Unto the Sons (21 page)

His grandfather remained silent. He waited several minutes until Joseph had stopped crying. And when Domenico did speak, it was in a voice that was quite unfamiliar.

“I do love you,” he said, in the most sympathetic tone Joseph had ever heard. “But you are not yet old enough to understand this love. You confuse criticism with a lack of love. But the opposite is true. People who
criticize you
care
about you. They want to see you improve. People who do
not
care about you hold no high expectations for you. They accept you as you are. They allow you to relax. They make you feel contented.

“People who do
not
love you,” he concluded, “make you laugh. People who love you make you cry.”

11.

T
hrough the spring, the summer, and the autumn of 1911, young Joseph Talese continued his apprenticeship at Cristiani’s tailor shop, taking his position each day in the front of the store behind the large window, where, while sewing on buttons and basting seams, he watched the many pedestrians and horse-drawn vehicles in the street, occasionally wondering if the dreaded Mr. Castiglia and his equally fearsome bodyguard would ever return.

While the tailors in the back room ceased wearing the wing-kneed trousers every day, having convinced Cristiani that they were wearing them out, Joseph was warned not to interpret this change in policy as an indication of laxity. “Mr. Castiglia may return at any moment,” he was reminded by Cristiani. “You must remain vigilant. You are posted in the front room to warn us in the back as soon as you see him. You must keep one eye on the street even as you sew, which is a little trick that you can easily learn. I myself learned it when I was your age. My beloved father had once infuriated the late baron of Palizzi, who swore he would return to our shop with his sword when he learned that we had burned one of the sleeves of his tailcoat he had left to be altered, after a small fire had broken out in the workroom because of an exploding gas lamp. But I should not bother you with such details now. You have enough to worry about. You must worry about Mr. Castiglia. And your task is even more difficult now with Christmas upon us, and our streets more crowded than usual with shoppers and visitors. So you must search the streets with more care—and let out a loud yell the
instant
you see Mr. Castiglia approaching our door.”

Joseph nodded, knowing he would have no trouble identifying Mr. Castiglia or the bodyguard if they did reenter the town. The remembrance of the Holy Saturday incident, though now many months past,
was starkly vivid in Joseph’s mind; and since that dreadful day he had often been awakened in the middle of the night by visions of the corpulent Mr. Castiglia smashing through the shop’s front door with guns blasting and blood splattering, retaliating against the tailors who had so ignominiously deceived him. And as Joseph walked home after work he found himself studying certain faces and figures in the street, particularly those men with broad shoulders, thick necks, and large bellies; and there were moments when he would suddenly stop and hide in the shadow of a building, or lurk behind another pedestrian, as he saw in the distance a pudgy profile or a bulging stomach that reminded him of Mr. Castiglia. Pausing to catch his breath, Joseph would then move closer, slowly and guardedly weaving his way through the crowd—his heart pounding, his anxiety increasing, not knowing what he would do
if
the man he was stalking was in fact the gimlet-eyed gangster whom Cristiani had turned into a fool. But none of these individuals, on closer inspection, happened to be Mr. Castiglia—for which Joseph was most grateful; but he still continued to remain on the lookout, week after week, in accord with his master’s mandate.

Indeed, Joseph was becoming an obsessive observer of the people in the village, if not an outright snoop. He became intimately acquainted with their way of walking, their most common gestures, their style in dress, the extent of their wardrobe, the tone of their voices, the topics of their conversations, the gossip they were circulating. For the first time in his life Joseph became aware that most of the villagers were creatures of habit. They seemed to retrace their steps every time they took a stroll; they entered church each time from the same side of the staircase; they invariably sat at the same table at the sidewalk café.

Early each morning, through Cristiani’s window, Joseph watched the stout and brooding poet, Don Ciccio Parisi, shopping at the tent-covered market in the town square, selecting his fruit and vegetables as carefully as he presumably chose words; and also shopping in the market were many women in voluminous black shawls that reached to the ground, some with veils covering the lower part of their faces, a vestige of Arab influence, and children wearing small pieces of rock salt tied around the neck, amulets against the “evil eye.”

