Unto the Sons (20 page)

Vito’s position as foreman would be taken over by Sebastian after Vito’s death—or so Sebastian had recently confided to Joseph; but insofar as Joseph could see in the stable, much life remained in Vito as he pushed and cajoled the others into moving faster. And as was known throughout the village, Vito’s father, Antonio Bevivino, had lived to be more than a hundred—despite the tiny fragments of metal and rock that were buried somewhere in his misshapen head.

Antonio Bevivino had been a cavalryman with the French army during the early 1800s, when thousands of Italians were recruited by the Napoleonic Empire, which controlled almost all of Italy. In 1812, Antonio invaded Russia with the units led by Joachim Murat, and it was in Russia that he sustained a strange cranial injury. He claimed that chips from a ricocheting cannonball (fired by his own rearguard artillery) had grazed his skull; and, after surgery, Antonio was left with a hollow spot in the center of his head, an almost fist-sized indentation that suggested the crater of a volcano. Still, he lived on through the 1880s, and Domenico Talese as a younger man often saw him during his final years, the old veteran sitting in the square and smiling at passersby while doffing his tasseled conical hat—and revealing, within the hole in his head, a fresh piece of fruit or vegetable, most often a squash.

Antonio’s tasseled hat, which proved to be even more durable than Antonio himself, was later appropriated by his son, who wore it in the stable as he called each morning to the men:
“Andiamo!”
—Let’s go! and
“Presto!”
—Hurry up! Then the seven horse-drawn wagons carrying the men and farm tools, and three donkey carts containing food and water,
would pull away from the stable and head toward the tall iron gate. Joseph would remain behind, waving good-bye to Sebastian. His brother usually looked back, nodding without expression, seated in the back of the rear cart.

Up ahead, Domenico would be waiting, sitting on a white stallion, on the cobblestone road beyond the gate. He usually wore a dark cape and a wide-brimmed gray hat, white riding breeches, and black boots with silver spurs. Domenico would watch until the caravan had almost reached him, counting the workers, noting who was absent and would thus be penalized with the loss of two days’ earnings.

Then, with the tap of his whip across the flank of his horse, Domenico would gallop to the front of the line and proceed at a prancing pace to lead his group downhill toward the valley, through the heavy mist which rose each morning. Soon the sound of hoofbeats and wagon wheels would become muted; silence would return to the village, a silence unbroken until the clanging bells of a church signaled the start of the six a.m. Mass.

Domenico would be attending this Mass, young Joseph knew, since this was part of his grandfather’s well-known daily routine. Domenico accompanied his men each morning only to the crossroads at the bottom of the hill; there, entrusting to his tassel-hatted foreman the responsibility of escorting the group to the farm site five miles beyond, he would salute with his whip and turn his horse around toward a bridle path in the bushes that offered a shortcut back to Maida. After tying his horse to a hitching post along the side of the church, Domenico would pass through the arched entranceway into the candlelit interior, and then into an oakwood curtained booth where he knelt for confession. Ever since his days as a youthful seminarian in Naples, Domenico had been a daily communicant; and on those many occasions when he had taken Joseph to Mass—during the harvest or on Sundays, when Joseph was not at Cristiani’s or in school—Joseph would sit in a crowded pew watching his white-haired grandfather at the altar rail, his head held back as he received the host from the priest; and then his grandfather would stand with his hands clasped and walk swiftly down the aisle toward Joseph with his eyes closed, a blind man guided by inner light, a figure of such intense religiosity that Joseph felt both uncomfortable and oddly proud.

His grandfather seemed different from everyone else in town. He seemed more ascetic, more commanding; very stylish in an old-fashioned way, and never with mud on his boots—he was not a man of the common earth. He neither smoked nor drank liquor, not even wine. Except for an occasional piece of fish, and perhaps a taste of pork or lamb at Christmas
or Easter, his diet was that of a vegetarian, following the custom of Saint Francis of Paola. He was the only member of the family who was an avid reader, mostly of texts on theology and history, interests first cultivated at the seminary. But he also read the Naples newspapers every day, and even periodicals from Rome and Milan whenever they appeared for sale at the rail terminal. He spoke not the dialect of the region, but a more formalized Italian, soft-tongued but distinctly enunciated, and he often expressed himself in proverbs.

