by Gay Talese
“I thought the monsignor had a niece we were to see in Jacurso,” Antonio commented in a weary tone, indicating his declining interest in continuing the conversation.
“The monsignor does have a niece in Jacurso,” his father said, “but he’s somehow also related to the young lady in Bovalino. And the young lady in Bovalino comes with a handsome dowry.”
“Look,” Antonio said, “I have to get home. I have to get off a letter to the man who’s taking care of the shop in Paris. I also want to spend a little time alone and think a bit more about all of this.”
“I understand,” said his father, sounding reasonable for the first time.
“Maybe I’ll take another stroll past Olympia tomorrow, maybe a final stroll, and then we can decide where we go from there, is that all right?”
“Fine,” said his father.
“So I’ll be going on home,” Antonio said softly, pushing his hat down hard on his head. “And I’ll see you a little later.…”
“Wait a second,” his father said. “I’ll go with you.”
40.
The next afternoon, a few minutes before four, Antonio crossed the square and headed toward the palm trees near the post office. It was much colder than it had been earlier in the week, and dark clouds were floating down from the mountains, and the atmosphere contained a bone-chilling mistiness and a slight musky scent that in Maida portended rain.
Midway across the square, after turning up the velvet collar of the chesterfield he had brought from Paris and was wearing for the first time in Maida, Antonio paused to allow Guardacielo’s homeward-bound herd to pass in front of him. The herd consisted of nearly two dozen sheep, three goats, and two watchdogs wearing steel-spiked collars. Antonio waved spiritedly with both arms in the air and called out Guardacielo’s name, having not seen him in years, but the old shepherd kept walking with the aid of his wooden pole, not looking up, seemingly deaf and blind. The trotting watchdogs, however, turned their spike-ringed faces toward Antonio and glared.
This afternoon’s chilling dampness was typical of the hill country in late January; and as Antonio proceeded across the square—nodding along the way to some elderly but unidentifiable pedestrians who wore hooded capes and greeted him by name—he found the weather strangely refreshing, clearing his head a bit after two hours in the smoky local café, having a heavily liquored lunch with his boyhood friends Basile and Paone. The lunch had in fact been enjoyable, with much laughter and reminiscing. Antonio had been with both of them for a time at the barracks in Catanzaro, until their units went on ahead of his own toward the Austrian front. After the war, Basile and Paone had returned to Maida to live, if not to work, on their parents’ neighboring farms, and each had married the other’s sister. Both men received disability benefits from the army, but at the café neither showed any signs of disability, not even after all the grappa, wine, and anisette that Antonio had abundantly provided, along with his packs of Turkish cigarettes that were chain-smoked and finished before the arrival of the food.
While seated at a rear table warmed by the kitchen and convenient to the bar, Antonio learned much from his talkative friends about the trends and thinking of the town; and to a degree they confirmed most of what he had heard earlier from his father—although not to the degree that would prompt him to credit his father with great perspicacity. His father and his friends, after all, had merely seen the same things, and had interpreted them similarly—through the eyes and understanding of fellow villagers. Whereas Antonio knew, all modesty aside, that he saw and understood things with a more worldly view, and, indeed, this broader and deeper insight was saddening to him at times, for it tended to diminish in his eyes some of the people he wanted to look up to—particularly his father. Antonio finally understood the profundity of the old village saying that his grandfather Domenico used to quote often: “Never educate your children beyond yourself.”
Antonio’s father, for example, and his village friends as well, seemed to be offended by many of the well-to-do Italian families who had recently returned from the United States, labeling them as spoiled by their affluence and having an attitude of arrogance and superiority that probably came as a result of living in the young nation made vainglorious by all its postwar prosperity and power. But Antonio regretfully saw in the critical reaction of his father and his friends, and undoubtedly also in their fellow villagers who had never risked going to the United States, a certain enviousness toward those townsmen who had gone abroad—and, worse, had returned with enough money to buy whatever they desired in Italy.
