Unto the Sons (80 page)

“
Please
, Father, don’t,” Antonio interrupted, wanting to be firm without sounding firm.

“Don’t worry—leave everything to me,” his father said, waving him away as Antonio tried to stop him from picking up the suitcase. Antonio again grabbed for the suitcase handle, but his father held on to it firmly and began walking toward the exit while Antonio was being held back by his mother.

“Oh, Antonio,” she said, “I’ve missed you.” Again she embraced him, and once more there were tears. As his father continued on, talking to himself and assuming his son and wife were right behind him, Antonio put his arms around his mother and patted her gently on the shoulders, the pressure and rapidity of his touch increasing slightly as he wished that she would stop crying so he could release her. Then, suddenly, Antonio
felt a sharp rap across
his
shoulders; and before he could disengage himself from his mother, he felt another rap, harder this time.

When he turned around, he saw a white-bearded man holding a cane overhead, threatening to hit him again. The man wore a gray caballero hat and a cape of matching color, its collar so high that Antonio had only a limited view of his attacker’s face.

“Hey, what’s the meaning of this?” Antonio yelled, glaring at the old man. He broke away from his mother and held his clenched fists in front of him, then slipped them under the upraised cane.

“Don’t touch him! don’t touch him!”
Antonio’s mother raised her voice.
“That’s your grandfather Domenico!”

Stunned, Antonio unclenched his fists and stood facing the scowling, ruddily complected eighty-six-year-old man, who was his oldest living relative.

“You are indeed a fool!” Domenico snapped, slowly lowering his cane. “You’re such a fool, Antonio, that it takes a whack of my cane to call your attention to the fact that I’ve come all the way out here to greet you, and then you try to punch me!”

“Grandfather, I’m so sorry,” Antonio said, “I didn’t recognize you.”

“No excuse,” Domenico responded.

Antonio tried to step closer to embrace his grandfather, but Domenico held out his cane. “Stay away—until you learn better manners,” he said. “You’ve been in Paris too long.”

Then Domenico turned his frowning face toward Antonio’s mother, who, though fifty, suddenly appeared to be transformed under her father’s gaze into a guilt-ridden young daughter who knew without being told that she had displeased her father. Yes, she
had
violated one of his cardinal rules by displaying her affections in public; and even though these affections had been directed to her son, she knew this made little difference to her father.

“What a spectacle you were making of yourself,” Domenico commented, seeming to know that a further explanation was unnecessary.

“But I didn’t think you’d be here,” Maria said meekly.

“No excuse,”
Domenico repeated, “and what’s worse, you didn’t want me to be here.”

Turning toward Antonio, who had witnessed the exchange between his mother and grandfather with even more embarrassment than he had felt after almost hitting his grandfather, Domenico explained: “Your mother and father
thought
I didn’t see them sneaking out through the back of the
house and getting into that carriage parked down the road! All to prevent me from being here!”

“I thought you weren’t feeling well,” his daughter protested.

“You thought I was too old to make the trip to the station, is what you thought!” Domenico insisted, adding: “And look who gave me a ride!” With his upraised cane Domenico directed their attention across the tracks toward the shriveled figure of a man who wore a conical cap and sat holding the reins of a two-horse wagon positioned near the terminal. Antonio recognized the man because of the conical cap, a medieval heirloom kept in practical use by only one man in Maida—the venerable Vito Bevivino, Domenico’s ninety-four-year-old foreman and the sole surviving offspring of the old soldier who had fought in Russia under General Murat.

Antonio waved toward the old soldier’s old son who sat holding the reins, and Vito Bevivino waved back, doffing his conical cap.

“And since it’s been years since you’ve come here to visit us,” Domenico resumed his harangue toward Antonio, “do you think you can find the time tonight to come to my house and
properly
greet the rest of your family?”

Before Antonio could reply, Domenico said: “I’ll expect you promptly at seven o’clock.”

Then, after pointing the cane firmly on the platform, Domenico shoved himself off in the direction of the exit, moving swiftly ahead of his billowing cape that all but covered his slight limp.

