Unto the Sons (96 page)

The legacy of broken promises being what it was in this village where everything was remembered and tardiness was a venerated tradition, Antonio felt less reluctant to represent himself to his townsmen as a problem solver. It was an honorable calling in the south, one in which he really never had to solve a problem but had only to convey the impression that he was
trying
to solve one. Being a social-climbing tailor, well practiced in the cloaked art of appearances, made him ideal for this role; and whenever he arrived at the Maida train station he gave a command performance.

Hardly did he embrace his mother and father before he would turn to the crowds pressing around him: people who whispered into his ears, and to whom he nodded encouragingly; people who shouted reminders of past requests, which he now jotted down for the first time in his notebook, pausing to slip a few hundred-lire bills into the pockets of others as they pretended not to notice. Such gestures of kindness and hope, repeated whenever he came to town, brought merriment to this terminal most often pervaded by the gloom of black-ribboned trains bearing coffins of war victims as well as injured soldiers returning from Italy’s ill-fated campaigns in Africa, or Greece, or, more recently—as Mussolini had backed Hitler’s turnabout on their onetime ally Joseph Stalin—the bloodstained steppes of Russia. What a contrast Antonio’s arrivals were to such reminders—his leaping onto the platform with a two-handed wave after doffing his homburg, his clothing remarkably unwrinkled and his jacket lapels rouged with rosettes; his tan-and-white semibrogue footwear, buffed minutes before with a dinner napkin he had purloined from the dining car, shining as brightly as his lacquered leather valises, which two huffing porters carried behind him, along with his gift packages for his family, his friends, and a few favored bureaucrats and
prominenti
. After reassuring his entire constituency, and devoting more lines in his notebook to their wishful thinking, Antonio would be escorted by the town’s left-wing mayor and right-wing monsignor toward Maida’s only motor vehicle, a four-door Fiat touring car owned by the municipality and used on such special occasions as Saint Francis’s feast day procession, the most important funerals and weddings, and Antonio’s quarterly sojourns to his
native village. The driver of the vehicle on all occasions was the prefect of the province, a white-haired, blue-uniformed man bearing a pistol and sword whose oldest son was currently serving with the Italian air force in Albania. When the prefect had once complained of his son’s distant assignment, Antonio had hinted that arrangements might be made to transfer him closer to home—to Cosenza perhaps, or better yet to Catanzaro. The prefect knew that this was impossible, there being no air bases located in Cosenza or Catanzaro; but appreciating Antonio’s good intentions, he made no mention of this. He also hoped he might use Antonio’s influence in other ways, for he had studied the photographs and news clippings in the window of Francesco Cristiani’s tailor shop, accounts of Antonio’s receiving many honors, including one that pictured him shaking hands with the Duce’s son-in-law, Count Galeazzo Ciano.

When this was first sighted by the baron of the Bianchi family, it brought tears to his eyes as he remembered his hopes years before to have Antonio for
his
son-in-law, and it might have happened if the baron’s beautiful daughter Olympia had not been too narcissistic to court, and wiser than to end up in Argentina owning a bankrupt boutique. As a sign of his enduring esteem for Antonio, the baron was always on hand at the station to greet him, expecting nothing in return except that Antonio dine on occasion at the crumbling palazzo and regale the doddering baroness and himself with amusing tales and comments about modern life beyond the surrounding mountains.

Another habitual attendee of Antonio’s arrivals was the local leader of the Fascist Party, a cement mixer by trade who was born of a Sicilian mother and was therefore viewed with grave suspicion by party leaders in the north; he believed Antonio could swing a lucrative road-building contract his way on the Maida marina through influence with the Duce’s son-in-law. When the cement mixer sought Antonio’s intercession in this matter, the latter patted him on the back, gave him a hearty smile, and said he would see what could be done—knowing as he spoke that he would do absolutely nothing. As Antonio remembered well, the last time he had tried to use his influence with the Duce’s son-in-law, the graceless Count Ciano had reacted by sending three intimidating Fascist henchmen to visit his shop in Paris.
One of my friends in the Italian Embassy confided that Ciano’s office thinks I’m too pro-French and therefore an enemy of Italy
, Antonio noted in his diary during the spring of 1942.
But in Paris many French people think I’m too pro-Italian, and naturally a Fascist.… I must remain very, very careful these days
, very
careful
.… And very careful he remained throughout the year. So long as Ciano was Mussolini’s son-in-law, and so long as
Mussolini was the Duce, Antonio’s image in Maida as being close to Italy’s ruling family would continue as a myth he would neither affirm nor deny.

