by Wally Lamb
When he turned ten, Vincenzo was apprenticed to Uncle Nardo, a gumbare of Papa’s and a fat-bellied pig of a stonemason. May the carcass of that son of a bitch Nardo roast in the fires of Hell forever and ever and longer than that! On weekends, when our family reunited, my brother Pasquale was often bruised and swollen in the face because of accidents at the mine or because of his failings as Papa’s caruso. Papa’s stern hand often caught up with young Vincenzo on Sunday mornings after Uncle Nardo visited with his weekly report. Vincenzo was lazy, Nardo complained, and had fallen in with a band of young toughs who laughed and traveled together after work and committed acts of hooliganism. Sometimes my father beat both brothers, one after the other, Vincenzo for what he had done and Pasquale for what he had failed to do. My own behavior was beyond reproach, and I escaped my father’s blows and received only his praise. Sons of Italy, take notice! Industry and seriousness of purpose will assure your success. Work hard! Honor famiglia, and follow the virtuous path!
More tomorrow if these goddamned hemorrhoids will let me sit and tell.
10 July 1949
At the age of sixteen, I was enrolled at the seminary school in Roma where I began my priestly studies. Meanwhile, at home in Giuliana, another scandal erupted that set my mother to screaming and caused my father such shame that he threatened to travel to the Mediterraneo and throw his gold medallion into the sea as an act of contrition for having sired such a delinquent son as Vincenzo!
That season, Uncle Nardo had been hired by the magistrato to build an elaborate new courtyard and vineyard wall. One hot afternoon in the midst of this project, Nardo fell asleep in a shady spot after his noon meal. Vincenzo, unsupervised, seized his opportunity and scampered away from his afternoon work. The magistrato, who was entertaining a visiting monsignore from Calabria, had invited his guest to stroll the grounds of his estate. The two officials heard a strange groaning coming from the arbor and hurried to help whoever was hurt or wounded.
Shamefully, the groans had come from Vincenzo. What the magistrato and the monsignore found that afternoon among the twisting grapevines was my youngest brother, standing with his pants at his ankles and involved in a lewd act with the magistrate’s spinster of a daughter who was twice my brother’s age! The visiting monsignor nearly fainted from the shocking sight of that lunatic woman’s head between my brother’s legs. The shouting and screaming emitting from the mouth of the magistrato awoke Uncle Nardo, who came stumbling onto the scene before Vincenzo could even calm himself and button his britches. Nardo was fired on the spot. The magistrato banished both the disgraced mason and his lascivious apprentice from his property, uttering the wish that he, the magistrato, hoped to drown in the molten spew of Mount Etna before he laid eyes on either of those two again!
Uncle Nardo did not wait until Saturday to give Papa his weekly report about Vincenzo. Instead, he stormed the road that led from the village to the mines and shouted Papa’s name into the gorge. What happened next was told to me by my brother Pasquale, who witnessed the whole thing.
Nardo told my father that he, Giacomo Tempesta, was liable for the sum of money Nardo had lost on the big job at the home of the magistrato as a result of Vincenzo’s shameful behavior. Papa told Uncle Nardo that he could not hand over money he did not have. He promised, instead, that he would beat Vincenzo until the blood flowed and that Vincenzo would repent and reform. He would work so diligently from then on that the unfortunate incident would be bricked over by his youngest son’s industry.
Uncle Fat-Belly shouted back that he had no use at all for a lazy billygoat with a frozen pipe in his pants. He demanded again the money he had lost. Again, my father assured Nardo that he could not pay such a sum as that to which Nardo laid claim.
“I see that a fancy golden medaglia cannot by itself make a man honorable,” Nardo retorted. Those were his miserable words exactly. My brother Pasquale stood beside Papa and heard the slander himself!
To my father—to any siciliano!—an accusation against one’s honor is more painful than a blow to those loins that sire sons. Yet what could Papa do—perform an act of magic and make money spill from the sky? Pay off Uncle Nardo with bolts of my mother’s lace?
