by Gay Talese
At twilight they arrived. Domenico was waiting for them behind the wall near the front gate. Their dark veils concealed their faces as they bowed slightly and followed him along the cobblestone path and up the side steps into the living room on the second floor. Domenico could hear from across the courtyard the voices of his returning farm crew, the neighing of the horses, the barking of Guardacielo’s dogs. The nuns moved soundlessly behind him, and Domenico was confident that nobody had spotted them as he ushered them into a large room where Ippolita was waiting.
The oldest nun introduced herself to Ippolita as Sister Carmela, but the other two nuns kept their heads bowed and remained silent. Refusing Domenico’s offer of something to eat or drink, Sister Carmela quickly surveyed the room. Then she walked down the hall and looked into the main bedroom, and, seeing the statuettes in the wall niches and the crucifix atop Domenico’s bureau, she said: “Here is where we should be.”
After summoning everyone into the bedroom, she directed that Domenico and Ippolita kneel in the far corner, while she and her companions would kneel together at the foot of the altarlike bureau, which held candles in tiny crimson glass cups.
“You must concentrate completely on each word of our prayers,” Sister Carmela told Domenico and Ippolita, “and one thing more—I will need some of your valuable articles so that they may be multiplied to many times their worth.” Seeming perplexed, Ippolita glanced toward her husband. Before he responded, Sister Carmela pointed her right hand from under her veil toward the rings on Ippolita’s fingers, saying: “Those will be fine, and also your earrings. And some of those gems that I see over there on that other bureau near the jewelry box.” Ippolita again looked quizzically at her husband. But he paid no attention as he walked to Ippolita’s bureau, fetched all the gems he could gather in his palms, and then handed them over to the nun, who had meanwhile pulled a black silk scarf from out of her habit and formed it into a little bag. Into this bag she placed the gems Domenico had given her, and also the jewelry he then directed his wife to remove from her ears and fingers.
“Thank you,” said Sister Carmela, examining each piece before depositing it into the bag. “This jewelry will remain under the silk in front of the crucifix on this bureau for the entire evening. By sunrise, if you do not touch it, and if we have said our prayers properly, the jewels will have expanded to twenty times their size and value. And now, let us all kneel and begin the prayers.”
Domenico did as he had been instructed, taking his place in the far corner of the bedroom, kneeling next to Ippolita, while the three nuns knelt facing his bureau and began the Lord’s Prayer. Sister Carmela’s voice rose above the others’, and as she continued to lead the prayers through the first decade into the second, Domenico became aware for the first time of her strange accent, one that he had never before heard in this region or any other.
But then he concentrated on the prayers, as the nun had requested, and soon he closed his eyes and felt himself comfortably adrift in the repetitious familiarity of the Rosary—while his wife, unaccustomed to kneeling, fidgeted in place next to him and kept both eyes open. In front of her she saw the backs of the bent nuns silhouetted in the candlelight, and she heard their blended voices and the slight rattling of their beads as they progressed from prayer to prayer without any indication of fatigue or tedium with the singsong sameness of it all. Ippolita did not join them; and since her husband’s eyes were closed she did not move her lips for his benefit. She thought only of how empty her hands felt without her rings, and wondered how much longer she could remain in this painful position on the hard stone floor. She quietly recited poetry to help pass the time, and also began to count the number of her cousins in the Gagliardi family, and had reached close to forty when she suddenly became aware in the reddish light that Sister Carmela’s right hand was reaching toward the bureau where the gems were stacked under the silken cloth.
Ippolita held her breath as she noticed that Sister Carmela was placing what resembled an acorn under the cloth while removing a few gems and slipping them into her habit. Ippolita watched this happen again: the nun tucked another acorn under the cloth in exchange for more gems! Finally, as this was about to be repeated once more, while the praying continued unabated, Ippolita screamed: “Thief!”—and she also poked her husband in the ribs with an elbow to arouse him from his prayerful reverie. “The nun is stealing the jewelry!” she exclaimed. Domenico jumped to his feet and lunged forward to grab Sister Carmela by the shoulders, seeing for himself that she held a few gems in her fingers.
