by Gay Talese
She screamed, terrifying Joseph and the other children, and alarming as well her relatives in the two flanking buildings; and within moments the entire row was astir with confusion and panic. In bedclothes, everyone leaned out of rear windows, or hastened onto balconies with gaslamps and torches, to stare across the courtyard toward the animal pens and poultry coops. Domenico and his son Vincenzo began to fire their shotguns up into the sky, hoping to scare off the intruder. Soon other screaming female voices joined Marian’s, as there appeared in the reflected light two more wolves scaling the stone wall, then moving toward the area where the domestic animals were enclosed. Since the spike-collared watchdogs had been leashed to chains for the night, the wolves went unchallenged, attacking many lambs and fowl that died quickly; others scampered and flapped about the courtyard trying to avoid the clutches of the pursuing wolves and the flying objects that were now being thrown down by the furious, yelling people in the houses. They threw pots, pans, boots, knives, and bottles; and Domenico and his son were now directing their gunfire to the targets—but nothing seemed to distract the wolves’ continued mauling of their prey. Four wolves had now been counted in the courtyard, and two others had earlier been seen dragging off the limp carcasses of lambs into the darkness beyond the stables.
Marian, having run from room to room bolting windows, searched futilely for a pistol in her husband’s bureau. Then she exerted the full strength of her lean body to shove a china cabinet against the locked door that opened into the second floor from the outside staircase. Finally, clutching a broomstick in one hand, and cradling her crying three-year-old daughter with the other, she stood wide-eyed and ashen behind one of the windows that looked down over the staircase. Although she was within view of dozens of Talese relatives who were now gesturing toward her from their balconies, shouting inaudibly in the din, there was no connection aboveground between their buildings and her own. She was isolated with her four children, feeling, as rarely before, forsaken by her husband in America.
Her son Sebastian tried to remain calm as he sat on the edge of the bed comforting Joseph and the six-year-old Nicola, who had run in from the adjoining room. But Joseph noticed that Sebastian’s hands shook as he kneeled to place chunks of coal into the brazier, and Sebastian suddenly blessed himself as a blast heard above the roof destroyed one of the stanchioned streetlights that stood on the other side of the wall in front of Domenico’s house.
The explosions and disruptions continued for much of the night, not only on Domenico’s property but throughout the village—from the low ground near Lena Rotella’s orphanage, to the high ground near the ruined abbey and the cemetery, and into the middle ground of the town square itself. There, watching from the torchlit balconies of the palazzos, many horrified villagers saw two entangled wolves rolling on the cobblestones, using their teeth and claws to fight over the bloody remains of a tiny lamb. Nothing could distract them—until a wagon of armed men, pulled by four horses, arrived to explode fusillades at close range. Only then did the voracious rivals fall away dead from one another and from the lamb’s sundered body.
Moments later more wagons appeared, carrying spike-collared watchdogs that were released in the streets to join the attack; and a posse of black-capped equestrians in hunting attire galloped through the square, led by Torquato Ciriaco, who, saddled on a prancing horse, held a pistol in the air and carried a jeweled sword at his side. Following Don Torquato’s group, in an open carriage driven by Maida’s barrel-chested chief of police, rode the town’s newly elected monarchist mayor, accompanied by his spinster daughter, who gestured with her hands up to the crowds to put down their weapons and cease throwing things into the streets—which now were so littered with household objects, rocks, and shattered glass that the horses were forced to trot in an awkward, side-stepping gait.
As the early-morning light exposed the town in sharper focus, seven wolves and several dozens of their prey were found dead in gutters, courtyards, alleys, and in the square. Six of Domenico’s lambs had been lost, along with four chickens. No wolf was found dead on his property. One wolf, its gray mangy remains riddled with ruptures, lay bleeding in front of the Farao palazzo. The animal’s haunted, undernourished face and body showed the depth of starvation that had driven it down from the mountainside.
