by Gay Talese
“Isn’t she beautiful,” the baron remarked. Antonio nodded, but what impressed him was the strength of her stride, the long muscular legs revealed under her billowing skirt. If she wanted to catch someone, he thought, she could do so with ease.
After she had disappeared into the post office, the baron stepped out from behind the trees and held on to his homburg, waiting for the wind to settle down.
“All right, my young knight, I’ll be running off,” he said. “I think you should begin your little stroll now, too, but slowly as you please. She’ll be coming out in a second. All I can say is, Good luck.”
Antonio bowed slightly and watched the baron move toward the courtyard of the church, where his carriage driver awaited him. Antonio lit up another cigarette with much difficulty in the wind, pressed his gray bowler more firmly on his head, and proceeded in the direction of the square with a sense of abandon he hoped would mark him as a true Parisian boulevardier—one whose only worry in Maida was to avoid stepping into the droppings that farm animals and horses had left scattered along the cobblestones.
Before reaching the café, where he saw some of the boyhood friends with whom he had drunk coffee and anisette the afternoon before, he quickly turned back toward the post office, as if he had forgotten something, and then remembered that he had forgotten something. The books of French fiction that he had brought along to carry under his arm as an added lure for the French-reading Olympia—two novels by Balzac that Antonio had brought home after the war but had never finished reading—had been left on the ground behind the trees. As he headed toward the side of the road where the trees were, however, he caught a peripheral glimpse of the spry Olympia leaving the post office, several envelopes in hand that she seemed in no hurry to open. In almost no time at all, the speedy young woman was directly in his path, regarding him with curiosity—or so he chose to imagine. Ignoring her completely, Antonio moved smoothly to his left; and then, with the nonchalance of the toreador he had seen performing in a bullring the year before during a week’s visit to Spain, Antonio turned his back on his potential attacker and strolled on in the opposite direction, going where he had not intended to go: away from the town and to an uninhabited field of brambles and high weeds that led uphill through a winding path to the hillside creek where Antonio and his boyhood friends used to play on Sunday afternoons in summertime, hurling sticks and stones at the large lizards and water moccasins that lingered there.
It was already getting dark before he reached the site of the creek, and he decided to turn back, having heard behind him neither the pattering feet of a pursuer nor even the scurrying of the usually omnipresent squirrels and rabbits. By the time he had left the leaf-strewn path and reentered the cobblestone clearing leading back to town, it was close to five, and the square ahead was nearly vacated. Antonio returned to where he had left the books behind the palm trees, then blinked twice before he accepted the fact that they were gone. And so, of course, was Olympia.
That evening Antonio said nothing to his parents about his afternoon’s experience with the baron’s daughter, and he was glad they did not ask, for he was in no mood for talking.
The following afternoon, however, after he had again crossed paths with her, ignoring her as before, Antonio did hear footsteps behind him; but clearly they were not the sounds of her limber, loping strides. They were heavy-footed, very masculine sounds that became somewhat unsettling to Antonio when, midway across the square, they multiplied and gave him the impression that perhaps three men were now deliberately tailing him at a distance of no more than ten yards.
Refusing to turn around and permit them to think he was intimidated, if that was their intention, he maintained his casual pace until he had crossed the square, and then he quickened it a bit as he reached the narrow street where his father’s shop was located. He could see the lights in the windows of the tailor shop, and in the adjacent shops as well, but the street itself lay in the shadows of buildings that blocked what was left of the late-afternoon sunlight. In the near distance he could vaguely see the outline of a cloaked woman walking toward him, a slender woman accompanied by a one-legged man who swung himself forward with the aid of crutches. Antonio heard coming from behind him the murmurings of the men, but there was no longer the sound of their footsteps. He walked on until, as the couple neared him, he moved to one side to let them pass. The woman nodded with a smile and continued, while her companion concentrated on Antonio for a moment, and then, after another vigorous thrust with his crutches, stopped and shifted his weight forward on his one good leg and tilted his head sideways.
