Unto the Sons (78 page)

It was not really nationalism that he saw binding him to Italy. It was something less patriotic, but more deeply rooted. It was his connection to his village, the place of his birth, the source of his energies and dreams. Although he had left it bodily, he could not replace it in spirit as his true home. He was a village Italian from the south, and the gravitational pull of that place had been felt strongly when he had decided back in 1925, just before turning thirty-one, that he wanted to be married. He had lived alone long enough.

The demands of his business had made a stable and loving relationship seem far preferable to the exciting but frequently lonely bachelor’s life he had led since the war—even though he imagined he would miss the varied pleasure and some of the freedom that had also been his privilege.
But whenever I think of marriage, and having children
, he wrote in his diary,
I’m aware of how different my mentality is from the Frenchwomen I’ve known. I don’t know if they’re too frivolous, or if I’m too responsible, or if I’m just in the wrong place for finding a wife I can trust. Paris is a crazy place now
.…

The Frenchwoman he had gotten closest to had been Mademoiselle Topjen, the attractive and lively owner of a boutique who was also a frequent partygoer and a bit of a socialite within the fluid world of postwar Parisian society. Since the Versailles Peace Conference, Paris had reestablished itself as the international center of gaiety—late-night soirees under the sway of Elsa Maxwell; stage entertainment by such new sensations as Josephine Baker, sometimes wearing only a banana skirt; and nocturnal alliances negotiated among diplomats, bankers,
grandes dames
, and
grandes cocottes
.

Mademoiselle Topjen had first entered Antonio’s shop on the arm of a Spanish embassy attaché who was on his way back to Madrid; and three days later, she had returned alone. She and Antonio became lovers before they became friends; and when they became close friends, their love life began to deteriorate. But they always enjoyed being of help to one another in their respective careers. As a designer of costly dresses and suits that were produced in her atelier by Algerian seamstresses whom she paid poorly, and who did shoddy work, Mademoiselle Topjen often found it necessary to have her merchandise resewn and sometimes completely remade before she could display it for sale—and this corrective effort was provided gratis by Antonio and his tailors. She in turn went out of her way to see that Antonio, her most frequent escort at social events, was introduced to the ambassadors, ministers, and wealthy American visitors who cared most about clothing and who would greatly enrich him as their tailor. She confided in him fully. He knew about her sad childhood—her mother had died young, her father drank heavily and had lost his job as a Métro conductor. He knew about her financial status—she had nothing in the bank, her earnings squandered on luxurious living—and her other love affairs—one with a married woman, another with the elderly Monsieur Sabate, who had made available the funds to launch her boutique.
She is a free spirit, but clever
, Antonio wrote in his diary, and
I’ve learned a lot from being around her. She’s one of many couturieres in this city who envies Mademoiselle Chanel, but at least she’s smart enough to know she cannot rival Mademoiselle Chanel. Lots of couturieres are fooling themselves these days into thinking that they’re second best only to Chanel. But not Mademoiselle Topjen. She knows she’s not second best, or third best. That’s one reason she’s smart. She knows what she’s not. She also knows what she wants, and how to get it.… If I have any quarrel with her, it’s probably with the way she talks about some of her men friends behind their backs. She makes them sound like fools. Even Monsieur Sabate, who had been so helpful. This bothers me. But I say nothing. I only wonder what she’ll be saying about me someday
.…

There had never been any discussion of marriage during the three years they had been seeing one another regularly. She had always made it clear that she was as yet unready to commit herself exclusively to any one individual; and when Antonio decided to go on a sojourn to Italy in 1925, there had been no question of her joining him, nor had she seemed upset—on the contrary, she had seemed pleased, if also amused—when he admitted that the main purpose of this trip was for him to be introduced to a young Italian woman who might become his wife.

