Unto the Sons (43 page)

He often quarreled with his wife during this visit home, and young Joseph, eavesdropping one day from his room upstairs, heard his father denouncing his mother for her failure to accompany him overseas. His father also threatened to break up the family in the not too distant future: Sebastian, he declared, could remain in Maida with the younger children, but Joseph would be headed for America. Joseph’s father had already revealed this to him in private. He had come into Joseph’s room the night before and, while reminiscing fondly on his travels through the New Land, had said: “I’m sorry I can’t bring you with me this trip, you’re still too young. But when I come back the next time, I promise I’ll take you.”

A week later, as his father began to pack his large suitcase for the voyage on the weekend to follow, Joseph helped him, with a sense of excitement and involvement—he was only one trip away from a big journey of his own. Meanwhile he had also received permission from his mother to
go with his father on the train to Naples, joining his uncle Francesco Cristiani and his older cousin Antonio to see his father off on the ship.

But on the morning of the departure Joseph woke up ailing with what was feared as a recurrence of his earlier bout with diphtheria, and so the others left without him. Throughout the day and the week that followed, Joseph seemed ill more from disappointment in missing the trip to Naples than from any actual relapse. Antonio, when he returned from Naples, had reassured Joseph that everything would turn out as planned, that his father would be back to fulfill his promise within a year, or perhaps even a few months.

Antonio became closer than ever to Joseph during this period, while Joseph’s relationship to his mother became oddly distant. It was as if she had already given him up as a hostage in her marital agreement with her husband; she had her favorite son, Sebastian, as her main source of comfort and support, and, sustained as well by her tight links to the Rocchinos, who helped raise her youngest children, she was absorbed in the warmth of her own family.

When the entire year of 1910 passed without Joseph’s father returning, and as his relationship with his brother Sebastian became more strained, Joseph’s dependence on his cousin increased—and continued to increase as
another
year came and went without any sign of Gaetano. Joseph had been especially disappointed by his father’s failure to come home in time for the Christmas season of 1911, for this was when the wolves attacked the village, and Joseph had felt more vulnerable in the aftermath of that incident—and more eager to leave home—than he had even during two earlier earthquakes. He was also greatly affected during this winter by the changing attitude of Antonio, now seventeen. His cousin’s remoteness did not come from any diminished affection for Joseph, but rather from his realization that he could no longer stand working in his father’s tailor shop. “I belong in Paris,” he had boasted to Joseph that memorable morning in the shop.

20.

A
ntonio had chosen to leave Maida during the Christmas holidays, when the trains were crowded with travelers, because he thought he
would have the best chance of being inconspicuous as he made his escape. He carried two large suitcases packed with clothes he had designed, which he intended to sell along the way, supplementing the savings he had sewn into the lining of his jacket and stuffed into the money belt tied around his waist inside his trousers. Antonio felt fat but rich.

His entrance into France had been accomplished without deviating from the plan he had plotted long in advance, in which Joseph had been his sole confidant. Antonio had gone directly from the Naples train station to one of the waterfront bistros where, he had been told, arrangements could be made to smuggle passengers onto ships sailing to every part of the world. Arriving at the bistro at midday, when there were no customers at the tables and the bartender was slumped on a stool with his head resting against a wall, Antonio had gone directly to the cashier and said: “I would like to go to Marseilles, but I have no papers.”

As Antonio later described in one of his many highly descriptive letters to his cousin that kept alive in young Joseph a spirit of adventure and an impatience to leave home, the cashier was a thin mulatto woman with a red handkerchief tied around her head and a sea captain’s cape draped over her shoulders, and, astonishingly, she was puffing on a cigarette. Antonio had never before seen a woman smoking. Such bold habits in women were beyond Joseph’s imagination. Blowing smoke in Antonio’s direction, she studied him momentarily and then yelled across the room to the big, snoring, scraggly-bearded bartender: “Bruno, this man wants to go to Marseilles, and he has no papers.” The bartender slowly lifted up his head, opened one eye, and yawned. “Does he have fifty francs?” he finally asked. When Antonio answered that he did, the bartender said: “Come back at ten o’clock tonight, and pack enough cheese and salami for a two-day trip.” Then the bartender again rested his head against the wall and seemed to go immediately back to sleep.