It had also been suggested by his father and his friends that the rich returnees from America had often been harmed by the living conditions overseas, and were now bringing back to Italy many New World maladies and mischievous inclinations. Tuberculosis was often mentioned, as was an advanced form of alcoholism supposedly unknown to the nontraveling villagers. But Antonio recalled as a boy hearing old-timers in Maida attributing these same ailments to an earlier wave of emigrants who had returned from Argentina; and as for the drinking problems, Antonio wondered how Maida’s staunchest boosters could explain the inebriated presence of such village regulars as the red-eyed undertaker, Rombiolo; and that tumbling wine vat of a veterinarian Pepe Volpe, the illegitimate son of Don Marco, the grappa-guzzling avvocato; to say nothing of the village’s distilled barber, Pasquale Riccio, and his ever shaky scissors and razor.
And finally, if Antonio were to be limited by the thinking of his father and friends, he would accept their theory that the returning Italians also were afflicted with an inherent American propensity for violence. To hear them tell it, a man guilty of nothing more than stealing a chicken or a pig in Italy could quickly become subverted in America to a career in gangsterism, especially now when he could become rich overnight by catering to America’s thirst for the tasty thrill of illegal spirits.
America was a land of cowboys, Indians, showgirls, sugar daddies, and mobsters—according to these isolationists in Maida, who also made much of the fact that, in 1924, Mussolini’s Socialist nemesis, Giacomo Matteotti, had been murdered in Italy by an American-born Italian gunman named, appropriately, Amerigo Dumini. But making such a point was yet another manifestation of narrow-mindedness, as Antonio interpreted it; although he did recall hearing a similar anti-American bias expressed with reference to the Matteotti murder by some of his Italian friends in France—friends who years before had resented President Wilson’s efforts at the Versailles Peace Conference to “mutilate” the territorial gains promised Italy by its British and French wartime allies. None of this carping about America’s negative influence, however, made much of an impression on Antonio. Again, because of his broader perspective and awareness of history, he concluded that the Fascists’ use of the murderer Amerigo Dumini had nothing to do with the reputedly violent atmosphere of postwar America; he remembered, in fact, that his grandfather Domenico had made references to American violence long before World War I: Domenico saw the nation as a spawning ground for killers in the context of the 1900 assassination of Italy’s King Umberto I, a crime also committed by an Italian gunman who had sailed over from America. Domenico, of course, conveniently ignored the fact that the Mafia had been functioning in southern Italy and Sicily two hundred years before Columbus had discovered America.
Apart from whatever criminal behavior might be indigenous to rural Italian society, Antonio saw little to refute the historical documentation that depicted southern Italians as traditionally resentful toward invaders, and hardened in their resentment during centuries in which they had been made to feel like second-class citizens on their native soil; and therefore, Antonio wondered, why should it be surprising now, in the 1920s, that Maida’s ensconced villagers might have visceral feelings of resentment or enviousness toward this latest group of “invaders,” those from the Italian ghettos of North America. Was this most recent intrusion of privileged people into Maida any less envy-provoking merely because the arrivals had Italian names and
spoke the local dialect (albeit datedly, and blended with American vulgarisms), and because, having bettered themselves abroad, they now were ready to return and make those who had remained feel worse about themselves? Granted, many among those who had earlier escaped Italy had been very generous in sharing their foreign-made earnings with the kinsmen they had left behind (Antonio thought of himself as a primary example of this generosity), but many other travelers had shown no such altruism. Therefore some resentment in the village was in order. And yet, as Antonio crossed the square and headed toward his hideaway behind the palm trees, it gave him no pleasure to identify resentment and enviousness as strong native Italian characteristics, even if the great Italian patriot Garibaldi had once reluctantly admitted that it was indeed so.
——
Arriving behind the tree, Antonio could not believe it!
There, at his feet, leaning against the base of a tree trunk were the books by Balzac!
