Unto the Sons (22 page)

On the lower cliff, opposite the iron-gated entrance to the cemetery, was a grazing area for sheep and goats; and from the window of the shop Joseph had a distant view of the shepherd Guardacielo leading a flock of sheep down toward a stream and rows of olive trees. In the late months of 1911, when wool was trading even lower than cheese made from sheep’s milk, the primary asset of sheep was their fertilization of the olive groves. And yet the sheep were always the first among the animals to be blessed by the bishop at the annual procession of livestock through the square on the second Sunday of March; and the shepherds still valued their sheep sufficiently to bring shotguns as well as watchdogs into the hills to protect the grazing flocks from the attacks of mountain wolves.

Joseph had noticed once that Guardacielo’s watchdogs wore around their necks heavy leather collars studded with long, sharply pointed steel spikes. After describing what he had seen to Mr. Cristiani, the latter nodded knowingly and said: “Those collars save the dogs’ necks from the teeth of pouncing wolves. When I was your age, the dogs did not wear collars, and those wolves would sneak down from the mountains and bite the dogs’ necks—the wolves were twice as fast and ferocious as the dogs in those days—and then they’d run off with the sheep before the very eyes of the helpless shepherds, who were not yet carrying guns for protection. Hundreds of hungry wolves live high in the mountains all around
us,” Cristiani continued, “and in very cold weather, when the upper forestland is covered with ice, the wolves have a difficult time foraging for squirrels, rabbits, and other things they eat. The wolves then move down the mountain to the warmer areas, down closer to where we live. All it takes is a day or two of heavy snow and ice along the peaks to send the wolves our way. So if we get that kind of weather,” Mr. Cristiani concluded, with an oblique smile, “don’t be surprised when you open your door and find yourself staring at a wolf.”

If it was Mr. Cristiani’s intention to frighten Joseph (and it may have
been
his intention, for in this time and place older men believed that a frightened child was a more responsible and obedient child), then Cristiani’s intention was fulfilled. Joseph began to worry constantly about the wolves, and one winter afternoon, while kneeling next to his grandfather in the cemetery, in front of the family mausoleum, he could have sworn that he saw a blurred outline of a gray wolf leaping through an open space between two gravestones in the rear of the burial grounds.

Later that night, after Joseph had gone to bed, he was awakened by the echoes of wolves howling down from the mountains. In this part of Italy some mountain peaks are more than five thousand feet above the sea, and the nocturnal sounds of wolves in the higher altitudes carry for many miles down through the hillside villages and valleys; and anyone born within the rocky southern interior of Italy, where each village is an echo chamber of sounds near and far, soon accepts the nighttime howling of wolves as naturally as the morning crowing of roosters. Still, on this particular night, it seemed to Joseph that the wolves sounded nearer than usual to the village. But his brother Sebastian, who lay in bed next to him snoring, was clearly unconcerned. So Joseph said a prayer, and eventually went back to sleep.

Four days later, shortly before seven a.m. on the second Thursday in December, clouds of frosty mist drifted up from the valley as Joseph hastened down the foggy cobblestone road toward the square and Cristiani’s tailor shop. Under his arm, in a cloth bag, he carried his schoolbooks and lunch. After two hours at Cristiani’s, he would spend the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon in school, which was a five-minute walk from the shop; then he would return to Cristiani’s and remain there until seven-thirty or eight. This was his daily routine. His only physical exercise each day was walking. And as he walked to work on this morning, shivering under his thick wool overcoat, he noticed that the cone-peaked Mount Contessa that hovered in the distance beyond the hilltop cemetery was covered with snow. A few days before, the mountaintop
had been a brown triangle speckled with sunlit yellowish trees, and the warm air of the sirocco had swept through the valley, blown across the Mediterranean from North Africa. Today there were harsh winds from the north, and the sky that had been clear for weeks was overcast and getting darker. Joseph was unsettled by this change in weather.

