Unto the Sons (93 page)

The communiqué went unanswered. After three weeks had passed, this concerned Antonio, for the count’s replies to Antonio’s earlier cables had always been prompt and cordial. Perhaps the count was away from his Rome office on a short vacation, Antonio thought, all but dismissing the matter from his mind; but late in the second week of August, days before he was to leave for his vacation in Italy, Antonio’s shop was visited by a black-shirted colonel and two Italian civilians who said they were from the Foreign Ministry and were investigating reports that Antonio’s life had been threatened by French anti-Fascist hoodlums to whom he had refused to hand over a large sum of money.

Antonio had been called out of one of the fitting rooms by a clerk, leaving behind an important French banker who had been a customer for years. Antonio stood staring at his visitors momentarily, his face reddening, and wondered what was really behind this so-called investigation. The colonel was an erect, broad-shouldered man in his forties, who wore a peaked cap forward and down over his eyebrows, and displayed on the chest of his well-fitted gabardine jacket a double row of ribbons and the winged gold medallion of an air force unit. Flanking the colonel on the other side of Antonio’s glass counter were a stout man in his thirties, wearing a beige suit and a straw hat, and a younger, thinner man who had on a white shirt and a brown silk tie, and who combed his thick, heavily pomaded black hair straight back in the style favored by the late film star Rudolph Valentino.

“This report is false,” Antonio said finally, placing his hands on the counter, next to an ashtray and a pack of his Turkish cigarettes.

“But it comes to us on good authority,” the colonel said, addressing Antonio in a cultivated but aspirated Italian accent that Antonio identified as Florentine.

“Please believe me, Colonel, it is false,” Antonio repeated. He now stood with his arms folded across his chest, over which was draped his tan pleated tailor’s smock; a small rose stuck through the buttonhole of the left lapel, while the rest of the lapel flickered with the reflections of dozens of needles and pins.

“This is your shop?” the colonel asked.

“Yes.”

“And you are a citizen of Italy?”

“Yes,” Antonio answered, a bit sharply, noticing that the straw-hatted civilian had removed a pen and pad from his jacket and was taking notes. Turning to the civilian, Antonio said: “I assume you know that all this information about me, and a lot more, is documented in your files.”

The man looked up and said nothing, while the colonel cleared his throat. Antonio was tempted to ask if these men were acting on direct orders from Ciano, but he decided against it until he knew exactly what was going on.

“We do not mean to upset you,” the colonel said, trying for the first time to seem pleasant. But the straw-hatted man was still writing in his little book, and the younger Valentino type was gazing around the shop, studying the stacks of material on the shelves and the other people in the room. He had already helped himself to a couple of Antonio’s business cards that lay in a silver tray on the counter, and tucked them into the breast pocket of his shirt. “You realize, of course,” the colonel went on, “that we’re required to look into these reports, even if you believe they lack merit.”

“I have not been threatened,” Antonio repeated, “and I’m just trying to understand what you want from me.”

“Your cooperation,” said the colonel.

“I’m giving it to you,” Antonio said.

“When will you be leaving Paris?” asked the straw-hatted man, speaking for the first time. He had a bold Milanese accent, and Antonio now resented his questioner’s accent as much as the fact that these people were possibly aware of his travel plans. Feeling his perspiration flow as he stared into his questioner’s eyes, Antonio knew that he was definitely
alienated from the Italy of these Milanese and Florentine trespassers—the Italy of the Piedmontese dynasty, the Italy of the northern bankers and industrialists who had financed the Risorgimento, the Italy of the ex–Milanese newspaper publisher who was now the Duce. Antonio had fled the worsening poverty the northerners had brought to the south, and now they had the audacity to hunt him down in Paris and make further claims upon him!

“Who said I was leaving Paris?” he demanded, almost shouting. He realized too late that he had lost control, but he no longer cared. He saw the colonel and the two men suddenly turn around as the other people within hearing distance now seemed to be paying full attention. Three customers (including the French banker) poked their heads out from the velvet curtains of the fitting rooms; four tailors walked toward Antonio and stood not far from the counter; and two apprentices came out from the workroom. The colonel, raising his hand in a gesture of conciliation toward Antonio, said, “No offense was intended.”

