Unto the Sons (82 page)

“Where are you going?” Francesco asked, frowning.

“I have letters to write, I’ll see you later.”

“No,” said Francesco. “Wait for me. I’ll be closing early. We’ll go together.”

“Look,” Antonio said softly, with his hat in hand, “I’m afraid I gave you the wrong impression. I’m quite sure I
wasn’t
being followed. I was probably just getting some attention from a couple of pederasts admiring my suit. Maybe this town has finally gotten a touch of Parisian sophistication, and now has a few pederasts.…”

“Pederasts are the
least
of your worries around here,” his father interrupted. “You’d better get serious, Antonio. We have some dangerous characters drifting around here now. You’ve been away a long time. Things have changed.…”

Francesco stood up. He remained quiet for a few seconds but appeared to become more emotional. Then he pointed across the room toward a chair, his bony white hand shaking slightly, his expression quivering but insistent—a face Antonio knew well from his youth here as an apprentice.

“Sit down, Antonio,” his father said firmly. “Sit down over there and listen to me.”

Antonio shrugged but walked over and sat down, his hat in his lap.

“Since the Fascists took over,” his father began, “the police around here have been forced to do things they didn’t do in the old days. In the old days they didn’t go up in the mountains to raid the headquarters of hijackers and ransomers. In those days, as you probably know, the police used to be the go-betweens. They’d negotiate between the gang leaders and their victims, and everybody got something in return for something else, and people rarely got hurt. But now with these raids, the organized gangs are being broken up, and the police are locking up everybody they catch, even without evidence, and it’s made things worse. The runaways from these gangs are now operating on their own. They’re fighting with one another for the right to rob and kidnap. Things are out of control. Nobody knows who to deal with. And the economy has made some criminals so desperate that they’ll kill you for your watch. That’s what happened recently one night in Catanzaro. A man got shot to death during a struggle for his watch. This could happen in Maida. It could happen to you—you with your little jokes about Paris sophistication and pederasts.”

“What do you want me to do, go back to Paris?” Antonio asked, unable to repress his impatience.

“No, I just want you to keep your eyes open around here,” his father
replied. “And if you hear people breathing down your neck, for God’s sake, why don’t you turn around and see who they are?”

“
Nobody
was breathing down my neck!” Antonio insisted, about to get up.

“Sit down, Antonio,” his father said, holding up his hand. “I’m not finished yet. There’s something else I want to say.” Antonio sighed but remained seated. His father continued: “We also have some American-born men who’ve come back to these parts. They’re the sons of immigrants who worked hard over there, but most of the sons didn’t want to work and live like their fathers. They wanted to get rich, quick and easy. So some of them drifted into bootlegging. And they travel back and forth between around here and Sicily, and then back to the United States, involved with their secrets. They carry guns. I don’t doubt that some are killers.
And
listen to this: Today I heard that one of the people who’s been hanging around Olympia is a guy from America.”

“Oh my God, you really want her off the list, don’t you?” Antonio said, standing.

“I didn’t say that,” his father replied. “That’s just your hasty conclusion.”

“Well, then, what
are
you saying?” Antonio asked, facing Francesco directly. “Are you saying that she’s connected with a gangster?”

“I’m not saying that, either. I’m just passing on what I heard.”

“Where’d you hear it?”

“From the regional prefect, Don Vincenzo, who stopped in today. He’s a cousin of the baron, and he doesn’t like this man from America.”

“Did the prefect say the guy is a gangster?”

“No, he just thinks he’s not the type that should be hanging around Olympia.”

“I assume I
am
the right type?”

“The baron thinks so.”

“And you?”

“You know what I think. I think you can do better.”

“In Polia?”

“Oh, that reminds me,” said his father. “There may be a little difficulty with the Polia trip. The shy young lady up there apparently is insulted by your delay in getting there, and her father sent word to me hinting that even if you two should get to like one another, he’s not sure she would want to leave Polia for Paris. But I think he’s just using the delay as an excuse to reduce the dowry.”

“This is all getting pretty complicated, if you ask me,” said Antonio, shaking his head and thinking how simple things had been in Paris with Mademoiselle Topjen. “Well anyway, where do we go from here?”

