by Gay Talese
The journey from the Marne across France toward the German border would be costly for the Allies—the United States alone would suffer forty thousand fatalities; but the autumn shadows were much darker on the German side of the battle lines. Their renowned Hindenburg defense, near the French–Belgian border, was broken through by contingents of British, French, and Australians during the first week of October. The German chief of staff, General Erich Ludendorff, was soon dismissed by the Kaiser—while he himself contemplated abdication and escape to neutral Holland. Germany’s ally Bulgaria had collapsed at the end of September 1918; and by the end of October, the Turks would also quit fighting in the Near East. Another ally, Austria, persisted throughout October in the war south of the Alps, but was fighting now against optimistic Allied divisions commanded by Italy’s General Diaz.
Diaz initiated a counteroffensive against the Austrians along the Piave River on October 24—the first anniversary of the Italian collapse at Caporetto. Now the situation was reversed—the Austrians were driven back inexorably and swiftly at the battle of Vittorio Veneto, and by November it was all over. This month would mark the collapse of the Austrian army and bring to a close the rulership of the ancient Hapsburg kingdom. A clause in the armistice terms gave the Allies the right to use the Austrian railroads, and as a consequence the Germans could now be invaded from Austrian soil.
General Diaz was a national hero, but the triumph was shared as well by foreign Allied soldiers who had accompanied Diaz’s men throughout the months of retreat that preceded the glorious retaliation. Among the many Americans who had identified themselves with the Italian struggle was an Italo-American airman who had participated in raids on Austrian installations and who would be awarded a Flying Cross by the Italian king, Victor Emmanuel III. The airman had also served as an intermediary between Diaz in Italy and General Pershing in France during the final year of the war. He ended the war with the rank of major, and had been a freshman member of Congress before his enlistment, but he would be remembered best for his achievements later in life as the mayor of New York City—this was Fiorello H. La Guardia.
29.
World War I ended on November 11, 1918, but Antonio Cristiani—and many thousands of other able-bodied Allied soldiers—were kept on active duty for an additional year or more to help remove the debris and the body parts that had been strewn throughout Europe during the four and a quarter years of turmoil that had brought death to ten million people.
In January and February 1919, Antonio worked with a Franco-Italian road gang clearing barbed wire and mines from the southern bank of the Marne River; in March and April he served as a supply sergeant in a field hospital at Bar-le-Duc, near Verdun; and in May he was assigned to Paris as a French interpreter for an Italian colonel who was part of General Diaz’s military group attending the peace conference.
Although the commanders of the victorious armies were now taking a backseat to the statesmen representing Britain, France, Italy, the United States, and the other Allied nations, the officers were consulted regularly by their civilian leaders in an effort to clarify the many disputes that arose at the victors’ bargaining table. The shooting had stopped, but the Allied negotiators were now fighting among themselves over the spoils, and Italy was in the middle of the bickering. Italy’s prime minister, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, had walked out of the conference, and remained away for two weeks. He was displeased with President Woodrow Wilson of the United States, who wanted to withhold from Italy (and yield to the newly created nation of Yugoslavia) much of the territory held by the Austrians before the war that the French and British had secretly promised Italy in 1915 as an incentive to join the Allies. The Italian nation, having sacrificed the lives of more than 530,000 soldiers, was in no mood for bargaining; and many of its citizens were indeed pleased when Gabriele D’Annunzio, aided by thousands of invading insurgents, had gained control of some of these lands by force.
With this issue unresolved, the peace conference confronted other disturbances—such as the arguments between the French and British prime ministers over Belgian claims to Dutch territory, and the ways and means of extracting Germany’s reparations payments. At one point in a debate, the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, grabbed the collar of his French colleague, Georges Clemenceau, and demanded an apology for the allegedly false and insulting statements uttered by the Frenchman. President Wilson stepped between them to halt further physical abuse, but Clemenceau refused to apologize; he suggested instead that Lloyd George might seek satisfaction “with either pistols or swords.”
Antonio was pleased to be back in Paris that spring and summer as a linguistic aide to the Italian colonel, particularly because it allowed him the chance to begin negotiating for his own return to civilian life. When he arrived one day at Damien’s tailor shop, Antonio’s former employer embraced him warmly and offered him a large raise if he came back to work after his discharge; Monsieur Damien also made available at low rent an apartment on the sixth floor of the building he owned that housed his shop on the Rue Royale. After Damien’s suggestion that Antonio lease it immediately, even though he was required to remain billeted near the site of the peace conference, Antonio borrowed Damien’s driver to help with the moving, and in a few hours he had cleared out of his old apartment in the Latin Quarter—where he had to collect only a single suitcase containing two suits and a tuxedo, and to gather up the musty blankets, pillows, and sheets from the bed that he had not made in five years.
His new apartment, although it consisted of only one room with an alcove, would be large enough to include Joseph, at least temporarily; and there were other apartments on the sixth floor that Antonio thought he might obtain in the future. One was currently used for storing the firm’s old business records and furniture. Another was leased to an Algerian woman who had not been seen in several months, even though her rent arrived regularly through the mail. Another apartment was occupied by the building’s superintendent, an elderly, heavy-drinking Basque.
