by Gay Talese
“But I have just read it,” Gaetano said, looking at him curiously.
“Well, then,” Mr. Donato continued, after a pause, “when will you be returning to Italy for the birth and the christening?” Mr. Donato was a travel agent as well as a mortician, earning almost as much from the first business as the second.
“I have no plans for returning,” Gaetano said, in a manner that Mr. Donato found odd and irritating. Having taken the trouble to locate him, Mr. Donato now saw no guaranteed reward in the sale of a steamship ticket. “But when I do get my plans in order,” Gaetano went on, more sociably, “may I contact you?”
“Yes, thank you,” Mr. Donato said with a smile. And when Gaetano offered to reimburse him for the expense involving the letter, Mr. Donato waved his right hand in the air in a grand gesture of dismissal.
He was confident that Gaetano would soon return to buy his ticket.
Three years passed before Gaetano returned to Maida. But during this lengthy separation, aided by the exchange of several warm letters and Gaetano’s generous financial support of both mother and child, a marital rapprochement was established that was perhaps more harmonious than if the couple had tried living together in the same country—as they never would during nearly twenty years of marriage and the birth of seven children.
Gaetano did what he liked to do best—he worked with stone, and traveled extensively, sometimes to Italy, sometimes around the United States—while his steadfast wife, joining the ranks of the white widows, remained firmly in the home of her choice, in the familiarity of her village, where she had more than enough income for her children and herself, and an unusual yet romantic relationship with an enigmatic husband whom she never knew well enough to find predictable. She idealized him when he was away and quarreled with him when he was home (which was rarely more than a few months every two or three years)—just long enough to guarantee that, after he had gone back to America, he would receive a letter saying that she was again pregnant.
While Gaetano always promised to return to Italy in time for the birth and christening of a new baby, he invariably failed to do so, and his offended wife soon found ways to retaliate. No longer following the village tradition of naming infant boys in honor of their father’s kinfolk (Marian had done this once in naming her first son Domenico; he would contract a fatal case of meningitis, and she would similarly name her last son Domenico), she proceeded in the absence of her husband to supply her other sons with names from her own family. Her second son, born in 1899, she named Sebastian in honor of her father, with whom she was exceedingly close and whom she visited almost every day at his farm. More than three years later, after her unpredictable husband had again failed to be on hand for the birth of the third son, Marian named the child Francis, after her father’s younger brother—a decision that so insulted the Talese family that many of them absented themselves from the child’s baptismal ceremony. One member, however, who did appear in church was Gaetano’s devout and superstitious sister, Maria, who begged Marian to rename the child, hinting that her obstinance could invoke the wrath of God; but neither the entreaties of her sister-in-law nor those of the parish priest who had married her persuaded Marian to change the new child’s name. When she finally did agree in 1904 to rechristen the boy Francis Joseph, it was at the urging of her father, who implored her to do so as a loving favor to him. But two years after the birth of Francis Joseph (whom the Talese family would address only by his middle name, the same as that of one of Gaetano’s younger brothers), Gaetano would again disregard his promise to be with his wife when the next child was born. This would occur on December 6, 1905, and there would be twin boys, one of whom died at birth. The twin who died Marian named after her husband’s second younger brother, Vincenzo; the one who survived she named Nicola, in honor of the saint whose feast day coincided with the birthdate.
When Marian bore her sixth child, a daughter, in 1908, Gaetano was ill with pneumonia in America, and was forgiven for his failure to be present for the birth and christening. But he sailed home unaccountably during the winter of 1908–1909, arriving with presents for the entire family and especially for his first and only daughter, Ippolita, named, of course, after his mother. He remained away from the United States for the next five months, not returning until the spring of 1909. But much of his time in Italy was spent outside Maida. Often he was said to be receiving medical treatments at a respiratory infirmary in Naples. At other times he was known to be in Rome, and as far north as Bologna, for reasons unexplained. He was restless, and often unhappy, while he was in Maida, and twice he was involved in unpleasant scenes in the town square.
