Unto the Sons (102 page)

“I hate you, I hate you,” he cried at his father before running out of the apartment, and then down the side staircase to the first landing, where he grabbed his roller skates. “I hate you!” he yelled again, looking up toward the living room door, but seeing no sign of his father. Crying, he continued to the bottom of the staircase and out onto the avenue, then thrust his skates around his shoe tops without bothering to tighten them; and as quickly as he could, he headed up Asbury Avenue, thrashing his arms through the cold wind and sobbing as he sped between several bewildered people who suddenly stepped aside. As he passed the Russell Bakery Shop, he lost his balance and swerved toward the plate-glass window. People were lined up in front of the pastry counter, and two women screamed as they saw the boy, his hands outstretched, crash into the window and then fall bleeding with glass cascading down on his head.

Unconscious until the ambulance arrived, and then embarrassed by the crowds staring silently behind the ropes that the police held in front of the bakery’s broken window, he turned toward his father, who was embracing him in bloody towels, crying and saying something in Italian that the boy did not understand.

“Non ti spagnare,”
Joseph said, over and over—don’t be afraid—using the old dialect of southern Italians who had lived in fear of the Spanish monarchy.
“Non ti spagnare,”
Joseph went on, cradling his son’s head with
his bloody hands, and closing his eyes as he heard his son repeating, tearfully, “I hate you.”

Joseph then became silent, watching the ambulance crew arrive with a stretcher as the police ordered the people in the crowd to keep their distance. When Joseph next spoke, he did so in English, although his son found him no less bewildering than before, even as Joseph repeated: “Those who love you, make you cry.…”

AUTHOR’S NOTE

T
his book, begun in 1981, took ten years to complete. At least half of that time was devoted to research—interviewing people in Europe and the United States; reading about emigration from Italy and about the rulers the emigrants escaped—while the rest of the time was spent trying to portray on paper the quaintly mythified but pragmatic clan of village spiritualists and opportunists who populate my Italian ancestry.

An invaluable source of information about these ancestors was my father’s cousin and mentor in Paris, the late Antonio Cristiani, whose retentive memory I tapped often and at length prior to his death in 1986, when he was in his nineties; and I profited as well from his diary, which preserves much of the history of his native village and of our family as it was related to him by his maternal grandfather, Domenico Talese. I was also able to enhance my knowledge of the lore of the village and my forebears by reading some outstanding privately published local chronicles, which are cited below.

Still, my efforts to keep my own book within the boundaries of “nonfiction”—that is, to remain factually verifiable—do not meet the strict standards I have always followed in my previously published work. For the first time in my career as a nonfiction writer, in this latest book I have altered some of the personal names. These name changes do not apply to any of the major characters, including members of my own family, but I have deliberately falsified the names of some minor characters—either to avoid undue embarrassment and pain to their survivors or for legal reasons.

For my daughters
,
Pamela Frances
and
Catherine Gay

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The chronicles of the history of Maida that I refer to are Giuseppe Barone’s
Maida;
F. DeFiore’s
Monografia di Maida;
and Antonio Parisi’s
Il Feudo di Maida
. These three works, translated into English by Kristin Jarratt, to whom I am indebted also for her talents as an interpreter, served as my first guides in exploring the area and its ancient culture during my many sojourns there in the early and middle 1980s.

Other works that have been helpful to me are listed below:

Acton, Harold.
The Bourbons of Naples, 1734–1825
. London: Methuen, 1956.

Atteridge, A. Hilliard.
Joachim Murat: Marshal of France and King of Naples
. London: Methuen, 1911.

Banfield, Edward C.
The Moral Basis of a Backward Society
. New York: The Free Press, 1958.

Caldora, Umberto.
Calabria Napoleonica, 1806–1815
. Naples: Fausto Fiorentino.

Cateura, Linda Brandi.
Growing Up Italian
. New York: William Morrow, 1987.

Colton, Joel.
Léon Blum: Humanist in Politics
. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966.

Cordasco, Francesco, and Bucchioni, Eugene.
The Italians: Social Backgrounds of an American Group
. Clifton, N.J.: Augustus M. Kelley, 1974.

Crawford, Francis Marion.
The Rulers of the South: Sicily, Calabria, Malta
(2 vols.). London: Macmillan, 1900.

