Unto the Sons (32 page)

But such ritualistic obeisance to tradition was considered anachronistic in 1795, when Ippolita’s future grandparents, Maria and Vincenzo Gagliardi, went to live with Vincenzo’s wealthy cousin Luigi; and Luigi’s generosity was such that he not only provided the couple with spacious
quarters in a wing of his home in Vibo Valentia but also made available to them as a wedding gift a new carriage with two horses.

While Vincenzo continued his career as a tax assessor for the Bourbon crown, and also performed accounting and other administrative services on the side for the entrepreneurial Luigi, Maria volunteered her usefulness around Palazzo Gagliardi. She helped Luigi’s wife, Beatrice, supervise the children, compensating for the servants’ now tolerated laxity, and she became a companion as well to Baroness Fortunata, Luigi’s stepmother, who occupied the largest bedroom suite in the mansion, and who had a hauteur about her that kept Maria on guard. Maria did not want the baroness to perceive her as a servant, or as the daughterly nurse that she had been to the senile Duke Nicola Ruffo. At times Maria feared that this was the role she was destined for, to care for the ailing and elderly nobility; and she wondered if the patriarchal Luigi, whose generosity seemed not entirely devoid of pragmatism, might have welcomed her into his household with this in mind, that she would look after his spindly white-haired patroness and stepmother—indeed, Maria could also wonder if her crippled husband, Vincenzo, had not found comfort in this devotional aspect of her life when he first met her at the Ruffo estate. These were thoughts Maria expressed in a gilt-edged diary the duchess had given her, after the duchess had taught her to read and write; and that book, into which she would later record her memories of Murat, would become part of her legacy to her offspring—offspring that, fortunately for her, arrived early enough in her residency at Palazzo Gagliardi to extricate her from whatever expectations of servitude her benefactors might have cultivated had she long remained a childless woman.

Maria’s first and only child was born at Palazzo Gagliardi during the winter of 1796. Maria named him Giuseppe, in memory of her father, the Ruffos’ caretaker. During Giuseppe’s childhood and early youth, he was reared in the grandeur provided by Luigi. But a decade later—after Napoleon’s army in 1806 had avenged its British-imposed defeat at the battle of Maida, driving the Spanish Bourbon king out of Naples onto the British-protected island of Sicily—a certain bickering arose within Palazzo Gagliardi between Vincenzo, a Bourbon loyalist, and his politically accommodating cousin Luigi. Vincenzo soon left the palazzo and resettled his family downhill in the seaside town of Pizzo.

Deprived of his Bourbon-sponsored career as well as the comforts of Luigi’s palazzo, Vincenzo lived modestly with Maria and young Giuseppe, ultimately finding work as a minor customs official in the Pizzo marine terminal building—a position supervised during this postwar
period of loose French administration by an ex-Bourbon magistrate whom Vincenzo had known during his earlier days as a tax assessor for the now exiled King Ferdinand. Luigi Gagliardi meanwhile contrived introductions to the ruling French faction, and in late 1810 he gained audiences with Napoleon’s brother-in-law Joachim Murat, who was much taken by Luigi’s brio and buoyantly opportunistic personality, finding it a welcome contrast to the stoicism of most hill-country Italians. But before Luigi could amass huge profits through his cooperation and participation in Murat’s many projects for improving living conditions in the southern countryside, Napoleon pulled his brother-in-law out of Italy to help lead the French army into Russia in 1812. This would prove doubly upsetting to Murat. He would fail with Napoleon in battle; and then, on returning to the throne he had been forced to leave for several months untended in Naples, he would find himself among ministers and courtiers who viewed him as an impotent Napoleonic
beau sabreur
, a man whose regal days were numbered and whose future use to them (and to Luigi as well) was negligible. At the same time, Murat’s British and Spanish Bourbon enemies in Sicily, as well as on warships floating near Pizzo and Maida, were marking time until his deteriorating kingdom was most vulnerable to an attack and most receptive to the return of King Ferdinand—who, while Murat had been freezing in Russia, was living in sunny exile at his hunting lodge outside Palermo, riding to hounds and submitting to the varied ministrations of his priestly counselors and his dark-eyed mistress.

