Unto the Sons (44 page)

Antonio removed from his coat pocket the letter of acceptance from the Paris cutting school, the École Ladaveze, which he had received two weeks before at the post office in Maida. He showed it to the driver, pointing to the address on the letterhead as his destination. Noting that the letter had been sent to Italy, the driver began speaking to Antonio in fairly fluent Italian; he said he had first heard the language years before, when he had served with Italian mercenaries affiliated with the French Foreign Legion in North Africa. When Antonio explained that he had chosen Paris as his new home, the driver became even more friendly; and as the carriage headed downhill along the Rue de Lyon, and then turned left on the Rue Saint-Antoine toward the Rue de Rivoli, the driver pointed out certain distinguished buildings and landmarks—the July Column in the Place de la Bastille, the Hôtel de Ville, the Louvre Museum. When the carriage turned right and headed toward the Place des Victoires, where the cutting school was located, the driver pointed his riding crop toward the equestrian statue of Louis XIV, explaining that this statue had replaced an earlier one of the king that had been destroyed by a mob during the Revolution. The driver’s casual shrug accompanying his comment left little doubt that his sympathies were with the mob.

Antonio sat on the second bench, saying nothing but listening attentively, leaning forward to within a few inches of the driver’s neck. As the horses clopped steadily along the boulevard, the happy young tailor from Maida found it necessary to remind himself, again and again, that he was not dreaming. He really
was
in Paris.

The driver stopped in front of No. 6 Place des Victoires, a stately building that Antonio thought worthy of an embassy. The driver brought Antonio’s bags through the door into the foyer and then announced in French to the École Ladaveze receptionist at the top of the staircase that a new student from Italy had just arrived. Antonio expected to be charged more than the two francs the driver requested for the ride, but this was all
he would accept; and then, doffing his top hat, the driver was gone. Moments later, Antonio saw a slim, balding man, dressed in a tailcoat, coming down the staircase toward him with the agility of a dancer.

“Welcome to Paris,” the man said in Italian, introducing himself as Monsieur Melhomme, one of the directors. With more fluency than the carriage driver, Monsieur Melhomme explained that he had learned the language growing up in Tunisia, the son of an Italian mother. He took one of Antonio’s bags and escorted him out to a small hotel in the neighborhood, where Antonio registered, and then to a nearby café for an early lunch. The waiter automatically placed a basket of bread on the table, which surprised Antonio; at the restaurants he had been to in Italy, bread had to be requested and its cost was added to the bill. Antonio was also impressed by the fact that Monsieur Melhomme ordered for one price a three-course meal that included dessert and coffee, and that was half as expensive as these items would have cost individually in Naples. After consuming a full plate of sardines with oil, croquettes made with beef, fried potatoes, and steamed tomatoes, followed by fruit and a lightly liqueured coffee, Antonio concluded that life in Paris was less costly than in Italy. It was an impression that lasted only through the end of lunch.

When he returned to the hotel he found tucked under the door of his small room the weekly bill, which had to be paid in advance. He went immediately to the school to deposit his registration fee of one hundred francs and to show what money he had left to Monsieur Melhomme. The director confirmed that Antonio’s net worth would soon be zero. Most of his remaining cash was of dubious value, being too old for contemporary use and not old enough to redeem its listed worth from collectors of rare and ancient currency. So Antonio reluctantly wired his father in Maida, begging his forgiveness, and requested a loan.

21.

J
oseph was in the tailor shop when the postman delivered the message in an envelope. It had been five days since Antonio’s departure. The elder Cristiani had initially been furious when his son failed to appear for work; he had slammed a heavy pair of scissors down on the table, and characterized Antonio as spoiled and irresponsible. But when Antonio remained
away that night, the next day, and the night that followed, Francesco Cristiani conceded the possibility that his son had been hurt in an unreported accident. He left the running of the shop to the other tailors while he joined his grieving wife and the rest of the family at a special midday Mass dedicated to Antonio’s safe return.

In the afternoon Francesco Cristiani traveled to the provincial capital of Catanzaro to be with the police chief who was directing the search, and who would be the first to receive whatever information was forthcoming from the precincts that had been alerted throughout the region. At night, Cristiani returned to participate in the novena at the church in Maida, which Joseph also attended with his mother, his brother Sebastian, and his grandparents Domenico and Ippolita.