Antonio’s apartment, in the front of the building, had two windows that offered a fine view of the skyline and the street below. The forthcoming Bastille Day parade would pass along this route; it would be a huge spectacle, a triumphant procession of Allied marching bands from every part of the world, and Antonio planned to watch it from one of his windows. But on the morning of July 14, when he got to the sixth floor and entered his apartment, he saw a dozen strangers leaning out of his windows. The superintendent, who was also in the room, smiled sheepishly. Then he reached into his pocket, walked over to Antonio, and handed him some francs, claiming that this was half the amount the people had paid for their viewing space. Antonio accepted the sum without thanks, and sat out the parade on the staircase.
Antonio and Joseph exchanged several letters during the summer and autumn of 1919; and in January 1920—by which time Antonio was discharged and back at Damien’s—Joseph wrote saying that he had received permission from his mother and grandfather to join Antonio in Paris later in the spring. Postwar life in Maida continued to be bad, Joseph wrote; the town was still operating largely on the barter system, and many customers in Cristiani’s tailor shop, recently reopened, were paying for new clothes with bushels of flour, heads of cattle, and other tradable commodities. The family farm was operating, but with Sebastian bedridden and Grandfather Domenico, almost eighty-two, less active, half its acreage was untilled, and laborers were scarce even in this time of vast unemployment.
Many of the returning veterans who were physically able to work seemed unwilling to do so. They spent their hours playing cards in the café, or in the back of Pileggi’s butcher shop; barely subsisting on their wartime savings and small pensions, they cursed the government that had promised so much but was doing so little to improve the peacetime economy in the south. There were antigovernment demonstrations in Maida and elsewhere during the winter of 1920, all of them led by disillusioned veterans. But the most ambitious of these men, instead of demonstrating,
were packing their bags and leaving the country. They were en route to promised positions as high-paid laborers in North and South America and in Australia.
Two of Joseph’s uncles, the older of the four Rocchino brothers, left the village in late February 1920 to take up the factory jobs being held open for them at the Keasbey & Mattison asbestos plant in Pennsylvania. Joseph had accompanied his mother and other relatives to see the two men off. It was a bitterly cold morning, but the Rocchino brothers wore the same lightweight American linen suits and boaters they had worn back to Maida in answer to the call of conscription. Now, waving good-bye from the windows of their slow-moving Naples-bound train, they looked like two carefree tourists off on a grand adventure. Joseph, sixteen years old, watched from the platform, wishing he were with them.
Three months later, however, Joseph made his own exit. His mother came to the station with him, along with his grandparents, his younger siblings, and other relatives from both sides of the family. Domenico and Ippolita stood arm in arm a few feet back from the others on the platform; they were more reserved and better dressed than Joseph’s outgoing Rocchino grandparents, his sheepskin-jacketed uncle on his mother’s side, and her two gold-toothed, black-veiled widowed cousins. Joseph’s aunt Maria had stayed home to look after Sebastian. Joseph had gone earlier in the day to the bedside of his brother, but Sebastian had merely whispered unintelligible words and did not seem to understand that Joseph was saying good-bye. Joseph’s youngest brother, six-year-old Domenico, had been crying, disappointed that he would not be traveling on the train; and now on the platform he sat sullenly on Joseph’s suitcase, his right hand firmly holding on to the handle. The old suitcase had belonged to their father, and jagged strips of American steamboat stickers still clung to its sides. Behind the suitcase stood Joseph’s eleven-year-old sister, Ippolita, and fourteen-year-old brother, Nicola, looking at Joseph but saying nothing.
“You won’t forget about us, will you?” Joseph’s mother asked.
Joseph shook his head. He felt awkward with all eyes upon him, and he could barely wait to board the train. He was wearing the new brown overcoat and matching cap that his uncle Francesco had made for him, and delivered in the morning on his way to the shop. Tied around Joseph’s waist, inside his trousers, was a money bag containing the American dollar bill his father had given him, plus five hundred dollars in lire loaned to him by the Rocchino uncles who had departed for America. They had told Joseph he could live with them in Ambler if things did not work out in Paris. He had been happy to hear this, for the bombing of Paris about which the elder Cristiani had spoken so often as he worried about Antonio had made the city lose some of its appeal; as a result Joseph was now more receptive to his father’s affection for America. But Marian was expecting her son to return to Maida within a matter of months. This train ride to Paris was intended only as a summer visit in which Joseph would decide whether or not he liked Paris well enough to want to live there.
“You’ll be home before your birthday?” his mother asked, more as a reminder than a question, for this had already been decided. On October 6, his seventeenth birthday, his grandfather Domenico was having a Mass said in his honor and would give him a party. The age of seventeen marked his arrival into manhood. Only then would he be free to decide his own destiny.
“Yes,” Joseph replied, not looking into his mother’s eyes. Antonio had said that the important thing was to get out of Maida; once you were out, there was little that anyone could do about it. Joseph had prayed regularly to Saint Francis, seeking guidance and wisdom; but at this moment on the platform—as the train stood waiting, and the porter pulled the suitcase out from little Domenico’s grip and swung it up onto the steel steps of the car—Joseph was consumed with conflicting emotions.