The local order of mendicant friars, from whom some people kept their distance because the friars rarely took a bath, were also regularly part of Antonio’s receiving committee. They anticipated the day when he would serve as their fund-raiser—if there again came a day when the people of Maida had funds. The village had been on the barter system for years; and with the wartime rationing laws restricting everything except what was traded secretly on Italy’s flourishing black market, the mendicant friars claimed they were close to starvation, although there was rarely one among them who was not grossly overweight. It was truly impossible to starve in Maida, where vegetables and fruit grew miraculously out of rocks whenever there was the slightest whiff of famine in the air, which was discernible with the first sky battles between buzzards. But it was also true that, except for enough to eat, few people had enough of anything else.

The petrol to operate the municipality’s Fiat had to be procured periodically from the ferryboats that docked on the coast at a port where the prefect had nefarious connections. And the charcoal that burned in the braziers of the villagers’ homes came largely from the state railway, which was unaware of the generosity of its local stationmaster. Since all wool and other fabric had been requisitioned by the army for making uniforms, tents, and other military articles, Antonio’s father, Francesco, would have lacked the material to make suits even
if
he had had the customers with the money or sufficient tradable commodities to afford them. Francesco, now in his middle seventies, was reduced to patching people’s worn-out clothing, or to exchanging with tailors in distant villages and trying to resell locally the unneeded garments of customers who had died before trying them on, or who had tried them on, taken them home, and died at some later date—leaving to their next-of-kin the dismal but traditional duty of returning the wardrobe to the “dead storage” rooms that existed in every tailor shop. Even in these modern times of the 1940s, with the Germans inventing rocket ships that flew over England without pilots, it was considered dangerous and disrespectful for a villager to don the clothing of the dead, whose eternal and omnipresent spirits would surely avenge such insults. It was also deemed disrespectful to profit from dead people’s clothing, either through sale or barter.

But now that fabric was so scarce even scarecrows had been divested, many tailors felt no compunctions about trading and reselling buried
men’s bespoke clothing, although the tailors took care to sell only clothes of men buried far away. The term “far away” in the mountainous south usually meant any distance of more than twenty miles.

Antonio grabbed one of the gift packages from the stack the railroad porter was carrying, and handed it to a friar, saying, “Here, I’ve brought you a present from Paris.” Before the friar could say thank you, Antonio allowed himself to be shoved forward by those pressing behind him, a crowd that included the mayor, the monsignor, and the prefect, all of whom were eager to board the awaiting Fiat and proceed toward the village. If Antonio had handed the friar the correct present, and he prayed that he had, the friar would find in it the robe of a Franciscan monk who had recently died in Paris, and had earlier served as the chaplain in Antonio’s veterans’ association. The mayor’s present, which the prefect had just placed in the car trunk along with other packages, was a brand-new suit Antonio had made nearly three years before for a French deputy minister who had fled Paris days before the German invasion of 1940. The deputy minister had neither paid for the suit nor subsequently written asking Antonio to save it, and Antonio assumed that he had joined France’s other fleeing political figures in Vichy, the town in central France earlier known for its spa and health-giving waters, but presently known as the refuge for the ousted French government led by Marshal Pétain and others who had collaborated with the Germans. Many of these people had left behind in Antonio’s shop not only new suits and overcoats but also older garments that had been remodeled or altered. After storing them for so long without a word from their owners, Antonio was quite sure they would never be reclaimed. He became doubly convinced of this before Christmas 1942, when the Germans—who had hitherto limited their occupation to north central France and the coastal areas along the Atlantic Ocean and the English Channel—suddenly ordered their troops throughout central and southern France, thus occupying the entire country, including Vichy. Seeing no bright future for the forgotten French menswear that was crowding his shop, Antonio packed much of the new and used clothing into boxes and brought it to Maida to distribute to the townspeople.