“Would you like to go down to Bovalino?”

“I thought you said the roads were dangerous, that the crooks were running wild!”

“That’s what I said, but your mother and grandfather think differently,” Francesco explained in a matter-of-fact manner that only confused Antonio further. “They went down to Bovalino last week, in the monsignor’s carriage, which has crosses on the sides, and they’re very impressed, and want you to go down very soon—using the monsignor’s carriage.”

“I thought the monsignor had a niece we were to see in Jacurso,” Antonio commented in a weary tone, indicating his declining interest in continuing the conversation.

“The monsignor
does
have a niece in Jacurso,” his father said, “but he’s somehow also related to the young lady in Bovalino. And the young lady in Bovalino comes with a handsome dowry.”

“Look,” Antonio said, “I
have
to get home. I have to get off a letter to the man who’s taking care of the shop in Paris. I also want to spend a little time alone and think a bit more about all of this.”

“I understand,” said his father, sounding reasonable for the first time.

“Maybe I’ll take another stroll past Olympia tomorrow, maybe a
final
stroll, and then we can decide where we go from there, is that all right?”

“Fine,” said his father.

“So I’ll be going on home,” Antonio said softly, pushing his hat down hard on his head. “And I’ll see you a little later.…”

“Wait a second,” his father said. “I’ll go with you.”

40.

T
he next afternoon, a few minutes before four, Antonio crossed the square and headed toward the palm trees near the post office. It was much colder than it had been earlier in the week, and dark clouds were floating down from the mountains, and the atmosphere contained a bone-chilling mistiness and a slight musky scent that in Maida portended rain.

Midway across the square, after turning up the velvet collar of the chesterfield he had brought from Paris and was wearing for the first time in Maida, Antonio paused to allow Guardacielo’s homeward-bound herd to pass in front of him. The herd consisted of nearly two dozen sheep, three goats, and two watchdogs wearing steel-spiked collars. Antonio waved spiritedly with both arms in the air and called out Guardacielo’s name, having not seen him in years, but the old shepherd kept walking with the aid of his wooden pole, not looking up, seemingly deaf and blind. The trotting watchdogs, however, turned their spike-ringed faces toward Antonio and glared.

This afternoon’s chilling dampness was typical of the hill country in late January; and as Antonio proceeded across the square—nodding along the way to some elderly but unidentifiable pedestrians who wore hooded capes and greeted him by name—he found the weather strangely refreshing, clearing his head a bit after two hours in the smoky local café, having a heavily liquored lunch with his boyhood friends Basile and Paone. The lunch had in fact been enjoyable, with much laughter and reminiscing. Antonio had been with both of them for a time at the barracks in Catanzaro, until their units went on ahead of his own toward the Austrian front. After the war, Basile and Paone had returned to Maida to live, if not to work, on their parents’ neighboring farms, and each had married the other’s sister. Both men received disability benefits from the army, but at the café neither showed any signs of disability, not even after all the grappa, wine, and anisette that Antonio had abundantly provided, along with his packs of Turkish cigarettes that were chain-smoked and finished before the arrival of the food.

While seated at a rear table warmed by the kitchen and convenient to the bar, Antonio learned much from his talkative friends about the trends and thinking of the town; and to a degree they confirmed most of what he had heard earlier from his father—although
not
to the degree that would prompt him to credit his father with great perspicacity. His father and his friends, after all, had merely seen the same things, and had interpreted them similarly—through the eyes and understanding of fellow villagers. Whereas Antonio knew, all modesty aside, that he saw and understood things with a more worldly view, and, indeed, this broader and deeper insight was saddening to him at times, for it tended to diminish in his eyes some of the people he wanted to look up to—particularly his father. Antonio
finally
understood the profundity of the old village saying that his grandfather Domenico used to quote often: “Never educate your children beyond yourself.”