That night, after Antonio had paid the francs to the cashier, she introduced him to a sailor waiting to escort him on foot to the waterfront, and then by wagon to a dockside warehouse. There Antonio saw a dozen shabbily dressed men carrying sackcloth bags and small suitcases. Two sailors stood near the warehouse door, sliding it open and closed after each new arrival. Those waiting did not seem to know each other, and there was very little conversation. Shortly after eleven o’clock, Bruno arrived, wearing the same cape that the cashier had worn earlier in the bistro. With a wave of his right hand, Bruno directed everyone to follow him.

After passing through a small door in the rear of the warehouse, then out onto a pier, Antonio could see the silhouette of a large steamship in
the moonlight. Nearing the ship, he read the lettering that identified it as Austrian. He heard dance music coming from the upper deck, and sounds of laughter and clinking glasses. But all notions of a pleasurable cruise began to fade as Antonio and the others followed Bruno to the stern of the vessel, where a rope ladder dangled from the deck. Bruno said good-bye. A sailor helped Antonio with his luggage up onto the deck, then resumed leading the travelers down through a narrow interior staircase and several hatchways until they had arrived in a dimly lit dormitory, forty by forty feet, in the bowels of the ship. Bolted to the floor along the walls were steel cots and on them, Antonio would soon discover, mattresses stuffed with straw.

Throughout the night, the next day, and the night that followed, Antonio and the other passengers were confined there. They had access to buckets of water that the sailors had provided, and to whatever food they had brought along with them. Everyone slept fully clothed. Antonio remained awake throughout the first night because of the snoring that surrounded him, and the discomfort of his money belt bloated with coins. An early-morning storm caused the vessel to tilt and lurch so convulsively that some people were tossed to the floor. Antonio climbed down from his cot, held on to the metal leg that seemed the most securely bolted, and prayed that he would get to Paris.

Though polite to the other passengers, Antonio communicated with them as little as possible. He felt embarrassingly well dressed around his disheveled fellow travelers, and he was wary of nearly all of them. He had the feeling that many were vagabonds, military deserters, thieves, or worse. He saw that a few carried sheathed knives on their belts beneath their jackets or capes. One man had a holstered pistol strapped high to one side of his chest. He was fierce-looking, with a hooked nose, a square jaw pointed with a Vandyke, and slit eyes under beetle brows, and he covered his oily head with a battered shako from which all the military insignia and plumage had been removed. A few hours after the storm, he sidled over to Antonio’s cot and asked in a strange accent, almost accusingly: “What did you do?” The man’s assumption that he had committed a crime from which he was now fleeing concerned Antonio far less than the possibility that, if he denied being a criminal, he might offend his visitor by appearing to be morally superior. Not knowing how to reply, Antonio placed a hand on his stomach and bent his head down between his legs, as if he were suddenly seasick and on the verge of vomiting, and finally the man got up from the edge of the cot and walked away.

The only individual Antonio felt comfortable with was a shy, pimply,
ruddy-haired youth, a year or two his junior, who wore a faded blue jacket on the breast pocket of which was embroidered the name of the Orti Brothers Hotel. The young man was a night porter at the hotel, near the docks at Marseilles, who had gone to Naples to visit his ailing mother. She had run away years before from his French father, a violent alcoholic. The young porter told Antonio that if he wished to save money, he could stay at the hotel at no charge. He had a room there that he did not use at night, for he was required to be on duty in the lobby from midnight until six-thirty, while the concierge slept. Antonio was grateful, and immediately accepted the offer. He had given no thought to staying in Marseilles, but now he had a chance to get his clothes pressed as well as to catch up on his sleep before going to the railroad station to check the schedule of trains going to Paris and the cost of the ticket.

