by Gay Talese
Too confounded to reply, Joseph merely listened respectfully, as he always did when his grandfather spoke. His grandfather was like a philosopher to him, an antiquated deductive dogmatist who disregarded most of the views of the younger men of the village, and who also held in disfavor a few of Joseph’s teachers whom he considered to be too liberal with the students and too far removed from the traditional values of the Church. Joseph’s school had been run by the Church in the years prior to the 1860 revolution, an armed invasion of southern Italy led by the antipapist agitator General Giuseppe Garibaldi. In the prerevolutionary years, when a student was disobedient in class, he was forced to kneel at a distance from the other students during the daily prayers and to wear around his neck, on the end of a rope, a signboard on which was printed a description of his errant conduct.
But the current principal of the school discontinued the practice of signboards, kneeling, chanting and praying; and he brought into the school system young teachers who had been trained in Catanzaro, Cosenza, and the even more distant city of Naples, and were eager to develop a more modern society along the Socialist lines that had been envisioned by Garibaldi and other nineteenth-century Italian revolutionaries. Although Joseph’s teachers said nothing disrespectful about the Church, there were no longer any priests on the faculty, and the students were assigned books to read that portrayed Garibaldi as a hero and the revolution as perhaps the most auspicious event in Italian history. Instigated and financed largely by northern Italian aristocrats and a consortium of bourgeois radicals and youthful adventurers, the revolution finally absorbed the agricultural south into the more industrial north while reducing the temporal power of the Pope and confiscating vast amounts of Church land and property—such property as the old monastery that had been converted into Joseph’s school. But despite his grandfather’s grievances, Joseph privately liked his school and its teachers, a jovial group of young men who arrived for class each day wearing high-collared capes and colorful cravats, and who habitually smiled when they talked. They were perhaps the only people in the village who smiled a lot. The men and women Joseph knew among his kinfolk and their friends were invariably grim and solemn, if not as severe as his grandfather. Even the crowds he saw every day in the streets and the square conveyed the impression that they were preoccupied with problems or contemplating grave issues.
Why the teachers so often smiled bewildered Joseph, but he could not doubt the positive results that their friendliness and alacrity had on him as a student. In his first four years at school, he received the top academic medal in his class. In his fifth year—taking courses in mathematics, grammar, science, and history—he continued to earn the highest marks in his class on his quarter-term report card. This distinction would have meant more to Joseph had it impressed his grandfather, whose approval he so fervently desired. But after Joseph had brought home the report card, earning an embrace even from his mother, his grandfather merely glanced at it and nodded nonchalantly.
Domenico, as Joseph would later understand, was opposed to bestowing praise on individuals who were young and impressionable. Young people would profit more from the criticism of their experienced elders, he believed, than from receiving possibly head-swelling awards from liberal-minded teachers. The ancient proverb of the south—“Never educate your children beyond yourself”—still held meaning for Domenico, and he regarded patriarchal criticism as an antidote to youthful conceit. As a consequence, hardly a week passed without Joseph’s receiving carping comments from his grandfather about his tendencies, however slight, toward smugness or complaisance, vanity or pride, effrontery or unaccountability. The quibbling ranged from Joseph’s insufficient sharpening of the axe used for cutting firewood to Joseph’s slouched posture in church to Joseph’s mispronunciation of a somewhat ostentatious word that he had recently encountered while scanning one of the books in his grandfather’s library. The criticism was accompanied by threats of punishment when Joseph once strayed beyond the village walls on a Friday afternoon (a day of bad luck); and placed a loaf of bread upside down in a basket (also bad luck); and uttered a scatological word that he had overheard Sebastian using. And on those occasions when Joseph was sincerely contrite about his wrongdoings, such as the mishap to Mr. Castiglia’s trousers, Domenico usually exploited the situation to make him feel worse.