Antonio’s father, for example, and his village friends as well, seemed to be offended by many of the well-to-do Italian families who had recently returned from the United States, labeling them as spoiled by their affluence and having an attitude of arrogance and superiority that probably came as a result of living in the young nation made vainglorious by all its postwar prosperity and power. But Antonio regretfully saw in the critical reaction of his father and his friends, and undoubtedly also in their fellow villagers who had
never
risked going to the United States, a certain enviousness toward those townsmen who had gone abroad—and, worse, had
returned
with enough money to buy whatever they desired in Italy.

It had also been suggested by his father and his friends that the rich returnees from America had often been harmed by the living conditions overseas, and were now bringing back to Italy many New World maladies and mischievous inclinations. Tuberculosis was often mentioned, as was an advanced form of alcoholism supposedly unknown to the nontraveling villagers. But Antonio recalled as a boy hearing old-timers in Maida attributing these same ailments to an earlier wave of emigrants who had returned from Argentina; and as for the drinking problems, Antonio wondered how Maida’s staunchest boosters could explain the inebriated presence of such village regulars as the red-eyed undertaker, Rombiolo; and that tumbling wine vat of a veterinarian Pepe Volpe, the illegitimate son of Don Marco, the grappa-guzzling
avvocato;
to say nothing of the village’s distilled barber, Pasquale Riccio, and his ever shaky scissors and razor.

And finally, if Antonio were to be limited by the thinking of his father and friends, he would accept their theory that the returning Italians also were afflicted with an inherent American propensity for violence. To hear them tell it, a man guilty of nothing more than stealing a chicken or a pig in Italy could quickly become subverted in America to a career in gangsterism, especially now when he could become rich overnight by catering to America’s thirst for the tasty thrill of illegal spirits.

America was a land of cowboys, Indians, showgirls, sugar daddies, and mobsters—according to these isolationists in Maida, who also made much of the fact that, in 1924, Mussolini’s Socialist nemesis, Giacomo Matteotti, had been murdered in Italy by an
American-
born Italian gunman named, appropriately, Amerigo Dumini. But making such a point was yet another manifestation of narrow-mindedness, as Antonio interpreted it; although he
did
recall hearing a similar anti-American bias expressed with reference to the Matteotti murder by some of his Italian
friends in France—friends who years before had resented President Wilson’s efforts at the Versailles Peace Conference to “mutilate” the territorial gains promised Italy by its British and French wartime allies. None of this carping about America’s negative influence, however, made much of an impression on Antonio. Again, because of his broader perspective and awareness of history, he concluded that the Fascists’ use of the murderer Amerigo Dumini had nothing to do with the reputedly violent atmosphere of postwar America; he remembered, in fact, that his grandfather Domenico had made references to American violence long before World War I: Domenico saw the nation as a spawning ground for killers in the context of the 1900 assassination of Italy’s King Umberto I, a crime also committed by an Italian gunman who had sailed over from America. Domenico, of course, conveniently ignored the fact that the Mafia had been functioning in southern Italy and Sicily two hundred years
before
Columbus had discovered America.

Apart from whatever criminal behavior might be indigenous to rural Italian society, Antonio saw little to refute the historical documentation that depicted southern Italians as traditionally resentful toward invaders, and hardened in their resentment during centuries in which they had been made to feel like second-class citizens on their native soil; and therefore, Antonio wondered, why should it be surprising now, in the 1920s, that Maida’s ensconced villagers might have visceral feelings of resentment or enviousness toward this latest group of “invaders,” those from the Italian ghettos of North America. Was this most recent intrusion of privileged people into Maida any less envy-provoking merely because the arrivals had Italian names and spoke the local dialect (albeit datedly, and blended with American vulgarisms), and because, having bettered themselves abroad, they now were ready to return and make those who had remained feel worse about
themselves?
Granted, many among those who had earlier escaped Italy had been very generous in sharing their foreign-made earnings with the kinsmen they had left behind (Antonio thought of himself as a primary example of this generosity), but many other travelers had shown no such altruism. Therefore some resentment in the village was in order. And yet, as Antonio crossed the square and headed toward his hideaway behind the palm trees, it gave him no pleasure to identify resentment and enviousness as strong native Italian characteristics, even if the great Italian patriot Garibaldi had once reluctantly admitted that it was indeed so.