“Cristiani?” he called back over his shoulder. “Antonio Cristiani?”
Antonio paused and then turned to see the profile of a large-nosed man with a full beard and hardly any hair on the top of his head, a head that glistened in the reflection of the light from a window behind him. Antonio also looked down the street toward the square; but he saw no sign of the men who he thought had been following him.
“I’m Capellupo!” the bearded man announced, while the woman also stopped and turned. “Mario Capellupo from Cosenza! We were together in the barracks at Catanzaro.…”
Antonio had been with several hundred men during his first weeks as a recruit, ten years before, and seeing Capellupo now, and hearing his name, made him no less a stranger. But Antonio nonetheless moved at once toward Capellupo and embraced him with all the signs of familiarity and the sincere sense of fraternalism that he felt whenever he greeted a fellow veteran.
“You sewed up my pants after I tore a hole in them on the wires of the cot,” Capellupo laughingly recalled, tightening his grip around Antonio’s neck as one of the crutches fell to the ground.
“Oh, yes,” Antonio said, as if he remembered, and at the same time he watched the woman stepping quickly to pick up the crutch.
“They were the pants to my dress uniform,” Capellupo went on, “and I had to wear it an hour later in that parade they made us march in before they sent us up to Austria to get shot at.”
Antonio certainly remembered the parade, and the train ride up the coast, and the white cans the soldiers threw out the windows. Now the woman was beside him, pushing up Capellupo’s left arm with her raised elbow and, with one knowing motion, shoving the handle of the crutch into an upright and steady position under Capellupo’s armpit. As Antonio stepped aside, Capellupo introduced the woman as his wife, Bettina. She greeted him with a smile that was less restrained than before.
“Bettina’s grandmother lives around here,” Capellupo explained. “She lives alone. We’ve come to visit for a few days.”
“You know the Mancuso family?” Bettina asked.
“I know a Giuseppe Mancuso,” Antonio said. “He’s a tailor with my father.”
“That’s my hardworking cousin,” she said. “I hardly ever see him.” Antonio wondered if she knew that her cousin was now reduced to working just two mornings a week.
“And how’s your cousin getting along?” Capellupo asked Antonio. “The one who was at Caporetto.”
“You know Sebastian?” Antonio asked, surprised.
“Sure, we served together for a while, and he used to talk about you,” Capellupo said. “Then his section got transferred up the river, and then I heard about the terrible thing that happened.”
Antonio, who days before had visited the bedside of Sebastian at the Rocchinos’ farmhouse in the valley—where Sebastian’s mother was now living almost permanently—said that he had regained some mobility, and that on occasion he was strong enough to move around slowly with a cane. Antonio added that one of the army doctors who regularly passed through the area and had Sebastian as a patient predicted that his condition might improve in the near future.
“Sounds like my kind of doctor,” Capellupo said. “An optimist, a man of hope in this gloomy world. When my legs got all shot up, I’m told, one of the doctors wanted to cut them both off. But the other doctor, thank God, outranked him and overruled him. And look a
t me today. I can move around faster than Bettina—right, Bettina?” His wife, who was not much taller than the crutch she stood next to, looked up at him and laughed, nodding. “And don’t think I’m planning to have this ugly stump of a leg the rest of my life,” Capellupo went on. “It’s going to grow out and form a perfect foot with perfect toes before I’m middle-aged, and then watch me move!”
“You’d better not move too far from me!” Bettina said, smiling as she grabbed hold of a crutch and threatened to pull it out from under him.
“No fear of that,” he said. “Nobody else would put up with me.”
“That’s right, nobody else would put up with you.”
Bettina then turned her round and cheerful face toward Antonio, her contentment shown clearly through the faintness of the light. It seemed that she was about to ask Antonio a question. He waited, but then she slowly turned away and faced her husband.
“Mario,” she said, “I’m afraid Nana is waiting for us with the horses.”
