by Gay Talese
How his cousin would execute the plan was beyond Joseph’s imagination. While it was true that young men were regularly leaving the village unannounced, their departures were nearly all underwritten by the steamship companies and the factory bosses in America. Antonio would be going to Paris on his own. And so would Joseph. Where was the money coming from? How could Joseph slip away without the knowledge of his mother, his grandfather Domenico, and Sebastian? Joseph had great confidence in Antonio’s resourcefulness. But as Joseph continued across the square into the wind, holding his books and lunch in his bag tightly against his coat, he considered what would happen if he did leave.
Running away from home was not a casual undertaking. The constables would undoubtedly be summoned. He recalled hearing about the beating Antonio had received after the constables had come to the tailor shop carrying those fashion sketches for the king. Joseph could also foresee a furious response from his grandfather Domenico. What would his father in America think after he learned that Joseph had fled to Paris? Was it so different from what his father had himself done when he was younger? Yes, it was different, Joseph thought; his father had left at sixteen. Joseph had only recently turned eight. And at that age he was already engaged in a conspiracy with Antonio, an involvement that was making Joseph more nervous the more he thought about it.
Halfway across the square Joseph thought he felt the cobblestones vibrating under his feet. He looked around to see if other people in the square felt it. It was a tiny tremor, like an earthquake, but no one else seemed to notice anything different. His stomach lurched and he felt dizzy. Joseph had already lived through two earthquakes. He had been three years old during the first one, and six during the second. On both occasions most of the villagers had moved down to the valley to avoid the danger of flying rocks, some of which had already tumbled into the town from the higher hills and from building walls made unstable by the quake. The whole Talese clan, under the direction of Domenico, had lived under tents on the farm for a few days during the last one, and Joseph himself had vague recollections of torchlit evenings and throngs of people who took turns reciting the Rosary throughout the entire night. Joseph believed he had seen his father during the second earthquake, but his mother insisted that his father had been in America then, as he had been during the first earthquake. Joseph nevertheless recalled being face to face with his tall, dark-eyed father at some point during this time when he feared for his life, and it was then that his father had arrived to comfort him—and to give him a gift that Joseph would carry with him always as a memento. It was an envelope, tucked into the inside pocket of his overcoat on this very morning.
It was a green American dollar bill. He remembered his father appearing unexpectedly at night, a sloe-eyed, smiling man with an angular face and a moustache, wearing a pearl tie pin and a derby, looking every bit as handsome as his photograph on the wall of their home, holding the bill outstretched in the tips of his fingers. After folding the money inward, while still holding its ends, he abruptly stretched it out again, producing a resonant pop. “Listen to the snap of that paper!” his father had exclaimed, moving the dollar bill in and out like a little accordion. “Listen to the sound of a strong dollar that’s made of firm fiber!” Then he took an Italian lira note from his pocket, held it in front of Joseph’s face, and began to snap it back and forth in a similar fashion—except the note soon snapped in half. “Here in Italy we make the finest silk in the world,” his father had said, letting the torn lira note flutter to the floor. “But we still don’t know how to make strong money.” Then he handed the dollar to Joseph. “Keep this,” he said, “and one day spend it in America. You will buy something wonderful.”
When he arrived at school, Joseph climbed the high marble steps and passed through the arched entranceway. The school had once been a monastery. The corridor was wide and dark, and the walls so thick that Joseph could no longer hear the blustery wind, the hoofbeats, and the harness bells. At the far end of the corridor, dimly visible in the candlelight of two black metal chandeliers, Joseph saw the assembly hall, in which dozens of students were lining up according to grade, waiting for the principal to begin the roll call. There were almost sixty students registered in the seven grades. All of them were boys, ranging in age from four to fifteen. The girls of the village attended a different school, located on the other side of the square, in the wing of a building that was once a convent.