“They who have more, want more,” he commented one morning with a mildly sardonic smile, after hearing it announced at Mass that the region’s two most noble families, both relatively affluent, had approved the betrothal of a teenaged son to an adolescent heiress who was years away from nubility; and yet Domenico respected these families for arranging the marriage in advance, and saw the consolidation of wealth through marriage as a confirmation of the pragmatic wisdom that usually produced wealth in the first place.

“If you took all the assets of the people in this area, and divided these assets equally among all of the citizens,” Domenico once postulated to Joseph, “you would find that, in no time at all, the people who had been rich would be rich again. And the people who had been poor would again be poor.”

Not only did he have little faith in the individual initiative of the common people of his village, but he refused to be impressed with those returning emigrants who, while briefly revisiting the village, and swaggering through the square wearing American-made suits, boasted of their good lives in the New Land and condemned the customs and traditions of the ancient civilization that had survived the vagaries of southern Italy for more than two thousand years. When Joseph had read his grandfather a recent letter from Gaetano in America, a letter in which his father praised the New Land as a paradise of opportunity and equality, Domenico listened quietly for a few moments, but appeared to be annoyed by the letter’s contents. Domenico had never entirely come to terms with his son’s decision to remain in America. Gaetano was an unpredictable commuter who revisited Maida every few years, who impregnated his wife—and returned to America before the christening—and left his father with much of the responsibility for the young family’s welfare. If America was so abundant in opportunity, Domenico could well wonder, why was Gaetano not making more money? How come Gaetano, who claimed to be working for a multimillionaire outside Philadelphia—a pharmaceutical tycoon who was building a model industrial town with the profits from
packaged miracles—was not lining his own pockets with gold and enriching his family as well?

As for the reference in Gaetano’s letter to “equality,” Domenico
did
think it appropriate to enlighten his young grandson Joseph. “Equality,” he told Joseph, “is an illusion. Men were
not
created equal. There is no equality in the human condition, and there never will be. If God wanted equality he would have created it—but he did not, and you have only to look at your hand to find an example.” At which point Domenico held up his right hand in front of Joseph’s startled eyes and continued: “Look at these five fingers and note how no two of them are alike. The thumb is stubby and strong. The index finger is long and bony. The middle finger is even longer and more prominent than the index finger, and it is also longer than the fourth finger, the ring finger. And next there is the little finger, which of all the fingers is the most easily bent. It is weaker and shorter, and it will
always
be weaker and shorter throughout your lifetime. And yet,” Domenico went on, “even though these fingers are all different in size and strength, they work well together as a whole—which was as God intended. If all the fingers were the same size, the same strength, the hand would not function. But they were all made differently, and this is the same throughout all of nature—things are not equal, never were meant to be equal.”

Too confounded to reply, Joseph merely listened respectfully, as he always did when his grandfather spoke. His grandfather was like a philosopher to him, an antiquated deductive dogmatist who disregarded most of the views of the younger men of the village, and who also held in disfavor a few of Joseph’s teachers whom he considered to be too liberal with the students and too far removed from the traditional values of the Church. Joseph’s school had been run by the Church in the years prior to the 1860 revolution, an armed invasion of southern Italy led by the antipapist agitator General Giuseppe Garibaldi. In the prerevolutionary years, when a student was disobedient in class, he was forced to kneel at a distance from the other students during the daily prayers and to wear around his neck, on the end of a rope, a signboard on which was printed a description of his errant conduct.

