Unto the Sons (49 page)

Antonio came slowly behind, inserted the keys to lock the door, nodded toward Joseph, but said nothing. If he was in the least elated by the possibility that he would be avoiding the army, he seemed determined to repress it. But even Joseph knew that it was considered bad luck in the village to anticipate happiness.

——

On the following morning, when Joseph was awakened by Antonio, he saw that his cousin was already dressed and was leaving for work early.

Later, when Joseph arrived at the shop, he saw that the gray-green cloth had arrived from Catanzaro as promised, and was being unloaded from a truck by two soldiers under the supervision of Lieutenant Faro. After the soldiers had left, the tailors began at once the process of producing uniforms for the Forty-eighth Infantry Battalion. Three sewing machines had been provided by the army to speed up the work. Twenty uniforms were to be completed by the end of November, and the remaining thirty by the end of December.

Throughout the final days of October and into early November, Antonio and his father cut all the fabric and basted the suit sections together, leaving to three other tailors and the older apprentices the final sewing with the machines, which produced results, if not prideful tailoring. Joseph, the youngest apprentice, attached all the buttons to the jackets and trouser fronts, and sewed the sweat pads onto the lower part of the armholes, and the piping around the bottom of the jacket cuffs. Everyone worked long hours throughout the week, and on Sunday afternoons into the early evening. Francesco Cristiani had strung up some faded velvet draperies at the workroom doorway, wanting to conceal from his customers as best he could the extent of his cooperation with the military. While he knew there was no way such a thing could be kept secret in a small place like Maida, especially as the fabric for the uniforms had been delivered by the army in full view of everyone in the street, he still saw no reason to expose his workroom to the daily scrutiny of customers strolling around the front room of his shop. Were he to be asked by anyone about his military contract, he would confirm it but add that he had been given little choice. The military was part of the government, after all. Even the town’s most ardent Socialists should understand his predicament. Nonetheless, he was surprised and relieved that as his employees continued to labor each day at the long tables covered with gray-green material, none of his customers expressed any curiosity about the sounds of sewing machines and the muffled voices that could be heard coming from behind the draperies.

As each uniform was finished it was hung in a beige cloth bag in the widows’ closet, next to dozens of civilian suits, capes, and coats, and several pairs of trousers with wing-tipped knees. The closet was really an L-shaped room spacious enough to be put to uses other than storage; but Cristiani could never imagine what these uses might be, besides as
an occasional hiding place from customers he wished to avoid—such as the
mafioso
he had duped years before, the gullible but potentially life-threatening Mr. Castiglia.

When the first twenty uniforms had been completed on schedule, Lieutenant Faro returned in a truck driven by a sergeant from the Forty-eighth Infantry Battalion. All work stopped as Cristiani held back the draperies to admit the lieutenant, while the sergeant remained in the front room to keep an eye on the truck.

“Lieutenant Faro has come to inspect the first batch of uniforms before taking them to Catanzaro,” Cristiani explained to his tailors, while the lieutenant, his briefcase under his arm, bowed stiffly. Then he followed Cristiani into the widows’ closet and for the next half-hour checked to see that the uniforms met military specifications; with a tape measure he verified that five of the twenty uniforms were cut small, as requested, while the other fifteen were large. The army reasoned that it would be better for the quartermaster corps to issue the troops uniforms that were too large rather than too small.

“Very well,” the lieutenant said finally, after inspecting the last of the uniforms, “all of these are ready to go.” He removed from his briefcase a bulky envelope and handed it to Cristiani, who thanked him without opening it and placed it on a shelf in the closet. He assumed it contained the agreed-upon sum to cover the labor costs, plus a modest profit.

“By the way,” Cristiani said with some hesitation, before they had left the widows’ closet, “have you anything to tell me about what Captain Barone mentioned when he was here?”

Lieutenant Faro regarded him with a blank stare of confusion.

“The
deferments
,” Cristiani whispered intently, “the
deferments
for my tailors—and especially for my best tailor, who happens to be my son, Antonio. Don’t you remember that Captain Barone said that this might be arranged?”

