I Know This Much Is True (87 page)

That’s how good a curator
I
was.

Fuck
her
.

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28 July 1949

For two nights now, no sleep. I long to forget but weep to remember those strange days when my brother Pasquale became not the simplest, but the most puzzling of men. . . .

Omertà, omertà
, the Sicilian in me whispers.
Silenzio!
In the Old Country, the code of silence is a stone dropped into a pond. Its rings expand and encircle all.
Siciliani
remember but do not speak. And yet my brain hungers to understand—to crack open a brother’s secret and look inside. Pasquale, I speak not to dishonor your name, but to try one last time to understand and forgive. . . .

Mama and Papa’s secondborn son was not blessed with my superior intelligence or my desire to embrace destiny. Unlike our amorous brother Vincenzo, Pasquale did not tempt women and women did not tempt him. His gifts were for simple labor and stubbornness and hearty eating. Each week, he paid
Signora
Siragusa seventy-five cents for the extra things she packed in the dinner pail he carried to the factory: a half-dozen of boiled eggs, a whole loaf of bread instead of half, a generous slab of cheese, a ring or two of the
signora
’s hot
salsiccia
.

Sometimes, the
signora
included a special treat in Pasquale’s
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dinner pail—a jar of her pickled peppers, my brother’s favorite.

Pasquale’s custom was to eat the peppers with his fingers—a kind of
insalata improvvisata
—and then wash the rest of the food down with gulps of the pickling brine. “That brother of yours has the appetite of three men!” the
signora
would often remark to me, always with a cackle of motherly approval. In his years at the mill, Pasquale became famous amongst the workers for those big dinners and valued by the bosses for the hard work the food fueled.

Flynn, the agent, once stopped me and told me that Domenico Tempesta worked like a well-oiled machine and his brother Pasquale labored like a plowhorse!

He did not talk much, my brother. Was it his years in the sulphur mines as my father’s
caruso
that made him so private and singular? His was a childhood spent underground in filth and toil, so different from my own sunny youth at the convent school, where I had been sent because of my
natura speciale
and because the statue of the
Vergine
had wept in my presence. By the age of fifteen, I had eyed the sights of Palermo and Potenza! I had swum in the
Adriatico
, stood amidst the relics of Rome! But my poor, simple brother had known only the rock and darkness of the earth’s bowels, the stink of sulphur in his nose. . . .

And yet, I remember Pasquale as a happy boy. Each Sunday when our family reunited, he laughed and ran through the village and the hills with his friends, fellow
carusi
—those boys as pale as mushrooms enjoying their one day a week in the Sicilian sun. A pack of young dogs they were, with their pranks and
giuoco violento
.

The village wives would scold and chase them with brooms, frowning from one side of their mouths and smiling at the boys’

mischief from the other side. The leader of these naughty
carusi
was Pasquale’s best friend, Filippo, whose pale, pointed face and dark eyes my memory still sees. The terrible collapse that took Papa’s life also took the life of Pasquale’s beloved friend, Filippo. On that day, the happy part of Pasquale was buried in the mine forever.

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*

*

*

It was Drinkwater, that goddamned lazy Indian, who ruined things for Pasquale at the mill. One night, he snuck whiskey into the plant and got my brother drunk. When Flynn came out of his office to investigate the source of the
agitazione
, he caught Pasquale singing and pissing into the dye vat while the spinning girls screamed and peeked between the fingers they held to their faces.

Flynn fired Pasquale but not that no-good Indian, an injustice that fills me with anger to this day. Under other circumstances, I might have protested Flynn’s actions or even quit the mill in the name of
dignità di famiglia
. Ha! I would have gladly left Flynn to explain to Baxter, the mill owner’s son-in-law, the loss of his two best nighttime workers. But a man who vows to seek his destiny must be ready when opportunity arrives! Earlier that week, the newspaper had reported a transaction between the city of Three Rivers and old Rosemark’s widow. At long last, the old farmer’s hill property would be divided into city lots and put up for sale. A road was planned, the paper said, and a street name had been chosen: Hollyhock Avenue. The lots would be sold later that spring for five, six hundred each. By then, I had saved twelve hundred dollars. I would need all of that and more if I was to become the first
Italiano
in Three Rivers, Connecticut, to own his own land. Despite the injustice done to my brother Pasquale by American Woolen and Textile, I could not afford both family honor and a home of my own.