Early on a spring evening, as Gaetano was playing cards for small stakes in the back of Pileggi’s butcher shop in the square, his father appeared unexpectedly and asked that Gaetano return home with him. Gaetano, who was now thirty-seven, looked up from his cards and frowned at his white-haired father. As Gaetano looked down to reconsider his cards with seeming concentration, Domenico took hold of the tablecloth and jerked it, sending several cards and glasses of wine to the floor. Without apologizing to the other men at the table, Domenico turned and walked out, ignoring the puzzled protests of the cardplayers. Caught in a silent struggle of indecision, Gaetano stared around the room without expression for a few moments; then he stood up and followed his father home, seething with anger.
Several days later, during the Sunday-afternoon passeggiata, as Gaetano, in suit, white starched collar, sprucely knotted polka-dotted cravat, and homburg, walked arm in arm with a male friend, he was aware of a group of elderly men looking at him and speaking in what he sensed were hostile tones. They were gathered on wooden chairs around a table outside the café, and as he circled toward them with his friend a voice was raised toward him contemptuously: “Who do you think you are? You’re not a gentleman.”
Taking a few steps forward, Gaetano recognized a wizened and slightly intoxicated member of the Bongiovanni family, who years earlier had forfeited much of their baronial estate in an enforced sale to Gaetano’s father. Enraged, Gaetano charged toward the man, but his friend held him back. A few men in the café, mumbling words in Bongiovanni’s behalf, got up from their chairs, while other passersby stopped to watch. As Gaetano turned away from Bongiovanni, he knew that he was no longer in the right place. He had to return to America.
He often quarreled with his wife during this visit home, and young Joseph, eavesdropping one day from his room upstairs, heard his father denouncing his mother for her failure to accompany him overseas. His father also threatened to break up the family in the not too distant future: Sebastian, he declared, could remain in Maida with the younger children, but Joseph would be headed for America. Joseph’s father had already revealed this to him in private. He had come into Joseph’s room the night before and, while reminiscing fondly on his travels through the New Land, had said: “I’m sorry I can’t bring you with me this trip, you’re still too young. But when I come back the next time, I promise I’ll take you.”
A week later, as his father began to pack his large suitcase for the voyage on the weekend to follow, Joseph helped him, with a sense of excitement and involvement—he was only one trip away from a big journey of his own. Meanwhile he had also received permission from his mother to go with his father on the train to Naples, joining his uncle Francesco Cristiani and his older cousin Antonio to see his father off on the ship.
But on the morning of the departure Joseph woke up ailing with what was feared as a recurrence of his earlier bout with diphtheria, and so the others left without him. Throughout the day and the week that followed, Joseph seemed ill more from disappointment in missing the trip to Naples than from any actual relapse. Antonio, when he returned from Naples, had reassured Joseph that everything would turn out as planned, that his father would be back to fulfill his promise within a year, or perhaps even a few months.
Antonio became closer than ever to Joseph during this period, while Joseph’s relationship to his moth
er became oddly distant. It was as if she had already given him up as a hostage in her marital agreement with her husband; she had her favorite son, Sebastian, as her main source of comfort and support, and, sustained as well by her tight links to the Rocchinos, who helped raise her youngest children, she was absorbed in the warmth of her own family.
When the entire year of 1910 passed without Joseph’s father returning, and as his relationship with his brother Sebastian became more strained, Joseph’s dependence on his cousin increased—and continued to increase as another year came and went without any sign of Gaetano. Joseph had been especially disappointed by his father’s failure to come home in time for the Christmas season of 1911, for this was when the wolves attacked the village, and Joseph had felt more vulnerable in the aftermath of that incident—and more eager to leave home—than he had even during two earlier earthquakes. He was also greatly affected during this winter by the changing attitude of Antonio, now seventeen. His cousin’s remoteness did not come from any diminished affection for Joseph, but rather from his realization that he could no longer stand working in his father’s tailor shop. “I belong in Paris,” he had boasted to Joseph that memorable morning in the shop.
