A Writer's Life (30 page)

I was accompanied through the area by a black deacon whose church basement was filled with boxes containing hundreds of as-yet-undistributed care packages sent from all parts of the nation by civil rights supporters. Most of the boxes had been opened and picked through by church volunteers who were supposed to make lists of what had been sent, and then to record the names and addresses of those donors whose uncommon generosity the pastor might want to acknowledge with a note of gratitude, and finally to see to it that what was in the boxes was made available to the community's more impoverished families, which might make the best use of the articles of clothing and various items, including a share of the cash donations and checks that had been designated for Selma relief and been sent in care of the church.

In my visits to the church, however, I never saw anyone actively engaged in the process of sharing what had been received (the deacon explained that the volunteer committee had not yet had the time to implement the procedure fully); piled high along the walls of the basement were cardboard cartons with their tops torn off and some of the contents draped over the edges, or sprawled along the floor, or stacked haphazardly—hundreds of cans of Campbell's soup, bars of soap, bottles of soft drinks, shampoos, detergents; cellophane bags of Fritos and pretzels; sacks of rice, sugar, flour; children's toys, toasters, radios, books, and many piles of footwear: sneakers, slippers, men's and women's shoes, the latter having high heels, low heels, no heels, some shoes being unmatched, and there were seven pairs of ice skates. On wire hangers, dangling from long lines of rope extending high across the rear walls of the room, were countless dresses, blouses, suits, pairs of trousers, shirts, jackets, overcoats, and
some fedoras and other brimmed hats attached by clothespins to the sleeves of the coats.

Seeing all this clothing, some of it new, most of it used, reminded me of my boyhood days in the mid-1940s, when I would often accompany my father to the post office to help him carry the care packages that he and my mother had addressed to their relatives dwelling in poverty in a part of Calabria that had been overrun and bombed by the Allies near the end of World War II. Although the boxes were bound with heavy rope and further secured at the seams with sealing wax, I knew what was inside because I had earlier participated in the packing: There were suits and coats that my father no longer wore, some of my mother's old dresses and also new ones that she had been unable to sell in her boutique, and various articles of attire that my parents' customers had left unclaimed for a year or more in our dry-cleaning plant and storage vault.

Ten years after the war, when I visited my family's ancestral village in Calabria for the first time while on furlough from Germany in the spring of 1955, I was reintroduced to much of this clothing as it appeared in ill-fitting form on human figures for which it had never been clearly measured or fashioned; and yet as I embraced these people and brushed against the familiar scratchy fabric of my father's hacking jacket, and the soft silk, long-sleeved, slightly faded primrose yellow dress that once had been among my mother's favorites, I felt reconnected to my past and allied as well with these strangers and foreigners whose lives had long been distantly interwoven with my own.

I had come to the village unannounced, having two days earlier hopped an army transport plane in Frankfurt that was headed for Rome, and then I hitched a ride on a military bus that was escorting naval officers from the Rome airport to the American base in Naples, and on the following day I decided to purchase a third-class rail ticket at the Naples terminal on the overnight Rapido, which would carry me down the Tyrrhenian coastline into Calabria—a journey I would make with many passengers I assumed to be farmers, a few of whom sat and slumbered through the night on wooden benches with rope-leashed baby goats and pigs sitting at their feet, while our belching Rapido chugged along at no more than twenty-five miles per hour (when it moved at all), and it took us about fourteen hours to traverse less than three hundred miles of track.

Wearing my lieutenant's uniform and carrying a small canvas overnight bag that had served as my pillow, I stepped down from the railcar after the train had hissed to a halt along a sand-covered platform in front of a sturdy granite-walled, soot-stained station house bearing the sign
SANT
'
EUFEMIA
, which I knew was my final stop. My father had often mentioned this place as his departure point on leaving home in 1920, taking all his belongings because he did not plan to return. He described the station in those days as hectic and bustling, teeming with tense young men like himself who were eager to leave, and who bumped into one another as they advanced while grappling with their luggage and hoisting their steamer trunks, all the while being surrounded and assisted by relatives and family friends who did not want to see them go, especially the expectant brides, who traditionally wore maroon skirts and brown shawls and who, as the train pulled away, could only hope that the promises made by the men would be met.

