Unto the Sons (23 page)

Joseph did not speak. But all at once he felt himself isolated with familiar feelings of despair. The prospect of being abandoned by his debonair cousin, whose closeness had begun to fulfill Joseph’s need for a
confidant and a trusting friend, so frightened him now that he could only hand back the brochure to Antonio and turn away.

Joseph put on his overcoat and took his cloth bag, and headed for the door. He heard Antonio’s voice behind him. He ignored it. The voice became more commanding, and he felt a hand on his shoulder. Turning, Joseph looked into Antonio’s intense dark eyes and small chiseled face. Despite their difference in age, and the worldly image that Antonio had all but usurped from his magazines, Antonio was only a bit taller and larger than he was.

“Joseph,” Antonio said with a smile, “you’ll be coming to Paris with me.”

Joseph could not react. It seemed too unbelievable, too absurd.

“Yes,
yes!
” Antonio insisted, holding Joseph’s shoulder more tightly. “I’ll go to Paris, find a place to live, and then I’ll send for you.”

Joseph still did not speak. He looked down, avoiding Antonio’s eyes. He heard the muted voices of the older men in the back, talking casually among themselves. If he did not hurry he would be late for school. But as he thought about what Antonio had just said, the heavy feeling in his heart was becoming lighter.

“You’ll come to Paris only on one condition, however,” Antonio went on, quite businesslike now. “You must not tell anyone of my plans. Do you understand?”

Joseph nodded.

Antonio was not satisfied with the response.

“Joseph,”
Antonio demanded,
“do you promise?”

Joseph was suddenly excited by the idea of running away to Paris. He would be living with Antonio.

“Yes, Antonio,” Joseph said, finally. “I promise.”

12.

O
utside in the street, as Joseph walked to school, he saw people bustling around the fruit stands and grocery stores, and he heard the sounds of quickening hoofbeats, rattling wagon wheels, and the jingling bell-strung reins in the hands of impatient coachmen. The dry air of the sirocco had been dissipated by the misty currents from the north, nippy
winds that flapped the edges of the awnings upraised above the stores. A waiter at a sidewalk café, his white apron swirling around his waist, was pulling tables and chairs inside the door and shoving them close to the bar. There were no customers idling there now.

Looking up, Joseph noticed that the clouds were now more closely clustered and lower than before, and the snowy peak of Mount Contessa was no longer visible behind the cemetery. He did see in the near distance, standing prominently in the elevated piazza overlooking the square, the dark rectangular building that was his school. It was nearly nine o’clock. Roll call was scheduled to begin within minutes. But Joseph was concerned neither about tardiness nor about the weather. He had been invited to Paris. What mattered now was protecting Antonio’s secret.

How his cousin would execute the plan was beyond Joseph’s imagination. While it was true that young men were regularly leaving the village unannounced, their departures were nearly all underwritten by the steamship companies and the factory bosses in America. Antonio would be going to Paris on his own. And so would Joseph. Where was the money coming from? How could Joseph slip away without the knowledge of his mother, his grandfather Domenico, and Sebastian? Joseph had great confidence in Antonio’s resourcefulness. But as Joseph continued across the square into the wind, holding his books and lunch in his bag tightly against his coat, he considered what would happen if he did leave.

Running away from home was not a casual undertaking. The constables would undoubtedly be summoned. He recalled hearing about the beating Antonio had received after the constables had come to the tailor shop carrying those fashion sketches for the king. Joseph could also foresee a furious response from his grandfather Domenico. What would his father in America think after he learned that Joseph had fled to Paris? Was it so different from what his father had himself done when he was younger? Yes, it was different, Joseph thought; his father had left at sixteen. Joseph had only recently turned eight. And at that age he was already engaged in a conspiracy with Antonio, an involvement that was making Joseph more nervous the more he thought about it.