“Oh, yes,” Mario said, explaining to Antonio: “Bettina’s grandmother has the wagon near the square. She lives in the valley and doesn’t like being on the road after dark. But I’d like to stop in and see Sebastian someday before we return to Cosenza.”
“He’d want to see you, too,” Antonio said, “and he can’t be far from where you’re staying.”
“Yes,” said Bettina, after Antonio had described the Rocchinos’ farm. “I know exactly where it is.”
“So tomorrow we’ll go,” Mario said, “and we’ll have that old soldier Sebastian marching again in no time. Or at least we’ll cheer him up a little.”
“I’m sure you will,” Antonio said. “Thank you, Mario.”
Capellupo steadied himself on his crutches, preparing to move forward; but first, with some difficulty, he pressed up on his elbows and reached out to embrace Antonio once more. Antonio stepped in between the crutches and placed his arms around Capellupo’s powerful shoulders and back, feeling his weight swaying heavily, and the coarse curly beard covering his cheeks. He saw Bettina edging in beside him and, after a moment’s hesitation, turned away from Mario and faced her. Her arms were already raised, and she and Antonio exchanged kisses. Then she returned to her husband’s side and waited as he took the first step.
“Ciao, Antonio,” Mario said, with a little wave of his right hand over his shoulder.
“Ciao, Mario,” Antonio said. “Ciao, Bettina.”
Antonio watched them move together through the dark street toward the twilight of the square. Then he headed on to his father’s shop, feeling his eyes moisten slightly. But he was hardly unhappy. Indeed, he had found warmth in the presence of a couple in love, and he had not felt more cheerful and hopeful since returning to Maida.
After skipping up the steps and entering the shop, Antonio greeted his father with a smile and then, doing something he had never done before, removed his bowler and flipped it through the air across the room toward the wooden head of a mannequin in the corner. His father, who had been studying the patterns spread out on his desk near the fitting room, looked up in wonderment as the hat sailed past the mannequin and hit against a fabric shelf before falling to the floor.
“Well,” said Francesco, “you seem to be in high spirits. You must have had a good day.”
“Who knows?” Antonio said, picking up the hat and placing it on the mannequin’s head, then tilting it at a rakish angle. “I had my little strut past Olympia.”
“Nothing good can come of that,” said his father, again looking down at the patterns.
“I think she saw me,” Antonio said, “but I’m not sure I made any impression. The only people I probably impressed today were some male admirers. They practically followed me here from the post office.”
His father looked up and stared across the room at Antonio.
“You say men were following you?” he asked with concern.
“Yes, I think so.”
“Did you recognize any of them?”
“I didn’t turn around.”
“You didn’t turn around!” Francesco repeated in a loud voice. “Well, that’s typical of you—always carefree in the presence of danger.…”
It was not typical, but Antonio said nothing, not wanting an argument. A one-legged man might walk contentedly and optimistically through the streets of Maida, Antonio thought, with concealed sarcasm, but not the son of this tailor who remains constantly aware of every possible peril. Antonio was sorry he had mentioned the men to his father. He was sorry mainly because now, after thinking more about it, he believed he might have been mistaken. And the very idea that he could be unnerved by anyone along the streets of Maida, he who had served at Verdun and along the Marne, belatedly struck him as absurd. Taking his hat off the mannequin, he prepared to head home.
“Where are you going?” Francesco asked, frowning.
“I have letters to write, I’ll see you later.”
“No,” said Francesco. “Wait for me. I’ll be closing early. We’ll go together.”
“Look,” Antonio said softly, with his hat in hand, “I’m afraid I gave you the wrong impression. I’m quite sure I wasn’t being followed. I was probably just getting some attention from a couple of pederasts admiring my suit. Maybe this town has finally gotten a touch of Parisian sophistication, and now has a few pederasts.…”
“Pederasts are the least of your worries around here,” his father interrupted. “You’d better get serious, Antonio. We have some dangerous characters drifting around here now. You’ve been away a long time. Things have changed.…”
Francesco stood up. He remained quiet for a few seconds but appeared to become more emotional. Then he pointed across the room toward a chair, his bony white hand shaking slightly, his expression quivering but insistent—a face Antonio knew well from his youth here as an apprentice.
