Roberto Saviano - ZeroZeroZero

Lucia Gaviria — Natalia’s mother — is always on the lookout. The opportunity that fate has given her daughter must be cultivated fully for as long as it lasts, but it would be a grave error to depend on it. She too had posed for some fashion photo shoots in her youth, but without her law degree, who knows how she would have managed after she was widowed. You have to keep your head on your shoulders and your feet on the ground, aim for safe and solid goals. That beauty is an ephemeral asset, and that a Colombian woman must use other means to earn and to maintain control over her life, to be the author of her own destiny — of these lessons, Natalia’s mother is the best teacher, because she is the perfect model. She has a new partner now, and a second child: a normal family, one that is proud to know that’s what they are, especially in this time and place, which is overrun by such unbridled madness.

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Colombia is the country of a thousand faces. One minute you’re blinded by the sun reflecting off white walls, and the next you’re hit with a sunset, the colors of which light the landscape on fire. If Colombia is disorienting, Montería is energized by its contradictions. A city on the banks of the Sinú River, it is the capital of the department of Córdoba. Simple cottages and skyscrapers burst through tropical trees, dozens of different ethnicities are jammed together in an often impossible cohabitation.

Montería is where Salvatore Mancuso Gómez is born and raised, in a house his father builds with his own hands. His sons, even as little boys, tag along when he goes hunting, fascinated by his treasure: a small arsenal they are never allowed to get near. Don Salvador — which, thanks to an error at immigration, is how he is known in the registrar’s office — raises his children with a firm hand. To maintain their relative social and economic tranquillity, he sets down strict rules that are beyond question.

But in the end his severity pays off. Monkey’s recklessness is limited to his youth, when he is the little boss of the neighborhood, and the other children, in homage to the fuzz that sprouts on his body before any does on theirs, give him that nickname. Or during motocross season in the 1980s, when he wins the national championship and turns the Bianchi brothers, his Italian compatriots who run a Yamaha dealership in Montería, into sales champions.

Like Natalia’s mother, Don Salvador knows that a boy needs gratification, needs such moments of fleeting glory, as long as they don’t risk derailing his life. Salvatore is a good son. He finishes high school and goes to study in the United States; if he fails to graduate from the University of Pittsburgh, it’s not because he lacks the will to study but because he’s too homesick. Especially for Martha, whom he married before he was even eighteen, and little Gianluigi, just a few months old. Don Salvador insists he really wants his tenacious son to build a life for himself in the United States, but he can’t help but yield to the reasoning of a young father. Salvatore returns to Colombia, and he and Martha move to Bogotá, so he can finish his studies there.

Once again the second-born son’s plans diverge from those of his father, and once again his father will not be able to stop him: Salvatore doesn’t want to become an engineer; he wants to become a farmer and animal breeder, a real old-fashioned Colombian. It also seems that he plans to avenge his father, who, after thirty years of sacrifice, had finally managed to buy some land but was forced to sell his beloved finca when he refused to give in to the guerrillas’ extortions. What can you say to a son who stubbornly wants to finish what you couldn’t? That it’s too dangerous, too hard? The Mancusos are proud people, and in the end Salvatore takes a degree in agrarian studies, returns to Montería, and settles with his family on the Campamento farm that Martha has just inherited from her father. The soil is rich, the farmhouse a jewel to be treasured. Don Salvador backs the loan his son needs to transform his business into a lucrative, exquisite dream. It means getting up at dawn and toiling as much as — even more than — the campesinos. Putting his father’s philosophy into practice is hard work. Two years go by, and the hacienda Campamento arouses the admiration not only of the other farmers but of the guerrilla fighters as well, whose appetites are ravenous.

In the early 1990s, the country where Salvatore is starting to make a name for himself is like a gangrenous Wild West. For years now it has been impossible to keep track of all the guerrilla violence in the department of Córdoba: extortions; executions; cattle rustling; kidnapping of innocent people, women and children included. The guerrillas take advantage of the lack of political leadership and the inability of the police to control the situation. A decade earlier the farmers and breeders of the department of Antioquia gathered for the first time, in Medellín, to try to find a solution to the problem. The Association of Middle Magdalena Ranchers and Farmers (ACDEGAM) was born. Nothing revolutionary, they were simply acting on a 1965 decree that gave farmers the right to take up arms in self-defense, with the help of the authorities. Soldiers and farmers arm in arm in an all-out war, where what counts is not the monopoly of force that characterizes every modern state but the identification of a common enemy to annihilate. Yet the situation for farmers in Antioquia and Córdoba remained alarming, the worth of their lands and livestock having fallen to one-fifth its previous value.

Salvatore Mancuso knows all this far too well, just as he knows of the acronyms, manpower, and locations of the insurgents. For years he has listened to the stories of oppression and assembled all the examples he could of people confronting those parasitic bandits who fatten on the fruits of honest people’s labor. He is ready. If an immigrant electrician, worn down by a lifetime of work, didn’t cave, then neither will his son, in the prime of his life and prepared to die for his land and his men. Let them try something, if they dare.

It’s just past dawn, the sun’s slanting rays speckle the ground ochre. Three shadows, lit from behind, approach Salvatore. Emerging into the light, they take on the appearance of guerrillas. Salvatore grabs his rifle and without thinking twice, points it at them. They tell him that their boss wants to see him, but Salvatore refuses to go with them.

Parrita works on Salvatore’s finca . He’s a sharp kid, barely twelve years old, not afraid of anything. The men tease him, tell him he’ll be afraid once he grows up, that Colombia teaches you respect for those who are stronger than you. But Parrita just shrugs his shoulders. He’s a cocky kid, and Salvatore likes him. Salvatore sends for him, gives him a two-way radio, and tells him to follow the three guerrillas, to find their base, and to lie in ambush, awaiting further orders. In the meantime, Salvatore starts organizing; he convinces the colonel of the Junín battalion of Montería to lend him some men and, following Parrita’s directions, he flushes out the three guerrillas and kills them.

Salvatore Mancuso has taken his destiny into his own hands. There’s no going back now unless he wants to lose everything he has built for himself. Word spreads from farm to farm about the young haciendero who defied the terrorist thugs in a way no one had ever dared to do before. Not even Pablo Escobar, who, when the daughter of Don Fabio Ochoa Restrepo, a big horse breeder and primogenitor of a high-ranking criminal family in the Medellín cartel, was kidnapped, founded a group called MAS, Muerte a Secuestradores (Death to Kidnappers) in keeping with his theatrical bent. The most powerful man in Colombia shouted threateningly and loaded the avengers with money and weapons. But an immigrant’s son, rather than sending others to do the job, silently took the law into his own hands. Salvatore himself, rather than his farm, became the example to follow. The Montería soldiers get him the permissions he needs to turn his estate into an armed fort and provide him with bodyguards. They’re galvanized as well, and start calling Salvatore cacique , because he’s a chief now, a leader, recognized by the local community. One man in particular bonds like a brother with Salvatore: Major Walter Fratini, vice commander of the battalion that came to his aid during his first retaliation against the guerrillas. They’re both of Italian descent, and they share a love of guns and good wine.