Unto the Sons (4 page)

Gaetano Talese, according to my father—who rarely saw him, knew him only slightly, but idealized him always—was a handsome, wandering man of six feet with a lean, sensitive face, large brown eyes resembling my own, and a slight scar over his right temple that was inflicted during his bachelorhood in Maida. One night while he stood under a young woman’s balcony, he engaged in a conversation that seemed perhaps too intimate by the standards of her jealous suitor who, after eavesdropping in the shadows, suddenly leaped upon Gaetano from behind, slashed him with a knife, and escaped into the night.

While such fierce possessiveness of women had long been a male custom in Maida—as it was in other southern villages with a history of invasion by foreign men, and domination at times by feudal barons who presumed first-night privileges with the brides of villagers beholden to the barony—Gaetano Talese abhorred this lingering manifestation of primitive emotion, regarding it as symptomatic of a backward society in which he saw no future for himself. All that he saw in his village seemed impervious to change, too deeply rooted in rock, as stagnant as the malarial lakes left by the Romans.

In Maida the countrywomen still walked with clay pots balanced on their heads, and the dust rising along the sun-scorched roads of the valley behind the horse-drawn carriages and farmers’ oxen was possibly the same dust kicked up ages before by Hannibal’s elephants, by the Norman knights who galloped through the eleventh century, and by the elaborate caravan of King Frederick II, the thirteenth-century German conqueror of Italy, whose traveling retinue included Arab dancers, acrobatic jesters, and black eunuchs who hoisted curtained palanquins containing the reclining figures and veiled faces of his royal harem.

Most of Maida’s hillside homes leaned against one another at bizarre angles, standing crookedly on oblique foundations, and the narrow cobblestone
roads leading up and down the hill between the irregular rows of houses and shops were so curved and jagged that they could be traversed gracefully only by mules and goats.

The people of Maida usually walked as if they had drunk too much wine, and yet despite their lurching, listing, and shifting of weight as they walked, their facial expressions never suggested that they were discomforted by the difficult footing. Perhaps they did not even know that they lived in a lopsided town; it was, after all, the only town most of them had ever seen.

And so except for such adventurous young men as Gaetano, who frequently rode off on horseback down to the sea to watch the ships sailing back and forth between Naples and Messina, and dreamed of his escape, Maida’s citizenry seemed content to remain perched up in the village where they were accustomed to all that was awry—although they
did
hope and pray they would be spared another earthquake that might further alter the deformed shape of their hill town, which in the past had often been subjected to God’s fickle nature.

Maida exists in Italy’s seismic center of uncertainty. Situated between two great volcanoes—Mount Vesuvius to the north and Mount Etna to the south—the inhabitants of Maida and its neighboring villages were ever aware that they might at any moment be flung into obscurity by a calamitous convulsion. Perhaps this is one reason why southern Italians have always been very religious, dwelling, as most of them do, on perilously high ground dependent for its stability on the goodwill of the omnipotent force that periodically reasserts its power by shaking people up and bringing them to their knees.

One day, many decades before Gaetano’s birth, as dark clouds and cliffside vibrations moved along Italy’s southwesterly coastline toward the village of Paola, north of Maida, it appeared that a vengeful God might be anticipating the desecration of the shrine of southern Italy’s most idolized native son, Saint Francis of Paola—a prospect that panicked the villagers and led the priests to guide them to the hill site of the large statue of Saint Francis and urge them to prostrate themselves and beg God for mercy.

Within an hour, as the desperate crowd remained huddled in prayer around the trembling base of the towering statue, the black clouds began to lift, the sky became brighter, and the earth tremors seemed to subside and then to expire entirely—having finally no effect on the landscape except that the statue of Saint Francis, which had overlooked the sea, had been slowly spun around by vibrations and now faced the village.