Croce, Benedetto.
History of the Kingdom of Naples
(trans. Frances Frenaye). Ed. H. Stuart Hughes. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1965.

De Conde, Alexander.
Half Bitter, Half Sweet: An Excursion into Italian-American History
. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971.

Di Donato, Pietro.
Christ in Concrete
. New York: Pocket Books, 1977.

Diggins, John P.
Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America
. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972.

Douglas, Norman.
Old Calabria
. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956.

Fermi, Laura.
Mussolini
. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1961.

Fernandez, Dominique.
The Mother Sea
(trans. Michael Callum). New York: Hill & Wang, 1967.

Gallagher, Dorothy.
All the Right Enemies: The Life and Murder of Carlo Tresca
. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988.

Gambino, Richard.
Blood of My Blood: The Dilemma of the Italian-Americans
. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1975.

Gibson, Hugh, ed.
The Ciano Diaries, 1939–1943
. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1946.

Gissing, George.
By the Ionian Sea: Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy
. London: Chapman & Hall, 1921.

Hapgood, David, and Richardson, David.
Monte Cassino
. New York: Cong-don & Weed, 1984.

Hare, Augustus J. C.
Cities of Southern Italy and Sicily
. London: George Allen, late 1800s.

Hibbert, Christopher.
Garibaldi and His Enemies: The Clash of Arms and Personalities in the Making of Italy
. Boston: Little, Brown, 1966.

Hutton, Edward.
Naples and Southern Italy
. New York: Macmillan, 1915.

Johnson, Colleen Leahy,
Growing Up and Growing Old in Italian-American Families
. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1985.

Johnston, R. M.
The Napoleonic Empire in Southern Italy and the Rise of the Secret Societies
(2 vols.). New York: Da Capo Press, 1973.

La Sorte, Michael.
La Merica: Images of Italian Greenhorn Experience
. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985.

Lewis, Norman.
The Honoured Society: The Sicilian Mafia Observed
. New York: Hippocrene Books, 1984.

Liddell Hart, B. H.
History of the First World War
. London: Pan Books, 1972.

Mack Smith, Denis.
Cavour
. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985.

——.
Mussolini
. London: Paladin/Granada, 1983.

Mangione, Jerre.
America Is Also Italian
. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1969.

Marshall, S. L. A.
World War I
. New York: American Heritage Library, 1985.

Masson, Georgina.
Frederick II of Hohenstaufen: A Life
. New York: Octagon Books, 1973.

Moquin, Wayne, with Charles Van Doren, eds., and Francis A. J. Ianni,
consulting ed.
A Documentary History of the Italian Americans
. New York: Praeger, 1974.

Murat, Inès.
Napoleon and the American Dream
(trans. Frances Frenaye). Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1981.

Murray, John.
A Handbook for Travellers in Southern Italy
. London: John Murray, 1878.

Nichols, Peter.
Ruffo in Calabria
. London: Constable, 1977.

Panella, Vincent.
The Other Side: Growing Up Italian in America
. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979.

Ramage, Craufurd Tait.
Ramage in South Italy: The Nooks and By-Ways of Italy. Wanderings in Search of Its Ancient Remains and Modern Superstitions
(Introduction by Harold Acton; abr. and ed. Edith Clay). London: Longmans, 1965.

Ridley, Jasper.
Garibaldi
. London: Constable, 1974.

Rolle, Andrew F.
The Immigrant Upraised: Italian Adventurers and Colonists in an Expanding America
. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968.

Sowell, Thomas.
Ethnic America: A History
. New York: Basic Books, 1981.

Taylor, Henry Osborn.
The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages
. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1957.

ALSO BY
GAY TALESE

A Writer’s Life

Thy Neighbor’s Wife

Honor Thy Father

The Kingdom and the Power

Fame and Obscurity

The Overreachers

The Bridge

New York—A Serendipiter’s Journey

Gay Talese began work as a reporter at
The New York Times
in 1956, where he worked until 1965. Thereafter he wrote often for
Esquire
magazine; his piece “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” was named by the magazine’s editors the best it ever published. He is the bestselling author of
Thy Neighbor’s Wife
,
Honor Thy Father
, and
The Kingdom and the Power
. His most recent work is
A Writer’s Life
.

He lives in New York City.