20.
Antonio had chosen to leave Maida during the Christmas holidays, when the trains were crowded with travelers, because he thought he would have the best chance of being inconspicuous as he made his escape. He carried two large suitcases packed with clothes he had designed, which he intended to sell along the way, supplementing the savings he had sewn into the lining of his jacket and stuffed into the money belt tied around his waist inside his trousers. Antonio felt fat but rich.
His entrance into France had been accomplished without deviating from the plan he had plotted long in advance, in which Joseph had been his sole confidant. Antonio had gone directly from the Naples train station to one of the waterfront bistros where, he had been told, arrangements could be made to smuggle passengers onto ships sailing to every part of the world. Arriving at the bistro at midday, when there were no customers at the tables and the bartender was slumped on a stool with his head resting against a wall, Antonio had gone directly to the cashier and said: “I would like to go to Marseilles, but I have no papers.”
As Antonio later described in one of his many highly descriptive letters to his cousin that kept alive in young Joseph a spirit of adventure and an impatience to leave home, the cashier was a thin mulatto woman with a red handkerchief tied around her head and a sea captain’s cape draped over her shoulders, and, astonishingly, she was puffing on a cigarette. Antonio had never before seen a woman smoking. Such bold habits in women were beyond Joseph’s imagination. Blowing smoke in Antonio’s direction, she studied him momentarily and then yelled across the room to the big, snoring, scraggly-bearded bartender: “Bruno, this man wants to go to Marseilles, and he has no papers.” The bartender slowly lifted up his head, opened one eye, and yawned. “Does he have fifty francs?” he finally asked. When Antonio answered that he did, the bartender said: “Come back at ten o’clock tonight, and pack enough cheese and salami for a two-day trip.” Then the bartender again rested his head against the wall and seemed to go immediately back to sleep.
That night, after Antonio had paid the francs to the cashier, she introduced him to a sailor waiting to escort him on foot to the waterfront, and then by wagon to a dockside warehouse. There Antonio saw a dozen shabbily dressed men carrying sackcloth bags and small suitcases. Two sailors stood near the warehouse door, sliding it open and closed after each new arrival. Those waiting did not seem to know each other, and there was very little conversation. Shortly after eleven o’clock, Bruno arrived, wearing the same cape that the cashier had worn earlier in the bistro. With a wave of his right hand, Bruno directed everyone to follow him.
After passing through a small door in the rear of the warehouse, then out onto a pier, Antonio could see the silhouette of a large steamship in the moonlight. Nearing the ship, he read the lettering that identified it as Austrian. He heard dance music coming from the upper deck, and sounds of laughter and clinking glasses. But all notions of a pleasurable cruise began to fade as Antonio and the others followed Bruno to the stern of the vessel, where a rope ladder dangled from the deck. Bruno said good-bye. A sailor helped Antonio with his luggage up onto the deck, then resumed leading the travelers down through a narrow interior staircase and several hatchways until they had arrived in a dimly lit dormitory, forty by forty feet, in the bowels of the ship. Bolted to the floor along the walls were steel cots and on them, Antonio would soon discover, mattresses stuffed with straw.
Throughout the night, the next day, and the night that followed, Antonio and the other passengers were confined there. They had access to buckets of water that the sailors had provided, and to whatever food they had brought along with them. Everyone slept fully clothed. Antonio remained awake throughout the first night because of the snoring that surrounded him, and the discomfort of his money belt bloated with coins. An early-morning storm caused the vessel to tilt and lurch so convulsively that some people were tossed to the floor. Antonio climbed down from his cot, held on to the metal leg that seemed the most securely bolted, and prayed that he would get to Paris.
Though polite to the other passengers, Antonio communicated with them as little as possible. He felt embarrassingly well dressed around his disheveled fellow travelers, and he was wary of nearly all of them. He had the feeling that many were vagabonds, military deserters, thieves, or worse. He saw that a few carried sheathed knives on their belts beneath their jackets or capes. One man had a holstered pistol strapped high to one side of his chest. He was fierce-looking, with a hooked nose, a square jaw pointed with a Vandyke, and slit eyes under beetle brows, and he covered his oily head with a battered shako from which all the military insignia and plumage had been removed. A few hours after the storm, he sidled over to Antonio’s cot and asked in a strange accent, almost accusingly: “What did you do?” The man’s assumption that he had committed a crime from which he was now fleeing concerned Antonio far less than the possibility that, if he denied being a criminal, he might offend his visitor by appearing to be morally superior. Not knowing how to reply, Antonio placed a hand on his stomach and bent his head down between his legs, as if he were suddenly seasick and on the verge of vomiting, and finally the man got up from the edge of the cot and walked away.
The only individual Antonio felt comfortable with was a shy, pimply, ruddy-haired youth, a year or two his junior, who wore a faded blue jacket on the breast pocket of which was embroidered the name of the Orti Brothers Hotel. The young man was a night porter at the hotel, near the docks at Marseilles, who had gone to Naples to visit his ailing mother. She had run away years before from his French father, a violent alcoholic. The young porter told Antonio that if he wished to save money, he could stay at the hotel at no charge. He had a room there that he did not use at night, for he was required to be on duty in the lobby from midnight until six-thirty, while the concierge slept. Antonio was grateful, and immediately accepted the offer. He had given no thought to staying in Marseilles, but now he had a chance to get his clothes pressed as well as to catch up on his sleep before going to the railroad station to check the schedule of trains going to Paris and the cost of the ticket.
Although he was laden with money, he was not exactly sure of his financial worth. Before leaving Maida he had calculated that he had saved from his earnings about four hundred lire; he was carrying also much foreign currency and some antiquated Italian money—gold and silver coins, as well as bank notes—that dated back to the eras of southern Italy’s now defunct conquerors. Antonio had collected this old and foreign money, along with some contemporary Italian currency, from the pockets of dead men’s clothing that bereaving widows and kin had brought into his father’s tailor shop to be sold or given away to traveling strangers.
The mourners usually delivered the clothes to Francesco Cristiani’s counter wrapped in blankets, not wanting to touch
or see again the sad and familiar sight of the departed men’s garments; and these people were by and large too overwrought or superstitious about death in general to dip into the pockets of wardrobes that the deceased had left behind—unlike Antonio. Always on the alert for the arrival of doleful-looking people carrying blankets, he was quick to greet them, and, if they had clothing for the widows’ closet in the back of the store, he would assure them that the clothes would be treated with the utmost respect and would be passed on to the most worthy of wearers. And then, as he hung the clothes in the widows’ closet, unseen by his father and the other tailors (although Joseph was in on the secret), he would riffle through the pockets and discover not only new and old lire and francs, but also—usually from the pockets of migrant workers and the traveling wealthy—coins and bank notes from the Americas and various parts of Western and Eastern Europe, not excluding the Papal States, the Duchy of Lucca, the Republic of San Marino, Monaco, Romania, and Serbia.
But while this might have made Antonio the envy of numismatists, it did not necessarily represent exchangeable currency after he had begun his journey toward Paris in December 1911. This was why he particularly welcomed the idea of being a nonpaying guest at the Orti Brothers Hotel, to which he and his porter friend went directly by hired carriage after disembarking from the Austrian steamer in Marseilles. True to his word, his new friend did have access to free lodging at the hotel, but to Antonio’s immediate disappointment these accommodations were not much superior to those on the ship. Unfurnished except for a cot and a small table, the room was located off the service entrance in the rear of the ground floor, next to a large stable for the horses and carriages of the guests. Still, despite the smell and neighing of the horses, Antonio slept soundly for the first time in several days, rising reluctantly at six-thirty when his friend returned to take over the bed.