Unto the Sons

by Gay Talese

  Mussolini stood ready to indulge him—to convert Italy through Fascism into a state of prudery and repression. Not only did contemporary depictions of nudity and other pornographic expression come under severe Fascist review, but an Italian neo-Victorianism also looked disapprovingly upon nightclub entertainment and the “Negro dances” made popular in America, and upon any Italian woman who appeared in the streets wearing high heels, short skirts, or cosmetics, or who ventured onto beaches in anything but the most demure of bathing attire. Since Mussolini did not smoke, and since his ulcers discouraged him from drinking anything stronger than milk, he was a natural spokesman against cigarette and alcohol consumption; and since he was an adherent of horsemanship, jogging, and tennis, he recommended sports activities as a healthy outlet for Fascist men and women—until the Vatican differed with him on the question of women’s participation. “If a woman’s hand must be lifted,” said a Vatican spokesman, “we hope and pray it may be lifted only in prayer or for acts of beneficence.” Mussolini’s further silence on the subject was interpreted as his concession to papal wisdom, and his diplomacy was to lead in 1929 to the Lateran Treaty in which the Church and the Italian government would officially recognize one another for the first time since the Risorgimento. The treaty created the autonomous State of Vatican City; affirmed Catholicism as the national religion; validated religious teaching in intermediate-level schools; and recognized religious marriage as binding under civil law.

  Although the State of Vatican City was little more than one hundred acres—consisting primarily of the Vatican Palace, the Basilica of Saint Peter, and the piazza in front of it—the Church was compensated for the loss of ecclesiastical property confiscated during the Risorgimento with a financial settlement approaching two billion lire—after which an apparently satisfied Pope announced that for the treaty to have been completed “a man was needed like the one that Providence has placed in our path.”

  That the Duce was now acclaimed by Catholics worldwide was a miraculous achievement for this onetime Socialist priest-baiter whose anticlerical writings in the past included a tawdry novel entitled The Cardinal’s Mistress. Mussolini had written it two decades before, while serving a prison term for left-wing insurrectionism; and while the book had not been published in Italy, it had been translated and sold in foreign editions, including an English-language edition distributed in the United States. But after the signing of the Lateran Treaty, Mussolini’s popularity in America was even shared by the nation’s leading cardinals (he was praised by William O’Connell of Boston and Patrick Hayes of New York), and his already established shift toward capitalism had won his regime goodwill from American business and political leaders.

  Mussolini began inviting to Rome thousands of Italian-born business and professional men who had become successful in foreign cities. Their visits were marked by many ceremonies and grand tours that allowed Mussolini ample opportunities to congratulate both his guests and himself for achievements in the name of free enterprise; and he also used these occasions to promote closer bonds, through Fascism, among influential Italians at home and abroad.

  Among the invitees to Rome in July 1928 was a group of Italian-born entrepreneurs and artisans from France, ranging in occupation from contractors to jewelry designers, from engineers to restaurateurs. The members of the 102-man delegation had been encouraged to bring their wives, in keeping with Mussolini’s recent pro-family attitude. His own wife, Rachele, was not with him to greet those from France because she was pregnant with their fifth child (the year before, at thirty-five, she had produced their fourth child), but her image as an ideal Fascist wife was so well publicized that her presence was not required; Mussolini tirelessly boasted of her virtues to all but his mistresses (even in the privacy of their bedroom Rachele now addressed him as Duce). There were ninety-eight wives with the group from France; the four single men were widowers wearing mourning bands.

  After boarding a special train in Paris, the group was taken first to Turin for a banquet in their honor given by the city’s leaders, and they were further celebrated with a parade on the following day at which bands played both the “Marseillaise” and the Fascist anthem “Giovinezza.” The group then continued south into Rome, where, after another orchestrated ceremony at the rail terminal, the guests were taken to luxury suites in the Grand Hotel and briefed before proceeding on to Palazzo Venezia for their first meeting with Mussolini.

  “The Duce respects people who speak directly and to the point,” one of Mussolini’s protocol ministers explained to the group leader in the lobby, as everyone gathered to board buses for the palazzo. “We received your countrymen from South America the other day, and their spokesman was so nervous and intimidated in the Duce’s presence that little was gained from the meeting. These meetings are for learning about our brothers working in other countries. We want to know them better, want them to know us better. The Duce does not want a lot of courtesy and flattery from his visitors—he wants facts and figures.”

  “I understand perfectly,” said the French group’s leader, who would be called upon to speak at Palazzo Venezia. “So let’s load the buses and move on without delay.”

  Mussolini awaited them at his office in the palazzo, an imposing brick edifice that was built four centuries before, in the style of the early Renaissance with some stones from the Colosseum. Near the palazzo, and the neighboring white monument to Victor Emmanuel II and Italian unity, stood the Forum of Trajan and the Tower of Nero. Mussolini’s office, on the second floor, was approximately sixty-six feet long and forty-three feet wide, and on one wall was an ancient map of the world—which was why the office was referred to as the Sala del Mappamondo. A double row of windows looked down upon the square below, and the tall center window opened onto a balcony from which Mussolini liked to make speeches. He was seated at his desk in the far corner of the room as the delegation arrived, and with a smile he quickly rose to greet them.

