires the hope that numbers may one day matter."
He took a sip of cognac.
"That first evening was when I saw Xanthos."
"At once the hall fell silent."
"Not gradually. Not because he commanded it. The silence arrived before him, as if the men had learned to hear his approach long before footsteps became audible."
"He came to stand beside me," Joseph said, "and I remember the smell first."
"Not dirt. Not illness. Something medicinal that had turned foul. Like antiseptic losing an argument with decay."
He looked at me.
"Have you ever stood too close to an animal trap that has not yet been emptied? It was like that, but sharpened somehow — as if rot itself had become precise."
He did not describe Xanthos immediately. He let the impression spread first.
"He was smaller than I expected any adult man to be," Joseph said at last. "Not merely short. Compressed. His proportions were somehow correct and incorrect at the same time. The beard was too long. The hands too still. The eyes too wakeful."
"He stopped beside me, looked at me once, then pointed to the young prisoner chained on my other side."
"The guards unchained the boy and took him away."
"He returned around midnight," Joseph said, "and they did not bother chaining him again. He lay down on the bare concrete and slept like an infant."
"That, for me, was the first thing at Xanthos that truly unsettled me."
"No mattress. No pillow. No blanket. No evening meal. And still he slept."
I asked nothing. Joseph continued.
"I was starving. We had not been fed since our arrival. I could not sleep. So I nudged Vitelli and asked how he was."
"Vitelli was shaking violently."
"At first I thought from cold."
"Then from fever."
"Then, looking more carefully, from deprivation. The body searching frantically for what the will no longer governed."
"He said only one thing to me," Joseph said. "'I need my pills.'"
"Vitelli began scratching at himself with such fury that I thought he might strip off his own skin by dawn. Then he stood and began shouting at the hall itself, kicking the chained men nearest him, swearing, dragging the chain, trying to turn his own misery into public weather."
"What struck me," Joseph said, "was the reaction of the other prisoners. They did not laugh. They did not enjoy the spectacle. They begged him to be quiet."
Because they knew what was coming.
"Xanthos entered almost at once."
"Naked," Joseph said.
I stared at him.
"Naked," he repeated. "As if clothing belonged to another category of men."
"He ordered Vitelli unchained."
"The moment the chain was removed, Vitelli threw himself at one of the guards. It was a hopeless effort, all withdrawal and rage and no leverage. The guards drove him to the floor and kicked his face until blood ran from the nose and mouth. Then they hauled him upright."
"And Xanthos said a single word."
"Pilot."
Joseph let the word hang there.
"At once the prisoners stood."
"All of them."
"Those who had been slumped half-conscious a moment before now rose into a line with the obedience of men responding not to a command but to a condition long since installed in them."
"I stood too," Joseph said. "At that point I had no idea what the word meant. I only understood that everyone else did."
"Vitelli was dragged to the corner of the hall and held upright in front of the first prisoner in line."
"The man struck him."
"Not casually. Not angrily. With full formal commitment, as if performing something taught."
"A spectacular slap," Joseph said. "One of those blows with enough body behind it to produce echoes."
"Vitelli staggered. Then he was marched to the next man. And the next. And the next. Each of them struck him. By the time they brought him to me, he was barely conscious."
"I was expected to join in," Joseph said. "So I did."
"I slapped my uncle."
"Xanthos raised a hand and the line stopped."
"Then, in a tone almost amused, he said:"
"The boy does not know how to slap."
Joseph laughed under his breath.
"At first I thought Guffong — or Goofang, or whatever the word truly was — might be the name of one of the guards. Later I realised he used it for all of them."
"One guard pulled me to my knees."
"Head to the side," the man said.
"I obeyed."
"Then came the first slap."
"So hard," he said, touching his own ear, "that my head struck the floor and my ear began bleeding. After the second, I stopped hearing properly. The others landed somewhere beyond pain. I recognised only force."
"But that wasn't Pilot?" I asked.
"No," Joseph said. "That was merely instruction."
"They hauled me upright and ordered me to strike Vitelli again. This time I hit him with everything I had."
"It still failed to satisfy Xanthos."
"He still does not know," Xanthos said.
"Then he ordered me unchained."
"At that point," Joseph said, "I was frightened enough to wet myself."