The trip had been prompted in part by letters from his father in Maida. Francesco Cristiani had acknowledged receiving a number of indirect inquiries about Antonio’s marital status from some prominent men in the Maida area who had marriageable daughters. Even Antonio’s contemplating the
possibility
that he might find a wife through the contrivance of his elders marked him as a man who, with all his exposure to Parisian sophistication, remained intrinsically a true son of the old south. For centuries the marital bonding of young couples in this region had been consummated first by the fusion of their families, particularly their fathers. Emigration had of course tampered with this tradition. But in Antonio’s case, his heart had not emigrated.

Entrusting his Paris shop for a month to his most senior tailor, and leaving during the mid-January lull that followed the holiday season, Antonio boarded the Paris express that got him into Naples on the following day. Once there he transferred to a southern-bound Italian
“rapido”
that stopped twenty-three times and took fifteen hours to get from Naples to Maida. Antonio knew in advance the names of some of the young women he would meet, but his father’s last letter had also reminded him that all the arrangements were subject to last-minute changes—which, Antonio did not have to be told, might include outright cancellations if the elders could not agree on the terms of the dowry and other unromantic issues that would have to be resolved before there could be any thoughts of
romance. Antonio also knew that his father had been in contact with the fathers of prospective brides who resided at some distance from Maida—one was more than forty miles away, and a visit to her might involve a trip in the company of armed guards, for highway bandits with access to town gossip were often on the alert for these courtship calls. They knew that aspiring grooms and their fathers would be eager to present the best
bella figura
to their potential in-laws, and this might mean not only wearing their finest clothing, but also packing their pockets with noticeable wads of cash, and hanging gold watch chains across their vests, and adorning their fingers with diamond rings.

Antonio knew finally from his father’s last letter that in two cases he would
not
initially be introduced to the bridal candidates under the direct chaperonage of their parents or other family members. One father had explained to Francesco Cristiani that his eighteen-year-old daughter, Emanuela, was shy, incredibly shy; she was a maiden so sheltered and estranged from the wicked ways of the world that even a cloistered convent might not meet her standards of privacy and propriety—for which her father proclaimed his gratitude, because his daughter did not belong in a nunnery. “Emanuela is even more
beautiful
than she is shy,” he revealed in a tone of voice that was reverentially hushed; there followed by a wink, a nodding of his head, and finally the crossing of his heart—gestures he hoped Cristiani would somehow relay to his son in Paris so the latter would realize that Emanuela was one of Italy’s great undiscovered beauties as well as a peerless challenge for stalwart unmarried men.

“But in order for your son to meet my daughter,” her father then emphasized to Francesco Cristiani, “he will have to be patient. Emanuela cannot be expected to immediately come face to face with a stranger of the opposite sex, even with her entire family gathered around her, unless she first has a chance to see and familiarize herself with him
without him seeing her
.” Emanuela’s father next suggested how this might be done. On arriving in Maida from Paris, Antonio should come directly to Emanuela’s family village of Polia, several miles south of Maida. It was, however, a bit difficult to reach. The single, rocky road leading up to Polia was too narrow for carriages. Should Antonio come by carriage, it would be necessary for him to abandon it at the base of the hill and proceed for a half-mile up to the town gate on foot or by mule.

Never pausing to allow Antonio’s father a moment to doubt that the trip was surely worth the inconvenience, Emanuela’s father went on to say that Antonio, after passing through Polia’s gate, should cross the square and enter the town’s only café, and announce his name to the proprietor,
Emanuela’s oldest brother. He in turn would send word to summon Emanuela’s other brothers and her father, who resided farther uphill. After they had all come down to meet Antonio, and had treated him to lunch, they would walk with him in the midafternoon
passeggiata
, traversing the square perhaps dozens of times so that Emanuela, observing him from her shadowed balcony, would come to regard him as less of a stranger, and would herself gradually become—in the words of her father—“less shy than beautiful.”