By 1815, after Murat had led what was left of his loyal cavalry on a vainglorious attempt to unify the entire Italian peninsula, an attempt that succeeded only as pageantry, he slipped out of Italy, vacating the Neapolitan throne. It was soon occupied by Ferdinand, who returned triumphantly from Sicily, and the saga of Murat was now reduced to the final tragic act that would ensue four months later, when he would dramatically reappear on the beach of Pizzo on that fateful Sunday morning in early October.

After Murat’s execution, the grateful King Ferdinand ordered that a monument be erected along the shoreline where the last French king of Italy had properly perished. The monarch ordered that the monument be inscribed to read: “Heaven has reserved for the inhabitants of Pizzo the glory of saving our fatherland and Italy from fresh revolutionary calamities.” King Ferdinand also decreed that the royal treasury would pay for the restoration of the Pizzo church that Murat’s administrators had never gotten around to doing, and he further stated that all the citizens who had resided in Pizzo at the time of Murat’s capture would be perpetually exempted
from royal taxes, and that they could in the future expect other privileges and special treatment from the Bourbon crown.

Suddenly this small seaside village was the envy of the entire realm; and whenever a resident of Pizzo traveled elsewhere in the kingdom and made known his place of origin, that acknowledgment usually elicited a favorable comment or a reaction that made him feel heroic and blessed. Even Vincenzo, who during the time of Murat’s capture had done nothing except to remain steadfastly uninvolved, was now regarded as an influential figure by most people whom he knew in neighboring villages—including his cousin in Vibo Valentia, Luigi Gagliardi. One evening Luigi paid Vincenzo a visit and asked if Vincenzo might intercede in his behalf with the Bourbon authorities should Luigi’s past dealings with the French ever be raised as an issue. Vincenzo quietly said that he would do whatever he could if the problem arose—and to his relief, it never did.

Vincenzo and Maria’s son—who would become Ippolita’s father—was at this time an ambitious young man in his early twenties who had already begun to benefit from the favored treatment extended by King Ferdinand to the residents of Pizzo. Even before this turn of events, Giuseppe Gagliardi had been prepared to take advantage of it; his early education, provided by visiting tutors in the Gagliardi manor in Vibo Valentia, had given him a foundation in learning superior to what had been available to the young people of Pizzo, where the Church-run school offered a most rudimentary curriculum and stressed mainly religious obedience. And with the revitalization of Pizzo’s economy due to the king’s munificence—the tax concessions, the royal subsidy to new businesses, the king’s designation of Pizzo as a port through which the realm funneled part of its olive oil and silk trade with England—Giuseppe had many opportunities for employment that were varied and remunerative.

Tall and slender, amiable and well-spoken (even in French, although it was now impolitic to speak it), Giuseppe followed his interest in mathematics by working first in an accounting office. A year later he moved on to the weights and measures section of the seaport terminal building, where his father was the director of cargo inspection. Two years later, Giuseppe took a job as a clerk to the director of loans at the Pizzo bank, an enterprise recently enriched by the substantial deposits made by the region’s land barons who sought to be associated with the king’s favorite city.

After nearly three years at the bank, Giuseppe gained a transfer to Naples, where he received wider experience at the main office of the
Banco di Napoli. There he lived in a one-room flat overlooking the bay, in view of Mount Vesuvius. On Sundays he often strolled down to the pier to watch the arrivals and departures of large sailing vessels. He became acquainted with ship owners and captains, and befriended the minister of navigation for the Bourbon crown. One day Giuseppe suggested to the minister that the new twice-weekly mail steamer between Naples and Palermo, which sailed along the western coast of the peninsula, should stop at Pizzo. The minister considered it a worthy request, and with little delay it was arranged.

In 1831, at the age of thirty-five, Giuseppe left Naples to accept a higher position closer to home. He was named a subdirector of banking for the kingdom’s southern region, headquartered in Catanzaro, a city of more than twenty thousand residents that was about forty miles northeast of Pizzo via a bumpy and circuitous route that cut through the valley of Maida. In 1832, Giuseppe took that route to return to Pizzo for his father’s funeral. Vincenzo Gagliardi had died of heart failure at seventy-two. Giuseppe convinced his mother after the funeral to return with him to Catanzaro. Maria shared his small house there for three years, but she was never happy in Catanzaro. During the summer of 1835, Giuseppe took her back to Pizzo for a visit. A week after their arrival, Maria asked her son to escort her up to Vibo Valentia so that she might see Luigi. Wizened but not feeble at ninety-one, Luigi rose from his tree-shaded chair in the garden as their carriage approached. He greeted Maria and Giuseppe with a vigorous embrace, and he seemed almost as pleased to see their carriage after Maria had reminded him that, forty years before, he had given it to her as a wedding present.

