Unto the Sons

by Gay Talese

  13.

  The seven rows of students stood silently in the assembly hall, as Don Achille held the leather-bound registry in his hands and, peering through his pince-nez, began to call the roll in alphabetical order.

  “Amendola?” he cried out in his deep baritone.

  “Presente,” responded the squeaky-voiced Vito Amendola, in the second row.

  “Barone?”

  “Presente,” replied Nicola Barone, a taller youth of more mellow modulation.

  “Cartolano?”

  “Presente,” said Franco Cartolano, the hefty son of a butcher, and a classmate of Joseph’s.

  “D’Amico?”

  “Presente.”

  “Gentile?”

  “Presente.”

  “Giardino?”

  “Presente.”

  “Giglio?”

  Silence.

  “Giglio?” Don Achille repeated, looking up and squinting over his pince-nez. Many students turned immediately toward Joseph’s row, for Gino Giglio should have been there. Gino’s father was a construction worker in America, and Gino lived with his widowed grandfather, his mother, and her three younger children.

  “Giglio has already been absent twice this week,” Don Achille said, seeming more disappointed than irritated. “He is probably ill,” the principal concluded, in a sympathetic tone. But then, as if not entirely convinced, Don Achille asked, “Has anyone seen Giglio around town in the last day or two?”

  There was murmuring within the rows of students. But no one came forward to answer directly. Joseph kept his eyes downward. Earlier this morning, on his way to Cristiani’s, Joseph had seen Gino in his grandfather’s blacksmith shop. Gino had been energetically banging a hammer on an anvil, with a cigarette dangling from his lips. Many young boys openly smoked cigarettes, which were banned in school, once they decided to drop out and work full-time. Joseph’s brother Sebastian smoked. So did the first-born sons in most other families Joseph was acquainted with, especially those in which the father was laboring overseas and the mother was struggling economically in the village with several dependent children. Such a woman was inclined to favor a supportive son who worked full-time to one who, in advancing his education, neglected his family. School attendance beyond the third or fourth year was considered an unaffordable luxury by a majority of poorer families; and despite the spirited lobbying of such dedicated educators as Don Achille, the politicians in the national government had so far failed to repeal the antiquated education act of 1877 that made school attendance compulsory only until the age of ten.

  “Giordano?” Don Achille resumed the roll call, after pausing to make a note in his registry.

  “Presente.”

  “Greco?”

  “Presente.”

  It took Don Achille about twenty minutes to complete the roll call. This chore could have been accomplished more rapidly had he divided it among the teachers, to be done before the start of their classroom sessions; but he seemed to relish the opportunity to appear in front of everyone in the assembly hall, exercising his prerogative as a principal who enjoyed large audiences and being the center of attention. He also liked the fact that his campaign against truancy was getting positive results. Smiling, he announced after the roll call that only six of the school’s fifty-seven registered students were absent today, and that the absentee rate had dropped this month to a record-low ten percent.

  After descending from the platform, Don Achille strode into the corridor with his right hand extended, and paused momentarily while his history students lined up behind him; then they followed him through the wide corridor toward the room where he conducted his class. Similarly, the students in the other grades were summoned by their teachers—Don Bartolomeo and Don Fabrizio, Don Carmelo and Don Enrico, Don Nicola and two faculty assistants who taught reading and writing to the younger students. Soon all the students had been escorted through the corridor into various classrooms, passing along the way two holy-water fonts that had been dry for decades and a large wall plaque that had been hung long before in honor of the ascetic priest, Giovanni Cervadoro, who had converted this seventeenth-century monastery into Maida’s first school in 1820.