  He wore a gray double-breasted silk suit—he was two years away from adopting military uniform as standard dress—and his hair was shaved off in preference to allowing his receding hairline to make further inroads across his crown. Escorting the group was a Fascist minister named Giuseppe Bottai, a onetime journalist. After saluting Mussolini, who briefly welcomed the group in the name of Fascism and the king, Bottai nodded in the direction of the group’s leader, summoning him forward to say a few words.

  The latter wore a gabardine suit with a striped white vest, and pointed tan shoes with spats, and carried a pearl-handled walking stick. Short as he was, barely five feet, six inches, he was nonetheless an imposing figure even in the exalted company of the dictator of Italy; and he looked directly into Mussolini’s eyes as he began, in a firm voice: “Duce, cifre volete … eccole”—Duce, figures you want … here they are. Rapidly, he went on:

  “There are a total of 2,348 members of our group in France, a group broken up into fifteen specialized categories specific to our various trades and professions, and today we in this room proudly represent all of them with the same pride that in France we bring to our work as energetic and progressive Italians. To the people of France we uphold Italy’s highest standards in craft and service, in innovation and reliability. We can be seen each day in any of three hundred ninety French towns and cities—from Marseilles in the south to Calais in the north. We are most numerous, of course, in the capital of Paris, where each of us thinks of himself as an unofficial Italian ambassador of goodwill, as an exemplar of …”

  Unhesitatingly he continued, barely pausing to take a breath, and Mussolini listened with raised eyebrows, seemingly impressed with the perkiness of his visitor. Then Mussolini turned questioningly toward his minister Bottai, who stood next to him.

  “He’s a tailor from Paris,” Bottai whispered. “He has won many awards there. His name is Cristiani. Antonio Cristiani …”

  38.

  Antonio Cristiani was a happily married man of thirty-four, was thriving financially, was
a frequenter of fine restaurants—and was no less hungry for success now in 1928 than he had been when he had first come to Paris as a seventeen-year-old runaway from Maida in 1911, arriving at the Gare de Lyon on a misty day that he would remember with lasting clarity.

  But his impressionistic early days in Paris were eventually replaced by indistinguishable weeks and months of hard work and little time for enjoyment of the city—and then by the war. And then Joseph had come and gone.

  It had been nearly eight years since Antonio had seen Joseph. His cousin had spent most of those years living alone on a small island off the shore of New Jersey. His letters indicated he was struggling as a tailor. Antonio would have welcomed his return immediately. Although he already employed half a dozen tailors, he needed another one. His business was expanding.

  Antonio’s new shop was on the fashionable Rue de la Paix, near the Place de l’Opéra. The director of the Opéra was a client and friend, and Antonio was often invited to sit in the management’s box overlooking the center aisle—where nearly two decades before, as a young member of the claque, hiding his poverty under a tuxedo, Antonio used to applaud every soloist generously and without discrimination. But the applause was now coming his way in the form of praise from customers who patronized his shop, and from French charitable and military societies which during the postwar years became appreciative of his civic-mindedness.

  He had helped raise money for the welfare of elderly citizens displaced during the war. He had worked toward the establishment of more trade schools for disabled veterans who were potentially employable as tailors or other craftsmen. He was commended for founding a Paris-based association of former Italian servicemen currently living and working in the French nation that had once been part of their combat zone. In the postwar years, as these Italian veterans cosponsored benefits with French veterans and joined them at memorial ceremonies, they revived feelings of camaraderie that had existed between the two nations during the Great War.

  In his role as an intermediary between leading French citizens and the resident Italians, Antonio had maintained connections with most of his French wartime acquaintances, some of whom had remained in the military and were now senior officers, while others had returned to civilian life to pursue careers in the government. One morning in 1928 he was visited by a friend from the French Foreign Ministry who cheerfully reported having overheard that Antonio would soon be made a chevalier in the Legion of Honor. Antonio was delighted. But weeks later his friend returned in a somber mood to say that the nomination might be overturned. Some members on the selection committee apparently resented the fact that Antonio, having first come to Paris in 1911, had never applied for French citizenship.

  “But that’s not fair,” Antonio said. “The Legion of Honor is often given to citizens of other nations. And besides, when you and I were in battalions fighting side by side at Verdun, and later along the Marne, nobody in France was complaining about my Italian citizenship. And even more to the point: If I revoked my Italian citizenship, I’d be a bad Italian. Would a bad Italian make a good Frenchman?”

  His friend said he would try to get this message through to the committee. A year and a half later, in 1930, Antonio was named a chevalier in the Legion of Honor. But he stayed on in Paris as a citizen of Italy; and this would continue to be his policy even though Paris would remain his primary residence throughout his lifetime, and be the locale of such added laurels as the Legion of Honor’s third highest rank of commander.

  It was not really nationalism that he saw binding him to Italy. It was something less patriotic, but more deeply rooted. It was his connection to his village, the place of his birth, the source of his energies and dreams. Although he had left it bodily, he could not replace it in spirit as his true home. He was a village Italian from the south, and the gravitational pull of that place had been felt strongly when he had decided back in 1925, just before turning thirty-one, that he wanted to be married. He had lived alone long enough.