Climbing the slanted cobblestone steps overlooking the square was a firm-footed tall woman with her neck held high and her shoulders arched back; she walked with remarkable grace while balancing on her head a yard-long wooden plank stacked with shawls that she would try to sell to the people she met along the way. As they approached her she paused and
curtsied, giving them a better look at the merchandise. After they had passed it by, shaking their heads, the woman straightened up and continued to climb the steps in her nimble fashion, moving toward her next prospective customer, and the one after that, with a patience that matched her poise.

Hurrying down the steps toward the market each morning, minutes after the church bells had signaled the completion of the Mass, would be the impish Padre Panella. A year before, with his most demure and devout parishioner, he had produced a child—or so Joseph had overheard a gossipy tailor allege in Cristiani’s back room.

Then there was the almost daily appearance of a six-piece band, loudly playing marching music in the market square while the king’s uniformed recruiters tried to enlist men to fight in Italy’s war against the Turks in Libya. Rarely did any volunteers step forward. Later in the morning the town’s teenaged bully, Pietro Mancuso, would gallop through the square in a wagon laden with barrels of olive oil, snapping a long whip which had often stung Joseph and other students on the back when they wandered along the road too unguardedly after school. Also passing through town almost every day were men wearing white flat-topped caps and belted embroidered green tunics and black boots—they were visitors from Vena, a neighboring village occupied by hundreds of unassimilated Albanians whose ancestors had come to Italy centuries before to escape their Moslem persecutors in the Balkans. These Albanian descendants who lived near Maida adhered to their ancestral language and style in dress, and they worshipped in a Greek Orthodox church, where the priests, unlike their Roman brethren on the Maida side of the mountain, were free to marry.

Among the other strollers Joseph observed daily from Cristiani’s window was the town chemist, Dr. Fabiani, whose apothecary was known as an after-hours gathering place for Maida’s Socialists and other antimonarchists; the wood sculptor Carmine Longo, who carved everything from guitars to church altars; and the town’s most recent widow, Maria Palermo, who walked slowly through the square wearing a black mantilla and ankle-length black dress while holding on to the arm of her similarly dressed spinster sister, Lena Rotella.

Lena, as most people knew, lived behind the Norman wall in a large building that sheltered children born out of wedlock. There were sometimes as many as a half-dozen infants in that building awaiting adoption. The illegitimate children were usually brought to the rear of the building late at night, being carried in blankets to a ground-floor window that was
never locked. Inside the window, on a round table, was a wicker basket large enough to hold a child. The basket was always placed on the edge of the table next to the window. Midway across the table, suspended from the ceiling, was a black curtain that obscured the entire room beyond. After the window had been opened and the child was placed in the basket, the round table was spun on its pedestal, and the child was brought through the curtains into the arms of Lena Rotella or one of the women who helped her operate the orphanage and raise funds for its maintenance. The curtain was the women’s way of bringing some privacy to the act of parting with a child.

Joseph once knew a boy in school who, though not illegitimately born, had been reared in Lena’s orphanage. The boy was two years older than Joseph, and he was difficult to understand because of his stuttering. During his infancy, the boy’s mother had carried him in her arms one afternoon high up the mountain road toward the town of Tiriolo, where his father was employed as a tree-cutter and had just been seriously injured in a fall. Since the wife had no other means of transportation when she heard the news, and since the weather in Maida was very mild, she thought she could accomplish the journey on foot in three or four hours. But after she had walked for more than six hours, climbing higher and higher without reaching the peak where Tiriolo was situated, a snowstorm swept over the mountainside; and in the sudden inclemency and darkness of the late afternoon she found herself in the woods, lost and frantic. With her child in her arms, and no one around to assist her, she rested against a tree. The temperature began to drop rapidly. During the night it was below freezing. She took off her clothes and wrapped them around her child. That night she froze to death. But the boy was discovered by hunters the next morning and was rescued. The child’s father, permanently injured by his fall, placed the boy in Lena’s orphanage for a number of years—until, at ten years of age, he left Maida and joined his crippled father in Tiriolo, where the father—then working as a sedentary watchman for a timber company—had found him a job as a logger’s helper.

