Unto the Sons

by Gay Talese

  Sebastian sometimes boasted quietly to Joseph about their grandfather’s promise to make him rich, but Joseph was never envious of Sebastian—so long as Joseph could go on with his schooling, could continue his apprenticeship among the smartly dressed people in Cristiani’s tailor shop, and could remain forever free of full-time service to the farm that would become Sebastian’s ill fortune to own. Joseph could imagine nothing worse than being Sebastian—having to rise each day at five to the wake-up call of the whip being lashed by their grandfather against the outer walls of their house; and then mounting a mule and joining the slow-moving procession of farm workers down through the shadowy woodlands into the valley, in the dark light of a fading moon; and finally, fatigued after a day’s work in the hot fields, returning home at dusk with his face scorched by the sun, his arms stung by mosquitoes, his boots and clothes grimy and malodorous.

  Seeing Sebastian come home made Joseph sad, even made him feel guilty. But his compassion shifted to alarm whenever Sebastian suggested, as he often did in spiteful moments, that this grim existence might also represent Joseph’s future; for Joseph feared that this could be true. There was no one to prevent it. Joseph’s father, away in America, was a stranger he could not rely upon. And Joseph’s mother believed that there was nothing odious about farm labor, having herself been reared on a farm; indeed, Marian Talese considered farming a more practical livelihood than working as an unpaid apprentice in a tailor shop that made fine clothes for clients who, in this ever-worsening economy of southern Italy, might be unable to afford them. At this time she also had, in addition to Joseph, two younger children to worry about—a son of five and a daughter of three—and her husband’s irregularly arriving checks from America (where he was sometimes laid off) made her especially appreciative of the coins and comestibles that Sebastian earned on the farm from his affluent but hardly generous grandfather.

  While Grandfather Domenico fancied himself an extremely just and religious man, even Joseph knew that he did not believe in charity. Domenico believed in bone-wrenching labor and long hours of sweat—a belief he had impressed upon the tired body and embittered soul of Sebastian, who, as time went on, was beginning to complain to his mother about the unjust conditions of his life.

  One evening, as Joseph sat at a small table doing his homework in the second-floor bedroom he shared with Sebastian, he overheard his brother downstairs pleading with their mother: “Why am I the only one around here who has to wake up with the chickens and ride a mule with those old men to the stinking farm?” Hearing her sympathize with Sebastian, Joseph became very nervous; and the next morning, without being asked, he got up with Sebastian at five a.m. to the sounds of their grandfather’s whip, and thus began a new policy of Joseph’s trying to appease Sebastian, to disarm him with a kindness that might reduce his resentfulness, to bow and cater to him in the manner that Francesco Cristiani often used on the most difficult customers in the store.

  It soon became a routine: Joseph would greet Sebastian with a polite good morning, then hop out of bed and bring in Sebastian’s work clothes that their mother had washed, then dried over the fireplace the night before; while Sebastian dressed, Joseph would return with a cup of coffee from the pot their mother had just brewed in the kitchen. As Sebastian sipped the coffee, Joseph would go out to the courtyard to gather more wood for the fire, wearing over his nightclothes an old sheepskin coat their father had left behind. From across the courtyard Joseph could hear the animals stirring in the stables, and the hoofbeats of his grandfather on horseback galloping back and forth along the cobblestone road on the interior side of the long wall, occasionally cracking the whip against the houses to remind everyone inside that a workday was about to begin.

  After carrying the wood inside, Joseph would return upstairs with a metal tray filled with charcoal that he carefully placed, one piece at a time, in the brazier that burned on the bedroom floor near the washstand that Sebastian was using. Not wanting to draw Sebastian’s attention unnecessarily to the different lives they were now living, Joseph kept his schoolbooks under the bed, and the Cristiani-made clothes that he wore each day to the store and to school hanging behind the closed doors of the armoire.