Although he was laden with money, he was not exactly sure of his financial worth. Before leaving Maida he had calculated that he had saved from his earnings about four hundred lire; he was carrying also much foreign currency and some antiquated Italian money—gold and silver coins, as well as bank notes—that dated back to the eras of southern Italy’s now defunct conquerors. Antonio had collected this old and foreign money, along with some contemporary Italian currency, from the pockets of dead men’s clothing that bereaving widows and kin had brought into his father’s tailor shop to be sold or given away to traveling strangers.

The mourners usually delivered the clothes to Francesco Cristiani’s counter wrapped in blankets, not wanting to touch or see again the sad and familiar sight of the departed men’s garments; and these people were by and large too overwrought or superstitious about death in general to dip into the pockets of wardrobes that the deceased had left behind—unlike Antonio. Always on the alert for the arrival of doleful-looking people carrying blankets, he was quick to greet them, and, if they had clothing for the widows’ closet in the back of the store, he would assure them that the clothes would be treated with the utmost respect and would be passed on to the most worthy of wearers. And then, as he hung the clothes in the widows’ closet, unseen by his father and the other tailors (although Joseph was in on the secret), he would riffle through the pockets and discover not only new and old lire and francs, but also—usually from the pockets of migrant workers and the traveling wealthy—coins and bank notes from the Americas and various parts of Western and Eastern Europe, not excluding the Papal States, the Duchy of Lucca, the Republic of San Marino, Monaco, Romania, and Serbia.

But while this might have made Antonio the envy of numismatists, it
did not necessarily represent exchangeable currency after he had begun his journey toward Paris in December 1911. This was why he particularly welcomed the idea of being a nonpaying guest at the Orti Brothers Hotel, to which he and his porter friend went directly by hired carriage after disembarking from the Austrian steamer in Marseilles. True to his word, his new friend did have access to free lodging at the hotel, but to Antonio’s immediate disappointment these accommodations were not much superior to those on the ship. Unfurnished except for a cot and a small table, the room was located off the service entrance in the rear of the ground floor, next to a large stable for the horses and carriages of the guests. Still, despite the smell and neighing of the horses, Antonio slept soundly for the first time in several days, rising reluctantly at six-thirty when his friend returned to take over the bed.

During the morning and afternoon, after a pleasant introduction to French coffee and
pâtisserie
at a café in the train station—where he had gone not only to book a reservation but also to try to sell one of the three suits that he carried under his arm—he sold two suits to transient Italian businessmen, for a total of forty francs. This was more than enough to buy a ticket on the sleeper that left for Paris the following evening.

Antonio spent most of the next day wandering around Marseilles observing how the pedestrians were dressed, examining the merchandise in store windows, and trying to understand the French words printed on street signs and in the headlines of newspapers that people in the cafés held in front of their faces. He returned to the hotel later in the afternoon to say good-bye to his friend, but the concierge told him that the porter had taken the night off and gone to visit his father in the countryside. After the concierge had unlocked the door to the porter’s room, Antonio left a note of thanks on the table and took his suitcases, which he had packed earlier. He did not notice that the suitcases were unusually light, and did not open them until he was on the train. It was then that he discovered that his two extra pairs of shoes were missing, along with one of his suits. He regretted losing the shoes more than the suit, which he had remodeled but which had been made by his father. As the train rattled through the night he could not believe the porter had stolen them.

At nine a.m. the train slowed up along the right bank of the Seine and pulled into Paris’s Gare de Lyon, with its glass arcade and its roof tower encasing a grand four-sided clock. Antonio hurried off the train with his bags, resisting an offer of help from a porter, and followed the crowd along the platform, through a great hall, and then out the front door. There he paused, inhaled deeply, and filled his lungs with the Paris air.

Downhill in the distance he could see spread before him, under the subdued sunlight of early winter and behind the morning mist, endless rows of brownish-green trees and gaily colored awnings along a wide, white boulevard; and there were also rows of ornate buildings, taller than any he had seen before, crowned by flat-topped curved roofing that, he later learned, was the architectural specialty of a man named Mansart. What he saw was like a magnificent painting in a museum; and when a cheerful carriage driver wearing a top hat and a pale blue frock coat appeared before him and offered him a ride in his open carriage, Antonio’s most lasting impression of Paris was complete.