Luckily, my brother’s firing occurred during the spring. Pasquale found work immediately as a roofer for the Werman Construction Company. One night, drunk at a tavern he visited with fellow workers, Pasquale bought a monkey from a sailor who had just returned from Madagascar. No bigger than a house cat that scrawny thing was, with its orange fur, its human eyes and fingers.

Pasquale named the monkey Filippo in honor of his boyhood friend and built him a cage which
Signora
Siragusa allowed Pasquale to keep on her front porch. The monkey soon became a I Know[566-612] 8/19/02 1:21 PM Page 584

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neighborhood
attrazione
both because of its exotic species and its delicate conditon. That goddamned thing was pregnant!

Filippo quickly became Filippa. Several of the young West Side girls knitted and sewed hats and dresses for that foolish little creature. Another of
Signora
Siragusa’s boarders, a piano tuner with a gold tooth (name forgotten), went so far as to write a song about her titled “
La Regina Piccola
”* This
strombazzatore
performed his song,
basso profondo
, on the boardinghouse porch all that summer. Each performance brought tears to the eyes of neighbor women. As for me, I held my hands to my ears and slammed the window shut.

In August, Filippa’s baby came out of her stillborn. She cradled that dead, shriveled
bambino
for two, three whole days and, when she finally gave it up, cried tears which I saw with my own eyes! My brother Pasquale shed tears, too—cried as he had never cried for Papa or Mama or Vincenzo or even for his friend Filippo. He buried the dead baby in the backyard of the boardinghouse and held its grief-torn mother in his lap, stroking and rocking her for hours and hours and humming “The Little Queen”—not in the operatic style of that show-off of a piano tuner, but as a comforting lullaby, a sad but soothing lament. My brother hardly ever spoke and now, for that goddamned little
scimmia
, he wept and sang! Pasquale grieved as if Filippa’s baby had been his own. . . .

Omertà
, I tell my moving lips!
Omertà!
And yet I am an old man with stool like
zuppa
and a head burdened with memory. . . . I speak not to bring shame on you, Pasquale, but to understand why.

Why, Pasquale? Why? . . .

My brother began opening Filippa’s cage and taking that smelly monkey of his to work with him. Each morning, the two would head off from the
signora
’s, Pasquale on foot and Filippa riding on his shoulder. Pasquale would spend his day hammering and hauling shingles and whistling, half the time with a stripe of monkey shit drying on the back of his shirt or his coat. Sometimes as my brother worked, Filippa would sit on the peaks of new and half-built buildings or in nearby trees, removing bugs from her fur and eating I Know[566-612] 8/19/02 1:21 PM Page 585

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them without care or notice as she stared and stared at Pasquale.

When the cold weather came, Pasquale made an agreement with
Signora
Siragusa. In exchange for the privilege of allowing Filippa to come inside and live in the
signora
’s coal cellar during the winter months, Pasquale would tend the stove and carry his own bed to the basement, freeing space upstairs for another paying boarder.

That winter my brother seemed happy, living once again the underground life of the
caruso
, emerging from the
signora
’s cellar only for meals or trips to the tavern. His foolish monkey accompanied him there, buttoned up inside his coat, its scrawny head poking out of a gap between the buttons.

La lingua non ha ossa, ma rompe il dorso!
* By springtime, the Italian

women began to gossip, chuckling and wondering when Pasquale Tempesta and his pretty little “wife” would be expecting another
bambino
, ha ha ha.
Signora
Siragusa herself whispered to me that she had seen Pasquale and that little furry witch holding hands and whispering into each other’s ears, even kissing each other on the lips! The men talked, too. They were no better. Colosanto, the baker, stopped me on the street one day and asked me, with a laugh, was it true my crazy brother had taught that monkey of his how to undo his pants and “play the pipe” for him?