“Ah, yes,” the lieutenant said, after a pause. “I believe he is working on it. I shall remind him when I see him.” Then he walked into the workroom, bowed again to the tailors, and, parting the draperies, notified the sergeant to begin loading the truck. Antonio and the others worked busily with their heads down as the husky sergeant made four trips back and forth. Meanwhile Francesco Cristiani walked the lieutenant to the door and, before saying good-bye, thanked him for his offer to consult with Captain Barone about the deferments.

“I shall remind him,” the lieutenant repeated, “but keep up the pace.
Finish those other uniforms as fast as you can. Maybe you can finish in three weeks instead of four. What do you think?”

“I will try,” Cristiani said.

“Try hard,” the lieutenant said, “and it may make a fine impression on Captain Barone.”

After the truck had pulled away, Cristiani returned to the workroom and reported what he had been told. One tailor, Cerruti, appeared to be upset that his deferment had not yet been confirmed, but Antonio seemed to take the news without reacting.

“There is nothing we can do but work and wait,” he said. “Let’s finish this contract as fast as we can, and hope for the best.”

Cristiani agreed that they had little choice, and for the next three weeks, the tailors worked at an accelerated pace and also subcontracted the job of lining the jackets to a few village seamstresses Cristiani knew in the neighboring village of Jacurso. By the third week of December, a week ahead of schedule, the thirty uniforms had been finished and were hung in the widows’ closet, awaiting inspection. Word of this reached Lieutenant Faro in a message that Cristiani sent to Catanzaro via a carriage driver, and within a few days the army truck reappeared in Maida carrying not only the lieutenant but also Captain Barone.

Jovial as usual, the captain strolled into the workroom and complimented the tailors for the work they had done the previous month. Then, accompanied by his adjutant and Cristiani, he entered the widows’ closet to begin the inspection; but he did not remain as long as the lieutenant had on the earlier occasion.

“Bravo,” he said as he reappeared before the tailors, while Lieutenant Faro summoned a sergeant and another soldier to begin loading the truck. “You have once again performed impressively under pressure. The quartermaster corps joins me, I know, in my salute to all of you.” After a snappy salute he sallied past the draperies, and was out the door when Cristiani caught up with him.

“Captain Barone!” he called urgently, “what about the deferments?”

“Oh,” the captain paused, “forgive me.” He reached into his pocket, removed a tiny notebook and began to flip through the pages. “Here it is,” he said finally, and began to read what he had written. “As for your tailor Cerruti, who is thirty, his deferment was granted. As for the twenty-year-old Antonio Cristiani, he will have to report to the Pepe Barracks in Catanzaro this weekend. He is assigned to the Forty-eighth Infantry Battalion.”

As Cristiani stood at the curb, stunned, Antonio came out of the shop and joined him.

“I am sorry, young man,” Captain Barone said, “but I did all that I could.”

Antonio put his arm around his father, and the two stood silently for several minutes as the soldiers finished packing the truck and started up the engine. Little did Antonio know during the past several weeks that he had been making his own uniform.

24.

D
uring the winter and into the spring of 1915, Private Antonio Cristiani underwent basic training at the Pepe Barracks in Catanzaro, where he learned to load and fire a cannon, to maneuver on his belly without permitting dirt to jam his rifle, and, while clutching a pair of steel clippers in his soft tailor’s hands, to cut barbed wire. Twice a month he was allowed to return home for the weekend; but on a Friday afternoon in late May, as he was about to hitch a ride on a Maida-bound coach, a military policeman intercepted him at the depot and told him to return to the barracks at once. All traveling soldiers stationed in Catanzaro, as well as in dozens of other military posts around the nation, were being ordered to their units. Italy was about to declare war on Austria.

Two days later there was a farewell parade through the main thoroughfare of Catanzaro, and Antonio’s entire family came to see him march with eleven hundred other troops toward the rail terminal and the northbound trains that would carry them to the edge of the Austrian border. His mother and father watched in tears, and the rest of the kinfolk—which included everyone from his grandparents to Joseph—were equally solemn as they blended in with the throngs of black-clad spectators who lined the parade route, unreceptive to the lively music of the brass bands and indifferent before the politicians who stood making patriotic speeches from the main balcony in the Piazza dell’Immacolata.