They had been stolen from there two days before—who had returned them? Who ever returned stolen merchandise in Italy voluntarily? What was the meaning of this? Antonio stared down at the books, not daring to touch them. Suddenly he imagined a sinister aspect entering his courting adventure, and the sweetness of the anisette that lingered in his mouth began to agitate the exposed nerve in one of his lower molars.
From his position behind the tree he cautiously edged forward for a better view of the post office. But there seemed to be no one afoot watching him. The only people entering the post office now, moments after the four-o’clock church bells had stopped ringing, were two nuns who crossed themselves before pulling open the heavy doors with ease. Still very tense, Antonio again looked down at the books. He closed his eyes momentarily and breathed deeply, trying to regain his composure, to think with clarity. He cursed Basile and Paone for smoking all his cigarettes. He opened his eyes again; the books were still there. They looked the same as they had two days earlier; at least the book on top appeared no more wrinkled or bent than when he had last seen it, and the tiny part that had been torn off on the lower tip of the cover had gotten no larger.
Within a few seconds he had calmed himself somewhat, for it occurred to him that he was aggravating himself unnecessarily. What was there to worry about? Surely, Olympia had taken them—and not one of her jealous suitors—for, as the baron said, she read French. If she had read both books in two days, it indicated that she was a fast reader, and that she stayed home a lot (a good sign in a potential wife). Her having returned the books indicated, of course, that she was on to his little game. But so what? Maybe a love note, or a pressed flower, awaited him between the pages. If a vindictive suitor were involved, however, there might be the dreaded imprint of the Black Hand society; and then what? At lunch Basile and Paone had confirmed that Olympia had many admirers, including the one from America to whom Antonio’s father had alluded.
Basile said his name was Raffaeli. Bruno Raffaeli. He was said to have been born in Philadelphia. Basile, who had many relatives there—and not a good word to say about any of them—had seen Raffaeli sporadically in Maida, and was convinced he was an individual of dubious character. Raffaeli’s parents had operated a restaurant in Philadelphia, but they had sold the place before returning to Italy a year and a half before and acquiring the cliffside manor beyond Maida that had belonged to the late marquis of Botricello.
Antonio was told nothing more by his friend about Bruno Raffaeli, except that he was big and broad-shouldered, and that he was in and out of Maida frequently, but never predictably, and that, like the majority of trans-Atlantic travelers who made guest appearances in the local passeggiata, he eschewed the proletarian fashion adopted by most hometown bachelors in favor of the wide-brimmed fedoras and sharp-lapeled double-breasted overcoats preferred by gang leaders in America—overcoats with a white handkerchief in the outside pocket, and most likely a pistol in the inside pocket.
Impatiently, Antonio reached down, picked up the books, and flipped through the pages, prepared for anything—love notes, flowers, or threatening messages from the Black Hand society. He found none of these. Everything about the books seemed the same as when he had last touched them, except that his page markers were missing, which was the least of his concerns—for now, looking up, he saw Olympia walking along the road. It was four-ten. She was late. Her head was covered by the hood of her cape, which she held close to her body on this frosty day. But he recognized her instantly from her walk, and especially her long legs. If she was cold in her upper body, she was apparently warm below: her skirt today seemed shorter, exposing her legs above the knees, and, as usual, she wore sandals.
She did not look in his direction before entering the post office, which surprised and also disappointed him. The game was still on, although now there were renewed doubts about the players. Still standing behind the trees, Antonio glanced backward, then turned toward the front and peeked through the leaves. A few harmless-looking elderly couples were coming and going along the road, but no stalwart figures in fedoras. So Antonio tucked the books under his arm and stepped out of what he assumed to be his obscurity. Summoning whatever stoicism was within him, he stood ready to confront the vicissitudes of his village.
Boldly he walked toward the post office, half tempted to enter. But what would he do in there? Confront her directly? Confront her about what? No, he thought, that would be forcing the issue, and it might make him appear foolish. While he believed it had been Olympia who had taken the books, he could not be absolutely certain. It might have been Raffaeli. Or some other possessive deviant awaiting the right moment to ambush Antonio. Suddenly, serious thoughts of danger rose within Antonio, much as he tried to repress them. For the first time in years he recalled the fate of his late uncle Gaetano. Antonio remembered hearing the tale of how young Gaetano, standing in the shadows beneath the balcony of the woman he would eventually marry, had been jumped from behind and slashed across the temple with a knife. This had occurred in Maida thirty years before. Was Maida today any more advanced? The town today might be even more backward!