“Sit down, Antonio,” his father said firmly. “Sit down over there and listen to me.”
Antonio shrugged but walked over and sat down, his hat in his lap.
“Since the Fascists took over,” his father began, “the police around here have been forced to do things they didn’t do in the old days. In the old days they didn’t go up in the mountains to raid the headquarters of hijackers and ransomers. In those days, as you probably know, the police used to be the go-betweens. They’d negotiate between the gang leaders and their victims, and everybody got something in return for something else, and people rarely got hurt. But now with these raids, the organized gangs are being broken up, and the police are locking up everybody they catch, even without evidence, and it’s made things worse. The runaways from these gangs are now operating on their own. They’re fighting with one another for the right to rob and kidnap. Things are out of control. Nobody knows who to deal with. And the economy has made some criminals so desperate that they’ll kill you for your watch. That’s what happened recently one night in Catanzaro. A man got shot to death during a struggle for his watch. This could happen in Maida. It could happen to you—you with your little jokes about Paris sophistication and pederasts.”
“What do you want me to do, go back to Paris?” Antonio asked, unable to repress his impatience.
“No, I just want you to keep your eyes open around here,” his father replied. “And if you hear people breathing down your neck, for God’s sake, why don’t you turn around and see who they are?”
“Nobody was breathing down my neck!” Antonio insisted, about to get up.
“Sit down, Antonio,” his father said, holding up his hand. “I’m not finished yet. There’s something else I want to say.” Antonio sighed but remained seated. His father continued: “We also have some American-born men who’ve come back to these parts. They’re the sons of immigrants who worked hard over there, but most of the sons didn’t want to work and live like their fathers. They wanted to get rich, quick and easy. So some of them drifted into bootlegging. And they travel back and forth between around here and Sicily, and then back to the Un
ited States, involved with their secrets. They carry guns. I don’t doubt that some are killers. And listen to this: Today I heard that one of the people who’s been hanging around Olympia is a guy from America.”
“Oh my God, you really want her off the list, don’t you?” Antonio said, standing.
“I didn’t say that,” his father replied. “That’s just your hasty conclusion.”
“Well, then, what are you saying?” Antonio asked, facing Francesco directly. “Are you saying that she’s connected with a gangster?”
“I’m not saying that, either. I’m just passing on what I heard.”
“Where’d you hear it?”
“From the regional prefect, Don Vincenzo, who stopped in today. He’s a cousin of the baron, and he doesn’t like this man from America.”
“Did the prefect say the guy is a gangster?”
“No, he just thinks he’s not the type that should be hanging around Olympia.”
“I assume I am the right type?”
“The baron thinks so.”
“And you?”
“You know what I think. I think you can do better.”
“In Polia?”
“Oh, that reminds me,” said his father. “There may be a little difficulty with the Polia trip. The shy young lady up there apparently is insulted by your delay in getting there, and her father sent word to me hinting that even if you two should get to like one another, he’s not sure she would want to leave Polia for Paris. But I think he’s just using the delay as an excuse to reduce the dowry.”
“This is all getting pretty complicated, if you ask me,” said Antonio, shaking his head and thinking how simple things had been in Paris with Mademoiselle Topjen. “Well anyway, where do we go from here?”
“Would you like to go down to Bovalino?”
“I thought you said the roads were dangerous, that the crooks were running wild!”
“That’s what I said, but your mother and grandfather think differently,” Francesco explained in a matter-of-fact manner that only confused Antonio further. “They went down to Bovalino last week, in the monsignor’s carriage, which has crosses on the sides, and they’re very impressed, and want you to go down very soon—using the monsignor’s carriage.”