The Corsican by William Heffernan Page B

of a small ox. His sister, Carmela, was entirely different, however, a delicate beautiful creature, who caused the eyes of young men to risk too long a look as she moved past. She was his closest friend, partly because of his inability to play with other boys as a child, but mostly because of her devotion to him. At night she would sit for hours and listen to everything he had learned from his books that day.
    Carmela was sixteen, two years younger than he, on the day she was killed. He had found her body near the edge of the town. She had fought the men who had raped her and had been beaten for her efforts. They had left her there with her skirt still pulled up over her face, the underpants they had ripped from her body still stuffed into her mouth. She had choked on the cloth and they had just let her die. But she had also identified them in dying. Next to the body he had found a French army insignia, ripped from the collar of one of the men, and in the dirt around her were the footprints of at least five.
    Two days earlier a squad of five soldiers had camped outside the town. They were the advance unit of an army force that would engage in one of the regular sweeps of Mount Cinto is another vain effort to locate a group of Corsican bandits.
    On the evening after his sister’s funeral, Marcosi gave his mother all but a few francs of the money he had saved and told her she would leave that night for his uncle’s home in the village of L’lle-Rousse, ten miles to the north. At first his mother objected, knowing what he would do. But one look into those dark, piercing eyes told her she was no longer dealing with a child, and it also told her she would not see him again for many years.
    The Frenchmen slept in three tents, snoring deeply from the large amount of wine they had drunk the night before, the sound obscuring the young man’s movements as he went from one tent to the other shortly before dawn. It was simple and quick for the first four, a hand over the mouth and a quick slash of the throat severing the jugular vein. In the last tent was the sergeant. Marcosi had gone to that tent first, but when he saw the insignia missing from the sergeant’s tunic he had decided to save him for last.
    He had knocked the sergeant unconscious as he slept, then tied his hands and feet, spread-eagled, to the four stakes of the tent. When the man regained consciousness he lit the kerosene lantern in the tent. He wanted to see this man, but even more, he wanted the sergeant to see what would happen to him.
    Slowly he opened the sergeant’s trousers as the man screamed for mercy. Marcosi did not speak. His eyes told the sergeant the reason. He pulled the man’s genitals from his trousers as his body bucked violently, fighting to escape. The knife moved in three quick motions and the blood spurted from the severed arteries as he placed the prize on the man’s chest. Now he worked even more quickly. The blade of the knife slipped under the socket of one eye and with a quick twist of the wrist the eye popped forward and dangled on a cord against the sergeant’s cheek. Within seconds the other eye followed. Marcosi pulled the gray egg-shaped testicles from the severed scrotum and placed one in each empty socket. The sergeant’s screams were deafening, turning into a muffled gagging sound as Marcosi forced the severed penis down his throat with the blade of his knife. The sergeant choked to death on his own member before he could lose consciousness from a loss of blood. The man suffered and died just as his sister had.
    Marcosi sat staring at the dead man for several minutes, then tore open his tunic and, with his knife, carved a message on his chest, knowing it would be found by the French army unit that would discover the bodies. It was a simple message. In memory of Carmela Marcosi. Murdered at the hands of French pigs .
    When the Guerini family found him in the mountains a week later, they had already