  As Don Achille closed the classroom door, Joseph and his nine classmates sat in the wooden desks that faced the rostrum and, behind it, on an easel the oil painting of General Giuseppe Garibaldi. The painting, which was six feet by four feet and swayed slightly on the spindly legs of the easel, had been on display for more than a month, ever since Don Achille had begun lecturing on Garibaldi. It showed the bearded and plume-hatted general on horseback leading a battalion of red-shirted musketeers. Behind the portrait, the word “Risorgimento” was printed in large chalk letters across the blackboard. Risorgimento referred to the nineteenth-century revolution that Garibaldi had boldly personified, and which ultimately led to the unification of Italy in 1861. Now in Joseph’s class, as in schools throughout Italy during 1911—in accord with the wishes of the education minister in Rome—the Risorgimento was advocated as a subject for intense study, in the hope of cultivating a stronger nationalistic awareness among the young. This was, after all, the fiftieth anniversary of the unification. It was the Jubilee year in the life of a relatively new nation that had slowly evolved following centuries of chaos and decay after the fall of the Roman Empire. And Don Achille, whose passion for his subject required no encouragement from the education minister, had exceeded himself this year in communicating to his class the colorful, almost operatic saga that constituted Italian history and lent itself so readily to his penchant for melodrama.

  “Ready the horses, students, for our final ride with Garibaldi,” Don Achille began the morning session. “We shall gallop behind him through the hills and valleys of the south as he fights his way into the capital of Naples. We sense signs of melancholy in his mood, for the war is suddenly coming to an end. Up ahead, surrounded by royal guards, the king awaits his greeting. This is the king whom Garibaldi has fought for, but at this moment Garibaldi has doubts about his decision. Is this king worthy? Will this king be an improvement over the king Garibaldi has just driven off the Naples throne?… Oh, Garibaldi was a wise man,” Don Achille exclaimed softly. “Look into those sad and knowing eyes, and ponder that wisdom.”

  All the students looked up from their desks at the bearded, brooding portrait of Garibaldi, his saber on his shoulder. His eyes, which earlier had seemed confident, did indeed seem sad.

  The portrait of Garibaldi was a worthless work of art. It was amateur in the extreme. But it served Don Achille’s purpose. Convinced that students would relate better to history if they had a visual sense of the historical figures—what they looked like, how they dressed—Don Achille a year before had commissioned an earnest, if untalented, local artist (who happened to be his uncle) to paint portraits of certain kings, warriors, statesmen, and other bygone luminaries whom Don Achille planned to feature in his Jubilee year history of Italy, which would date back to the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans.

  When Joseph and his fellow students had attended their first class in the autumn of 1911, they were surprised to discover, hanging across the front wall of the classroom above the blackboard, three garish oil paintings that related to the Greco-Roman period. One showed the muscle-bound Greek warrior Milo, swinging a mace and leading his foot soldiers against the retreating cavalry of the hedonistic colony of Sybaris, which he destroyed in 510 B.C. Another painting depicted the renowned Roman orator Cicero, reclining with his eyes closed in a steam bath on an estate southwest of Maida, in Vibo Valentia, which the Romans built in 192 B.C. and the Arabs toppled ten centuries later. Also on the wall was a picture of the bowed figure of Hannibal, the loser in a drawn-out battle against the Romans, exiling himself from Italy on a small ship crowded with injured and downcast Carthaginians.

  “These paintings, and others that you shall see here in the weeks ahead, represent the diversity of the people who once lived among us and played a role in our history,�
�� Don Achille had then explained, as the students looked back and forth at the paintings without comment. “I also hope that these paintings will help you distinguish between the many leading characters who took turns trying to rule us. Because we live in the narrowest part of Italy, with little more than twenty miles of rocky land existing between our nation’s eastern and western shorelines, we have been regularly crisscrossed and double-crossed by seafaring invaders and so-called liberators from every part of the world. And thus we have tended to establish our homes as our fortresses, and to survive as best we could against the intruders at our gates. And yet we have also profited at times from the presence of these outsiders. They have enlarged our sense of the outside world. They have enriched our culture. They have made us more adaptable to change. ‘Change’ is a key word in our history—change for the better, change for the worse—as you will see from the changing pictures on our walls throughout this course.”