Halfway across the square Joseph thought he felt the cobblestones vibrating under his feet. He looked around to see if other people in the square felt it. It was a tiny tremor, like an earthquake, but no one else seemed to notice anything different. His stomach lurched and he felt dizzy. Joseph had already lived through two earthquakes. He had been three years old during the first one, and six during the second. On both occasions most of the villagers had moved down to the valley to avoid the
danger of flying rocks, some of which had already tumbled into the town from the higher hills and from building walls made unstable by the quake. The whole Talese clan, under the direction of Domenico, had lived under tents on the farm for a few days during the last one, and Joseph himself had vague recollections of torchlit evenings and throngs of people who took turns reciting the Rosary throughout the entire night. Joseph believed he had seen his father during the second earthquake, but his mother insisted that his father had been in America then, as he had been during the first earthquake. Joseph nevertheless recalled being face to face with his tall, dark-eyed father at some point during this time when he feared for his life, and it was then that his father had arrived to comfort him—and to give him a gift that Joseph would carry with him always as a memento. It was an envelope, tucked into the inside pocket of his overcoat on this very morning.

It was a green American dollar bill. He remembered his father appearing unexpectedly at night, a sloe-eyed, smiling man with an angular face and a moustache, wearing a pearl tie pin and a derby, looking every bit as handsome as his photograph on the wall of their home, holding the bill outstretched in the tips of his fingers. After folding the money inward, while still holding its ends, he abruptly stretched it out again, producing a resonant
pop
. “Listen to the snap of that paper!” his father had exclaimed, moving the dollar bill in and out like a little accordion. “Listen to the sound of a strong dollar that’s made of firm fiber!” Then he took an Italian lira note from his pocket, held it in front of Joseph’s face, and began to snap
it
back and forth in a similar fashion—except the note soon snapped in half. “Here in Italy we make the finest silk in the world,” his father had said, letting the torn lira note flutter to the floor. “But we still don’t know how to make strong money.” Then he handed the dollar to Joseph. “Keep this,” he said, “and one day spend it in America. You will buy something wonderful.”

When he arrived at school, Joseph climbed the high marble steps and passed through the arched entranceway. The school had once been a monastery. The corridor was wide and dark, and the walls so thick that Joseph could no longer hear the blustery wind, the hoofbeats, and the harness bells. At the far end of the corridor, dimly visible in the candlelight of two black metal chandeliers, Joseph saw the assembly hall, in which dozens of students were lining up according to grade, waiting for the principal to begin the roll call. There were almost sixty students registered in the seven grades. All of them were boys, ranging in age from four to fifteen. The girls of the village attended a different school, located
on the other side of the square, in the wing of a building that was once a convent.

As he went to take his place in line, Joseph nodded greetings to a few of his schoolmates. There was Francesco LaScala, an affable boy who worked before school each day in his grandfather’s carriage repair shop. There was Giuseppe Paone, a diffident and cross-eyed youth who began the day helping out at his uncle’s vegetable stand in the square. And there was Vincenzo Pileggi, a barber’s apprentice who appeared at school each morning with a pomaded pompadour and a garnet ring on each pinkie, and who marched in the town band on ceremonial occasions, holding a clarinet that he did not know how to play. Nearly every boy worked at a job before coming to school, and for this reason the roll call commenced at nine o’clock and not earlier. With the arrival of the principal, the students stopped talking. He was a stout and bouncy broad-shouldered man who almost waltzed across the platform, trailed by his flowing maroon cape, and high on his aquiline nose was perched a silver pince-nez. His large azure-colored eyes were penetrating and yet reflected a friendly twinkle, and his lofty forehead rising above his jowly pink face was fringed with thinning reddish hair that failed to cover the center of his balding crown. He was a descendant of an old family of Socialist educators and politicians—one of them the courageous antimonarchist mayor of Maida during the prerevolutionary days, when southern Italy was controlled by Spanish Bourbon kings—and his name was Achille Schettini. But in addressing him, the students used only his Christian name preceded by the Spanish title of courtesy that was preserved in his land. He was Don Achille.