“
Bah!” I told him, pushing past. “Go stick yours in a loaf of dough and bake it in the oven!”

Another time I was at Salvatore Tusia’s barbershop, getting a shave and minding my business, when Picicci, the ice man, came in. “Hey, who’s that whose whiskers you’re taking off, Salvatore?”

Picicci asked Tusia. Picicci was always a wise guy with a smirk on his
faccia brutta.

Tusia told Picicci that he knew very well who I was. I was Tempesta, the dyer at American Woolen and Textile.

“Oh, it’s Tempesta, is it? The monkey’s uncle himself!”

Every man in that shop had a laugh on me that morning, even that goddamned barber I was paying to shave my face. I stood up half-done and told them all to go to hell in a handbasket—walked I Know[566-612] 8/19/02 1:21 PM Page 586

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out of there with the soap still on my face and Tusia’s cloth hanging from the front of me. On my way back to the boardinghouse, I wiped my face and threw that goddamned cloth down the sewer rather than give it back to Tusia. Let him pay for another one and have a laugh about that! I fixed Picicci, too. The next week, downtown, he called across the street to me and asked why my landlady, the
signora,
bought her ice from Rabinowitz the Jew instead of from a
paisano
. It was crowded in the street that day, I remember. Picicci had a line of three, four customers. I called back that Rabinowitz’s prices were cheaper and that Rabinowitz didn’t piss in his ice before he froze it. Two of those customers walked away from Picicci’s cart and he raised his fist and cursed me and kicked his horse. If that goddamned son of a bitch was going to call me “monkey’s uncle,” then he was going to pay for it in his pocketbook!

But a family’s honor is a heavy burden to bear if all the lifting falls to the father’s firstborn son.

My brother Pasquale continued to smile and parade Filippa around the town, his ears deaf to the jokes and taunts of
paisani
.

Each day when I got back from the mill, I would lie in my bed and close my eyes, make fists, grind my teeth. I could hear all of Three Rivers laughing at the name Tempesta because of Pasquale and his goddamned monkey. Once again, I was called upon to clean up the mess a brother had made.

My first thought was to sneak down to the
signora
’s cellar in the middle of the night and wring that animal’s skinny neck! But I had learned in my sad dealings with Vincenzo,
a buon’anima
, the mistake of trying to force my will upon a hard-headed brother. Now I took a craftier and more practical path, one which called on my patience and my considerable talents as a planner. I refined my plan all that winter, always with old Rosemark’s property in my mind.

On 13 February 1914, I purchased a quarter-acre city lot on the hilly west end of Hollyhock Avenue for the sum of three hundred and forty dollars. I was shrewd enough to realize that two brothers I Know[566-612] 8/19/02 1:21 PM Page 587

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working steadily could build a home twice as quickly as one and that a
casa di due appartamenti
* would give its owner both a roof over

his head and a rental income. I was now thirty-six years old.

Though I was not a billygoat with a frozen
cazzu
as my brother Vincenzo had been, I did have male urges and a strong desire to pass on the name of Tempesta to Italian-American sons! I assumed that my brother Pasquale had these urges and desires, too, no matter how much that goddamned monkey had managed to turn his head, and I wove that
supposizione
into my plan. A two-family house, after all, required two families.

I wrote to my cousins in Brooklyn, inquiring about eligible young Italian women, preferably
siciliani
. I wanted no city-born wives for my brother and me—no fancy northern ideas.
Siciliani
are the simplest of women and simple women make the best wives. As a property owner, I insisted on strict requirements. They must be virgins, of course. For this reason, I had disqualified the eligible
signorini
of Three Rivers. Who could tell which ones had been soiled by Vincenzo? All of them, probably! The wives of Domenico and Pasquale Tempesta must also be pleasing to the eye and talented cooks and housekeepers. In addition, they must carry themselves with dignity and be devout and humble. And most important, the dowries their families provided must be large enough to furnish two large
appartamenti
.