As he went to take his place in line, Joseph nodded greetings to a few of his schoolmates. There was Francesco LaScala, an affable boy who worked before school each day in his grandfather’s carriage repair shop. There was Giuseppe Paone, a diffident and cross-eyed youth who began the day helping out at his uncle’s vegetable stand in the square. And there was Vincenzo Pileggi, a barber’s apprentice who appeared at school each morning with a pomaded pompadour and a garnet ring on each pinkie, and who marched in the town band on ceremonial occasions, holding a clarinet that he did not know how to play. Nearly every boy worked at a job before coming to school, and for this reason the roll call commenced at nine o’clock and not earlier. With the arrival of the principal, the students stopped talking. He was a stout and bouncy broad-shouldered man who almost waltzed across the platform, trailed by his flowing maroon cape, and high on his aquiline nose was perched a silver pince-nez. His large azure-colored eyes were penetrating and yet reflected a friendly twinkle, and his lofty forehead rising above his jowly pink face was fringed with thinning reddish hair that failed to cover the center of his balding crown. He was a descendant of an old family of Socialist educators and politicians—one of them the courageous antimonarchist mayor of Maida during the prerevolutionary days, when southern Italy was controlled by Spanish Bourbon kings—and his name was Achille Schettini. But in addressing him, the students used only his Christian name preceded by the Spanish title of courtesy that was preserved in his land. He was Don Achille.
“Good morning, students,” he said, smiling down from the platform, holding under his arm the leather-bound registry containing everyone’s name and attendance records.
“Good morning, Don Achille,” they answered in unison.
“First, let me compliment you on braving the weather and getting to school this morning,” he said, surveying with apparent satisfaction the seven rows of boys standing before him. He had recently made impassioned speeches in the square urging parents to help him reduce the high truancy rate, arguing that the better-educated pupils would most likely become the richest immigrants—an argument that had perhaps appealed to many mothers whose semiliterate husbands overseas had often complained of being cheated financially by their more educated countrymen who supervised the Italian work gangs in America.
“And I would also like to thank you students for making greater efforts in your classes this term,” he went on. “All the teachers have told me that when the term ends this week, higher marks will be given throughout the school in mathematics and science, grammar, geography, and especially history.”
He smiled at the reference to history, for it was he who taught these classes—and he did so with such oratorical gusto, with such a robust recounting of history’s heroes and villains in picturesque settings, that Joseph was always sorry when the daily class was over. Joseph virtually escaped from his own life while sitting in Don Achille’s class, which was the first on Joseph’s morning agenda, and the principal added to the appeal of his course by offering guided tours on certain weekends to students who were interested in seeing some of the many historically significant sites that existed within a day’s round-trip wagon ride from the village gate.
Joseph had twice joined the tour in recent months, viewing from his teacher’s hay-filled wagon along the coastal roads in the neighboring hills an assortment of ruined Roman walls and Saracen towers, Byzantine domes atop crumbling churches, Norman castles with toppled turrets, and a single Doric column that was all that remained of a once grand Temple of Hera. “Here is where civilization began in Italy,” Don A
chille had declared during the first tour, climbing down from the front bench of the two-horse wagon and standing at the base of the column with an arm outstretched. Grinning broadly, he added: “This was built six centuries before Christ by my ancient ancestors who sailed here from Greece.”
Later, as he stood along the rocky gully of a small river, Don Achille had directed his students’ attention to a clump of moss-covered boulders rising above the surface, and he announced in his stentorian voice: “Behold the burial place of the barbarian king Alaric, who sacked Rome in 410 A.D., and who abducted the daughter of the Emperor Theodosius, and who ultimately died of fever here as he was scheming to loot the Sicilians. After his barbarian soldiers forced the local populace to block the natural course of this river, and to build a royal sepulcher on the riverbed to contain the king’s body and his booty, the soldiers then massacred all the laborers and hurled them upon the sepulcher before restoring the water to its natural channel.” As Joseph stared timorously at the river with his classmates, Don Achille intoned: “Such is typical of the many atrocities that mark Italian history.”
