Unto the Sons (48 page)

“Yes, a
deferment
,” Cristiani said, and then he repeated the word in a faraway, almost spiritual manner; Joseph, standing in a corner behind the officers, could see the young tailors in the back reacting favorably to the sound.

Meanwhile, the transformed Cristiani had snatched the brochure out of the hands of Lieutenant Faro, and was now studying the pattern of the uniform with an interest that had been totally nonexistent moments before.

“It is really a
simple
design,” Cristiani conceded aloud, shifting his glance back and forth between the pattern of the military trousers and that of the jacket. “And I see that there are no epaulets or belt loops on the jacket, which should save us much time.…”

“Yes,” Captain Barone eagerly interjected, “and it will not be necessary to put cuffs on the trousers, or even to baste them at the bottom, for they will be covered by puttees, or tucked into the soldiers’ boots.…”

As Cristiani continued to peruse the patterns, Captain Barone went on talking, explaining proudly that while the fabric was drab-looking, it had been proven scientifically that the gray-green color was almost invisible in outdoor combat conditions. Lieutenant Faro, who had until now remained silent, said that boxloads of the material would be on Cristiani’s doorstep in the morning.

After the officers had left, Cristiani told Joseph to locate Antonio, to convey the encouraging news, and to urge him to return to the shop at once. Joseph hastened out the door, very excited, and took a shortcut to the Talese compound that avoided the square but required him to sneak through the courtyards and vegetable patches of some private estates, and thereby risk the wrath of their proprietors and their watchdogs. But nothing
mattered more to Joseph now than cheering up Antonio, reviving the spirit of his cousin who—until depressed by the draft notice—had been a stalwart source of strength and hope in the aftermath of Gaetano’s death. Antonio had taken many long walks with Joseph, reassuring him that they would soon be in Paris together, that the war in northern Europe would soon end, and that in any case the Italian people had nothing to fear, thanks to their government’s strict neutrality. Unlike France, Italy had not been invaded, Antonio had reasoned, and Italy had nothing to gain in the war; so why should it become involved?

But then, overnight, everything changed. The Italian government, while insisting it was still neutral, nonetheless announced its plan to mobilize even though there had not been the slightest hint that the Austrians or the Germans intended to invade Italy. All bachelors of draft age were contacted by the police and told not to leave their area without reporting first to the local precinct. The only bachelors exempted in Maida were the village idiots, the incurably crippled, and the police chief’s son, who had just been appointed to the force.

Emigration was immediately terminated, and Italian citizens in the United States who were eligible for the draft were called back to Italy. Two of Joseph’s maternal uncles, who worked at the Keasbey & Mattison asbestos plant in Ambler, were notified to take the next ship home, all expenses to be paid by the Italian government. The names of Maida’s first round of draftees, a total of fourteen men, were printed in large letters on a billboard in front of the municipal building. On seeing it for the first time, many mothers screamed and fainted, or, crossing themselves, fell to their knees. The billboard was viewed as a death warrant. Heading the list, which was in alphabetical order, was “Cristiani, Antonio.”

Now Joseph, bearing promising news for Antonio, made his way through the brambles and thorns and ran up the dirt road toward the compound. But after entering the Cristiani home he saw no sign of Antonio or anyone else. The bedroom that Joseph shared with Antonio, who was gone before Joseph had risen for work that morning, was exactly as Joseph had left it. The two cots were made up in his earnest if inept fashion, and the small ashen chunks of charcoal in the brazier had not been added to since he himself had placed them there and ignited them. The wood in the kitchen fireplace was now all cinders, although there was still the slight smell of the incense his aunt Maria usually burned in the house during the midday Angelus.

Joseph looked out the window and saw no one in the courtyard behind the row of houses. His mother had been away the entire week with
her parents; and his brother Sebastian had not yet returned from the farm with the other workers. But along the upper road, beyond the wall, Joseph could see his grandfather Domenico riding downhill, his black hat and cape silhouetted against the fading sunlight and his white stallion. Joseph went down and waited along the road to greet him and ask if he had seen Antonio. “I have just left him,” Domenico said. “He’s at the rally in the square, wasting his time listening to the Socialists.”