Another frequent sight observed from Cristiani’s shop window was the striding, elegant figure of the town’s most handsome aristocrat, Torquato Ciriaco, heading toward Muscatelli’s bar, where he would be served an espresso with a drop of grappa in a delicate white cup. Don Torquato was a gray-haired bachelor in his middle thirties who always wore derbies and silk-lined capes (made at Cristiani’s) and carried a silver-handled cane. But as the second son in a family that still adhered to the primogenitary practices of the past, Don Torquato would inherit none of his parents’
wealth during the lifetime of his older brother; and therefore, like most southern Italian gentlemen in his situation, Don Torquato had a mistress instead of a wife. She was a buxom servant girl who lived with her widowed father in a carriage house behind the Norman wall, not far from Lena Rotella’s orphanage. At least twice a week Don Torquato visited her there, but he always returned later at night to his family’s palazzo near the square.

The palazzo was a dark granite structure with the Ciriaco coat of arms carved in marble over an arched entranceway; and it had immense front windows that were usually opened wide in mild weather, exuding classical music that young Joseph always paused to listen to in the evening on his way home. One evening Joseph heard what he later learned was the excellent flute of Don Torquato himself playing the overture to Verdi’s
Joan of Arc
. Joseph would remember the exquisiteness of that moment for the rest of his life.

Sometimes the music of an orchestra and the chatter of many people could be heard coming from the palazzo; and although the common women of the village never danced with men—the Church discouraged dancing as erotically arousing—it was rumored that the elite couples of Maida occasionally met in the Ciriaco ballroom and, with haughty decorum, would indulge in the waltz. It was said that after the couples had arrived the women would sit among themselves, while the musicians at the end of the empty dance floor played waltzes with patience and anticipation. Eventually, from across the room where the men had assembled, a gentleman would separate himself from the others and approach the circle of women from the rear; and, after singling out the woman of his choice, and leaning over her shoulder, he would whisper into her ear. Instead of turning to reply, she remained seated while lifting her hand mirror to her face, to glance at the reflection of the man who stood behind her—in accord with the ritualistic coyness that virtuous women of the region were expected to exhibit toward the opposite sex. But then, with a gloved hand slowly extended, she nodded her assent to be escorted onto the floor. While moving to the music, however, she held her body rigidly at a scrupulous distance from her partner’s, and she made every effort never to look directly into his eyes. One by one, each man would do the same as the first until the dance floor was crowded with stately, stiff-backed couples.

Higher in the hills of Maida, next to a ruined abbey—but still within sight of Cristiani’s tailor shop—stood an abandoned watchtower that the Normans had built a thousand years before, to alert the town to seafront
infiltrations by the Arabs; and also in the upper hills was the local cemetery, which Joseph visited each Sunday afternoon with his paternal grandparents, to place fresh flowers on the gravestones of Domenico’s forebears. Surrounding the burial grounds were tall cypress trees through which the wind whipped and made sounds that often unsettled the mourners, eerie sounds believed to be the wailings of entombed spirits. While the gravestones of poor people were not much larger than dress boxes, the town’s property owners, such as Joseph’s grandfather Domenico, had mausoleums sizable enough to hold six or eight coffins; and old feudal families such as the Ciriacos, the Fabianis, the Faraos, the Romeos, and the Vitales had grand mausoleums with façades embellished by classical Roman columns and statuary—miniature villas containing private chapels with altars and towering candles and carved wooden pews and sufficient space along the side walls to accommodate dozens of coffins. Affixed to the recently placed coffins were oval framed photographs of the deceased, together with messages inscribed in stone from the dead to the living.
Non torno, vi aspetto
—I will not come back, I will wait for you.
L’alba di ogni giorno ti porti il mio saluto
—May the dawn of every day bring you my greeting.