That weekend, Papa went to the home of the magistrato with a jug of his best Malaga and his precious golden medaglia. Signore Big Shot had already sunk his buck teeth once into my father’s medaglia; now Papa was going to allow him to gobble it up. By the time the wine jug was empty, my father’s prized possession had been handed over to the magistrato so that Nardo could be reinstated as the magistrato’s mason. But there was a problem, still. Nardo would not take Vincenzo back! The next week, against the howls of my mother and the protests of the village padre, I was plucked from my priestly studies and sent back to Giuliana to work alongside Uncle Nardo in the unfinished courtyard. There, reluctantly, I began my apprenticeship under that fat-bellied son of the devil whom I soon grew to despise. I had no choice but to obey and honor the arrangement my father had made.
Young men of Sicily, remember this: a father’s command is a son’s law!
Over the months that I transformed myself from scholar to laborer in service to my father’s honor, my hands coarsened and the muscles in my arms and chest grew strong from heavy lifting. With all my heart, I hated the trade of masonry and ached to be back among my books and words and religious icons, but that was not to be. With each stone I hoisted into place, with each tier of brick I laid, I honored my father’s good name and good word. And as for the magistrate’s filthy daughter, all her flirtations and lewd whisperings to me went unanswered. I upheld the good name of Tempesta and looked at stone and mortar and trowel, not at the hairy privates of that deranged pest of a puttana who kept lifting her skirts to entice me!
12 July 1949
In March of 1898, Mount Etna once again showed Sicily her wrath.
For three days and nights, steam leaked from the cracked southern rim. Next day, quiet as la morte. Day after that, the earth itself trembled and broke the town apart. In the hills, the section of the sulphur mine where my father and brother were working shuddered and collapsed. Pasquale, who was at the kiln when the shaking began, was spared. But Papa and eleven other miners and carusi perished in the mine.
Papa, Papa, I weep to remember your loving guidance! I curse the cruel earth that swallowed your life too soon!
Can talk no more today.
15 July 1949
As my father’s eldest son, I was now the sostegno del famiglia. I took seriously my duties as both the family’s main provider and its chief disciplinarian. I did not spare either of my brothers the beatings for which their actions or inactions cried out. With Vincenzo, especially, I was firm. His shameful behavior had cost me my priestly studies and cost the Tempesta family its ownership of our father’s valuable gold medaglia. Though the medaglia had passed from my father to the magistrato, I, Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, was still allowed to wear it at village celebrations and at Easter and vigilia di Natale. I sat on the platform with the padre and the magistrato during parades with that medallion resting close to my heart—not only as the eldest son of a village hero, but also as the man to whom the Weeping Vergine had once shown her tears. It is not exaggeration to say that I was, even as a humble laborer, the most distinguished young man in Giuliana.
Sadly, as head of my famiglia, I sometimes was forced to raise a hand to my beloved mother. Mama had adjusted poorly to widowhood and to the reduced income and status my father’s death had pressed upon us. Sometimes, crazy with grief, she would awaken screaming in the night or threatening that she would follow her mother’s example and take poison rather than live this wretched life of toil and denial with three such terrible sons as Pasquale, Vincenzo, and me. She resumed her conversations with the moths. They comforted her, she said, and brought her news about her departed husband. Although I forbade these crazy, one-sided conversations of hers, she sometimes disobeyed me. The blows it was my sad duty to deliver for this and other reasons some
times quieted Mama’s screaming fits and sometimes began them.
In all things I learn quickly, and so my talents for masonry soon matched my talents for language and holy study. Within a matter of months, I had far surpassed that idiot Nardo in both artistry and industry and he knew it and was jealous. It is fair to say that I, Domenico Tempesta, carried most of Nardo’s business on my strong and capable back. When I made that simple observation one afternoon as we worked side by side, Uncle Pig-Face laughed and cursed me and spat on my boot.
I reminded him that, in addition to being a superior mason, I was also the son of a hero and, unlike Nardo himself, an educated man. I demanded an apology.