After thanking his grandfather, Joseph quickly turned and ran toward the square.

Antonio had spent the morning and most of the afternoon walking alone in the mountains. He had risen at dawn with his mother, had escorted her to Mass, but had not gone into the church. He was uncomfortable at the sight of all the black-shawled women passing beneath the torchlit arcade into the church, mourning in advance the departure and possible demise of their loved ones. After leaving his mother at the door, he continued up the rocky road that he had not climbed in years, and made his way in the nebulous light to the peak of Mount Contessa just as the noonday sun had reached its height; here he had a panoramic view of the entire landscape.

To the west he could see the rocky, indented Tyrrhenian coast, its beachfront promontories topped by two watchtowers, its azure waters drifting out to the misty dark bulk of the isle of Stromboli. To the east was the Ionian Sea, which extended to Greece, its Italian shoreline eroded and abandoned, left to the legends of Ulysses.

For Antonio, the past week had been the strangest in his life. It had begun with his seeing his name at the municipal building, together with the names of thirteen of his contemporaries whom he thought he had left behind forever; but now they were all suddenly reunited in a disquieting bond of apprehension. He who had never wanted to return to Maida now did not want to leave it. Nobody he knew wanted to join the army. He suspected that very few people in his village or in the entire south felt that they were part of the Italian nation. The unification of Italy a half-century before had been forced upon the south by the north, by the promoters of the Risorgimento, and since then the ruling government of Italy—gathered first in Turin, then in Florence, and finally in Rome—had brought to the south nothing but worsening poverty and the necessity of emigration. It had driven out the Bourbons, deglorified the capital city of Naples, and replaced it with nothing. Domenico said this often, and now Antonio more or less agreed with his grandfather’s view that the south
had become more isolated than ever, and that today it owed the north nothing. And so why should the south now yield young men from its villages and emigrant ships to support the wartime profit-making ambitions of northern industrialists and their irredentist friends in parliament who wanted a deeper penetration into the Austrian Alps, and more seafront territory to the east of Venice, and more farmland to its north? How would this help solve the problems of the south? If Austria were threatening to reclaim Venice, which it had lost to Italy in 1866, then Antonio could understand the present mobilization, and would undoubtedly support it. But as things stood now, he was more patriotically inclined toward the government of France than the government of Italy, for France had been provoked and forced to defend itself against the German invaders. He could only hope that the French would prevail, for it was in France that he saw his future.

Antonio spent the entire morning in the mountains, eating nothing, seeing no one; then early in the afternoon he began his walk back, and arrived in Maida after the siesta, just as a crowd was gathering in the Piazza Garibaldi to hear speakers from the Socialist Party. They had not yet taken their positions in front of the fountain, but Antonio, recognizing two of the speakers from the rallies of the previous days, assumed that he would be hearing more of what he had already heard, and what hardly anyone in the village disagreed with.

Its Catholicism aside, Maida’s population had become increasingly sympathetic to Socialism largely because of the threat of war. The Socialists had been tireless in their support of continuing neutrality. Each day orators from the local party or from outside the village could be heard reiterating their position that Italy should stay out of the war, that Italy had already invested too much blood and money in recent years on its colonial adventurism in Libya. Antonio had already heard this theme expressed in Turin two months before, when he had left Paris; but there he had also heard speakers attacking the Socialists, urging intervention behind France, Britain, and Russia, and soliciting funds for Italian volunteers eager to go at once to northern Europe to battle the Germans and Austrians. Among the Italian volunteers now fighting alongside the French were two of Garibaldi’s grandsons and many other young red-shirted Italian interventionists. But Antonio saw no red-shirted Garibaldini among the crowd in Maida on this day. As he stood at the bar of a café waiting for something to eat, he noticed that there was only one policeman in this crowd of perhaps four hundred people. In Turin, many policemen were needed to separate the arguing factions; here, no confrontations were anticipated,
because the people were by and large like-minded, and even some Catholic clergymen had come out to hear the Socialists. Antonio counted four priests, three monks, and the monsignor with his rector. While perhaps adverse to Socialism in general, the clergymen agreed with its antiwar stance, which was in accord with the position of the Pope. The last thing the Pope wanted was for Italy to be fighting the Catholic nation of Austria. The Austrians, it was often said, were more devout than the Italians.