Although Joseph at first could not believe that any harm had come to his cousin, and certainly did not want to go back on his promise, by the third day he felt intense pressure to betray his pledge to Antonio. Surrounded by mournful and tearful relatives who would be greatly relieved to know that Antonio had merely run away, Joseph finally decided that evening to go to his grandfather’s house and tell him all he knew. But just as he was walking across the courtyard, he heard the voice of Sebastian, who had been sitting on the steps smoking a cigarette. He had regarded Joseph with a certain suspicion ever since Antonio had left, or so it had seemed to Joseph; but now Sebastian accused him outright: “You
know
where he is, but you’re just not telling.” “I know nothing!” Joseph shouted back, so loudly that he feared he might be overheard by others in the compound. Then he returned quickly to his room, where he decided he must continually guard the secret of the young man who was more his brother than Sebastian.

But the arrival of the postman on the fifth day increased the anxiety of everyone in Cristiani’s tailor shop. Francesco Cristiani had stopped in at the store just a few moments before, and was in the back room when the postman asked Joseph to summon him. A signature was needed. Joseph could not tell from the look on the postman’s face whether he was aware of the contents of the message. When Mr. Cristiani came in to receive the envelope he was extremely tense, saying nothing to the postman as he unsealed the envelope and began to read. The other tailors had come in from the workroom and stood behind him. Joseph watched as tears appeared in his uncle’s eyes. Then he looked up and announced with relief, and even a certain pride: “Antonio is alive and well, and has gone all the way to Paris!” As the tailors cheered, and Joseph felt lightened of his burden, Cristiani rushed out of the shop to tell his wife and the others.
Later that evening there was a feast at Domenico’s house, and by the following morning Cristiani was at the post office to arrange that a money order of more than four hundred lire be sent as quickly as possible to Paris. Along with it, he enclosed a message to his son: “Sew with love.”

Letters from Antonio arrived with regularity in the subsequent months, and his father read them aloud to everyone in the shop, including the customers. Antonio’s experiences became a public event, like a serialized novel that everybody in the village was eagerly following; and hardly a day passed without a customer’s stopping by to ask: “Anything new from Paris?” The town’s most sophisticated aristocrat, Torquato Ciriaco, while being measured for a new suit, told Mr. Cristiani that in the two-thousand-year history of Maida, Antonio was probably the first native villager ever to enter the famed French city. This seemed very significant to Mr. Cristiani, and he bowed with appreciation toward Don Torquato.

Joseph also received letters, and in one of them Antonio said that he was keeping a diary and recording much of what he saw and heard in his neighborhood and the city at large. In a letter dated February 5, 1912, Antonio wrote that all of Paris was talking about a French tailor who had designed an aviator’s parachute and had tested it by jumping from an upper level of the Eiffel Tower. The parachute failed to open, and the tailor was killed.

A month later, Antonio wrote that the tuxedo he had made for himself before leaving Maida was coming in very handy; he and a half-dozen other students at the École Ladaveze who owned evening attire had been invited by the
chef de claque
of the Opéra (a friend of Monsieur Melhomme’s) to be nonpaying occupants of the orchestra seats at operas, concerts, and all theatrical events—so long as they came formally dressed and applauded the stage performers with unrelenting enthusiasm. Paris had been experiencing an acute decline in attendance by opera buffs and theatergoers, Antonio said, adding that some people blamed it on the competition of the cinematograph, while others faulted the inferior offerings of the producers. In any case, Antonio said that he and his fellow tailors were busy most evenings clapping their hands energetically and yelling “Bravo, bravo!”

Even before Antonio had taken his midterm examination he was suggesting to Joseph that he was the best student at the École Ladaveze. More than one hundred students—two-thirds of them from Paris or the French provinces; the rest almost entirely from leading cities in northern Europe and South America—were enrolled in junior- and senior-level courses in
cutting and fitting. Although most students were five to ten years older than the seventeen-year-old Antonio, and were more experienced by virtue of their previous full-time employment in tailor shops, the rarely modest Antonio saw himself as the master of even the advanced students when it came to designing and cutting suits, sewing, shaping, and molding the fabric to fit perfectly on the wooden mannequins and also on the bodies of the live models who were often hired for the classes.