"Six guards formed a circle around me."
"Xanthos spoke again."
"Pilot."
"The term, I later learned, came from Xanthos's own explanation: he imagined the victim as an aircraft and the line of prisoners as the pilots who kept it airborne through successive blows."
"In practice," Joseph said, "it was closer to being turned into a shuttlecock."
"The guards struck me one after the other, left, right, left, right, with such speed and precision that balance became impossible. The dizziness created the illusion of flight only from the outside. From within it was pure dislocation — as if the head had detached from the body and been made to ricochet between invisible walls."
"At some point," Joseph said, "the floor took me back."
"I woke the next morning chained once more beside Vitelli."
"My uncle looked at my face, which by then must have resembled badly stored fruit, and asked what had happened to me."
He smiled faintly.
"The difficulty was that his own face had swollen to the size and colour of a festival mask."
"I told him so."
"He told me my eyes were bleeding."
"Neither of us looked particularly alive."
"Soon the guards unchained the whole hall and marched us outside at gunpoint."
"That was how I first saw the yard."
"It was a wide open enclosure behind the main block, hard-packed earth fouled everywhere by human waste."
"At first I thought they were taking us out for work," Joseph said. "Then I realised this was the lavatory."
"The prisoners relieved themselves there, in rows, under supervision, once a day."
"One of the boys beside me said, very gently, that I should do what I could because there would not be another opportunity until the following morning."
"So I did."
"There are forms of degradation one imagines will destroy all dignity," he said. "The astonishing thing is that most do not. A human being grows used to almost anything if enough witnesses are equally deprived."
"They used stones instead of paper."
"Well," Joseph added, "that part at least was ecumenical. The ancients and the prisoners had one technique in common."
"And that was not the worst of it?"
"No," he said. "The water was."
"The prisoners drank from three great clay jars set at the edge of the yard."
"Each morning, after relieving himself in public alongside the others, Xanthos would rise, step to the jars, and dip his genitals into the water before the guards carried them back inside."
I put my glass down.
"He did that deliberately?"
"Everything at Xanthos was deliberate," Joseph replied. "To reduce an act to madness is often just another way of refusing to think about it."
"They were fed twice a day."
"Lentil broth and bread in the morning. At night some shapeless fried protein and more bread. During the day they were worked in a quarry, breaking stone under armed supervision. Those who ran were not pursued. They were shot."
"There was no drama around it," Joseph said. "A single report from the rifle, and the matter was settled. Men disappeared that way. The administration could always say they had fled, or fallen, or been buried in a slide. Families prefer lies if the truth is expensive."
"The nights were worse."
"After the evening meal the prisoners were gathered back into the hall and made to sit in rows for what Xanthos called exercises in discharge. I will not describe the first of these with any relish. It is enough to say that refusal was punished by Pilot, and once a man had been properly piloted in front of two hundred others, modesty ceased to function as a motive."
"That place stripped humiliation of its novelty," he said. "Once everything had been exhibited, shame lost its chief occupation."
"It was during one of those evenings that I first saw what I would later call Xanthos's real power."
"A new prisoner had arrived that morning — a heroin addict in the full rage of withdrawal, scratching, vomiting, shivering, swearing at anyone who approached. The guards beat him. He laughed. They threatened him. He cursed them back. The body, when deprived at that depth, cares very little for institutions."
"Vitelli watched him with something like pity," Joseph said. "So did I. There are punishments no sensible man would inflict even on an enemy. Sudden withdrawal is one of them."
"When Xanthos entered and saw the disorder, he spoke to the man almost softly."
"Keep still."
"The prisoner ignored him, clawing at his own arms."
"'I have insects under my skin,' he kept saying."
"Xanthos repeated the instruction."
"The man turned, looked at him, and told him to go to hell."
"A flicker of interest appeared in Xanthos's face."
"Then he said, very clearly:"
"You will address me as the Most High."
"The addict laughed."
"This little bastard wants to be God," he said to the room.
"No one else laughed."
"Xanthos pointed at him."
"You will burn," he said.
"At that point," Joseph said, "I still thought I was watching theatre."
"The addict laughed again."
"Then Xanthos repeated it."
"This time louder."
"And something in the room altered."