It took two days to scrub the streets clean with scalding water, and to burn and bury the carcasses of the wolves and their victims in a ravine beyond the valley. The monsignor led a crowd of onlookers in prayers over the charred bones of the animals, and he gave special thanks to Saint Francis of Paola—whose statue was carried down the hill by eight men, including Domenico—for protecting human life from death, injury, or other mishaps. The mayor also appeared at the site to acknowledge the courage of his fellow citizens, and to comment that Maida—which during its long history had been overrun by an infinite variety of transgressors, although rarely before by representatives of the animal kingdom—had again proved its capacity to endure. As a precaution against the possible lingering presence in the hillside of those wolves that had not been shot, the mayor said, two new constables had just been hired to join the three-man Maida police force. Standing next to the mayor, the police chief nodded his approval. One of the new constables was his cousin.
After the wolf incident, Joseph and his family vacated their house and moved in temporarily with his grandfather next door. Joseph’s mother was still fearful of additional attacks, even though, as the cold weather passed beyond the region, there were no new reports of lurking predators. In fact, very warm weather suddenly arrived in Maida just before Christmas—hot moist winds of the sirocco returned from North Africa; and the villagers removed their capes and shawls as they swept up the last of the debris from around their doorsteps and courtyards and decorated their balconies with carved wooden religious figures and festive Christmas bunting wrapped around the railings.
The evening chorus of strolling holiday balladeers carrying guitars, mandolins, flutes and ribboned torchlights was a diverting sight to the entire community, and comforting to Joseph; and on Christmas Eve most of the village children were allowed to stay up to receive their gifts and attend the four a.m. Mass, passing along the way the Nativity scene and the bagpipers in sheepskin clothing playing their music. After Mass everyone gathered in front of the church, exchanged greetings and kisses, and visited not only the homes of friends but those of casual acquaintances as well. It was “open house” throughout the village on this night, and even the aristocrats opened their palazzos to the general public.
On entering the Ciriaco mansion, accompanied by his grandparents, Joseph saw for the first time the interior of the salon and ballroom that had been the locale of the merriment and classical music he had so often heard from the street; and he got his first close glimpse of the entire Ciriaco family in the receiving line, a dozen descendants of eminent but presently shrinking estates and depreciating dowries, dressed in timeworn gowns and tailcoats—and adorned by antique jewels and meaningless medals awarded by the now exiled Bourbon crown—welcoming warmly the effusion of local politicians, bureaucrats, artisans, farmers, and their kinfolk as if they were all cherished cousins. Then the Ciriacos’ valet, with an exaggerated bow, directed the long line of visitors toward refectory tables laden with sliced ham and stuffed eggplant, homegrown wine and imported liqueurs, a variety of fruits, cheeses, and cakes, and the crispy fried, sweet, doughnutlike zeppole that were a holiday specialty.
Joseph noticed that his grandparents were very relaxed in this setting. And indeed, Domenico’s reserved and confident moneylender’s manner, fortified no doubt by the fact that a few of the younger Ciriacos (including Torquato) were mildly in his debt, induced a certain pluckiness and perhaps undue familiarity on his part toward his titled hosts; whereas Domenico’s wife, the blue-eyed and genteel Ippolita—the progeny of a grandmother’s mésalliance long before with a secondary scion of the Gagliardi family of Pizzo—greeted her hosts with modesty and grace, as if assured of he
r welcome at such receptions as the one the Ciriacos were generously providing, at whatever strain to their solvency, on this bountiful Christmas morning.
Joseph’s mother never attended these festivities. By nature shy, and even more so during the prolonged absences of her husband, Marian preferred spending Christmas in the unornamented surroundings of her own parents’ house to visiting palazzos in the custody of her overbearing father-in-law. And so, while her favorite son and most frequent escort, Sebastian, helped her bundle the younger children into a carriage that would carry them downhill to the farmhouse of her family, the Rocchinos, she permitted young Joseph to accompany his paternal grandparents to the palazzos, knowing he liked to be with them at such social gatherings, wearing custom-made clothing and listening to accomplished musicians.