In any case, Antonio decided not to enter the post office. Olympia would be coming out any second. At once Antonio turned away from the front door and, with the books underarm, ambled on toward the square, reminding himself, as he had earlier, that there was no reason to panic. He should remain calm; alert but calm. He should continue for at least another day to play the baron’s game: play hard to get, if that was what Antonio had lately been doing with his time-consuming, possibly ill advised, masquerade of coquettishness.
Antonio saw Basile and Paone approaching. As Antonio waved, Basile left Paone behind and ran toward Antonio. He staggered before he reached him, and gasped for breath, seeming indeed disabled.
“Antonio,” he blurted out, holding on to Antonio’s shoulder for support, “I saw Raffaeli!” Basile then began to cough, and appeared on the verge of choking until Paone rushed forward to revive him by pounding him on the back.
“Raffaeli walked past the café with another man just after you left,” Basile went on haltingly, as Paone rubbed his back and looked upon Antonio with an expression of Maidese gloom that Antonio found irritatingly similar to the agonized face displayed in paintings of Saint Francis.
“Antonio,” Basile concluded, almost in a whisper, “I think we should stay with you.”
“No, no, my friend,” Antonio said, placing his hand on Basile’s shoulder, “I’m grateful, but that won’t be necessary.”
“Please, I think we should stay,” Basile insisted, “this man might be dangerous.…”
Antonio’s first instinct had been to welcome his friends as bodyguards, but then he saw this as a sign of cowardice, and also a capitulation to the philosophy of pessimism that had persisted in his village for centuries. Were he to be guided by the thinking of his friends—and, alas, his father—he would in spirit be back with them in the hills. No, Antonio believed that he and his father were cut from different cloth; the metaphor displeased him as
much as the paternal disrespect it implied, but it was nevertheless the truth. Antonio had not returned home to reenter the Middle Ages. He was in southern Italy in search of an idealized woman of old-fashioned values whom he considered timeless and priceless. And in his quest for such a woman he would not be discouraged by any reputed gangster from America, or by some local cutthroat who might exist only in the imagination of these kindly but fearful villagers who seemed at home only in a secluded place of oppression and frequent earthquakes.
“Well,” Basile said, finally breathing normally, “maybe you’re right. Raffaeli, when I saw him, wasn’t headed toward the post office. He was walking down toward the fountain, and maybe to his horses, and maybe he was off to see his parents.”
“Yes,” agreed Paone, sounding quite relieved that Antonio would not be needing them as bodyguards.
“But let me thank you both again,” Antonio said, shaking their hands and waving them off. “I’ll just be stopping at my father’s shop, and there are plenty of people around, and anyway I’m not concerned about Raffaeli, or anyone else.”
After his friends had departed, Antonio continued with an added spring in his stride, his feelings of pride and self-confidence renewed. He whistled as he walked, recalling a flamboyant musical revue he had seen in Paris at the Folies-Bergère; and while he remained on the alert, aware of the pedestrians in front of him as well as those along the edges of the square, there was in neither his look nor his manner any anxious expectation. Frankly, he was feeling good. He had outgrown his town, was above its petty grievances, but was not unmindful of the positive things about this place and its people. The offer of help from Basile and Paone, fearful as they undoubtedly were, had touched Antonio, and they certainly could not be held accountable for what this land of misfortune had done to their souls. And Maida, for all its antiquation and its occasional primitive passions, retained a quality of simple beauty and familiar intimacy that he missed in Paris. This square itself, rather large for a village so small, had been planned centuries before by people who thought big, and there was a largeness to be found even in these townsmen whom he may have ungraciously thought of as narrow-minded.