The other bridal candidate whom Antonio would not immediately meet through a parental introduction was a young noblewoman in Maida named Olympia Bianchi. She had been described by her baronial father to Francesco Cristiani as unfortunately
not
shy or in the least bit old-fashioned. She was so modern in her thinking, in fact, that she automatically rejected any potential suitor whom her parents would allow in the palazzo. The whole idea of parental involvement in the garnering of suitors she decried as primitive, exploitative, and, in her case, completely unnecessary. She had more suitors than she could count. Which
was
the problem, according to her father. She had received so much attention from men through the years that it gradually became the attention, not the men, that she loved. “My daughter Olympia,” concluded the baron with feigned anger, “is as spoiled as she is beautiful.”

But soon she would be twenty-seven, her father admitted with sincere concern to Cristiani one day in the back of the tailor shop; and since she was the lone survivor of the baron’s three children, his sons having died in the war, he and his ailing wife feared that they would never see Olympia standing at the altar as a bride; and they feared even more the possibility of her entering old age as a spinster, abandoned by her suitors—should her suitors outlive their frustrations—and of her ending up impoverished, and evicted from the palazzo because of her inability to pay taxes on it.

Francesco Cristiani was already aware of the declining fortunes of the Bianchis and similar aristocratic families in the south. It had been years since he had received an order of clothes from any man within the Bianchi family. It had also been years since the Bianchis and Maida’s other nobility had hosted one of the “open house” nights that had been traditional during the Christmas season; nowadays these families could no longer afford to open their palazzos to the entire town and offer the finest in food and musical entertainment to everyone who entered. The doors and windows of some palazzos remained closed throughout the year, the owners having moved to Naples or Palermo to occupy the servants’ quarters in the palazzos
of their less destitute noble kinsmen. The nobles who had remained in Maida, such as the Bianchis, lived, ironically, with more exclusivity in their relative poverty than they had in their days of power and glory. They closed social ranks, retreating with inverted pride from the town’s commoners, bartering only among themselves. They released many old family retainers who had been the source of high-level gossip. Their gilded carriages bearing their coats of arms no longer pushed through the streets on shopping days; and at night, even on warm evenings, the shutters of their palazzos were closed to prevent outsiders from glimpsing the candled chandeliers that glowed with less and less frequency over the social gatherings of the town’s dwindling elite. Given the matchmaking possibilities, it was not surprising that Maida had been without a titled wedding since the end of World War I. And given the fact that the baron was a realist, it was not surprising that he would visit Francesco’s shop in late 1924 and tactfully inquire about the latter’s prospering son in Paris.

Antonio’s success was no secret to anyone in Maida. His father often displayed in the window of his shop some of his son’s advertising that had appeared in French newspapers and magazines (although Francesco’s motive in doing this had less to do with boosting his son than with suggesting that the Cristiani shop on the Rue de la Paix was really a branch of the one in Maida). Few people in Maida, however, knew anything about Antonio’s relationship with women. He had not been home since a brief visit following his discharge from the army; and during his earlier years in Maida, Antonio had kept his distance from every young woman in the village and beyond.

Antonio’s father, on the other hand, was just as unknowing about Olympia Bianchi’s personal life until her father had begun visiting, for she had come of courting age during the time of the social withdrawal of the nobility and after her family had ceased having their clothes made at Cristiani’s. But what Francesco
was
learning about her from her father convinced him that Olympia was exactly the kind of woman Antonio should
not
marry. She was very intelligent, her father had said; and worse, she had opinions and was eager to express them. She was probably licentiously inclined, too, because as her father admitted, she liked reading French novels in the original. Francesco Cristiani could only speculate darkly, although he could never bring himself to ask, just
how
freely Olympia had been relating to those admirers who supposedly never tired of pursuing her.

As for financial gains coming to the Cristiani family if Antonio were
to marry Olympia, financial gains being second to none in Francesco Cristiani’s order of priorities, he could foresee absolutely nothing of material value. Her family’s feudal estate in the countryside was unproductive. Their palazzo in town was crumbling. What hope was there of a dowry coming from a family who for years had owed the Cristianis the cost of a cape? Social climbing in Maida at this time was definitely along a downward economic curve.