Joseph did not call it electricity. Nor hypnosis. Nor any of the embarrassed little vocabularies by which the educated try to rescue themselves from astonishment.
"I felt," he said slowly, "the pressure of command."
"The addict convulsed."
"At once the hall dissolved into shouting. Some men screamed that he was burning. Others fell back before there was anything visible to fall back from. Then, suddenly, there was flame."
Joseph paused.
"It is possible," he said, "that there are better explanations than the one I had at the time. A hidden accelerant. Chemical sabotage. Some elaborate preparation. I do not know."
He looked directly at me.
"What I know is what I saw."
"The man burned where he stood."
"His body took the fire first. The flames seemed to feed upward from within his movements rather than downward from any obvious source. What horrified the hall was not merely that he was burning, but that so much of the immediate surroundings did not ignite with him. The clothes blackened slowly. The floor remained untouched. The body itself appeared to carry the event like a private verdict."
"And when a roomful of half-starved, beaten, desperate men see something that violates the order of the world," Joseph said, "they do what men have always done."
"They worship?"
"They submit."
"The whole hall went down in prostration."
"All except Vitelli."
"Vitelli stared at Xanthos with naked loathing, as if the thing before him had finally declared its species. Xanthos returned the stare. He did not raise his voice. He merely looked. After several seconds even Vitelli lowered himself."
"When a man seems able to alter the rules of reality," Joseph said, "obedience ceases to feel moral. It becomes practical."
I asked him, "Did you believe then that Xanthos was supernatural?"
Joseph smiled faintly.
"At the time? I believed whatever fear was strongest."
"Visitors were permitted at the centre. This, for me, was in some ways more frightening than the punishments, because prisoners who lived like animals within the institution somehow transformed into obedient, coherent sons before their families."
"I could not understand it at first," Joseph said. "Later I realised that obedience is never more complete than when it borrows the language of recovery."
"The first time Don Giovanni came to see me, he did not come alone. With him was the older patriarch of the family, Don Vincente DeSantino, still alive then and fully capable of reordering a room simply by entering it."
"Before the visit, Xanthos assembled Vitelli and me in a small chamber and placed a Bible in each of our hands."
"He made us repeat a statement," Joseph said. "That we were well. That the treatment was progressing. That we were recovering slowly but surely. That the institution was saving us from ourselves."
"And did you believe it?"
"No."
"Then why repeat it?"
Joseph gave a slight shrug.
"That is the wrong question. The right question is why, once spoken there, the words seemed to place a border around every other sentence."
"When I was led in to meet my father, I could still hear in my own head everything I wanted to say — the filth, the beatings, the yard, the jars of water, the dead addict, all of it. But when I tried to speak, another set of sentences emerged instead, smooth and prepared, like furniture already laid out in a room I had not known I was entering."
"The harder I tried to resist," he said, "the more violently my body rebelled. Nausea. Tremor. Heat behind the eyes."
"The guards removed me quickly and told the visitors I was still unstable, that contact with my former life aggravated the cravings."
"For the first time in my life," Joseph said, "I saw tears in my father's eyes."
"And Vitelli?" I asked.
Joseph smiled.
"Vitelli was never vulnerable to the same mechanisms."
"When Xanthos placed the Bible in his hands, Vitelli treated it not as an oath but as counter-magic. He told Don Vincente everything. The abuse. The beatings. The deprivation. The dead prisoner. He omitted nothing."
"And when I asked him later how he had managed it," Joseph said, "he told me that if a demon demands obedience while one's hand is on scripture, then one should simply obey the scripture instead."
I could not help laughing.
"And that worked?"
"For him it did," Joseph said. "Men are sometimes saved by the exact form of foolishness most suited to them."
"Don Vincente, once informed, removed Vitelli from Xanthos almost at once."
"Nobody could stop him then," Joseph said. "Not my father, not the guards, perhaps not even Xanthos."
"You knew Don Vincente well?" I asked.
"Oh yes," Joseph said. "Very well."
I hesitated, then asked, "Is the story true?"
"What story?"
"The bull."
Joseph laughed properly this time.
"Ah. That one."
He took another drink.
"Yes. It is true. I saw it myself."