“Good morning, students,” he said, smiling down from the platform, holding under his arm the leather-bound registry containing everyone’s name and attendance records.

“Good morning, Don Achille,” they answered in unison.

“First, let me compliment you on braving the weather and getting to school this morning,” he said, surveying with apparent satisfaction the seven rows of boys standing before him. He had recently made impassioned speeches in the square urging parents to help him reduce the high truancy rate, arguing that the better-educated pupils would most likely become the richest immigrants—an argument that had perhaps appealed to many mothers whose semiliterate husbands overseas had often complained of being cheated financially by their more educated countrymen who supervised the Italian work gangs in America.

“And I would also like to thank you students for making greater efforts
in your classes this term,” he went on. “All the teachers have told me that when the term ends this week, higher marks will be given throughout the school in mathematics and science, grammar, geography, and especially history.”

He smiled at the reference to history, for it was he who taught these classes—and he did so with such oratorical gusto, with such a robust recounting of history’s heroes and villains in picturesque settings, that Joseph was always sorry when the daily class was over. Joseph virtually escaped from his own life while sitting in Don Achille’s class, which was the first on Joseph’s morning agenda, and the principal added to the appeal of his course by offering guided tours on certain weekends to students who were interested in seeing some of the many historically significant sites that existed within a day’s round-trip wagon ride from the village gate.

Joseph had twice joined the tour in recent months, viewing from his teacher’s hay-filled wagon along the coastal roads in the neighboring hills an assortment of ruined Roman walls and Saracen towers, Byzantine domes atop crumbling churches, Norman castles with toppled turrets, and a single Doric column that was all that remained of a once grand Temple of Hera. “Here is where civilization began in Italy,” Don Achille had declared during the first tour, climbing down from the front bench of the two-horse wagon and standing at the base of the column with an arm outstretched. Grinning broadly, he added: “This was built six centuries before Christ by my ancient ancestors who sailed here from Greece.”

Later, as he stood along the rocky gully of a small river, Don Achille had directed his students’ attention to a clump of moss-covered boulders rising above the surface, and he announced in his stentorian voice: “Behold the burial place of the barbarian king Alaric, who sacked Rome in 410 A.D., and who abducted the daughter of the Emperor Theodosius, and who ultimately died of fever here as he was scheming to loot the Sicilians. After his barbarian soldiers forced the local populace to block the natural course of this river, and to build a royal sepulcher on the riverbed to contain the king’s body and his booty, the soldiers then massacred all the laborers and hurled them upon the sepulcher before restoring the water to its natural channel.” As Joseph stared timorously at the river with his classmates, Don Achille intoned: “Such is typical of the many atrocities that mark Italian history.”

Farther along on the tour, after informing the students that they were traveling the same route used in the twelfth century by Richard the Lion-Hearted and his knights when they headed south from Salerno toward the Holy Land and the Third Crusade, Don Achille stopped the wagon in
front of a well-preserved but totally abandoned feudal castle. This was one of many castles in southern Italy that was occupied during the thirteenth century by the Emperor Frederick II, a restless king who controlled not only Italy but much of the rest of Europe from his court that moved constantly from place to place. In addition to being the sovereign of a vast army, Don Achille emphasized to the students, King Frederick II had been an individual of artistic sensibilities and boundless intellectual curiosity. He spoke six languages fluently, and filled his court with a worldly representation of philosophers, mathematicians, physicians, astrologers, musicians, painters, and poets. He himself wrote poetry in Italian that was acknowledged in the following century by no less a practitioner than Dante Alighieri; and King Frederick’s interest in the dissemination of knowledge facilitated the construction of several Italian centers of learning, including the University of Naples, which he founded in 1224.

“Frederick was the first man of the Renaissance,” Don Achille had told his students, who sat around him in a circle on the grass in front of one of the parapets. “The first intellectual awakening of Europe after the Middle Ages occurred not in such northern cities as Florence, but right here in southern Italy, within the walls of such a castle as stands before us today.”