Maida was too small to support its own concert hall, but those professional singers and instrumentalists born and trained in the area who returned each Christmas to visit their parents were invited to appear as honored guests at various palazzos. And a kind of competition had developed gradually among palazzo owners, as each was eager to provide the finest music in the town. On this particular night at the Ciriacos’ residence there was a retired but still vibrant soprano who had been featured not long before at La Scala opera house in Milan; while at the Vitales’ would be heard a Mozart piano recital given by the son of a local music teacher who, as an emerging pianist on tour in northern Italy, had received acclaim as a soloist earlier in the year in Bologna.
At the Farao palazzo, the crowd was introduced to a robust young baritone who had recently made his debut at the San Carlo opera house in Naples, and was now, through the Faraos’ open windows, belting arias by Rossini and Donizetti across the square and into the not always appreciative ears of the owners of the Ciriaco and Vitale palazzos.
Along with the music and food, the hosts offered their guests brief sightseeing tours through the spacious houses and verdant courtyards. Wishing on his first visit to see all that he could, Joseph convinced his grandparents to ascend the grand staircases of three or four mansions before morning and, with countless other visitors, to traipse through the moldering but magnificent rooms with their frescoed walls, coffered ceilings, fading emblazoned tapestry, and ornately carved gilt Baroque furniture designed in Naples two and three centuries before, when that proud capital was the most populated city in Europe next to Paris, and in Italy second only to Rome as a center of patronage for artists.
On the walls of these deteriorating palazzos in Maida, as well as in hundreds of other palazzos in the towns and villages of the fallen kingdom, hung heroic portraits and other reminders of the affluence and style of old Naples: contented faces of the bejeweled seventeenth-century Spanish viceroys and the eighteenth-century Bourbon kings who ruled the realm; stoical faces of Christian martyrs who catered to the zealous Hispanic religiosity of Naples’ Catholic court; and other vivid depictions of men and women who personified the good life and the good death in those years prior to the defeat of the kingdom in 1861 by invading soldiers subsidized by northern Italian money and inspired by Garibaldi. The unification of Italy, as Domenico often emphasized to Joseph, did nothing for the south except sink it further into poverty and despair. Naples lost its throne, its autonomy, and its importance as a center of trade and patronage; and its once thriving seaport was now principally active as a point of embarkation for emigrants.
More than a million native-born Italians were already in the United States, with many others in South America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The overwhelming majority of these outflowing Italians were from the disenfranchised Bourbon kingdom of the south—farmers’ sons, for the most part, toiling in faraway factories and mines to support themselves and their families; and Domenico could only lament this situation and belatedly resent that so many of his fellow citizens back in 1860 had allowed General Garibaldi to think, on that warm day of his speech in Maida, that their applause was sincere. Domenico was convinced it was not.
And he could see confirmation of his belief all around him on this early Christmas morning, in these palazzos, where—in contrast to the Garibaldi plaque on the Farao palazzo’s exterior wall, and the sign bearing the general’s name in the public square—the interior walls displayed no heroic portraits or tributes to the conquering general. Inside the palazzos, close to the true sentiments and hearts of the people, were paintings and decorative tapestries that evoked a spirit of nostalgia for the old regime and for the Baroque period in which it flourished.
On the walls of the Ciriaco ballroom was a large oil painting of a procession of courtiers and cavalrymen leading the first Spanish Bourbon ruler of Naples, King Charles, into that city in 1734. And here, too, was a portrait of Charles’s son and successor, the devout if slovenly Ferdinand, who was chased into Sicily by the French, where he prayed to Saint Francis while his wife took opium.
In addition to the regal portraits there were many other mementos and relics of the old regime on display in the palazzos of Maida; and as the crowds of Christmas visitors continued the festive tour from mansion to mansion, their hosts seemed to take pleasure in explaining the historical significance of each artifact and heirloom.
At the Vitale palazzo it was pointed out that the enameled gold fan encased in glass atop the piano had once belonged to King Ferdinand’s wife, Marie Caroline, who had received it as a gift from her sister, Marie Antoinette. Also in the Vitale palazzo, hanging over a mantelpiece, were British muskets and bayonets that had been used during the 1806 battle of Maida, after which the victorious British commander, General John Stuart, stayed in the mansion as an honored guest.