The train traveled overnight up the coast, and by the next morning it had passed Rome and was rolling toward Tuscany. Joseph had spent his hours quietly in the compartment, alternately sleeping and reading through a French phrase book and a French dictionary that Antonio had sent him. But after the stop in Rome, the train became crowded, and Joseph shifted on the velvet bench closer to the window to accommodate the two nuns and the elderly white-haired gentleman who sat down on his right. Now across from Joseph were two young women in black dresses and lace mantillas, and a portly bespectacled man wearing a black suit, a black tie, and a black bowler, with a black ribbon sewn across the left sleeve of his jacket. The man took the young women’s valises and placed them on the overhead rack. Then he removed his bowler and fanned himself with it a few times before sitting down between the women, the hat in his lap. His fingers drummed impatiently along the brim until the train began to move. He said something to the young woman on his right, then to the one on his left. The first was about Joseph’s age, the other a few years older. Both were pretty in a serene and delicate way, and the man’s familiarity toward them made Joseph think that he was their father; from the way they were dressed Joseph guessed that the three were either going to or coming from a funeral.
Joseph went back to his French book, but every so often he gazed out toward the shimmering sea outside, and up at the mountains and hillside towns overlooking the train to the east. Diverting as the scenery was, it did not look all that different from what he remembered of earlier train rides between Naples and Maida with his uncle Francesco; and Joseph had to remind himself constantly that he was now passing through unexplored territory—he had indeed left home, and he was traveling up the Tyrrhenian shoreline into northern Italy, and would soon reach Turin and cross the French border en route to an entirely new life. Having never before ridden in a plush compartment, he was grateful to his grandfather Domenico, to whom the stationmaster in Maida was in debt, for procuring this window seat in the first-class section.
As the journey continued, however, Joseph began to feel uneasy. The man seated between the young women kept looking at him. It was not a critical look, as if Joseph were guilty of some mild indiscretion; but neither did the man’s attention suggest the amiable curiosity that a paternal figure might bestow upon a studious-looking young traveler cradling a French dictionary. The man obviously was troubled by some aspect of Joseph’s appearance; and after he exchanged a few words with his female companions, they too studied Joseph with expressions that, though passive, were concentrated.
Joseph shifted in his seat behind his book. Twice he looked up, and both times the women averted his glance. But the man continued to stare. He seemed to be looking at Joseph and through Joseph. It occurred to Joseph that the man might be blind. But Joseph recalled that he had lifted the women’s luggage effortlessly to the rack after they had entered the compartment.
The train was now passing through a tunnel, and the compartment lights were flicking on and off. A hollow echo permeated the car, and the sounds of the wheels rolling over the tracks rose a full octave. Beams of twilight sun flashed again through the windows as the train sped out of the tunnel, and the man looked down at his feet. But in the flickering light of the next tunnel, Joseph again saw the man staring at him, as if Joseph were projecting some sort of aura.
The nuns on Joseph’s right seemed oblivious to all of this. They continued to talk between themselves as they had since boarding the train. The elderly gentleman, his head bent to one side against the corner cushion near the door, was fast asleep.
When the train stopped at Genoa, the nuns stood up and one of them nudged the old man. He quickly got up, took the nuns’ valises, opened the door, and led them out. Joseph also stood, intending to wander the train in search of a seat in another compartment. If he found one, he would return for his suitcase. He was tired of being the object of this mysterious attention. But as he headed out, he felt a hand holding on to his arm; and the man asked in a gentle voice, while extending in front of him an empty cut-glass pitcher: “Excuse me, please, but would you mind getting us some water?”
Joseph stopped and looked directly at the man for the first time. He was certain he had never seen t
his person before. The man’s face was round and kindly, with a crown of receding light brown hair, and a broad chin tipped by a grayish-red goatee. His steel-rimmed glasses fit tightly on his bony nose, and his pale-colored eyes were quite bloodshot. The two young women adjusted their mantillas and edged forward on their seats but made no attempt to rise. The older of the two studied Joseph momentarily and did not turn away as he looked at her; she in fact bowed her head slightly and smiled after he took the pitcher and said he would get the water.
He stepped down into the evening air and filled the pitcher at one of the fountains along the platform. The air was very chilly and damp, smelling slightly of the sea. After the departing passengers had disappeared, the platform became quiet except for the hissing of the locomotive and the chatter of a few newly arrived passengers who were going on to Turin or possibly onward across the French border. The smile of the young woman had been heartening, but Joseph’s earlier uneasiness now returned as he heard the conductor’s final whistle and he climbed back into the car. Holding the handle of the pitcher carefully, he waited as two passengers in front of him dragged their hefty luggage into their compartments, and then he continued until he arrived at his own. The man stood in the aisle, near the door.
“You are very kind,” he said. He took the pitcher and handed it directly in through the door to one of the women, and then shut the door. Joseph stood in front of him for a moment expecting him to reopen it, but instead the man blocked the doorway and leaned closer to Joseph.