“Take your hands off me!” Sister Carmela demanded, as her companions shrieked and tried to get up and run toward the door. Domenico threatened them with his fist, kicked the door closed, and almost in one motion reached for his shotgun that had been hanging behind the door. Pointing the barrel toward the nuns, he said: “Stay kneeling as you were.”
While Ippolita ran out to get help from his relatives along the row, Domenico kept the nuns under gunpoint. The two younger nuns resumed praying, while Sister Carmela stared at him icily and spat out harsh-sounding words that he could not understand.
Soon the police arrived, and the nuns were escorted to the local station house. There they were later visited by the monsignor of the parish, who, after interviewing them, told the police: “They are not nuns. They are gypsies. They have stolen their clothing from a convent in Catanzaro, and they have practiced this trick on other devout people.”
After spending a night behind bars in the dungeon of the Norman castle, the masquerading nuns, still wearing their habits, were manacled and transported by carriage to be tried before the magistrate in the provincial capital. Domenico and Ippolita were among the crowd of villagers who gathered outside the castle to witness the gypsies’ exit. Behind his back, there was much tale-bearing and joking among the villagers at Domenico’s expense. It had been his avariciousness that had lured him into the gypsies’ ruse, they pointed out. Ippolita herself refused to discuss the episode with anyone. After she had recovered her gems and placed the rings back on her fingers, she resumed her life with Domenico as before, making no further mention of the gypsies and, of course, not questioning his belief in miracles. She had been married to him for nearly forty-three years, and during that lengthy period she had not seen, nor did she expect to see, much change in his nature. She did not expect miracles.
She had met him, ironically, inside a church. It was during a sunless Sunday morning in early March 1867, a day when limited light streamed down upon the parishioners through the windows of the church in Maida. Ippolita sat next to an older female cousin, privately commemorating the first anniversary of her father’s death. In the course of two years, the almost twenty-year-old Ippolita, an only child, had lost both her mother and her father. Her mother, Teresa, had died of influenza at the age of thirty-nine. Then her father, Giuseppe Gagliardi, who was thirty years older than her mother, died of a heart ailment that had doubtless been aggravated by the unexpected death of his younger wife and after much anguish over the failure of his banks, small branches of the Banco Nazionale, which had been financially shaken by the 1861 fall of the Bourbon dynasty.
Since the death of her father, Ippolita had been living in Amantea with the cousin who had brought her to church this morning, Michelina Gagliardi. Michelina was thirty-two, and the administrator of a church hospital for the blind, located between Amantea and Maida. But in the spring, Michelina planned to marry an emigrant and move with him to Argentina. Ippolita did not know where she would live after that.
While Ippolita had an inheritance from her parents, her father’s quarrel with the patriarch of the Gagliardi family in Vibo Valentia, when Ippolita was thirteen, had prompted her parents to move almost forty miles up the coast to Amantea; and as a result she had lost contact with the main branch of the family. It was that branch that controlled the social and political life of Vibo Valentia. Its patriarch was Marquis Enrico Gagliardi, who was the town mayor, the tax collector, the commissione
r of real estate administration and permissions, and the owner of the tuna industry that employed dozens of fishermen and vendors along the waterfront of the neighboring village of Pizzo. The marquis’s aristocratic title and the foundation of his wealth stemmed from his grandfather Luigi Gagliardi, a lawyer who during the 1780s had skillfully managed his stepmother’s baronial estate and then—solidifying his wealth as he curried favor with its source—had married his stepmother’s least beautiful daughter, Beatrice, with whom he had eleven children.