The large beige stone house in which Gaetano was born in 1871 had cracked walls, slanted floors, an eroding façade, an exterior staircase that was almost scallop-shaped as a result of the countless contorting eruptions that had struck Maida through the centuries. This house, and the two tottering lodges that flanked it, were remnants of a sixteenth-century feudal estate purchased from an impoverished nobleman by Gaetano’s father, Domenico Talese, who, by the modest standards of Maida in the late 1800s, was a relatively affluent and influential figure.

In addition to his large farm in the valley—which contained part of another man’s olive plantation that had flown through the sky during an earthquake and, having landed intact, was successfully acquired by Domenico after a court dispute in which he argued that the airborne olive trees had been entrusted to him by the will of the Almighty—Domenico owned a wheat mill and a percentage of the local aqueduct, and operated a thriving business on the side as a moneylender. Strained by Domenico’s high interest rates, the people of Maida equated the occupation of moneylender with that of middling cutthroat—or, to use their word for it,
strozzino
.

Although Domenico was married to a genteel woman named Ippolita who was descended from a large titled family in a neighboring village, her parents’ branch of that family was almost destitute; yet in Maida the people continued to address her, with a respectful bow, as “Donna Ippolita,” whereas her husband, the moneylender and new owner of an old barony, was never approached deferentially as “Don Domenico” but was referred to instead, behind his back, as “Domenico the Strozzino.”

His awareness of such an unflattering appellation greatly rankled Domenico’s prickly pride. He smoldered within himself while maintaining his stringent business standards, and remained remote from his fellow villagers except for his once-a-year walk with them on the feast day of Saint Francis of Paola, when he helped carry the heavy statue through the narrow winding roads down toward the sloping stone sanctuary which, four centuries before, the saint himself had blessed.

Other than this annual procession, and his attendance each Sunday at Mass—wearing a flowing cape and polished boots, and carrying his feathered felt hat with his missal—Domenico always appeared alone in public, whether on foot or horseback, coming or going from his row of stone houses on the hill that he occupied in baronial presumptuousness with his large extended family, whose affection for him rarely exceeded their sense of indebtedness. All of them worked for him—on the farm, or at the wheat mill, or at the aqueduct—and he ran his family as he did his
businesses, in the autocratic tradition of a medieval lord. The fact that the feudal system of masters and serfs was now outlawed in postrevolutionary Italy did not discourage Domenico Talese from trying to extend the past into the present for whatever advantage he could take of it; and much advantage could still be taken in isolated places like Maida, where the distant past and the present were barely distinguishable.

Here the ancient superstitions and religious traditions extended through timeless days and nights, and my grandfather Gaetano—Domenico’s first son—grew up often feeling as rootless and displaced as the trees and rocks of his village. Each morning he awakened to the blacksmith’s thrice clanging anvil that beseeched the Blessed Trinity, and he half believed, as everyone claimed, that the moths fluttering through the early-evening air were representatives of the souls in purgatory. On certain holy days, and on Tuesdays and Fridays, which were days of bad luck, Gaetano watched the flagellants in crowns of thorns as they crawled up the rocky roads on bleeding knees. He was also affected, much as he sought to be different from his antiquated father, by such superstitions as the dreaded
jettatura
.

The
jettatura
was a vengeful power said to exist within the eyes of certain strangers who, although they journeyed through the countryside with words of goodwill and courteous manners, possessed within their mesmerizing glance the glint of a curse that presaged disaster, or death itself, or some unimaginable vexation that would surely victimize the villager unless he carried an amulet to neutralize the threat of
jettatura
. The women of Maida, in addition to always wearing protective charms, would attempt to thwart
jettatura
when they perceived it in a stranger’s eyes, by placing their hands within the folds of their long skirts and pointing their thumbs, which they would tuck under their forefingers, toward any potentially perilous individual. When the men of Maida sensed the closeness of curse-carrying strangers, they would usually place their hands deep into their pockets and quickly touch their testicles.

If the farmlands were under attack by locusts or other crop-threatening pests, the village priest was summoned to read from a book containing certain prescriptive conjuring words that constituted a curse, and if the spring rains were excessively late, or during any prolonged period of treacherous drought, the statue of Saint Francis of Paola was taken from the church by the farmers and paraded slowly through the fields.