As the first speaker began, Antonio left the café and moved closer to the fountain. Along the edge of the square he saw his grandfather Domenico turning his horse around and leaving. Antonio was glad his grandfather had not noticed him and come over, for he had heard enough of Domenico’s haranguing at dinner the night before. It had become Domenico’s habit, since Joseph was living at the Cristianis’, to dine at least twice a week with the family. Domenico was against the war, the government,
and
the Socialists. He was among the last adherents of Bourbonism, a period piece from the Baroque. Antonio moved through the crowd toward a few of his fellow draftees who had waved him in their direction. Among them were the sons of a court clerk, a carriage maker, a cobbler, and a miller. There were a number of other draftees standing nearby who were farmers’ sons from the valley.

Much cheering followed the lengthy introduction of the first speaker, a stocky bald man who was the party boss in Cosenza; he began the program by attacking a disgraced Socialist in Milan, Benito Mussolini. Antonio had never heard of Mussolini until his name began making headlines in recent days. Mussolini had been the editor of the Socialist newspaper
Avanti!
and had written many articles advocating neutrality, but then, without warning to his staff or the leaders of his party, he confessed in print that he had heretofore been unwise and ill informed, and he urged that Italy get behind the British and French and enter the war at once. So vehemently did the Socialists around the nation react that Mussolini resigned his editorship and severed his connections with the party. “Mussolini is the slimiest of snakes,” cried the speaker in Maida, as the crowd roared its approval. “He sold out his principles to the northern industrialists who are his true friends, and we now hear that they are giving him money so that he can publish another newspaper to spread their warmongering propaganda!”

After this man had concluded his diatribe and been replaced by a speaker who was similarly critical of Mussolini and interventionism, Joseph entered the square and soon located Antonio among his companions.
One of them had an arm around Antonio’s shoulder, and both were cheering on the speaker. Joseph stood unnoticed next to his cousin for several minutes. When Antonio saw him and smiled, Joseph was tempted to tell him about the officers’ visit, but he decided not to while Antonio was surrounded by his friends. He tried instead to concentrate on what the speaker was saying. He was a white-haired man who waved his hands in the air and repeatedly yelled out “Salandra, Salandra”; and each time he did the crowd booed and hissed in support of his denunciation of this “Salandra.” Although Antonio leaned close to Joseph and explained that Antonio Salandra, Italy’s prime minister, was suspected of trying to nudge the country into the war, it made little sense to Joseph: the crowd also hissed and booed whenever the speaker mentioned Gabriele D’Annunzio, whom Antonio identified as a poet, neglecting to mention he was also an outspoken interventionist.

The speeches continued until almost twilight, impressing Joseph mainly for the enthusiasm they engendered in those around him. The talk and excitement about the war this week had, if nothing else, drawn his attention away from himself. He was not so preoccupied with his father’s death, or the fact that he would not be going to America, or maybe not even to Paris. Joseph’s concerns now were centered on Antonio. When the rally ended, and some of Antonio’s friends suggested that he accompany them to a café, Joseph pulled him aside and told him that his father was waiting for him at the shop and had something important to tell him. Joseph would not say what it was, only that it was necessary to go to the shop at once.

Antonio’s father was in the back room working when they arrived. The other tailors had left, and all the shops on the street had locked their doors. Joseph waited in the front room while Antonio joined his father in the back. For the next five minutes Joseph could hear his uncle speaking rapidly but quietly, doing all the talking except for a concurring word now and then from Antonio. When the two of them had finished and closed the lights, the elder Cristiani patted Joseph on the shoulder and led him outside to the street.