But the current principal of the school discontinued the practice of signboards, kneeling, chanting and praying; and he brought into the school system young teachers who had been trained in Catanzaro, Cosenza, and the even more distant city of Naples, and were eager to develop a more modern society along the Socialist lines that had been envisioned by Garibaldi and other nineteenth-century Italian revolutionaries. Although
Joseph’s teachers said nothing disrespectful about the Church, there were no longer any priests on the faculty, and the students were assigned books to read that portrayed Garibaldi as a hero and the revolution as perhaps the most auspicious event in Italian history. Instigated and financed largely by northern Italian aristocrats and a consortium of bourgeois radicals and youthful adventurers, the revolution finally absorbed the agricultural south into the more industrial north while reducing the temporal power of the Pope and confiscating vast amounts of Church land and property—such property as the old monastery that had been converted into Joseph’s school. But despite his grandfather’s grievances, Joseph privately liked his school and its teachers, a jovial group of young men who arrived for class each day wearing high-collared capes and colorful cravats, and who habitually smiled when they talked. They were perhaps the only people in the village who smiled a lot. The men and women Joseph knew among his kinfolk and their friends were invariably grim and solemn, if not as severe as his grandfather. Even the crowds he saw every day in the streets and the square conveyed the impression that they were preoccupied with problems or contemplating grave issues.

Why the teachers so often smiled bewildered Joseph, but he could not doubt the positive results that their friendliness and alacrity had on him as a student. In his first four years at school, he received the top academic medal in his class. In his fifth year—taking courses in mathematics, grammar, science, and history—he continued to earn the highest marks in his class on his quarter-term report card. This distinction would have meant more to Joseph had it impressed his grandfather, whose approval he so fervently desired. But after Joseph had brought home the report card, earning an embrace even from his mother, his grandfather merely glanced at it and nodded nonchalantly.

Domenico, as Joseph would later understand, was opposed to bestowing praise on individuals who were young and impressionable. Young people would profit more from the criticism of their experienced elders, he believed, than from receiving possibly head-swelling awards from liberal-minded teachers. The ancient proverb of the south—“Never educate your children beyond yourself”—still held meaning for Domenico, and he regarded patriarchal criticism as an antidote to youthful conceit. As a consequence, hardly a week passed without Joseph’s receiving carping comments from his grandfather about his tendencies, however slight, toward smugness or complaisance, vanity or pride, effrontery or unaccountability. The quibbling ranged from Joseph’s insufficient sharpening of the axe used for cutting firewood to Joseph’s slouched posture in
church to Joseph’s mispronunciation of a somewhat ostentatious word that he had recently encountered while scanning one of the books in his grandfather’s library. The criticism was accompanied by threats of punishment when Joseph once strayed beyond the village walls on a Friday afternoon (a day of bad luck); and placed a loaf of bread upside down in a basket (also bad luck); and uttered a scatological word that he had overheard Sebastian using. And on those occasions when Joseph was sincerely contrite about his wrongdoings, such as the mishap to Mr. Castiglia’s trousers, Domenico usually exploited the situation to make him feel worse.

His grandfather had somehow become aware of the misdeed even before Joseph had returned home from Cristiani’s late in the day on that horrid Holy Saturday. Domenico had been standing alone on the path that led to his row of houses, wearing as usual his cape and wide-brimmed hat; and after Joseph had greeted him and tried to continue on his way past him, Domenico gestured with his hand. Joseph stopped and waited.

“An apprentice should know his job,” Domenico began, in a stern and solemn voice, “and should never defy the rules that wiser men have made. And yet you have defied those rules. And you have disappointed me very much. You, for whom I had high expectations, have shown signs of recklessness, stupidity, and, worse, insubordination.…”

As Domenico paused for a second, Joseph began to tremble. He feared that the next words out of his grandfather’s mouth would spell out the punishment he most dreaded—banishment to the farm with Sebastian. Before Domenico could continue, Joseph looked up and interrupted. “Grandfather,” he pleaded, “it was a
mistake!
It was the first serious mistake I ever made! I was
not
insubordinate. I just did not see that the trousers were hidden under the cloth I was cutting. It was my first mistake after doing many good things that you’ve never given me credit for.” Speaking louder now, though aware that he had never before been so direct toward his grandfather, Joseph added, despairingly, “I can
never
please you! Nothing I ever do is good enough in your eyes. You are always strict with me, harsh with me.” Sobbing now, Joseph said, “You just don’t love me.…”