“I think I’ve heard enough impertinent questions for one day,” Antonio went on, heatedly. “And now, with your permission, I’d like to return to my work.”

“Very well,” said the colonel, nodding with understanding toward him and the others around the room. “We shall be going. I may have to ask your assistance again in the future, but meanwhile let me express our thanks for the time you have given us.”

Watching them leave, Antonio was still shaken with anger; but on his way home from the shop that night he felt only sadness. He had sent a wire to his wife, now in Bovalino, explaining that he had to postpone his visit. He blamed it on business, a lucrative order placed by a very important person who required delivery within the month. But in his diary he wrote:
This is no time for a vacation. I cannot leave my shop and the apartment unguarded. Once more, I feel like a soldier
.

Antonio remained in Paris alone through the summer and fall of 1939 expecting that every day might be his last, that at any hour the alarm would be sounded and the government would announce (as it had in the late summer of 1914) that all foreign civilians were to return immediately to their homelands and leave to the French the task of fighting a war. Antonio would always remember the bravery of those Parisians as they banded together to save the city—the older citizens manning the interior, the younger ones rushing to the front in military vehicles, municipal buses, and even taxicabs. Never was the word
camaraderie
more nobly defined
than during the summer and autumn of 1914; and Antonio left Paris then with all the love and regret that he felt now, twenty-five years later, at the thought of having to abandon once more his chosen home during a perilous time. But he also sensed that there was a considerable difference between the prevailing sentiments within the capital today and those in 1914. Then, the city was filled with the drum sounds of patriotism and a passion for challenging the Kaiser; now, the city was factionalized and quarrelsome, and even as the Hitlerian hand that held Austria and Czechoslovakia was reaching toward Poland, the rallying voices of the pacifist crowds in view of the Arch of Triumph were asking: “Why die for Danzig?”

On September 3, 1939, the French and British governments declared war on Germany, two days after the Nazi invasion of Poland, but the French and British showed little determination to pursue the battle. A large portion of the French military was at that moment underground, assuming defensive positions along the French–German border inside a two-hundred-mile subterranean installation called the Maginot Line. Begun in 1929 and named in memory of France’s late minister of war, André Maginot, the fortification extended along the eastern edge of France, northward as far as Belgium and southward toward Switzerland. In its final form it would be spacious and deep enough to hide multiple substratums, triple- and quadruple-decked constructions connected by steel beams that held floors and roads that supported the weight of a covert army of men moving about under the footprints of the trench fighters of the previous war. While the Maginot Line was not completed by 1939, enough had been done to deem it impregnable.

And thus troops were massed there on the day France declared war. They remained there for half a year without any sign of the enemy. It was all quite surrealistic: war had been declared after the Nazi invasion of Poland, and French soldiers and civilians waited expectantly, but the autumn of 1939 became the spring of 1940 without a French bullet’s being fired at the enemy. Many French citizens began to relax, believing that the fighting would never come, that the impregnable Maginot Line had already diverted Hitler’s war plans toward less potent targets along the North Sea or perhaps west of Poland into Russia.

If the Communists in Paris were less noisy than usual, it was possibly because they were too embarrassed to speak after Hitler signed a nonaggression pact with Russia—a pact permitting Russia to share in the partitioning of Poland. Two weeks after the Nazis had entered Poland, the Soviet troops joined them, arousing such outrage among anti-Communist
political leaders in France that the government banned the party and declared illegal the distribution of Communist newspapers and other literature.

Fortunately for Antonio, Mussolini’s government remained neutral during and immediately after the conquest of Poland, and Antonio kept his business running in an atmosphere of perpetual twilight. What he lacked in clarity was balanced by his resolve to see the situation through, to not panic and desert the city, to honor his training as a soldier. Enough of that remained within him, along with his pride as a proprietor, that his shop became his command post, and he would not surrender it by choice.