“We must be there,” Antonio’s mother said, still sounding more like a daughter. “He’s been very angry with your father these days. He’s felt insulted about being kept out of your father’s negotiating with these other men, and he’s insisted that he wants to accompany you and the others on your visits out of town.”

“I may not be going out of town,” Antonio said.

“Yes, that’s another problem your father is having with him—they can’t seem to agree on the baron’s daughter. Your father doesn’t want her, but your grandfather likes the idea. And I guess you can imagine why.”

As they walked slowly arm in arm, giving Domenico plenty of time to climb up on his wagon and ride on ahead of them, Antonio could not help noticing his father sitting on the suitcase on the far side of the terminal, out of sight of Domenico. Antonio waited for his mother to explain what she meant; but she did not, apparently out of respect for her father, or maybe out of a conditioned fear that whatever she said behind his back would somehow find its way to his ears. Antonio could only assume that his mother was referring to his grandfather’s abiding respect for, and perhaps
envy of, the town’s nobility, and maybe also his lingering hope that, were Antonio to marry Olympia, Domenico would finally be accorded the respect that had always eluded him in his townsmen’s resistance to addressing him as
Don
Domenico.

Riding in the carriage uphill to Maida, Francesco said nothing; he was preoccupied with this unaccustomed position as the driver, and the task was made no easier by the dust flying in his face from Domenico’s wagon up ahead—clouds of dust that made Francesco’s white hair seem whiter. But once they had arrived home, and Maria hastened to grind fresh beans for coffee, Antonio’s father took him aside and said: “I assume we’re going to your grandfather’s tonight?”

“Yes,” Antonio said.

“He’s really been making a pest of himself around here,” Francesco said. Then he elaborated in a whispered voice that he was sure his wife could not hear in the other room.

“Did your mother tell you about the young woman you were supposed to see in Curinga?” he asked, referring to a village just southwest of Maida.

“No,” Antonio said.

“Come closer,” said his father. “This you won’t believe. In Curinga there is a nineteen-year-old girl named Nina, who is very rich and very pretty. I can guarantee her looks because I saw her myself. Her father stopped in at the shop with her one day and introduced us. Her father, whom I’d met earlier through the local magistrate who is his cousin, apparently made a fortune in the cement business in America. He went there as a young laborer, and years later he was a big contractor, stuffing money each night into his mattress. He then sent back to Curinga for his wife, who was his third cousin. In America their daughter Nina was born. Nina probably speaks English better than Italian, because I could hardly understand her Italian. But they’ve been back in Italy only a short while. Her father sold his business and house in America about a year ago to come back to Curinga. With all his American money I don’t doubt he lives in Curinga in the grand style of the old
signori
.

“He’s a little rough around the edges,” the elder Cristiani conceded, “and shaking hands with him is like rubbing against sandpaper—but who cares? It was Nina I was interested in, and after I’d met her I thought she came very close to what you’re looking for. Not only because she was nice to look at, and dressed well, and seemed to be well mannered, but she’d also been to the New World, and I thought she’d fit into your life in Paris fairly quickly. But then I made the mistake one night of mentioning
Nina’s family to your grandfather, saying that you were going to meet her, and he asks: ‘Is that the family that just moved back to Curinga?’ I tell him it is. He says, ‘She’s off the list.’ Finally I ask him: ‘Why do you think she should be off the list?’ ‘I knew her grandmother,’ he says. ‘Her grandmother was from Maida. She was a fast woman.’ ‘Her
grandmother
was fast!’ I say. ‘What’s that have to do with Nina?’ ‘It’s in her blood,’ says your grandfather.