Farther along on the tour, after informing the students that they were traveling the same route used in the twelfth century by Richard the Lion-Hearted and his knights when they headed south from Salerno toward the Holy Land and the Third Crusade, Don Achille stopped the wagon in front of a well-preserved but totally abandoned feudal castle. This was one of many castles in southern Italy that was occupied during the thirteenth century by the Emperor Frederick II, a restless king who controlled not only Italy but much of the rest of Europe from his court that moved constantly from place to place. In addition to being the sovereign of a vast army, Don Achille emphasized to the students, King Frederick II had been an individual of artistic sensibilities and boundless intellectual curiosity. He spoke six languages fluently, and filled his court with a worldly representation of philosophers, mathematicians, physicians, astrologers, musicians, painters, and poets. He himself wrote poetry in Italian that was acknowledged in the following century by no less a practitioner than Dante Alighieri; and King Frederick’s interest in the dissemination of knowledge facilitated the construction of several Italian centers of learning, including the University of Naples, which he founded in 1224.
“Frederick was the first man of the Renaissance,” Don Achille had told his students, who sat around him in a circle on the grass in front of one of the parapets. “The first intellectual awakening of Europe after the Middle Ages occurred not in such northern cities as Florence, but right here in southern Italy, within the walls of such a castle as stands before us today.”
The king was born in the Italian town of Jesi, uphill from the Adriatic coastline, in 1194. His Norman mother, Queen Constance—whose forebears had invaded and conquered southern Italy more than a century before—had been traveling with her entourage toward Sicily from Germany, “when suddenly she was forced to delay the journey because of her birth pangs,” Don Achille explained, reading from his historical notes that he always brought with him on tours. She had been more than forty years old and childless at the time, and she knew there would be much skepticism in the gossipy courts of Europe about her capacity to have a child at her advanced age. This was an era in which women were frequently mothers at fifteen. And the queen was even more concerned that her sudden childbearing in the remote town be verified by numbers of witnesses and chronicles so that there would be no doubt about her offspring’s legitimate rights to inherit her royal domain, and that of his father, the German king Henry VI, whom she would conspire to poison fatally a few years later. So the queen decided to deliver her child in the public marketplace of Jesi, under a large tent, into which she invited all the town’s matrons. “They arrived in great numbers,” Don Achille continued, “and later they applauded the birth of the future king—who, in the early hours of his existence, was carried outside into the crowded square by his barebreasted mother, who suckled him within view of hundreds of hushed men and women.”
The students were also hushed as they sat listening to the tale, and Joseph was embarrassed as well by the vision of the queen standing barebreasted in a public square. But without pausing, Don Achille continued to elaborate on the boyhood of the future king, explaining how Frederick grew up in the exotic surroundings of the Palermo court, where the walls were decorated with Norman shields and Oriental tapestries, and how as a young man he wandered through the teeming and dusty streets of the city, where he was attracted to the lute sounds of the Arab quarter, and to the dancing girls with snapping fingers, and to the elderly sages from whom he later learned to speak and read Arabic. Frederick also took long walks through the lush royal park that—once the pride of Moorish sultans, and still a Mediterranean preserve of rare African animals and birds—emitted the pungent aroma of citrus groves and bay trees and evergreen shrubs that sprouted blue-black berries and pink flowers.
In time the future King Frederick became a naturalist, as keen an observer of wildlife as he was an expert young horseman and jouster; and even after he had assumed his imperial responsibilities, and built on the Italian mainland such castles as still existed in southern Italy in 1911, he always journeyed in elaborate caravans that included birds and other animals, Arab dancers, and other reminders of his youth. Indeed, Frederick’s movements through the towns and villages of Italy, including Maida, recalled less the equipage and retinue of Europe’s most powerful king than the menagerie and grotesqueries of a traveling circus.