  Joseph’s mood had also changed regularly as he sat through Don Achille’s classes during the early weeks of autumn, listening to his teacher relate history through the re-creation of dramatic events involving the protagonists. While Joseph enjoyed the stories told about the reign of his favorite emperor, Frederick II, he had nightmares after Don Achille had described the beheading of Frederick’s grandson Conradin. Even Don Achille himself seemed to be affected at times by the persuasiveness of his oratory, turning around one day in class to point an accusing finger up at the portrait of the fifteenth-century Spanish monarch Ferdinand the Catholic—who financed Columbus’s expeditions to the New World—and declaring: “Oh, you tyrant! You master of the Inquisition! Not only did you allow ten thousand people to be tortured in Spain, but you sent your conquistadors to our shores in southern Italy, and what cruelty they brought us under the banner of their religion!”

  Don Achille’s face had remained red as he turned back to the class, and it took him a few seconds to gain his composure. “Excuse me, class, for speaking so disrespectfully to the king,” Don Achille then explained with apparent embarrassment to his students, who had been startled by his outburst, “but you must realize that the Spanish invasion of Italy has left a deep and lasting impression. Even now, centuries later, you can see the traces of the old Spanish influence in our architecture, which is similar to that in Spanish towns. And you can see it in the mantillas our women wear to Mass, and in the strictures of our religion, and even in the fact that I, as a principal of an Italian school, bear the title of ‘Don.’

  “You must never forget,” he went on, “that our ancestors in this part of Italy lived for the better part of three and a half centuries under rulers who were linked to the Spanish crown. Except for the brief rule of Austrian royalty in the early 1700s, and the even briefer reign by Napoleon Bonaparte’s relatives in Naples in the early 1800s, southern Italy was governed by viceroys who were members of the noblest families in Spain, most of whom had come to Naples after service in Rome as Spanish ambassadors to the Pope. So cruel were these Spanish authorities that even our word spagnarsi, meaning ‘to be afraid,’ refers to the Spaniards. When we are afraid we say, ‘Io mi spagno.’ When we say, ‘Do not be afraid,’ it is: ‘Non ti spagnare.’ But if we used these phrases in Rome, or Florence, or Milan, or other northern Italian cities that were never under Spanish rule, we would not be understood.”

  Dedicated as Don Achille was to enlightening his students about the Hispanicization of southern Italy, Joseph found this part of the course a bit boring and confusing at times (too many successors to the Neapolitan throne were similarly named Ferdinand or Francis); but when Don Achille’s lectures focused on the challenges to the Spanish Bourbon leadership, especially those challenges fomented by the red-shirted volunteer army led by the fearless Gesù guerriero named Garibaldi, Joseph suddenly was riveted while his teacher’s stirring words seemed to reverberate within the wooden frame of Garibaldi’s portrait, enlivening its face and figure, and transferring Joseph back to another time and place far more exciting than anything he could imagine in present-day Maida. Indeed, for five successive weeks, from November through mid-December, Joseph hurried to class each morning to the fancied sounds of reveille being blown by a red-shirted bugler; and even on this particular morning, when Joseph came to school enraptured by the possibility of escaping to Paris with Antonio, he nonetheless knew he would be saddened to leave Don Achille’s school. And particularly saddened to no longer hear the daily episodes of the great Garibaldi, for, as Don Achille said, the war against the Spanish Bourbons was coming to a close; King Francis II had just sailed out of the Bay of Naples, abandoning the palace to Garibaldi and his Redshirts, who would in turn relinquish it to a newly arrived king from northern Italy, Victor Emmanuel II—doing something that Joseph, had he been in Garibaldi’s position, would never have done. Why should Garibaldi step aside for Victor Emmanuel II? It had been Garibaldi and the Redshirts who had driven the Spanish Bourbons out of Italy, and to these victors belonged the prize of the palace and the right to rule. Who could have stood before the Italian people more majestically than Garibaldi? From Don Achille’s description, Italy had never produced a greater hero; and disappointed as Joseph was that his teacher’s lectures on Garibaldi were coming to an end, he knew that he would carry forever within him the story of this hero that each morning Don Achille had re-created so realistically, beginning at the beginning, when Garibaldi was no older than any student in the classroom.