The mansion she had lived in as a new bride had been sold by Luigi; he had moved into an even grander palazzo that stood behind him now, a fifty-room edifice with windows filled with figures and faces of people old and young, most of whom Maria did not recognize. Luigi’s wife, Beatrice, and his stepmother, Baroness Fortunata, were now dead. So were five of his eleven children, and twelve of his thirty-one grandchildren. Maria Gagliardi was of course not a blood relative, being related to the family through her late husband; but even before she entered the house to begin the greetings and introductions, she felt more than reunited with the Gagliardis when the old patriarch informed her that a suite in the palazzo would always be available whenever she wished to move in.

With her warm reception in Vibo Valentia she felt less isolated and lonely than she had after Vincenzo’s death; and when she told Giuseppe
that she preferred not to return with him to Catanzaro, he deferred to her wishes without much discussion. She was clearly happier away from Catanzaro. And in Catanzaro he would not be entirely alone. Giuseppe would continue to see, and now less furtively, the woman his mother had not approved of—his part-time housekeeper and mistress, a widow of almost forty whose husband had died with Murat’s army in Russia.

Giuseppe had first hired her four years earlier, shortly after his appointment to the Catanzaro bank, and before his father’s death had brought his mother into his home. The housekeeper was a handsome olive-skinned woman who wore white blouses and colorful skirts, suggesting that her mourning days were behind her. There was never any question of marriage—to her, or to anyone else. Cautious in all things, Giuseppe was particularly cautious regarding women. Most young marriageable females in the provinces of southern Italy were ever under the watch of protective male relatives and aspiring suitors, and the back roads of the kingdom were lined with white crosses under which were buried the bodies of unwary men who had looked twice at the wrong woman. Giuseppe was also fortunate in not having in his veins the hot blood of a daring Lothario; he was, except for his occasional dalliances with his housekeeper, as cool and correct in his private as he was in his professional life. He determinedly saw himself as a bachelor for life. Having felt claustrophobic as a child within the lower level of the Gagliardi hierarchy in Vibo Valentia, and as the overly protected single offspring in his parents’ house in Pizzo, Giuseppe wished to remain free of additional binding, clinging relationships.

This continued to be his attitude even as he approached his fiftieth birthday and was beginning to find his business routine tedious, and his personal life empty, as there had gradually disappeared from his life every individual who had played any part in it. First, his housekeeper abandoned him one day with the announcement that she had fallen in love with a man whom she refused to name but was leaving to marry. A month later his mother died in her sleep at her home in Pizzo, willing to him her diary and the gems the duchess had given her. Before Giuseppe had returned to Catanzaro from his mother’s funeral he learned of the death of Luigi Gagliardi at ninety-seven. Giuseppe went to Vibo Valentia to attend the Requiem Mass and walk in the funeral cortege. More social than solemn, and joined by nearly every nobleman and politician in the deep south, the long procession to the cemetery afforded Giuseppe an opportunity to eavesdrop on the men’s unflattering comments about the king
and their complaints about the worsening conditions in the provinces. The local economy was depressed, this Giuseppe knew for sure, but the extent of the people’s rancor against the present occupant of the throne of Naples was deeper and more emotional than what he had been hearing in Catanzaro. Giuseppe got the feeling that the area of his birth was now almost ripe for insurrection.

Ferdinand II, grandson and namesake of the revered old monarch who had rid the country of Murat, was now the king. Many of the concessions granted by his grandfather had become loosely administered or were ignored entirely by his ministers, including the annual supply of free salt to Pizzo citizens, which many complained they were no longer getting. Salt was much craved by people throughout the realm because the crown had always made it scarce by monopolizing its supply and distribution, thereby gaining large revenues in sales taxes. Citizens had been warned against collecting even small amounts of salt water, on the assumption that they would expose the water to the sun for the purpose of crystallization. Guarding against this, the Bourbon police and coastal patrol had been entrusted to maintain an alert watch along the beaches; and while they had rarely been vigilant in the past, they suddenly became so after the coronation of Ferdinand II. And lately their watch came to include even the beach of the once privileged town of Pizzo.