“First came the light cavalry on Arabian horses accompanied by Eastern music,” Don Achille elaborated sumptuously, referring to his notes, which he seemed to have memorized, “and then came the quick-stepping special breed of camels from Babylon; and then, balanced on poles that weighed on the shoulders of black eunuchs, were the palanquins in which lounged the silken figures of King Frederick’s harem. Several paces back, far enough to allow the road dust to settle, came the mounted procession of knights and courtiers, and behind them a jumbled assortment of court musicians and attendants, astrologers, magicians, dwarfs and other jesters. And then, more paces back, riding on a black charger, sitting upright but not rigidly, came the king himself. The crowds of roadside spectators never had trouble identifying Frederick because of the deferential treatment accorded him by all the other horsemen, and yet he called no attention to himself.
“His traveling attire was usually a modest brown belted huntsman’s outfit that fit snugly over his lean body; and his most distinguishing features, since he was beardless and rarely wore a hat, were his high forehead and auburn-colored hair and the almost hypnotic way in which he directed his blue eyes toward the objects of his concentration—a hawkish manner as natural to him as it was to the flock of his pampered falcons that followed him in the cavalcade, dozens of them strapped to the gloved wrists of tunic-uniformed pages, the falcons’ aerial fury grounded and contained under the leather hoods that King Frederick himself had designed. Walking behind the pages were Arab grooms guiding the horse-drawn wagons that carried cages of lions and lynxes, leopards and cheetahs, rare birds and the high-strung imperial hounds with coats made lustrous from attentive brushing. Then came the king’s imported African giraffe, the first such creature ever seen in Europe, followed by the lumbering imperial elephant, on which was seated, in a wooden tower, a mahout and two Arab crossbowmen.…”
Joseph was mesmerized by the recital, and when he returned home from the tour he could think of nothing but the king’s cavalcade, which passed through his dreams that night and the next. When Don Achille later described to the students Frederick’s sudden death of acute dysentery in 1250, a death that was foretold by the king’s astrologer, Joseph felt the event in an oddly personal way; and he had a lasting image of the majestic procession that had carried the king’s body through southern Italy in a purple porphyry coffin into the cathedral in Palermo, where it was dressed and buried in a gold-embroidered linen garment and a red robe decorated by brocaded imperial eagles and clasped by emerald a
dornments.
Within two generations of King Frederick’s death, Don Achille had told the students, the realm would follow him into extinction; the king’s sons were either undermined from within their own forces or were overwhelmed by elements invading Italy—and the fate of the king’s grandson Conradin was tragic in the extreme. Conradin was only sixteen when he tried to rally an army to regain the crown, and Joseph and his classmates identified with the struggling young prince as he battled against the superior legions led by Charles d’Anjou, a French nobleman and papal favorite who had been invited into Italy by the Pope to destroy the last legitimate male link to the often sacrilegious Frederick.
“Prince Conradin was a courageous youth but an inexperienced and naive military commander,” Don Achille explained. “And one day as Conradin and his aides were resting at their secret headquarters—the prince was actually then engaged in a game of chess—their whereabouts were betrayed, and the French attacked, and soon Conradin was dragged off with his aides to face Charles d’Anjou, who had already gained control of Naples. Conradin and his friends were immediately tried and convicted of being enemies of the Holy Church and traitors to the ruling crown, and they were sentenced to die publicly in Naples next to the Church of the Carmelite Friars. Conradin protested to Charles d’Anjou that his friends were guiltless, and he begged that their lives be spared. But this appeal was dismissed. Conradin then asked that he be allowed to die first, so that he would not have to witness the execution of his friends. This request was also rejected.
“And so, days later,” Don Achille read somberly to his qualmish but attentive audience, “Conradin and his friends climbed the steps to the platform in the shadows of the church, where a large crowd of spectators had gathered. And there, one by one, Conradin’s friends were beheaded—and as each head fell, Conradin stopped to pick it up and kiss it. Finally, Conradin stepped forward to bend his own head toward the blade. But before he did so, he tossed his gloves in the air, out toward the gasping crowd—a farewell gesture from the last survivor of King Frederick’s dynasty in Italy.”