Английский язык с Крестным Отцом
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cruelly raped than any other in history. The Inquisition had tortured rich and poor alike.
The landowning barons and the princes of the Catholic Church exercised absolute
power over the shepherds and farmers. The police were the instruments of their power
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and so identified with them that to be called a policeman is the foulest insult one Sicilian
can hurl (бросать,
Faced with the savagery of this absolute power, the suffering people learned never to
betray their anger and their hatred for fear of being crushed. They learned never to
make themselves vulnerable by uttering any sort of threat since giving such a warning
insured a quick reprisal (репрессалия). They learned that society was their enemy and
so when they sought redress for their wrongs they went to the rebel underground the
Mafia. And the Mafia cemented its power by originating the law of silence, the omerta.
In the countryside of Sicily a stranger asking directions to the nearest town will not even
receive the courtesy of an answer. And the greatest crime any member of the Mafia
could commit would be to tell the police the name of the man who had just shot him or
done him any kind of injury. Omerta became the religion of the people. A woman whose
husband has been murdered would not tell the police the name of her husband's
murderer, not even of her child's murderer, her daughter's raper.
Justice had never been forthcoming (предстоящий, грядущий; ожидаемый) from the
authorities and so the people had always gone to the Robin Hood Mafia. And to some
extent the Mafia still fulfilled this role. People turned to their local capo-mafioso for help
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,
развращенность [di'prжviti]) 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