Luigi had lived in a grand palazzo in Vibo Valentia with his family and servants, and had also welcomed into his household his slightly infirm cousin, Vincenzo Gagliardi, a courtly man who would become the grandfather of Ippolita. Vincenzo had been born in 1760, the congenitally crippled son of a brother of Luigi’s late father, Domenicantonio; and Domenicantonio had adopted Vincenzo after the latter’s immediate family had perished in the earthquake of 1783. Despite his physical handicap, which caused a gimp in his left leg, Vincenzo got around very well with a walking stick, and he traveled by carriage many miles each day as a property appraiser and tax assessor for the Spanish Bourbon crown. Often he was called upon by the local magistrate to arbitrate some of the boundary disputes that, since the earthquake, had provoked years of litigation among the land barons of the region; and because of Vincenzo’s fairness and diplomatic manner, he not only negotiated many settlements but also made several friends among the claimants.
One of Vincenzo’s friends was the stately wife of Duke Nicola Ruffo. Her ill husband, stricken with an apoplectic fit during the earthquake, was cared for by a young woman who had grown up on the property, the beautiful, dark-haired, blue-eyed daughter of the head caretaker of the Ruffos’ estate. Her name was Maria Aversano, and Vincenzo soon fell in love with her. Her father, who had recently died, had lost his entire family—except for then six-year-old Maria—in the 1783 earthquake. She had survived the trauma in the protective arms of the duchess, who treated her as a daughter throughout her girlhood. Maria gradually assumed the duties of caring for the sickly duke.
Maria Aversano was sixteen when she first met Vincenzo Gagliardi, during one of his early visits to the mansion, and they were initially drawn together by the shared experiences of being the survivors of families largely destroyed by the great earthquake. Later, when they acknowledged their love to the duchess and their intention to marry, she helped with the arrangements and held the wedding in the mansion. Before the eighteen-year-old Maria had left the Ruffo estate near Maida for the neighboring highlands of Vibo Valentia with her husband, the duchess gave to the bride—and future grandmother of Ippolita—a wedding gift of valuable gems.
There had been a trend toward greater equality and caring between the social classes in southern Italy during the 1790s; the rigid rules and customs that had long distinguished the nobility from the commoners had begun to erode. Part of this change was the result of the French Revolution, which instilled much fear and uncertainty within the Spanish Bourbon court in Naples. Consequently the king’s advisers tried to pacify the people with hints that a liberal constitution was in the offing, and they also suggested that the earlier policies of land reform and ecclesiastical taxation would be revived, despite the threats of those clergymen who had cited the 1783 earthquake as God’s reaction to those policies.
But a more democratizing influence on the south than France’s bloody revolution had been perhaps the earthquake itself. In a single February day thirty thousand people had died; the homes of rich and poor had been destroyed unprejudicially, and the survivors within all social classes were reminded of their common vulnerability and interdependence. During this time many palazzos were opened to the general public as hospitals and sanatoriums; noblemen were frequently seen serving their ailing servants; and the earthquake left for years thereafter a less restrictive social order. There was increased intermarriage between the classes, and there was less adherence to the tradition that had long limited a family’s wealth to the fewest members—the tradition of primogeniture, whereby the eldest son inherited the estates of both parents. This custom had left the siblings of the male heir economically dependent on his goodwill and generosity, or else they had to consider other means of supporting themselves. They might seek careers in the military or the Church; and if they married—many did not, and had children out of wedlock—they might marry into lower-class families that were prospering and seeking upward mobility. However, in instances where a firstborn son and heir apparent had chosen as his bride a woman from the lower classes, a “left-handed” wedding had often been insisted upon by the young nobleman’s family—a wedding in which the groom offered only his left hand to his bride as they approached the altar, making it clear to all witnesses that he was willingly forfeiting his rights to the family title and to an exclusive inheritance.
But such ritualistic obeisance to tradition was considered anachronistic in 1795, when Ippolita’s future grandparents, Maria and Vincenzo Gagliardi, went to live with Vincenzo’s wealthy cousin Luigi; and Luigi’s generosity was such that he not only provided the couple with spacious quarters in a wing of his home in Vibo Valentia but also made available to them as a wedding gift a new carriage with two horses.