"One season a breeding bull had been purchased for the family estate. Healthy, fertile by every veterinary measure, physically flawless. Yet once introduced to the herd it refused the cows entirely. It would not mount, would not settle, would not perform the single task for which it had been purchased."
"At first everyone made excuses for it," Joseph said. "Shyness. New surroundings. A difficult temperament. You know how men are when money has already been spent."
"But after weeks of failure, Don Vincente came to inspect the animal himself."
"He watched it for perhaps an hour," Joseph said. "The bull pranced, snorted, and wasted everyone's time."
"Then Don Vincente stood, crossed the enclosure, and struck the animal across the back with his forearm."
"Not a fist," Joseph said. "Not a weapon. His forearm."
"The bull dropped where it stood."
"One sound," Joseph said. "Then nothing."
"Later, when the carcass was opened, the spine was found snapped as cleanly as if a beam of wood had been broken across a knee."
"Just like that?" I asked.
"Just like that."
Joseph smiled.
"They used to say men were stronger then. Which is nonsense, of course. Strength is not historical. It is individual."
"What made him terrifying was not the arm. It was the eye."
He leaned closer.
"You are still too young, Silvio, so you imagine power as an extension of the body."
He glanced down at his own hand.
"Muscle. Appetite. Violence. The ability to strike harder than other men."
He shook his head.
"That is only its costume."
He let the smoke leave him slowly.
"My grandfather could eat like a labourer and fight like an animal, yes. But neither of those was the source of his authority."
He tapped the ash into the tray.
"It was in the pause that entered a room before he had fully entered it."
I said nothing.
"In the eye," Joseph continued, "but not because the eye was fierce. Fierceness is common. Any drunk can manufacture fierceness. No — it was something quieter than that."
He searched briefly for the word and then abandoned the attempt.
"It was the sensation that resistance had already become outdated."
The room fell still between us.
"My father once told me of a land dispute brought before a local jury. The villagers, who had spent half their lives resenting us and the other half depending on us, agreed among themselves beforehand that when Don Vincente entered, none of them would stand. It was to be their little theatre of dignity."
Joseph smiled faintly.
"They discussed it at length. They even repeated it to one another, as cowards do when trying to turn intention into courage."
He looked at me.
"But the moment he walked in, they rose."
"All of them."
"No one gave the order."
"No one had time to reconsider."
"They simply found themselves standing, as though the body had reached a conclusion before the mind had been consulted."
Joseph lifted his glass but did not drink.
"That was his real force."
"Not strength."
"Not rage."
"Precedence."
He let the word remain there.
"In his presence other men did not feel defeated. That would have been easier. They felt late. As if he had arrived at the truth of the situation before they had even understood what situation they were in."
He leaned back.
"That is a much deeper form of rule."
I said, "And your father had the same thing?"
Joseph smiled, though not warmly.
"In diluted form."
He turned the glass again in his hand.
"The dispute with those villagers never really ended. It merely changed clothes. Boundary lines, grazing rights, old marriages, older insults. Their blood was too entangled with ours for clean separation. My grandfather's mother had come from their stock, which meant every act of retaliation carried some faint trace of domestic quarrel about it."
He paused.
"One season a head of our cattle wandered onto Don Marcello's land. Marcello killed it at once. Not because of the animal. Because he wanted an answer."
"And Vitelli wanted to give him one," I said.
Joseph nodded.
"He gathered men immediately. At that age rage still looked noble on him."
"My father, understanding that once Vitelli left the house someone would probably end up dead before dusk, went to ask my grandfather whether he should intervene and force the matter back into arbitration."
Joseph smiled into the smoke.
"My grandfather was furious about the cattle. But fury never made him unclear."
He set the glass down.
"He said, 'Go and arrange your jury after your brother has finished speaking to them.'"
I laughed despite myself.
Joseph did not.
"Then he added something my father never forgot."
Joseph's voice lowered.
"'These people mistake softness for uncertainty. You may speak gently to them, by all means. Just make certain that, somewhere behind the sentence, they can hear the metal.'"
He lifted his glass.
"That," he said quietly, "was Don Vincente."
A pause.
"The man who took Vitelli out of Xanthos."
He looked at me.
"And once Vitelli was gone…"
His expression emptied slightly.
"I remained."