My father had been taken to the station from his hillside village by an uncle who had cautiously guided a donkey-led wagon down a winding rocky road for three miles until they had reached the flatter coastal region and the railroad tracks that bordered the Gulf of Sant' Eufemia. The gulf and its environs—and eventually its rail terminal—had been named in honor of an eleventh-century martyr who died near Constantinople during the anti-Muslim crusades and whose head had been returned to southern Italy by the governing Normans so they could deposit it in the foundation of a Benedictine monastery they were then constructing south of where the rail terminal now stood. Although the old monastery was completely destroyed during the earthquake of 1638, my father told me that some of the rocks from this disaster had later been utilized in constructing the terminal—an unremarkable fact, it seemed to me, but one that my devout father, reared in a religion extolling relic worship, saw as signifying the enduring essence of the Church. He told me that he had paused to kiss one of the stones of the terminal's wall as he entered the building, praying for guidance, hoping he had made the right decision in disregarding his earlier inclinations toward a priestly life and choosing instead to abandon his widowed mother and his younger dependent siblings on the assumption that he could help them more if he were far away earning money. He was seventeen when he boarded the train, leaving behind an austere and indigent youth that, insofar as he recounted it to me, was so devoid of romantic longings and dalliances, there was not a chance that there might be standing among the waving onlookers on the platform a young woman lamenting his departure.

Arriving in Naples, he transferred to a train headed north to Milan, and then into France, toward an apprenticeship in a Paris tailor shop owned by an older cousin—all the while anticipating his future career as a custom tailor with a shop of his own in America. After he had achieved
this in 1922, and had enlarged upon it with a dry-cleaning plant and my mother's dress shop, he was sufficiently well-off financially to support his kinfolk overseas on a regular basis; he mailed them money orders every week, and gifts for special occasions, and boxes of well-cut suits and brightly colored frocks and blouses that, while perhaps slightly out of fashion or otherwise deemed dispensable on the New Jersey shore, nevertheless represented new-world modernity in southern Italy, where most of the people—as I observed from the window of my sluggishly progressing train during my lengthy ride from Naples to Calabria—were attired in the mode of the Middle Ages.

I saw men strolling along nearby roads wearing conical hats, pantaloons and waist-length tunics belted with rope, and turbaned, black-cloaked women balancing boxes or jars on their heads, and other women, sitting sideways on mules, enshrouded with dark scarves similar to the yashmaks worn by the Muslim women who had come here during the tenth-century Saracen invasion. This antiquated area of southern Italy, extending down through the hills and plains of Naples into Calabria, is often referred to by northern Italians as “part of Africa,” emphasizing that it is primitive, backward, and arid, its lowlands swept by sands from the Sahara, its highlands inhabited most naturally by mountain goats, and everywhere within its boundaries a characteristically slow-paced population and an ambience changing little from century to century.

The Sant' Eufemia station that I saw on arriving in 1956 was undoubtedly as my father remembered it on leaving thirty-five years before. There were the terminal's dark wooden benches and the thick, dank stone walls derived from what he had told me was the rubble of a medieval monastery. But there was also a hollowness and quietude about the terminal's interior that contrasted greatly with the crowded and active place that my father had pictured for me. Indeed, after I had stepped down onto the platform at Sant' Eufemia and entered the terminal in a vain search for an attendant—hearing at the same time the rattling departure of the southbound Rapido, which was scheduled, sooner or later, to reach the tip of the Italian boot—I realized that I was now entirely alone.

This surprised me even though I had been riding for a few hours in an almost empty train. Most of my fellow passengers, including all of those traveling with animals, had gotten off earlier at stations upcoast, nearer to the more fertile countryside of towns founded by feudal landlords and still plowed by peasant farmers only slightly risen from serfdom—while I, on the other hand, now found myself stranded in a dry, lifeless part of Calabria, marooned in the midday heat with flies buzzing around me in this
forsaken rail terminal that owed its identity to a thousand-year-old decapitated martyr.