Antonio complained in one letter that a majority of his classmates, despite their previous experience, still ignored the proper technique in precisely fitting the newly made suits to the bodies of the models for whom the garments had previously been designed and cut. Although the students took their tape measures to the models and rechecked the measurements and analyzed the fit while the models posed in a standing position, they did not insist that the models walk around the room, sit in a chair, assume a squatting posture. “The tailor must notice how the new suit behaves during these movements,” Antonio reminded Joseph. “He might then discover that he must make further adjustments to guarantee that a man’s suit and his body move together in perfect harmony.”

Joseph could only admire his cousin’s exacting standards and his lack of timidity. He would never forget the story of how Antonio, as a boy of eleven, had dared even to improve the sartorial appearance of King Victor Emmanuel III. And yet Joseph sometimes worried, after receiving Antonio’s opinionated accounts from Paris, that his cousin might inadvertently be antagonizing people, as he often antagonized his father during his tailoring days in Maida. In fact, there was a teacher at the École Ladaveze whom Antonio had already offended, as he admitted in his letters. The teacher was named Loubert. Apparently taking exception to what he perceived to be Antonio’s know-it-all attitude, Monsieur Loubert often referred to him in class not by his name but as “our smart little Italian.” When the other students failed to give the correct answer to a question, Monsieur Loubert would sometimes turn toward the dapper five-foot-five-inch Antonio, sitting erectly in the front row, and say, “Now let’s see how our smart little Italian might respond to this question.”

During one of the classroom sessions devoted to the cutting and fitting of formal wear—a session at which the hired model had failed to appear—Monsieur Loubert announced: “Since our smart little Italian has little to learn about the proper wearing of evening clothes, being a favorite of the
chef de claque
, we will ask him today to serve as our model.”

Antonio was embarrassed and offended. But, as he later wrote to Joseph, “I quickly decided that I would not give this teacher the satisfaction
of seeing me upset, so I stood up in front of the class, removed my jacket, shirt, and tie, and began to accept the topcoat, the white vest, and the frilly white shirt that he handed me. But as I was putting on the shirt I heard some snickering and also noticed that some people in the class, including Monsieur Loubert, were looking at me in a curious way. Suddenly I realized that the undershirt I was wearing had been made by my mother, who as you may know is not a good seamstress, and the shirt is badly sewn and fits badly. It is made of the heavy wool our farmers wear; and it has a little button to enclose the opening at the neck. I brought it to Paris to have something from my mother, and now these bastards in class were making fun of it—and making fun of me, too, for I have so often been outspoken in class about things that are not well sewn and do not hang right. My blood was boiling, but I tried not to show it. They thought that they had something on me, but they didn’t have a thing. I put on the white vest over the frilly shirt, and then the topcoat, and remained as silent as the models always do during the measurements and discussions. After the class, I quickly dressed in my own clothes and waited to see if the teacher or the others would say anything about the undershirt. But they didn’t dare. Monsieur Loubert was actually very polite. As I left the room he addressed me by name, and sincerely thanked me for modeling.”

In June, Antonio completed the six-month course with top honors, and was appointed to be one of the two students who would represent the school in competition with a dozen other cutting schools in the citywide young tailor’s contest sponsored annually by the Society of Master Tailors of Paris. The candidates were to assemble on a Sunday morning in late June in the ballroom of a large hotel and, after measuring a model for a suit, to prepare the pattern, cut the material (all of it donated for the occasion by the major woolen firms of Paris), and to baste it on the model by late afternoon in preparation for the first fitting. At this time the committee judges would examine the basting, the cutting, and the general craftsmanship; the winners of the first and second prizes would be announced at a banquet to be held in the hotel on the following Sunday evening. Antonio had heard that the winners received handsome trophies, gold for first place and silver for second. Among the four hundred to attend the banquet were most of the leading members of the French male fashion industry, together with the candidates, their families, and the directors of the school.