Among the speakers was a royal emissary from Rome, a top-hatted man wearing a morning coat crossed by a tricolored sash; and as the troops stood at parade rest with their rifles and bayonets, and after the bugles had summoned the attention of the multitudes of spectators gathered
on all sides, the emissary said in a stentorian voice: “Sons of Italy, for the conquest of national independence your fathers have fought on three occasions. Now this nation must again bear arms to complete what was left undone. This goal represents, in the words of our king, ‘your good fortune and your glory.… ’ ” There was little applause as the emissary quoted further from the king’s prepared text; and Antonio, perspiring in the sun and trying to blow the flies away from his face, hoped that the king’s generals would function more smoothly on the battlefield than had the king’s entourage when he visited Maida a decade before. Antonio recalled seeing the stranded Victor Emmanuel III on that occasion, strolling impatiently along a dusty road behind his guards, while his chauffeur and other retainers kneeled at the fender of his broken-down Fiat touring car.

Now Victor Emmanuel III was in Rome dreaming of victory; and Private Antonio Cristiani, who had recently turned twenty-one, was listening to speeches with eleven hundred other conscripts, sweating through his winter uniform fashioned for fighting in the Austrian Alps, feeling weighed down by his weaponry and bulky knapsack.

In his knapsack, in addition to his personal articles, were a metal tool for digging trenches, white cans of nearly indigestible food, his rain gear, a blanket, and an extra uniform made of the same gray-green woolen fabric as the one he was wearing.

Soon after his uniforms had been issued to him by the supply sergeant, Antonio had covertly begun to rip them apart, a little at a time, and gradually to refit them to the measurements of his body. He had brought a tailoring kit with him to Catanzaro; and in the early evenings when his fellow soldiers were at the canteen, or playing cards in the sergeant’s room in the rear of the barracks, he would resume his alterations, replacing the machine stitching with his own handiwork and inserting extra padding in the shoulders to lessen the pain he felt from the weight of his knapsack and rifle during even short marches.

When resewing the lining of one of the jackets, Antonio recognized the crude stitching of the seamstresses his father had employed in Jacurso; and he could also identify the tailor Cerruti’s slanted, left-handed interlooping style of sewing on the waistband of the trousers of the same uniform. Antonio’s other uniform, which, he could tell, had not been made in his father’s shop, had been entirely machine-stitched with seam lines that wavered unevenly, indicating that whoever had been assigned to use the machine had been a novice, an uncertain first-timer more concerned about puncturing his thumbs than sewing straight lines.

From his place in the ranks, surrounded on all sides by taller men,
Antonio doubted that he was within view of his family in the crowd. He was in the middle of the eighth row. His company commander believed that the unit would create a more formidable impression during parades if the taller soldiers marched on the outside and the shorter ones were kept inside, out of sight. But Antonio had already said good-bye to his family earlier in the morning, after Mass. They had gone together at seven to the cathedral, where, after confession, they had lined the altar rail for Communion. It was the first time Antonio had received the sacrament in six years.

After the final speech had been completed, there was an explosive salute from the town’s ceremonial cannon, followed by marching music, and the parade continued past the stately buildings and palm trees along the Corso Mazzini to the train station. At the head of the parade were senior officers on horseback, flanked by orderlies carrying banners and lances; then came the region’s uncharacteristically sharp-stepping Bersagliere corps with their flat-brimmed, rakish hats decorated with drooping black feathers; and next the cavalry regiments with their sabers raised in the sun, the artillery with their horse-drawn howitzers, and finally the battalions of common infantry conscripts, many of them out of step, Antonio among them, doubting the worthiness of their mission and fearing what lay ahead.

In the late afternoon on this day, May 24, 1915, on the train that carried him and the rest of the troops northward up the coast, Antonio wrote in his diary—a diary he had begun keeping in Paris:
Ventiquattro maggio—a sad day in the history of the South … Salandra had his way, and now we are being taken to the Austrian mountains to kill or be killed.… We are as helpless as the pigs we slaughter on our farms
.…