It was also unsettling to the tailors in Cristiani’s back room, or so it seemed to Joseph as he sat listening in the front, sewing with his legs crossed on the window bench and watching people pacing back and forth outside, their capes and skirts fluttering in the wind. One tailor complained that he had discovered his vegetable garden frozen this morning, and he said he feared for the farmers’ crops if the temperature continued to drop. Another tailor added that the small waterfall near his hillside house had been fringed with icicles as he passed it earlier in the morning. A third man said that he had never before seen Mount Contessa so densely packed with snow. Cristiani, who usually did most of the talking in the back room, was strangely silent.

Shortly after eight-thirty, Joseph paused in his sewing and sentry duty and prepared to leave for school. Usually he was replaced by one of the other young apprentices, all of whom were three or four years older than he was, and had dropped out of school; but on this occasion he was surprised to discover that his substitute was Mr. Cristiani’s seventeen-year-old son, Antonio, who considered himself a full-fledged tailor. Dapper and diminutive like his father, and nearly as opinionated, Antonio Cristiani had already made several waistcoats and pairs of trousers for the general public, and he believed himself fully qualified to make an entire suit. But every once in a while, to puncture his inflated sense of self-importance, his father would assign Antonio to one of the tasks ordinarily performed by apprentices. The most boring and aggravating of these tasks was Joseph’s—it deprived an individual of the camaraderie of the back room and isolated him for hours behind the front window, where he was expected to fasten buttons with one eye while keeping the other eye fastened upon the street.

On an earlier occasion when Antonio had been ordered to replace Joseph, an occasion that was viewed by the other tailors as Antonio’s rightful punishment for criticizing the shoulder line of a suit his father had just completed for the marquis of Botricello, Antonio had sulked behind the window the entire time Joseph was at school, sewing buttons with his head down and paying absolutely no attention to what was going on outside.

Now, again demoted to the duncelike duty that only Joseph did not
consider degrading, Antonio huffily arrived in the front room, red-faced, biting his lower lip, apparently still smarting from the unpleasant father-son exchange that Joseph had overheard moments before, which had been accentuated by the sound of a tabletop being pummeled by a metallic object, possibly the elder Cristiani’s heaviest pair of scissors.

As Antonio slumped in a chair next to Joseph, he shook his head and said, “I hate this place.” He spoke in a tone not quite loud enough to be overheard in the back room. “Those old men back there, including my father, have nothing more to teach me,” he went on, lighting a cigarette. After a long puff, he added, matter-of-factly: “I belong in Paris.”

Antonio liked making grandiose statements and boasting to his younger cousin—Joseph being the only person in the shop who listened attentively and seemed to agree with everything Antonio said. Joseph had in truth always admired Antonio’s brashness and confidence, and he was beholden to him for many past kindnesses. It had been Antonio who had begun to teach Joseph the rudiments of tailoring a year before, and who lately had been instructing him in the techniques of cutting and sewing buttonholes for jackets and inserting piping along the edges of lapels. Antonio had been very sympathetic to Joseph after the problem with the
mafioso
’s trousers, telling Joseph that this mistake could have been made by anyone in the shop, including the boss himself; and Antonio reassured Joseph that his job was secure and that he need not worry about being exiled to the farm. Antonio was sensitive to Joseph’s insecurity, and he frequently walked the boy home after work and discussed the latter’s difficulties with Sebastian and their grandfather Domenico; and he comforted Joseph with admiring recollections about Joseph’s father, Gaetano—the cherished older brother of Antonio’s mother, Maria, and a romantic figure to Antonio as well. Antonio described him as a wandering idealist, a man too curious about life to find contentment along the provincial hillside of Maida.

Antonio had seen a lot more of Joseph’s father than had Joseph himself. In recent years, as Joseph was growing up, his father’s visits back to Italy were inexplicably less frequent than before. During his father’s most recent visit, in early 1909, two and a half years before, Joseph had been bedridden much of the time with diphtheria and had only a hazy sense of his father’s presence. When it came time for his father to leave the village, it had been the elder Cristiani and Antonio who had accompanied him on the train to Naples, and then seen him off at the pier where Gaetano took a steamer back to America—wearing as a going-away gift a new overcoat made by Francesco Cristiani.