Fat-Face laughed and let fly, instead, sputa from his mouth that landed on my other boot. My honor thus insulted, I was forced to spit into his faccia di porco. He spat back into my faccia. Fisticuffs followed and I delivered to Uncle Nardo the worst end of that bargain—a blackened eye and a nose that spouted blood like the Fountain of Trevi! Ha! I would have given him even worse, too, if he had not reached for his trowel and sunk it into the back of my left hand. I wear the small scar to this day—the mark of that son of a bitch of a stonemason who was so threatened by my natural superiority that he sought my ruin.
After that day, Nardo and I became bitter enemies and rivals. Giuliana offered little enough work for a mason and that goddamned Pig-Face spread slander about me and my craftsmanship. For the next two years, I watched work that should have been mine go, instead, to Nardo. To hell with those idiots who believed an old man’s lies! That’s what I say! They deserved the shoddy craftsmanship and heaving walls they no doubt received from that son of a bitch!
Sons of Italy, it was at this time that I conceived my plan to seek my fortuna in America! More tomorrow. That rabbit-faced daughter of mine calls me to eat my lunch and I have to stop just to shut up her voice.
16 July 1949
I had read much about la ‘Merica—anything I could get my hands on, though in Giuliana, printed matter was rare and precious. America seemed a fitting place for me. I was, after all, the descendant of landowners. In that big country, I read, land went crying for ownership. America was the place for Great Men! In a land far away from earthquakes and slanderous old masons, I would fulfill my destiny!
We had famiglia there already. Papa’s cousins, Vitaglio and Lena Buonano, had made the trip three years earlier and were rich already. My two brothers also wished to seek their destiny in the New World and to escape Mama’s crazy screaming, which grew worse and worse. I therefore agreed to carry the burden of the firstborn son across the sea and allow my brothers to accompany me. In July 1901, Domenico, Pasquale, and Vincenzo Tempesta signed on as steerage passengers aboard the SS Napolitano.
Our dear Mama opposed our adventure, fearing that our departure would make of her a destitute beggarwoman. She conjured pitiable pictures of herself, an old white-haired hag, forced until her dying days to survive on crusts of bread and rinds of cheese—left with only the moths to talk to. God would damn me, she warned, for forsaking my own mother. What would I have her do once we were gone? Roast rats for meat while her wicked sons bathed in honey and milk and counted their gold?
Despite Mama’s protests, Pasquale, Vincenzo, and I sailed from Catania on the morning of 11 September 1901. Mama carried her objections all the way to the wagon that would transport us and our belongings from the village square to the seaport where the SS Napolitano was moored. As that rickety wagon rolled away, I looked back to see Mama raise her hands—one good, one scarred—and shout to God above, and to the sea on which we would travel, and to Italia itself that every mother’s son should shrivel in the womb rather than grow and thrive only to rip out the heart of the woman who had borne him. “I bleed from the knife my sons have stuck in me!” Mama shrieked, over and over again, as the wagon pulled away. Her bloodcurdling chant carried above the sound of horses’ hooves and the wagon’s squeaky wheels. “I bleed! I bleed!”
That was the last I ever saw of my mother. Later, she married Uncle Pig-Face just to spite me—took to her bed the man who had made it necessary for my father to surrender his gold medaglia to that greedy, buck-toothed magistrato, the man who had spit on my boots and ruined me with his lies. Until Mama’s marriage to Nardo, I had dutifully sent her pretty postcards and, at Christmastime, gifts of money and sweets. These were never acknowledged. Ha, never returned either! After that marriage, however, I stopped wasting my money. She died in 1913, but left me the legacy of her screaming, which I still hear in my memory. “I bleed! I bleed! I bleed!” Sitting in this room, talking into this goddamned machine, I hear her still!
Mama, what would you have had me do? Stay, and be supported by an old woman’s lacemaking? Stay, and be starved out of work by the slanderer who polluted my father’s bed? It was you, not I, who brought dishonor to the name of Giacomo Tempesta. It was you!