In this hazardous hill country, ruled for centuries by a remote aristocracy that seemed too often irresponsible and inadequate if not always evil, the villagers were conditioned to petition heaven for comfort and
support. From elderly fanatics like Domenico to younger skeptics like Gaetano—and to Gaetano’s son Joseph, my father, who made the transition from the Old World to the New—there existed a bond of belief in the God-appointed prowess of Saint Francis of Paola, the fifteenth-century mystical monk credited by eyewitnesses with resuscitating the dead, giving voice to the mute, realigning the malformed, multiplying food for the famished, and, during droughts, creating rain.

One day, after discovering a parched valley south of Maida that demanded irrigation, Saint Francis was said to have walked a mile to the nearest spring and, with his staff, traced a line along the ground that led back to the acres of dryness. Soon a stream of water was following him along the line that he had drawn.

On another occasion, after a ferryboat captain at the Strait of Messina, along the southernmost tip of Italy, had refused the saint’s request for a ride to Sicily, Francis had simply removed his large cloak and laid it flat on the sandy shore. Then, after hooking one end of the fabric to the edge of his staff and holding it up in the air like a sail, he was suddenly thrust forward by a gust of wind and placed softly on the sea, atop his raftlike cloak with its billowing improvised bow, which he then guided calmly across the four-mile strait onto the island of Sicily.

Two hundred years earlier, in Sicily and southern Italy, the guiding force over the people was a papal loyalist named Charles d’Anjou, who had been urged by the Pope to eradicate from the land the last vestiges of the irreverent influence of the thrice excommunicated German ruler of Italy, Frederick II, whose hedonistic involvement with his harem, and halfhearted participation in the Church’s Crusades against Muhammadanism in the Middle East, had established him in Rome as a spiritual outcast.

Brother of the devout King Louis IX of France (later canonized as Saint Louis), Charles d’Anjou came to Italy with pious credentials, which are exemplified in the large heroic painting of him that my father as a boy saw hanging in the Maida church where the Talese family worshipped. In the portrait, Charles is presented as a benign figure, almost enshrined in heavenly sunlight, being blessed by the Pope. According to my father, however, Charles d’Anjou’s thirteenth-century invasion and conquest of Frederick II’s dominions in southern Italy and Sicily was—quite apart from Charles’s building many splendid churches that pacified the papacy—more accurately characterized by the activities of his soldiers, who burned the crops of farmers, extorted money from men whom they later murdered, and abducted and raped women.

Several years of such behavior finally led to a people’s rebellion, an eruption of such magnitude that it culminated in the death of two thousand French soldiers of occupation and quickly diminished the size and influence of Charles d’Anjou’s dynasty in the Kingdom of Southern Italy.

The spark of the insurrection was ignited in Sicily during a quiet afternoon in a park on the outskirts of Palermo. The year was 1282. It was Easter Monday, a sunny day on which many Sicilian men, women, and children wore holiday clothes and strolled or relaxed in the park, or sat on the grass surrounded by baskets filled with fruit, cheese, and wine.

French soldiers were also in the park, patrolling the area in pairs, and they would occasionally join the picnickers without being invited and help themselves to the wine and make personal comments that, while embarrassing to the women, the Sicilian men tried to ignore.

But as the drinking continued and the soldiers’ remarks became more bold and crude, some Sicilians began to express their resentment. When two men stood up to address the soldiers more directly, a drunken French officer appeared on the scene and ordered his soldiers to search the men to determine whether they carried knives or other dangerous objects. When nothing was discovered, the officer demanded that the search be extended to include the women in the area; as this was being done, the officer saw walking along a path a beautiful young woman, accompanied by the man she had married earlier that morning.

Pointing to the woman, the officer announced that he would search her himself, and as her husband was held back by soldiers, the officer proceeded to move his hands up under her skirts and then into her blouse, where he fondled her breasts, causing her to faint. Her anguished husband was provoked to yell out to the crowd: “Death to all the French!”