  The demands of his business had made a stable and loving relationship seem far preferable to the exciting but frequently lonely bachelor’s life he had led since the war—even though he imagined he would miss the varied pleasure and some of the freedom that had also been his privilege. But whenever I think of marriage, and having children, he wrote in his diary, I’m aware of how different my mentality is from the Frenchwomen I’ve known. I don’t know if they’re too frivolous, or if I’m too responsible, or if I’m just in the wrong place for finding a wife I can trust. Paris is a crazy place now.…

  The Frenchwoman he had gotten closest to had been Mademoiselle Topjen, the attractive and lively owner of a boutique who was also a frequent partygoer and a bit of a socialite within the fluid world of postwar Parisian society. Since the Versailles Peace Conference, Paris had reestablished itself as the international center of gaiety—late-night soirees under the sway of Elsa Maxwell; stage entertainment by such new sensations as Josephine Baker, sometimes wearing only a banana skirt; and nocturnal alliances negotiated among diplomats, bankers, grandes dames, and grandes cocottes.

  Mademoiselle Topjen had first entered Antonio’s shop on the arm of a Spanish embassy attaché who was on his way back to Madrid; and three days later, she had returned alone. She and Antonio became lovers before they became friends; and when they became close friends, their love life began to deteriorate. But they always enjoyed being of help to one another in their respective careers. As a designer of costly dresses and suits that were produced in her atelier by Algerian seamstresses whom she paid poorly, and who did shoddy work, Mademoiselle Topjen often found it necessary to have her merchandise resewn and sometimes completely remade before she could display it for sale—and this corrective effort was provided gratis by Antonio and his tailors. She in turn went out of her way to see that Antonio, her most frequent escort at social events, was introduced to the ambassadors, ministers, and wealthy American visitors who cared most about clothing and who would greatly enrich him as their tailor. She confided in him fully. He knew about her sad childhood—her mother had died young, her father drank heavily and had lost his job as a Métro conductor. He knew about her financial status—she had nothing in the bank, her earnings squandered on luxurious living—and her other love affairs—one with a married woman, another with the elderly Monsieur Sabate, who had made available the funds to launch her boutique. She is a free spirit, but clever, Antonio wrote in his diary, and I’ve learned a lot from being around her. She’s one of many couturieres in this city who envies Mademoiselle Chanel, but at least she’s smart enough to know she cannot rival Mademoiselle Chanel. Lots of couturieres are fooling themselves these days into thinking that they’re second best only to Chanel. But not Mademoiselle Topjen. She knows she’s not second best, or third best. That’s one reason she’s smart. She knows what she’s not. She also knows what she wants, and how to get it.… If I have any quarrel with her, it’s probably with the way she talks about some of her men friends behind their backs. She makes them sound like fools. Even Monsieur Sabate, who had been so helpful. This bothers me. But I say nothing. I only wonder what she’ll be saying about me someday.…

  There had never been any discussion of marriage during the three years they had been seeing one another regularly. She had always made it clear that she was as yet unready to commit herself exclusively to any one individual; and when Antonio decided to go on a sojourn to Italy in 1925, there had been no question of her joining him, nor had she seemed upset—on the contrary, she had seemed pleased, if also amused—when he admitted that the main purpose of this trip was for him to be introduced to a young Italian woman who might become his wife.

  The trip had been prompted in part by letters from his father in Maida. Francesco Cristiani had acknowledged receiving a number of indirect inquiries about Antonio’s marital status from some prominent men in the Maida area who had marriageable daughters. Even Antonio’s contemplating the possibility that he might find a wife through the contrivance o
f his elders marked him as a man who, with all his exposure to Parisian sophistication, remained intrinsically a true son of the old south. For centuries the marital bonding of young couples in this region had been consummated first by the fusion of their families, particularly their fathers. Emigration had of course tampered with this tradition. But in Antonio’s case, his heart had not emigrated.

  Entrusting his Paris shop for a month to his most senior tailor, and leaving during the mid-January lull that followed the holiday season, Antonio boarded the Paris express that got him into Naples on the following day. Once there he transferred to a southern-bound Italian “rapido” that stopped twenty-three times and took fifteen hours to get from Naples to Maida. Antonio knew in advance the names of some of the young women he would meet, but his father’s last letter had also reminded him that all the arrangements were subject to last-minute changes—which, Antonio did not have to be told, might include outright cancellations if the elders could not agree on the terms of the dowry and other unromantic issues that would have to be resolved before there could be any thoughts of romance. Antonio also knew that his father had been in contact with the fathers of prospective brides who resided at some distance from Maida—one was more than forty miles away, and a visit to her might involve a trip in the company of armed guards, for highway bandits with access to town gossip were often on the alert for these courtship calls. They knew that aspiring grooms and their fathers would be eager to present the best bella figura to their potential in-laws, and this might mean not only wearing their finest clothing, but also packing their pockets with noticeable wads of cash, and hanging gold watch chains across their vests, and adorning their fingers with diamond rings.