His grandfather had somehow become aware of the misdeed even before Joseph had returned home from Cristiani’s late in the day on that horrid Holy Saturday. Domenico had been standing alone on the path that led to his row of houses, wearing as usual his cape and wide-brimmed hat; and after Joseph had greeted him and tried to continue on his way past him, Domenico gestured with his hand. Joseph stopped and waited.
“An apprentice should know his job,” Domenico began, in a stern and solemn voice, “and should never defy the rules that wiser men have made. And yet you have defied those rules. And you have disappointed me very much. You, for whom I had high expectations, have shown signs of recklessness, stupidity, and, worse, insubordination.…”
As Domenico paused for a second, Joseph began to tremble. He feared that the next words out of his grandfather’s mouth would spell out the punishment he most dreaded—banishment to the farm with Sebastian. Before Domenico could continue, Joseph looked up and interrupted. “Grandfather,” he pleaded, “it was a mistake! It was the first serious mistake I ever made! I was not insubordinate. I just did not see that the trousers were hidden under the cloth I was cutting. It was my first mistake after doing many good things that you’ve never given me credit for.” Speaking louder now, though aware that he had never before been so direct toward his grandfather, Joseph added, despairingly, “I can never please you! Nothing I ever do is good enough in your eyes. You are always strict with me, harsh with me.” Sobbing now, Joseph said, “You just don’t love me.…”
His grandfather remained silent. He waited several minutes until Joseph had stopped crying. And when Domenico did speak, it was in a voice that was quite unfamiliar.
“I do love you,” he said, in the most sympathetic tone Joseph had ever heard. “But you are not yet old enough to understand this love. You confuse criticism with a lack of love. But the opposite is true. People who criticize you care about you. They want to see you improve. People who do not care about you hold no high expectations for you. They accept you as you are. They allow you to relax. They make you feel contented.
“People who do not love you,” he concluded, “make you laugh. People who love you make you cry.”
11.
Through the spring, the summer, and the autumn of 1911, young Joseph Talese continued his apprenticeship at Cristiani’s tailor shop, taking his position each day in the front of the store behind the large window, where, while sewing on buttons and basting seams, he watched the many pedestrians and horse-drawn vehicles in the street, occasionally wondering if the dreaded Mr. Castiglia and his equally fearsome bodyguard would ever return.
While the tailors in the back room ceased wearing the wing-kneed trousers every day, having convinced Cristiani that they were wearing them out, Joseph was warned not to interpret this change in policy as an indication of laxity. “Mr. Castiglia may return at any moment,” he was reminded by Cristiani. “You must remain vigilant. You are posted in the front room to warn us in the back as soon as you see him. You must keep one eye on the street even as you sew, which is a little trick that you can easily learn. I myself learned it when I was your age. My beloved father had once infuriated the late baron of Palizzi, who swore he would return to our shop with his sword when he learned that we had burned one of the sleeves of his tailcoat he had left to be altered, after a small fire had broken out in the workroom because of an exploding gas lamp. But I should not bother you with such details now. You have enough to worry about. You must worry about Mr. Castiglia. And your task is even more difficult now with Christmas upon us, and our streets more crowded than usual with shoppers and visitors. So you must search the streets with more care—and let out a loud yell
the instant you see Mr. Castiglia approaching our door.”
Joseph nodded, knowing he would have no trouble identifying Mr. Castiglia or the bodyguard if they did reenter the town. The remembrance of the Holy Saturday incident, though now many months past, was starkly vivid in Joseph’s mind; and since that dreadful day he had often been awakened in the middle of the night by visions of the corpulent Mr. Castiglia smashing through the shop’s front door with guns blasting and blood splattering, retaliating against the tailors who had so ignominiously deceived him. And as Joseph walked home after work he found himself studying certain faces and figures in the street, particularly those men with broad shoulders, thick necks, and large bellies; and there were moments when he would suddenly stop and hide in the shadow of a building, or lurk behind another pedestrian, as he saw in the distance a pudgy profile or a bulging stomach that reminded him of Mr. Castiglia. Pausing to catch his breath, Joseph would then move closer, slowly and guardedly weaving his way through the crowd—his heart pounding, his anxiety increasing, not knowing what he would do if the man he was stalking was in fact the gimlet-eyed gangster whom Cristiani had turned into a fool. But none of these individuals, on closer inspection, happened to be Mr. Castiglia—for which Joseph was most grateful; but he still continued to remain on the lookout, week after week, in accord with his master’s mandate.