“I almost laughed in his face,” Francesco went on, “but your mother was there, and you know how she hates it when anyone suggests that your grandfather doesn’t know what he’s talking about—especially if that person is me. So I held my tongue, and let time pass, and assumed he’d forget all about it. Days later Nina’s father comes into the store and we discuss the dowry, and let me tell you, he is a very generous man. But shortly after he left the shop, your grandfather walks in and says, very indignantly, ‘I thought I asked to have the young woman from Curinga dropped from the list.’ I ask him: ‘What are you doing, spying on me?’ He doesn’t answer that question but instead tells me a little more about Nina’s grandmother. She had a husband and two children in Maida, but one day she met a young captain of the Carabinieri who’d been transferred in from Rome, and the next thing people knew, she’d run off with the Carabiniere for a whole weekend in Catanzaro. ‘When was this?’ I asked your grandfather. ‘In 1884 or 1885,’ he said. ‘That’s forty years ago,’ I reminded him, ‘and besides, we’re talking here about Nina.’ ‘It’s in her blood,’ he said again, and there was no way I could convince him otherwise. Later that night, when I returned home, I realized that your mother was talking the same way; her father had already convinced her. And she pleaded with me to break off the negotiations, saying if I did this she’d see that her father would stay out of my talks with other men. We’ll see if he does. But anyway, I felt I had to remove Nina from the list. I explained it all very delicately to her father. I lied and told him that
you
are not sure anymore that you’re ready to settle down. Her father said he understood the feeling, and he was very nice about it. But I’m really sorry you’ll not be going to Curinga to meet Nina. I think she would have been perfect.”

“I’m sorry, too,” said Antonio.

(Six years later, after Antonio and his wife had moved into a larger apartment in Paris with their infant daughter, Antonio would receive a letter from his mother mentioning that Nina—who had married a local man a few months after Antonio’s marriage—had recently left her husband and run off with her lover to Bologna.)

39.

T
he dictates of family courtesy being what they were in Maida—requiring that Antonio, after greeting dozens of relatives and friends at his grandfather’s reception, would then be expected to have lunch or dinner in the days ahead with each family individually—meant that nearly a fortnight would pass before he could concentrate fully on the main reason he had returned to Italy, his quest for a wife.

With the cancellation of the trip to Curinga, Antonio’s list of marital candidates had been narrowed to five: there was the baron’s daughter in Maida; the shy damsel in Polia; a monsignor’s niece in the nearby countryside of Jacurso (a candidate proposed by Domenico); a reputedly comely contralto whose father was a concertmaster in Catanzaro and, more important, whose godfather-uncle controlled the region’s property assessments and tax rates; and finally a maiden named Adelina Savo about whom Antonio knew very little, except that she was the pride and joy of a substantial family who lived far to the south of Maida in the coastal town of Bovalino, a trek through brigand-infested roads at the end of which even the prospect of meeting Italy’s most desirable virgin failed to stir within Antonio much enthusiasm for the trip.

No, the baron’s daughter, Olympia, still soared above the others insofar as Antonio was concerned; and while the elder Cristiani in the meantime had received a curt note from the sire of the shy lady in Polia inquiring exactly
when
Antonio planned to visit, Antonio insisted to his father that he first be allowed to try his luck with Olympia.

Her father was very friendly and encouraging during his first meeting with Antonio, which was at the baron’s suggestion held behind a cluster of mangled palm trees across the road from the entrance to the post office. They met there one afternoon shortly before four. If Olympia conformed to her usual routine, she would be coming up the road in a matter of minutes. As they stood slightly crouched behind the trees, the baron speaking more softly than he had earlier, Antonio lit up one of the Turkish cigarettes he had bought in Paris, his third since he had been with the baron.

“Relax, my dear boy,
relax
,” the baron whispered with paternal concern. “She’s on her way, she’s a creature of habit.…”

It was not the uncertainty of Olympia’s arrival that had Antonio on edge, but rather his having to hide behind the trees with the baron. It was an unusually mild and bright winter afternoon, with many people walking back and forth, not a few of whom Antonio recognized; and he could not imagine what they might think if they caught a glimpse of him lurking like a voyeur with the baron behind the drooping, worm-encrusted palms. He listened as the church bells signaled the fourth hour after noon, and he stomped on his cigarette. Then he felt a slight jabbing in his ribs.

“There’s
Olympia!
” the baron announced softly and with apparent pride. “Coming up the road, prompt as always—she’s a woman you can count on.…”

Antonio leaned forward between the leaves and saw a stocky woman wearing a hooded gray cape and holding a rope on the end of which was a frisky baby goat. Antonio winced.