While Vincenzo continued his career as a tax assessor for the Bourbon crown, and also performed accounting and other administrative services on the side for the entrepreneurial Luigi, Maria volunteered her usefulness around Palazzo Gagliardi. She helped Luigi’s wife, Beatrice, supervise the children, compensating for the servants’ now tolerated laxity, and she became a companion as well to Baroness Fortunata, Luigi’s stepmother, who occupied the largest bedroom suite in the mansion, and who had a hauteur about her that kept Maria on guard. Maria did not want the baroness to perceive her as a servant, or as the daughterly nurse that she had been to the senile Duke Nicola Ruffo. At times Maria feared that this was the role she was destined for, to care for the ailing and elderly nobility; and she wondered if the patriarchal Luigi, whose generosity seemed not entirely devoid of pragmatism, might have welcomed her into his household with this in mind, that she would look after his spindly white-haired patroness and stepmother—indeed, Maria could also wonder if her crippled husband, Vincenzo, had not found comfort in this devotional aspect of her life when he first met her at the Ruffo estate. These were thoughts Maria expressed in a gilt-edged diary the duchess had given her, after the duchess had taught her to read and write; and that book, into which she would later record her memories of Murat, would become part of her legacy to her offspring—offspring that, fortunately for her, arrived early enough in her residency at Palazzo Gagliardi to extricate her from whatever expectations of servitude her benefactors might have cultivated had she long remained a childless woman.
Maria’s first and only child was born at Palazzo Gagliardi during the winter of 1796. Maria named him Giuseppe, in memory of her father, the Ruffos’ caretaker. During Giuseppe’s childhood and early youth, he was reared in the grandeur provided by Luigi. But a decade later—after Napoleon’s army in 1806 had avenged its British-imposed defeat at the battle of Maida, driving the Spanish Bourbon king out of Naples onto the British-protected island of Sicily—a certain bickering arose within Palazzo Gagliardi between Vincenzo, a Bourbon loyalist, and his politically accommodating cousin Luigi. Vincenzo soon left the palazzo and resettled his family downhill in the seaside town of Pizzo.
Deprived of his Bourbon-sponsored career as well as the comforts of Luigi’s palazzo, Vincenzo lived modestly with Maria and young Giuseppe, ultimately finding work as a minor customs official in the Pizzo marine terminal building—a position supervised during this postwar period of loose French administration by an ex-Bourbon magistrate whom Vincenzo had known during his earlier days as a tax assessor for the now exiled King Ferdinand. Luigi Gagliardi meanwhile contrived introductions to the ruling French faction, and in late 1810 he gained audiences with Napoleon’s brother-in-law Joachim Murat, who was much taken by Luigi’s brio and buoyantly
opportunistic personality, finding it a welcome contrast to the stoicism of most hill-country Italians. But before Luigi could amass huge profits through his cooperation and participation in Murat’s many projects for improving living conditions in the southern countryside, Napoleon pulled his brother-in-law out of Italy to help lead the French army into Russia in 1812. This would prove doubly upsetting to Murat. He would fail with Napoleon in battle; and then, on returning to the throne he had been forced to leave for several months untended in Naples, he would find himself among ministers and courtiers who viewed him as an impotent Napoleonic beau sabreur, a man whose regal days were numbered and whose future use to them (and to Luigi as well) was negligible. At the same time, Murat’s British and Spanish Bourbon enemies in Sicily, as well as on warships floating near Pizzo and Maida, were marking time until his deteriorating kingdom was most vulnerable to an attack and most receptive to the return of King Ferdinand—who, while Murat had been freezing in Russia, was living in sunny exile at his hunting lodge outside Palermo, riding to hounds and submitting to the varied ministrations of his priestly counselors and his dark-eyed mistress.
By 1815, after Murat had led what was left of his loyal cavalry on a vainglorious attempt to unify the entire Italian peninsula, an attempt that succeeded only as pageantry, he slipped out of Italy, vacating the Neapolitan throne. It was soon occupied by Ferdinand, who returned triumphantly from Sicily, and the saga of Murat was now reduced to the final tragic act that would ensue four months later, when he would dramatically reappear on the beach of Pizzo on that fateful Sunday morning in early October.