17 July 1949
Ours was a terrible twenty-four-day journey to la ‘Merica, made unbearable by spoiled food, tainted water, and rolling seas. A broken propeller delayed us off the coast of Portugal for three extra days and nights of hell. Worst of all was the darkness and stink of life below, inside the belly of the big ship. Where there is sun and fresh air, there is hope, but here the sun did not shine and the air we breathed was stale and fetid. Aboveboard, bands played and the filthy rich dined off china and drank from fancy glasses. We in steerage lived like rats. Women and children sobbed, men fought each other over trifles, and everyone suffered the stench of vomit and excrement. There was a stabbing en route, and the birth of a baby, and the death of the child’s mother two days later. That crying bambino was passed from breast to breast after that, and we prayed for its fate. All our fates. That baby cried for us all!
There were rats, too, plenty of them; nighttime was when those goddamned creatures prowled. One night I woke to find one sitting on my neck, sniffing at my mustache. I screamed out, waking even my brother Pasquale, who always slept like a dead man. After that night, I took no chances, napping as best I could while sitting or leaning against beams and walls. Day and night fell together on that hellish journey across the sea, and my mind existed in a place between sleep and vigilance.
During the voyage, my brother Vincenzo was as shamefully behaved as always—pinching women’s behinds, boasting about his mischief, cheating at cards against men with bad and worsening tempers. Vincenzo was forever wandering away from Pasquale and me and getting himself in trouble, then calling for me to settle some dispute he had provoked. It is the firstborn’s burden to unravel the knots that younger brothers make.
Throughout that endless and terrible journey across the ocean, I was afflicted with lice and worry—scratching and haunting myself with the cold fear of what would come to pass once we landed in this place I had risked everything to reach. For a Sicilian, home is everything. How could I have done this? Had I been bewitched into thinking that the unknown would be preferable to putting up with the petty nuisances of a stonemason who would die off in time anyway? The rumbling every few years of a distant vulcano? As much as I hated Etna for the damage it had visited upon my famiglia, the lives it had claimed, at least it was an enemy I could watch. What enemies awaited me in this Mundo Novu toward which we sailed? My heart was sick from thinking and worrying and pinching those goddamned lice between my fingernails!
The little rest I stole came to me in short, interrupted naps made terrible with nightmares. In my dreams, I saw flowing lava, cracking earth, screaming women stuck in fiery trees. Somewhere in the middle of one of those desperate nights, I promised myself that I would never again put myself through such a hellish journey—that I would never return home. That night I said farewell to Sicily forever. Whatever la ‘Merica held in store for me, it was where I would stay for the rest of my days. The vow was small comfort, but comfort nonetheless.
Sometimes as the other steerage travelers slept, I crept amongst them and over them and did what was forbidden: climbed the narrow stairs to the ship�
��s deck where the wealthier travelers strolled and where I might take into my lungs the clean salt air or watch the moon’s rippling reflection against that endless sea. In the school run by the good Sisters of Humility, I had envied the rich boys their supplies of India ink. Now, here in the moonlight, was an ocean full of it through which we traveled—enough inchiostro di china in which to drown the whole world, let alone Domenico Tempesta. But I would not give those haughty boys at the convent school the satisfaction of dying! I was not weak. I had been the best of them—the student most loved by the good sisters—and I would prevail!
On one such night of watching the endless ocean, the moon shone brighter than usual, illuminating a small school of dolphins that jumped and swam alongside the SS Napolitano. I have always been a modern man who leaves superstition to ignorant old women, but the sight of those delfini that night—their bodies arcing toward the sky, their taut skin glistening in the moonlight—it seemed to me a powerful omen. That night, I stood smiling through my tears and was comforted. I knelt on the ship’s deck to pray and, in that position, fell into the only sweet, deep sleep I enjoyed during that long and horrible journey.
I awakened next morning to the blinding sun, a mocking voice, and a kick in the ribs! When I squinted and looked up, I was peering into the arrogant face of a ship’s waiter. Nearby, a well-dressed couple stood staring at me with looks of disdain. “Get back down where you belong,” the haughty waiter ordered—commanding me, the son of a hero! The grandson of landowners! A man who had once been singled out by the Blessed Virgin herself!
The rich woman shook her head and chattered like a squirrel. “Poveri si, sporchi no,” she told the rich man.*