His reassuring letters to Adelina and his children in Bovalino, and to his parents in Maida, stressed that everything appeared normal in Paris despite Hitler’s ominous ambitions, and Antonio urged them not to fear for his safety or become alarmed by what they might read in newspapers about the fate of France.
Paris is as beautiful today as when you last saw it
, he wrote Adelina during the early spring of 1940,
and it will be even more beautiful when you return
. He truly believed these words when he wrote them, for nothing that he could see in the streets of the city, or on the faces of its people, would justify his worries about another war on French soil. People strolled at their normal pace every day along the Champs-Élysées; they dined unhurriedly in restaurants and cafés; they attended the opera and fashion shows; they went to the Louvre to see paintings, to the Folies to see showgirls, to Notre-Dame to speak to God. Antonio told Adelina about the springtime arrival of tourists, their wandering pleasantly about the city while news vendors screamed out headlines that predicted rising gloom in distant places; but in Paris the sun was shining, and most people felt very safe and secure far behind the mighty Maginot Line.

But before the end of spring, much of the gloom reflected in the headlines became horribly real: the invading Russians overcame Finnish resistance in March; the Germans broke into Denmark in early April, taking Copenhagen in twelve hours; and in late April, the Nazis were supreme in Norway. By May, Hitler had taken Holland and Belgium, violating the neutrality he had often reaffirmed with those countries in the recent past; and as the massive German attack smashed through Belgium, flanking the Maginot Line to the south, the French people learned to their distress in mid-May 1940 that Nazi armored divisions had crossed the Meuse River, and were rolling unimpeded toward Paris—which they would enter and control by mid-June, unfurling a swastika flag high up on the Eiffel Tower.

I cannot believe what I’m hearing on the radio!
Antonio wrote in his diary
a few days before the city yielded to General Georg von Kuechler’s Eighteenth Army.
The French government is leaving Paris for Tours! Everyone else is being urged to leave. All the roads south are jammed. I’m packed and have a ticket for Rome but don’t want to go. Italy’s still neutral, thank God, but everything’s a mess. Daladier’s government has fallen, Reynaud is Minister but they’ve brought in Marshal Pétain and General Weygand, two very old men, to help keep order. Thousands of English soldiers have escaped back to England from Dunkerque, and the French are scattered all over. What happened? What caused the collapse of France?… An army that cost millions and it couldn’t resist even a week!… All that suffering and sacrifice between 1914 and 1918 for THIS!

A day later, Antonio visited the Italian embassy, where he was met in the corridor by one of his customers who was an adviser to the Italian ambassador, Raffaele Guariglia.

“Antonio,” he said, taking him by the arm and speaking softly. “Get out of here, and get out of Paris as fast as you can! Don’t ask me any questions. I’m doing you a favor.…”

That evening, after bolting the door to his shop, Antonio boarded the train for Rome. He had not left a note in his shop for his tailors; all of them had left two days before, as had the superintendent and custodian in his apartment building on the Avenue Rachel.
I’m too stunned to know what I’m thinking now
, he wrote as he sat in a crowded but quiet railcar moving slowly toward the Italian border.
I’m still not sure I’m not dreaming all this
.…

The train pulled into Rome the following day. Antonio saw hundreds of people running up and down the platform and heard the cries of news vendors coming through the open windows of the car. He bought a newspaper as he transferred to a train bound for Naples.

The nightmare continues. Mussolini made an announcement at twelve o’clock. Italy is now at war with France.… This page of my diary is wet with my tears
.…

45.

T
he news of Italy’s declaration of war on France brought disappointment and disgust to the American White House, and as President Franklin D. Roosevelt arrived at the University of Virginia to deliver a commencement address, he announced to his audience: “On this tenth day of June, 1940, the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back
of its neighbor.” The president was frustrated that his appeals in recent months to the Rome government and to Pope Pius XII had failed to prevent the Italian army from following Hitler’s forces into France, and his anger at the Duce was applauded now by his listeners and echoed the following day on the editorial page of
The New York Times: