by Gay Talese
Having already sent his telegram, Antonio sipped a glass of wine while waiting for his pasta and watched the crowds passing before him. He paid particular attention to the groups of young soldiers heading toward the tracks and presumably to the front. Though lively, they lacked some of the spirit and spunkiness of the troops he had accompanied before along this path. He remembered his first ride on the troop train—the cardplaying and gambling on the floor, the singing and joking in the aisles, the tossing of white ration cans out the windows along the rolling green countryside of Lombardy in late spring. Almost all his companions then had believed they were off to a war that would be short and victorious. The young men he saw today had no such illusions, and he doubted there would be any signs of gaiety as they traveled north.
From the newspapers he had bought near the telegraph office he learned that the Italians continued to hold the line along the western banks of the Piave River, and that the Italian Ninth Corps had been particularly effective in driving back one ill-conceived assault by the enemy. General von Below’s forces had pushed ahead so rapidly since breaking through at Caporetto that they had gotten too far ahead of their supply system. Now as von Below’s attacking units assembled along the east side of the river, they lacked the bridging material and other equipment necessary to fight their way across the water and overwhelm the well-positioned and reinforced Italians. Snow was also falling heavily throughout the mountains and valleys, making supply movement doubly difficult, and it was generally assumed by the Allied commanders that there would be no further blitz attacks until early spring.
By that time, Antonio would surely be back in action, but most likely in a different theater of operations. On being released from the hospital he had received a new set of orders: After his Christmas leave in Maida he would report to Turin and join Italian units preparing to be transferred to France. In an exchange program being tested by the Allied commanders, some Italian divisions would join the Anglo-French divisions on the western front and some Anglo-French divisions would be intermingled with General Diaz’s army in northern Lombardy and along the Piave River. This program was largely the result of the Allied commanders’ conclusion that they had up to now been functioning too independently, that there was a need for a more assimilated effort under a single mind who would establish a unity of command and reduce much of the inefficiency that had characterized their methods in battle. It had been emphasized, for example, that after eleven British and French divisions had arrived to assist the Italians in the post-Caporetto campaign, none of the Allied generals could agree on how or where they should be deployed. Now, under the new plan, such a decision would be entrusted to the new commander in chief of the combined Allied armies, France’s Marshal Ferdinand Foch.
While the Americans, under General John J. Pershing, would not subordinate themselves to Foch, they would of course cooperate with the French marshal; and what Foch’s elevation meant at the very least was that all the Allies would now be communicating more in the French language. Within General Diaz’s staff it was soon discovered that many Italian officers who claimed to be fluent in French could not be understood by Frenchmen; and as a result there were solicitations for more civilian interpreters and translators, and for Italian military personnel with a true mastery of the French tongue.
One day during Antonio’s last week in the hospital, he overheard an inspecting colonel asking one of the doctors if he knew of anyone who spoke perfect French. Without waiting for the doctor’s reply, Antonio piped up from his sickbed: “Oui, mon colonel!” Thus Antonio was appointed as an interpreter and courier between Italian and French officers on the western front. He had still to be assigned to an Italian infantry unit, but it was expected he would be detached often to accompany some of Diaz’s field officers to staff meetings with their French colleagues. It was hinted that Antonio, already a corporal, would soon become a sergeant, although his Christmas furlough to Maida had been reduced from three weeks to two.
When he heard an announcement through a megaphone that his train was ready to continue its journey, Antonio finished his coffee and left the café for the exit on the opposite side of the hall. As he made his way through the crowd, he saw more fresh-faced recruits, walking hunched forward as they carried their knapsacks, rifles, and gas masks, which, Antonio hoped, were improved over those issued at Caporetto. In addition to the elderly civilians and the many injured servicemen traveling through the station, Antonio noticed that large numbers of Naples’s street beggars and derelicts, more popularly known as lazzaroni, had been pressed into employment as station porters, sweepers, pushers of postal wagons, and even maintenance crewmen along the tracks.
The lazzaroni, whose name derived from that of the Biblical beggar Lazarus (Lazzaro in Italian), for centuries had fended for themselves in the open air and shadowed covers of the city; but every once in a while, particularly during national emergencies, they were summoned from their hand-to-mouth existence to serve the needs of the state. When the army of the French Revolution had entered Naples in 1799, thousands of them were recruited to help defend the city; and in alliance with the Bourbon troops and Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo’s vigilantes, they rebuffed the invaders. Now with the labor shortage brought on by World War I, the lazzaroni, decrepit and undernourished as most of them were, performed tasks around the terminal and at other places in the city; and as Antonio watched some of them assisting ailing soldiers with luggage, it was often impossible for him to tell who was the more incapacitated.
It was nearly twilight as the train moved south past the Neapolitan hills, and Antonio got his final view of Vesuvius, its vapors flowing west through a slight drizzle. Farther down the coast he saw desolate beaches, rows of overturned fishing boats, and clusters of palm trees, the first he had seen in two and a half years. His railcar was half occupied, or so he guessed from the volume of snoring, coughing, and sighing he heard coming from the seats where most soldiers had spread themselves. The younger one-legged infantryman with whom Antonio had sat during much of the trip had gotten off somewhere south of Rome. So had the airman who had fueled D’Annunzio’s squadron, and the blind artilleryman and his companion. Antonio was not sure whether he had been riding for two days, or three, or even longer. After countless stops, and after drifting in and out of sleep, he had lost his sense of time. But now that the train continued down the coast along the familiar route he had so often taken when returning home from fabric-buying trips to Naples with his father, Antonio began to sleep deeply, as he had always done as a boy; and when he woke up, it was morning, and the train was approaching the valley of Maida.
He stood up and reached for his duffel bag in the overhead rack. He wanted to be among the first off the train. He did not want to be on the platform and perhaps witness the arrival of local men in boxes. It was possible that caskets deposited at this coastal stop, Santa Eufemia, would not contain Maida men, for the station was used not only by the residents of Maida but also by people from neighboring hill towns and coastal communities. Still, Maida was the largest village in the area, and chances were good that if caskets were due here they would be carrying someone from his village; he did not want to risk seeing the agonized faces of the parents or spouses who were here to claim the bodies of young men he had probably grown up with.
So he jumped off the train even before it had stopped completely; and, pulling his cap down low over his eyes, he walked quickly across the platform away from where the roped-off crowd was standing. He did glance in their direction briefly, curious to see if any member of his family was trying to get his attention. But no one was waving toward him, nor did anyone even appear to be aware of him walking toward the station. Everyone was engrossed in watching the quartermaster sergeants exiting from the freight car that was trimmed with black bunting and had the tricolored flag of Italy flying on its roof. Antonio’s telegram home apparently had not been received, but he was not disappointed. Now he would not be detained as he headed directly toward the line of coachmen w
aiting with their horses.
Tossing his bag up to the back bench, Antonio told the driver to take the hill road to Maida; and he was about to board the carriage when he felt someone holding on to the back of his jacket. He turned and saw a woman in a black veil weeping and softly calling his name, and repeating it several times as if in disbelief. As she reached forward and embraced him, Antonio recognized his mother. They held one another silently for several moments until Antonio, feeling self-conscious, and aware that the coachman was waiting and that people in the crowd were watching them, firmly guided his mother up into the coach.
They rode for many minutes without speaking. Maria had pulled the veil back from her face, which seemed luminous with her smile, and Antonio felt her hand tighten around his arm. In reply to his question, she said his telegrams had not been received. During the night, she said, she had had a premonition that he would return home in the morning, and that was why she had been at the station. Francesco and the rest of the family were not aware she had come.
As the coachman continued toward Maida, Maria asked that they take a different route, one that would lead them off the main road to a back road in the woodlands. The coachman objected, saying that the road she suggested was not much wider than a bridle path, and that his coach would become entangled in bushes and tree branches. But she was insistent. She had often traveled by coach through the woodlands, she said, and turning to her son she explained she had a vow to fulfill along this route, one that she had made during her prayers begging for his safe return. Now it was essential that she be taken to this place to do as she had promised.
At Antonio’s urging, the coachman complied, and for the next half-hour they traveled through a narrow path surrounded by trees, which finally widened and led to a small dark-stoned chapel Antonio had never seen before, or known existed. It was built along the path that Saint Francis of Paola had walked when he had visited Maida centuries before, Antonio’s mother explained, and she asked the coachman to stop so that she could briefly visit the chapel. Antonio said he would accompany her, but she shook her head saying she must go in alone. He helped her down and watched her walk into the chapel. He and the coachman waited for five minutes, and then ten. It was a cool December morning and the night’s frost was still on the trees. They stood waiting next to the horse for another five minutes, when Antonio, more concerned than impatient, decided to join his mother.
When he opened the wooden door, he saw ahead of him an altar aglow with candles, and a row of benches in which no one was sitting, and paintings on the walls of figures he could not identify. He looked around the room but saw no sign of his mother. She was neither kneeling at the altar nor sitting in the pews.
He walked slowly down the aisle, then suddenly stopped. There, on the floor, Antonio saw a dark figure—his mother prostrating herself, crawling slowly forward with her veil tied back and her tongue licking the stones.
Horrified, he watched her. He waited for a few moments, then could watch no longer. Against her protests, he pulled her to her feet and, with his arm firmly around her shoulders, forced her out of this place where the faithful still made primitive bargains with God.
27.
After four days in Maida, Antonio was ready to return to the front. In the field of battle he at least had been diverted by his duties, had been preoccupied with staying alive, and had learned to remain emotionally detached from much of the death and destruction he had witnessed. But in the familiarity of his hometown, where he had too much time and too little to do, and where everything he saw had a personal meaning, he found himself tormented by the surrounding sadness; he felt the pain of everyone’s wounds, and sensed in particular the bitterness and hopelessness in the hearts of those amputees he had known when they possessed all their limbs and when they could dream, as he had, of one day discovering a better life far from this backward and pessimistic place.
Now not only had the war maimed and disfigured them, and left some demented from poison gas, but it had deprived them of the likelihood of ever leaving the village. Only able-bodied workmen were wanted overseas. And those casualties who had already worked abroad, and been told they could reclaim their jobs after the war, were now doubly disheartened. Having seen the future, they were now dropped back into the past, to whatever degree there still was a viable past in such moribund places as Maida.
The economy was bankrupt. Most of the shops were closed. The lack of farm labor had limited the planting and the care of livestock, and the people generally subsisted on what they grew in their own gardens or what they obtained through bartering with neighbors. Dozens of children had dropped out of school because half the faculty had quit to work in munitions factories farther north. The town was dark at night, the lamps overhead not having been repaired after the riot in 1916. During the day, one-legged men on crutches leaned and elbowed themselves forward along the stone walls of buildings as they made their way cautiously up and down the curved and lopsided cobblestone streets. Several families shared their homes with black-veiled young mothers and fatherless children. For the first time in decades, Maida was without white widows.
There was practically a moratorium on Christmas in 1917. The bagpipers were not in the square, there were no open-house feasts and concerts in the palazzos. The usually festive Midnight Mass was more like a requiem, and this melancholy atmosphere hung over Antonio’s household throughout his furlough. Much as everyone tried to rejoice in his presence, the telegram that his grandfather Domenico had received from the War Ministry two hours before Antonio’s arrival in Maida weighed heavily on everyone. Sebastian Talese had been belatedly identified as one of the casualties at Caporetto.
Sebastian was now barely alive at a hospital in Bologna. He had been gassed, and badly injured by an exploding shell. The family was not permitted to visit the hospital. Information that Francesco Cristiani had gotten from an army doctor he knew in Catanzaro indicated that Sebastian was suffering from slight brain damage and physical enfeeblements that would inhibit his ever resuming a normal life.
Joseph’s mother was in shock. Her oldest and favorite son would never return as she remembered him. When Marian’s parents heard the news they came to take her to live with them in the valley, as they had after her husband’s death three years before. Her three youngest children accompanied her. Fourteen-year-old Joseph was looked after, as usual, by his grandparents Domenico and Ippolita, by his aunt Maria and uncle Francesco Cristiani, and temporarily by Antonio himself.
“The war will soon be over,” Antonio told his cousin many times during Christmas week, when Joseph seemed to be overwrought with anxiety and confusion, “and then you and I will be living together in Paris.”
Joseph listened, as he always did when Antonio spoke, but he did not appear convinced. The years since the death of Joseph’s father had been filled mainly with false hopes. Joseph no longer worked at the tailor shop, which Antonio’s father had recently been forced to close because of lack of business. Customers had neither the money nor the occasions for new clothes these days.
During Joseph’s free hours from school he helped out on his grandfather’s farm. If Sebastian’s physical condition proved as bad as the prognosis of the doctor in Catanzaro, then he would never resume his foremanship on the farm, and Joseph saw himself as being pressured by Domenico, now nearly eighty, to take over the responsibility. But Joseph vowed that he would not allow this to happen.
“I’ll run away, like you did,” Joseph said on the eve of Antonio’s departure for Turin.
“You won’t have to,” Antonio replied. “I’ll come and get you. As soon as the war ends, I’ll come here, help you pack, and then we’ll travel together to France. I’ll probably be sent to France before the end of January, and I’m sure I’ll be able to slip into Paris before long, and then I’ll begin making the arrangements.”
Antonio was indeed in France before the end of January 1918, but he was far from Paris. He was stationed 135 miles east of the French capital i
n the fortress city of Verdun, on the Meuse River, sixty miles from the German border. The Germans had attacked Verdun two years before, in February 1916, initiating a ten-month battle that would be the longest of the war. The French suffered 348,000 casualties, 20,000 more than the Germans, but they defended Verdun so stalwartly that the Germans finally withdrew and reinforced their aggressions elsewhere.
In 1918, however, reconnaissance reports indicated that the Germans planned a new offensive in this area; and the French officers whom Antonio had come to know at Verdun, and with whom he attended staff meetings while interpreting for the newly arrived Italian commanders, regarded the future with such pessimism that Antonio was reminded of his fellow villagers in Maida. But perhaps the French gloom was unavoidable. The war had persisted for more than three years in France, had killed off a large percentage of its young male population, and still the nation could not rid itself of the German invaders. There were now, in fact, more Germans than ever garrisoned in France and Belgium, threatening to smash through the fatigued Allied defenders at several points and capture Paris as well as drive the British guarding northwestern France back into the English Channel.