I noted that a shutter had been lowered behind the bars of the ticket window, and that the toilet door was padlocked, and the fact that the premises lacked a drinking fountain, although this was probably a sign of prudence. As writers of Italian guidebooks have long warned their readers, this region is renowned for its stagnant and malarial lagoons and tributaries. Fortunately, I had ample water left in my canteen from the bottle I had purchased in Naples, and, since there were dried biscuits preserved in my bag in an army-issued tin container, I had no immediate fear of starvation. But I was worried about getting out of here, and I berated my impulsiveness in coming here and the bargain-motivated mentality that had propelled me to board the cost-free army flight from Frankfurt to Rome. It had all come about very quickly: On the day of my furlough I had been tipped off about the empty seat on the plane by a lieutenant who worked with me in the Frankfurt-based headquarters of the Third Armored Division—this lieutenant being a tireless procurer of whatever perks and marginally legal freebooting opportunities might exist within our grasp as young information officers who had previously dealt directly in Fort Knox with our highly decorated and eminent commander, Colonel Creighton W. Abrams, a World War II combat veteran who would eventually earn four stars and be appointed chief-of-staff for the entire army. I arrived in Italy without speaking a word of Italian. It was a language I had never been inclined to learn, it having been the mother tongue of Mussolini during my wartime boyhood. Even if I had hired an interpreter in Italy, I doubt it would have made it easier for me to get around; on the contrary, it would have imposed a sense of structure and directness antipathetic to what I prefer to believe was my improvisational nature. I had no idea what I wanted to do, nor where I wanted to go, nor did I want anyone to accompany me and suggest my itinerary. Even before I knew the meaning of the word
serendipity
—traveling without a specific destination, discovering things by chance—I was intrigued by the idea of aimless wandering, not committing myself to anything in advance, wanting to leave all options open, never wanting to be pinned down. This attitude had often brought me into conflict with my overly controlling father, and I had deliberately not telephoned him to inform him I was in Italy. He would have proceeded to tell me what to do, where to go, and he surely would have insisted that I visit Calabria. He himself, as I already indicated, had never revisited his homeland, using as an excuse the argument that he could not afford to take the time away from his business, being obliged to work incessantly in order to earn sufficient sums for the
continued well-being of his mother and the others in Italy. My father's responsibilites toward his business, however, did not prevent him from visiting his sartorial cousin in Paris for four weeks in 1938, sailing to and fro on the luxury liner
Normandy
. But when it came to revisiting his humble origins in Italy, my father seemed to be capable of sending everything back to his village except himself.

I dislike being critical of my father, and perhaps I am more familiar with his faults than my own. But I knew that he would have
ordered
me into Calabria had I called him, presuming that he had no less authority over my life than did Colonel Abrams; my father would also have arranged for his relatives to be awaiting my arrival—all of which I told myself I wanted to avoid. And yet here I was in Sant' Eufemia on my own terms, a solitary figure standing in a godforsaken terminal at the exact time of day when southern Italy was idle and indolent, when the local people and their farm animals were sleeping, resting, or otherwise partaking in the reposeful rite of their daily siesta. I read somewhere that the siesta is subscribed to more seriously in Calabria than anywhere else in Italy, and that between noon and 4:00 p.m. the only sign of life thereabouts is provided by the flies. Since I got off the train shortly before noon, it was possible that I could be there by myself for another four hours, unless in the interim a northbound train should arrive to offer me a wearisome ride back to Naples, an option that seemed even more dreadful than remaining where I was.

Removing my jacket and leaving it next to my bag on a bench, I walked out into the bright sunlight and began to pace back and forth along the platform, feeling on my face the dry heat and sometimes the light sting of the coarse-grained sand carried by the inland wind blowing between the jagged hills standing about three miles away from the railroad tracks. As I looked up to the highest of the hills, I saw my father's village, nestled like a soap dish into the cliffside, the white stone houses clustered together and crowded around a larger structure, which I guessed was the turreted Norman castle that had served as a prison when my father was a boy.