Indeed, Joseph was becoming an obsessive observer of the people in the village, if not an outright snoop. He became intimately acquainted with their way of walking, their most common gestures, their style in dress, the extent of their wardrobe, the tone of their voices, the topics of their conversations, the gossip they were circulating. For the first time in his life Joseph became aware that most of the villagers were creatures of habit. They seemed to retrace their steps every time they took a stroll; they entered church each time from the same side of the staircase; they invariably sat at the same table at the sidewalk café.
Early each morning, through Cristiani’s window, Joseph watched the stout and brooding poet, Don Ciccio Parisi, shopping at the tent-covered market in the town square, selecting his fruit and vegetables as carefully as he presumably chose words; and also shopping in the market were many women in voluminous black shawls that reached to the ground, some with veils covering the lower part of their faces, a vestige of Arab influence, and children wearing small pieces of rock salt tied around the neck, amulets against the “evil eye.”
Climbing the slanted cobblestone steps overlooking the square was a firm-footed tall woman with her neck held high and her shoulders arched back; she walked with remarkable grace while balancing on her head a yard-long wooden plank stacked with shawls that she would try to sell to the people she met along the way. As they approached her she paused and curtsied, giving them a better look at the merchandise. After they had passed it by, shaking their heads, the woman straightened up and continued to climb the steps in her nimble fashion, moving toward her next prospective customer, and the one after that, with a patience that matched her poise.
Hurrying down the steps toward the market each morning, minutes after the church bells had signaled the completion of the Mass, would be the impish Padre Panella. A year before, with his most demure and devout parishioner, he had produced a child—or so Joseph had overheard a gossipy tailor allege in Cristiani’s back room.
Then there was the almost daily appearance of a six-piece band, loudly playing marching music in the market square while the king’s uniformed recruiters tried to enlist men to fight in Italy’s war against the Turks in Libya. Rarely did any volunteers step forward. Later in the morning the town’s teenaged bully, Pietro Mancuso, would gallop through the square in a wagon laden with barrels of olive oil, snapping a long whip which had often stung Joseph and other students on the back when they wandered along the road too unguardedly after school. Also passing through town almost every day were men wearing white flat-topped caps and belted embroidered green tunics and black boots—they were visitors from Vena, a neighboring village occupied by hundreds of unassimilated Albanians whose ancestors had come to Italy centuries before to escape their Moslem persecutors in the Balkans. These Albanian descendants who lived near Maida adhered to their ancestral language and style in dress, and they worshipped in a Greek Orthodox church, where the priests, unlike their Roman brethren on the Maida side of the mountain, were free to marry.
Among the other strollers Joseph observed daily from Cristiani’s window was the town chemist, Dr. Fabiani, whose apothecary was known as an after-hours gathering place for Maida’s Socialists and other antimonarchists; the wood sculptor Carmine Longo, who carved everything from guitars to church altars; and the town’s most recent widow, Maria Palermo, who walked slowly through the square wearing a black mantilla and ankle-length black dress while holding on to the arm of her similarly dressed spinster sister, Lena Rotella.
Lena, as most people knew, lived behind the Norman wall in a large building that sheltered children born out of wedlock. There were sometimes as many as a half-dozen infants in that building awaiting adoption. The illegitimate children were usually brought to the rear of the building late at night, being carried in blankets to a ground-floor window that was never locked. Inside the window, on a round table, was a wicker basket large enough to hold a child. The basket was always placed on the edge of the table next to the window. Midway across the table, suspended from the ceiling, was a black curtain that obscured the entire room beyond. After the window had been opened and the child was placed in the basket, the round table was spun on its pedestal, and the child was brought through the curtains into the arms of Lena Rotella or one of the women who helped her operate the orphanage and raise funds for its maintenance. The curtain was the women’s way of bringing some privacy to the act of parting with a child.