It was Antonio, however, who made all of Joseph’s clothing, practicing his craft by designing smallish jackets, trousers, and coats, and then cutting the material from leftover rolls of fabric that were insufficient for man-sized fittings. Antonio occasionally cut down to Joseph’s dimensions, and then remodeled, part of the wardrobe that he himself had worn when he was younger. The heavy wool overcoat Joseph wore to work this morning, and was about to put on again to go to school, had once been worn by Antonio. He had designed it after seeing a fashion illustration in one of the magazines from Milan and Turin that he bought at the local rail terminal and kept hidden at home. The elder Cristiani did not approve of these magazines, Antonio had told Joseph not long before, without explaining why. But Joseph did know that Antonio’s strong opinions on fashion had once nearly led to his arrest by the police.

According to Joseph’s mother, who remembered the incident well, it occurred six years before, in 1905, when Antonio was not yet twelve. The King of Italy, Victor Emmanuel III, was then passing through Maida as part of an official visit to the southern provinces. The king arrived in a black Fiat touring car, the first automobile that anyone in Maida had ever seen, and the crowds of people along the road were more interested in the car than in its royal passenger—kings rarely being treasured objects in Italy. The previous king, Umberto I, had been assassinated a few years before; and the present king, surrounded by mounted guards, sat rigidly in the backseat waving a hand limply through the closed windows of the coach.

Suddenly there was a loud bang. The guards grabbed their weapons, the royal vehicle stopped, tilting to one side, and the king scrambled out the door onto the roadway. There were sighs from the crowd, whinnying from the horses. But soon, as the cause of the disturbance became known, order and tranquillity were restored. A front wheel had been broken loose by a rock.

While the chauffeur and another retainer proceeded to fix the wheel, the king paced impatiently along the side of the car behind his guards. Among the spectators were Marian Talese, accompanied by her six-year-old son, Sebastian, and her nephew Antonio, who managed to slip close enough to the cordon of guards to see how the king was dressed. Unimpressed with what he saw, Antonio later that day, after the royal entourage had moved on, took a pen and did a series of fashion sketches that he thought could inspire an ideal wardrobe for the king. Without a word to anyone, Antonio mailed the sketches the next day to the royal residence in Rome.

A week later, three members of the regional constabulary arrived at Cristiani’s shop with the sketches, which had been intercepted by a postal inspector. The constables declared that the sketches were demeaning to the king’s dignity, and, assuming they had been done by Antonio’s father, they threatened to incarcerate him.

Professing his innocence, Francesco Cristiani immediately recognized the handiwork and signature of the real culprit, who was then out of the shop on an errand. Cristiani remained silent for a moment, thinking fast. Then he looked humbly into his accusers’ eyes and explained that the drawings had been scrawled by his harmless young son, who was mentally retarded. There had always existed extraordinary sympathy in Italy for the parents of mentally retarded children, and the constables seemed moved by Cristiani’s explanation. When he guaranteed that the youth would never again be left unguarded to repeat such offenses, the constables accepted the promise with a stern warning and left the shop.

Upon returning, Antonio was greeted by his father’s paddle—a slab of oakwood designed primarily to be inserted inside the sleeves of jackets and coats to avoid unwanted creases during ironing and pressing. After it had been warmly applied to Antonio’s buttocks, his outraged father accused him of arrogance and impudence, stupidity and blatant irresponsibility. And in the years since this episode, if the elder Cristiani had vastly altered his opinion of his son, it was not evident to Joseph on this particular morning as he stood next to the cigarette-smoking Antonio at the front window.

“I belong in Paris,” Antonio repeated, “and I’ve already made a move in that direction.” As Joseph waited for him to continue, Antonio paused to reach into the inner pocket of his jacket, which had pointed lapels and a boutonniere, and he pulled out a folded parchment brochure decorated with the silhouette of a man wearing a top hat and tails. He handed the brochure to Joseph. Under the silhouette was the man’s name—Count Boniface de Castellane. And at the bottom of the brochure, in ornate lettering, were the name and the address of a renowned French tailoring school
—École Ladaveze, 6, place des Victoires
.

“I’ve mailed in my application,” Antonio told Joseph, almost in a whisper. “If they accept me, I’m leaving. Immediately! And I don’t care what anybody around here says or thinks.”