A noteworthy victim of morbidly operatic years in Italian history was memorialized in the Farao palazzo by a diamond-studded gold snuffbox exhibited in a display case on the wall of an alcove. A member of the Farao family told the Christmas visitors that this snuffbox had been the property of Napoleon’s brother-in-law Joachim Murat.
Murat’s name was legendary in southern Italy. Although he was part of the secular French regime in Naples that closed down monasteries and banned chaplains from the military, as king he nonetheless held the dramatic interest of his Italian subjects with his theatrical flair in court, his chivalrous valor on the battlefield, and finally the melodramatic circumstances of his death—an event that he himself directed in the courtyard of a castle, downhill from Maida, in the village of Pizzo.
Murat died in 1815. Seven years earlier, in the autumn of 1808, having been placed on the southern Italian throne by Napoleon, Murat was greeted by cheering crowds who were dazzled by the sight of him riding through the triumphal arches of Naples attired in one of his many glittering costumes—a gold-embroidered tunic topped by a scarlet velvet cloak; riding boots of bright yellow leather; a scimitar-shaped sword with a diamond hilt; and a three-cornered hat with ostrich feathers and a diamond buckle. His long dark hair flowed in curling locks, while his otherwise youthfully pallid countenance was solemnized by a whiskered jaw bearing a scar—the sign of an injury from a pistol fired by a Turk during the French invasion of Egypt in 1799.
Murat had been at Napoleon’s side in that conflict, as he would be in many conflicts to follow—from the coup d’état by which Bonaparte seized control of the French government, to the disastrous march into Russia that presaged the decline of Napoleon’s entire empire. By the late spring of 1815, Murat had been driven out of Italy by forces loyal to the exiled King Ferdinand; and when the elderly Spanish Bourbon monarch returned to Naples from Palermo in June of that year, the Catholic populace accepted him as their ruler by divine right. In all the churches, Te Deums were sung; and when Ferdinand first appeared in the royal box at the San Carlo, the opera house built by his father, Charles, the audience stood cheering for more than half an hour. Ferdinand was very appreciative and moved by their reaction. There were tears in his eyes.
But four months later, in early October 1815, Murat left his hideout in Corsica and sailed south, past Maida toward the adjacen
t beachfront of Pizzo. He was accompanied by only thirty men in two ships; but—as the great Bonaparte had proved after escaping Elba—remarkable things were possible with a minimum of men. Murat believed that he had the charisma and power to repossess the Italians. He was under the illusion that as a king he had been loved, particularly in this area around Maida and Pizzo, where he had been enthusiastically welcomed whenever he passed through the valley with his cavalry and retinue.
It was nearly noon, on a bright Sunday morning, as Murat climbed out of his boat and walked knee-deep in the water toward the beach and the town of Pizzo. Church bells were ringing. The square was crowded with people going to Mass or taking a leisurely passeggiata. It was also market day, and dozens of noisy vendors were touting their wares under tent-covered wagons, and a small band was playing on the steps of the municipal building, over which was flying the recently unfurled Bourbon flag of King Ferdinand.
Crossing through the square, on her way home after attending an early Mass and completing her shopping, was the grandmother of Domenico Talese’s wife, Ippolita. Her name was Maria; she had been born in the countryside north of Maida in 1777, the daughter of the caretaker of a ducal estate. Maria had been living in Pizzo with her husband, an enfeebled but active municipal bureaucrat named Vincenzo Gagliardi, one of the unendowed younger sons of the prestigious Gagliardi family, which occupied a palazzo in the nearby clifftop town of Vibo Valentia.
As Murat arrived with his troops at the seafront edge of the square, and momentarily observed the preoccupied gathering of people moving back and forth before him (while his black boots and white nankeen trousers were still dripping with water), Maria was walking in his direction, carrying groceries and flowers, intent on arriving at her small house below the square in time to prepare for the visitors her husband had invited to lunch. With her eyes downcast, as modesty required, she walked right past the former king and his troops without any awareness of their presence, and she had practically disappeared down the stone staircase that led from the square to her house before she abruptly stopped, hearing what resembled the sharp popping sound of a pistol.