Joseph once knew a boy in school who, though not illegitimately born, had been reared in Lena’s orphanage. The boy was two years older than Joseph, and he was difficult to understand because of his stuttering. During his infancy, the boy’s mother had carried him in her arms one afternoon high up the mountain road toward the town of Tiriolo, where his father was employed as a tree-cutter and had just been seriously injured in a fall. Since the wife had no other means of transportation when she heard the news, and since the weather in Maida was very mild, she thought she could accomplish the journey on foot in three or four hours. But after she had walked for more than six hours, climbing higher and higher without reaching the peak where Tiriolo was situated, a snowstorm swept over the mountainside; and in the sudden inclemency and darkness of the late afternoon she found herself in the woods, lost and frantic. With her child in her arms, and no one around to assist her, she rested against a tree. The temperature began to drop rapidly. During the night it was below freezing. She took off her clothes and wrapped them around her child. That night she froze to death. But the boy was discovered by hunters the next morning and was rescued. The child’s father, permanently injured by his fall, placed the boy in Lena’s orphanage for a number of years—until, at ten years of age, he left Maida and joined his crippled father in Tiriolo, where the father—then working as a sedentary watchman for a timber company—had found him a job as a logger’s helper.
Another frequent sight observed from Cristiani’s shop window was the striding, elegant figure of the town’s most handsome aristocrat, Torquato Ciriaco, heading toward Muscatelli’s bar, where he would be served an espresso with a drop of grappa in a delicate white cup. Don Torquato was a gray-haired bachelor in his middle thirties who always wore derbies and silk-lined capes (made at Cristiani’s) and carried a silver-handled cane. But as the second son in a family that still adhered to the primogenitary practices of the past, Don Torquato would inherit none of his parents’ wealth during the lifetime of his older brother; and therefore, like most southern Italian gentlemen in his situation, Don Torquato had a mistress instead of a wife. She was a buxom servant girl who lived with her widowed father in a carriage house behind the Norman wall, not fa
r from Lena Rotella’s orphanage. At least twice a week Don Torquato visited her there, but he always returned later at night to his family’s palazzo near the square.
The palazzo was a dark granite structure with the Ciriaco coat of arms carved in marble over an arched entranceway; and it had immense front windows that were usually opened wide in mild weather, exuding classical music that young Joseph always paused to listen to in the evening on his way home. One evening Joseph heard what he later learned was the excellent flute of Don Torquato himself playing the overture to Verdi’s Joan of Arc. Joseph would remember the exquisiteness of that moment for the rest of his life.
Sometimes the music of an orchestra and the chatter of many people could be heard coming from the palazzo; and although the common women of the village never danced with men—the Church discouraged dancing as erotically arousing—it was rumored that the elite couples of Maida occasionally met in the Ciriaco ballroom and, with haughty decorum, would indulge in the waltz. It was said that after the couples had arrived the women would sit among themselves, while the musicians at the end of the empty dance floor played waltzes with patience and anticipation. Eventually, from across the room where the men had assembled, a gentleman would separate himself from the others and approach the circle of women from the rear; and, after singling out the woman of his choice, and leaning over her shoulder, he would whisper into her ear. Instead of turning to reply, she remained seated while lifting her hand mirror to her face, to glance at the reflection of the man who stood behind her—in accord with the ritualistic coyness that virtuous women of the region were expected to exhibit toward the opposite sex. But then, with a gloved hand slowly extended, she nodded her assent to be escorted onto the floor. While moving to the music, however, she held her body rigidly at a scrupulous distance from her partner’s, and she made every effort never to look directly into his eyes. One by one, each man would do the same as the first until the dance floor was crowded with stately, stiff-backed couples.