  When Sebastian had finished washing and dressing—usually in a sweater his mother had knit for him and the oversized secondhand workmen’s attire his grandfather had provided—Joseph followed him down to the kitchen, where their mother would have packed Sebastian’s lunch box with slices of sausage and cheese, peppers and figs, and half a loaf of dark brown bread. Their mother was a lively, small-boned woman in her thirties with graying dark hair that she pulled back into a bun; draped over her shoulders was a heavy wool shawl that hung almost to the hem of her long maroon skirt. Until recently, Joseph had thought that his mother was pretty. But lately her lean face had become quite drawn, almost pinched, and bereft of spirit; and except when conversing with Sebastian, she had little to say, seeming adrift in private concerns. A letter from their father had arrived a week before, but she had refused to let Joseph read it—which was just as well, for Sebastian had been in the room at the time, and Joseph knew from experience how sullen Sebastian became whenever Joseph reached for the mail from America and knowledgeably perused what they both knew was beyond Sebastian’s capacity to understand.

  Each morning, after he picked up his lunch box and kissed his mother good-bye, Sebastian would head for the door, and Joseph would follow him. In the weeks of Joseph’s placating new routine, neither Sebastian nor their mother had shown any signs of gratitude; but Joseph repressed any disappointment when, pulling the sheepskin coat more tightly around his nightclothes, he proceeded across the chilly courtyard toward the stable, where he would help Sebastian load the donkey carts with jugs of mountain water that the workers drank instead of the possibly malarial waters of the lowlands.

  There were usually at least a dozen men inside the stable bridling the horses, while others were outside along the fence packing the wagons, murmuring among themselves. A few of them would wave toward Sebastian as they noticed him lifting the water jugs, but they never seemed to be aware of the smaller figure of Joseph on the other side of the donkey cart. The men wore bulky sweaters over their rumpled trousers, and peaked caps or wide-brimmed felt hats that were faded and sweat-stained from endless hours in the sizzling sun. The outer soles of the men’s boots displayed small iron spikes that were intended to lend traction on the slanting, often slippery gravel roads that curved down from the village to the valley. But even on the flat ground around the stable, the men walked tentatively and slowly, as if suffering from arthritis or some other physical restriction.

  Although they all lived somewhere within the row of houses owned by Domenico and were related to him intimately or distantly—being his sons, his uncles, his cousins, the offspring of these or their in-laws—Joseph did not feel particularly close to any of these men, and he often had trouble identifying them by name. One individual whom he did recognize instantly was his grandfather’s distant cousin Pepe, a shy and spindly gray-haired man with a ruddy pockmarked face and skin that was scaly, almost reptilian—the result, Joseph’s grandfather had explained, of Pepe’s parents’ having sinned many years before against the moral laws of the Church. They had fallen in love, and concealed the fact that they were first cousins as they stood before the priest marrying them in a distant church near Naples; and subsequently, after returning to Maida, they produced an ugly, blemished child they called Pepe.

  Pepe was now in his fifties, his parents were dead, and the young women of the village always kept their distance when they saw him walking through the town, although he was never forward or impolite to anyone. During the day his only companions were the farm workers. At night, he was alone at the end of Domenico’s property, in a shack behind the last of the row houses, next to a poultry coop.

  Another man Joseph recognized was the rotund and genial Vito Bevivino, the only worker in the group who was energetic and zestful—which was perhaps
why Domenico maintained him as the farm’s foreman even though he was eighty years old. He was a widower who had been married to one of Domenico’s sisters; and now he was Domenico’s closest friend, maybe Domenico’s only close friend, among the kinfolk he employed. It was Vito’s traditional duty to emasculate two of Domenico’s choice pigs each year so that the animals would be sufficiently tender and tasty for the Easter feast that was held in Domenico’s house for the entire clan, including Pepe; and it was Vito’s duty each morning to organize the procession of family workers and animals for the seven-mile trek down to Domenico’s farm in the valley.

  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.”