  Don Achille’s Story of Garibaldi

  Our hero was born on July 4, 1807, in a house on the seashore of Nice—which, alas, had once been part of Italy … and like most of you in this classroom, he spent much of his early youth in frivolous pursuits, sometimes happily, and sometimes in tears. In his memoir he admits to us: “I was fonder of play than of study.” His mother was very pious. She insisted that he be tutored by monks, but their strictness exasperated him. His father, a sailor, was often away from home, leaving young Garibaldi free to wander with other boys and to experience things that many of us might have experienced ourselves: “One day I picked up a grasshopper, and brought it into the house. The leg of the poor insect got broken in my hands, causing me such distress that I shut myself in my room and wept for hours.… Another time I accompanied a cousin on a shooting expedition, and we came upon a poor woman who was washing clothes along the water of a ditch. How it happened I do not know, but she fell headforemost into the water, and was in danger of drowning. I jumped in after her, and succeeded in pulling her out. In after-years, I have never shrunk from helping any fellow creature in danger, even at the risk of my own life.…”

  At the age of sixteen, our hero goes to sea as a cabin boy with his father … and he remains a seaman for the next ten years of his life. In 1833, when he is twenty-six, we find him working as a crewman on a large cargo boat headed toward Constantinople … a boat that is also carrying a dozen red-robed, long-haired men who have just been banished from their native France as undesirable citizens. He introduced himself to these men, who called themselves Saint-Simonians. They were part of an organization that had been founded in the period of the French Revolution, and they hoped to create a society that provided equal rights for women, welfare for the poor, and greater personal freedom for everyone. Garibaldi spent much time in their company during the twenty-three-day voyage to Constantinople. The Saint-Simonians were polite, well educated, and excellent traveling companions. Although Garibaldi at this time of his life was feeling alienated from his religion and his homeland, he resisted the temptation of joining the Saint-Simonians. But he was forever influenced by their idealistic outlook, and by a book that they had given him that expressed their credo. The book would be near his bedside nearly fifty years later at the time of his death.

  It was not long after meeting this group that Garibaldi encountered a young Italian who was interesting but also very discontented; his name was Giuseppe Mazzini, and he had just formed an organization called Giovine Italia [Young Italy], which aimed to overthrow all the fore
ign factions that controlled various sections of Italy. Mazzini wanted to transform Italy into one independent nation.

  Our part of Italy, as you know, was then still under the control of the Spanish Bourbon monarchy that ruled from the palace in Naples. The land north of Naples belonged to the Pope, and the papal territories extended throughout the city of Rome and up the eastern side of Italy to within thirty miles of Venice. Venice and its environs in northeastern Italy were ruled by the royal Hapsburg family of Austria; and the Austrians also prevailed over much of Italy’s northwest, which included Milan. West of Milan was the Piedmont region, governed by the Piedmontese king in the capital city of Turin, where most of the ruling figures spoke French. The royal family of Piedmont also governed the former Republic of Genoa. South and east of Genoa were the small duchies of Parma, Modena, and Lucca, and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, which included Florence. Most of Tuscany and the smaller duchies were also under the political influence, if not the outright military rule, of the Austrian Hapsburgs, who, because they were Catholic and archly conservative, had the blessing of the Pope.

  Since the Pope also enjoyed the loyalty of the Spanish Bourbons in our part of Italy, the only region of questionable fidelity to the political interests of the Pope was the domain of the Piedmontese, particularly the port city of Genoa, which was the hometown of the young radical Mazzini and the headquarters of many of his antipapist, anti-Austrian agitators. While the Mazzini organization’s bomb-tossing and sniping at the Austrian garrisons that were spread across northern Italy were publicly disavowed by the royal family of Piedmont, its king privately approved of much of its activities because they cast doubts on any illusion that the Austrians were welcome in northern Italy. The Mazzinian anarchic tactics continued even at the times when Mazzini and his new colleague Garibaldi and other young underground leaders were temporarily driven out of Italy, which often was the case between the 1830s and the 1860s.