As the Fiat carrying Antonio pulled to a stop on the edge of the Piazza Garibaldi, the afternoon
passeggiata
was already in progress. It was four p.m. on an unseasonably mild and almost windless day, with the sun dangling like an orange under the trees that reached out over the cliffs and shaded the valley. Church bells were ringing and the town band, seated
along the stone base of the fountain, played an aria from Verdi’s
Rigoletto
. A large group of slow-moving walkers, most of them elderly men—some accompanied by the young widows of soldiers (few white widows now resided in Maida)—paused and stared across the square as they spotted the Fiat, then nodded respectfully when they recognized the monsignor, the mayor, and Antonio stepping from it. Antonio waved and tipped his hat toward them, and also up at the baroness, whom he spotted watching him from behind the curtains of her palazzo; but he remained close to the car, waiting as the procession of horse-drawn carriages that had followed him from the station made its way up the winding cobblestone road. Piled high on the racks of the carriages, held secure by leather straps or lengths of hemp, were the gifts that Antonio had brought from Paris. He had never before brought so many parcels as on this occasion, and at the station it had taken fifteen minutes (and a gratuity in the form of four packs of Turkish cigarettes) for the porters to unload them from the baggage car and hand them, under Antonio’s direction, to the drivers of the carriages bearing the passengers to whom the boxes were inscribed.

Antonio was sure that his father would be pleased when he unwrapped his gift. It was a bolt of excellent English herringbone material that Antonio had acquired on the French black market, and out of which it would have been imprudent of him to make a suit or coat to be worn in Nazi-occupied Paris. Antonio had brought for his mother a black dress he had purchased at Galeries Lafayette, a simple but well-made frock similar to the others he had been bringing home for several years, since the sudden death of her nearly one-hundred-year-old father; her stunned reaction to his death suggested that she had assumed Domenico would live forever. Now approaching seventy, with her long white hair arranged in a bun under an ebony silk veil that flowed out from under her black lace mantilla, Maria Talese Cristiani spent most of her daylight hours in prayer either at the cemetery or in church, a routine she varied only when she accompanied her husband to the station to meet Antonio. Antonio had often asked her to ride back to town with him in the Fiat, but she had always refused. She seemed to know that the Fiat was powered by petrol of questionable origin.

After assisting his mother down from the carriage in the Piazza Garibaldi, Antonio escorted her and his father toward the crowd now gathered around the fountain. The mayor was already there holding a megaphone. The monsignor stood next to him ready to give the benediction. The prefect remained in the Fiat, keeping an eye on it and also on the extra packages that had not fit into the trunk and had had to be roped to the roof. A
group of teenaged boys, too young for conscription, were standing nearby along the road, one of them holding a chained leash attached to the leather collar of a goat. A few mangy-looking sheep wandered around near the edge of the square, having gained complete independence since the death of the village’s unsucceeded shepherd, Guardacielo.

After the band had stopped playing, and the monsignor had offered a prayer for the safety of Italian servicemen at the front, the mayor, a short moustachioed man wearing a leftover French frock coat that Antonio had given him the year before, mounted the bandmaster’s wooden box and began to speak into his megaphone. There were almost three hundred people gathered in the square and standing in the surrounding balconies, among them the late arrivals from the station—the baron, the Fascist cement mixer, the head mendicant friar. Sooner or later the mayor intended to introduce Antonio, but now, holding the megaphone in the air to the height of his flat-crowned black hat, the mayor was magnetized, unable to pull the trombone-length cone away from his mouth, even though it seemed to become heavier with each platitude and caused him to switch it constantly from one hand to the other.