by Gay Talese
Prominent among these was the California-based financier Amadeo P. Giannini, who expanded from a small Italian neighborhood banker in San Francisco to the founder in 1930 of the powerful Bank of America, which would soon have branch offices throughout the nation. Giannini’s ancestors were from Genoa—hardly within range of a southern Italo-American’s search for prideful regional identity; but, as in the case of Christopher Columbus, Joseph took what he could get. The NBC Symphony Orchestra was headed by another northerner whom Joseph looked up to: Arturo Toscanini, who was a native of Parma, southeast of Milan—although Toscanini had by 1940 installed as his first flutist a southern Italian, a future composer and conductor named Carmine Coppola. Coppola had an infant son who would grow up to become a Hollywood director, of such films as The Godfather. But as in the case of the younger Coppola—named Francis Ford Coppola because he was born in Detroit—the famous offspring of the Bourbon kingdom (offspring that would also include the 1984 vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, the New York senator Alfonse D’Amato, the architect Robert Venturi, the artist Frank Stella, and the feminist leader Eleanor Cutri Smeal) were at least a generation away from success and recognition. More typical of the occupation of southern Italo-Americans between World Wars I and II in America were such unheralded figures as Nicola Iacocca, who worked variously as a shoemaker, a short-order cook, and a seller of auto tires in Allentown, Pennsylvania (his son Lee would become president of Ford Motor Company in 1970); and Andrea Cuomo, who dug sewers in northern New Jersey (his son Mario would be elected governor of New York in 1982). But in 1940 the only well-known Italian name in American politics was of course that of New York’s Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, and if the popular politician was not unduly sensitive about the origins of his bandmaster father, Achille (a native of the southern town of Foggia), he most likely was about the origins of his Trieste-born Jewish mother, Irene. When her background was revealed in a New York Yiddish newspaper during the mayor’s first term, La Guardia initially refused to discuss it.
Insecure and factionalized as the Italians in America seemed to be—especially after Roosevelt’s stab-in-the-back comment in 1940—there was one politician who believed he could take advantage of this situation and swing great numbers of unhappy Italian voters to his side. He was the Republican candidate for president, Wendell L. Willkie. And during his campaign against Roosevelt, he often dared the president to repeat his reference to the Italians as back-stabbers. But Roosevelt avoided doing so. Although the race was close—with Willkie carrying most neighborhoods heavily populated by Italo-Americans—Roosevelt won an unprecedented third term with a popular vote of 27 million to Willkie’s 22 million. After this, as far as Italians in the United States were concerned, things only worsened.
Roosevelt’s declaration of war against Japan after the latter’s surprise air attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941, meant that Japan’s Axis allies, Italy and Germany, were obliged to take sides against the United States; and thus Americans of Italian descent were now officially at war with their families in Italy. Joseph’s situation was typical: while he was parading his patriotism by volunteering for patrol duty along the boardwalk with other members of his Rotary Club, his brothers and other relatives overseas were dressed in Fascist uniforms strutting to the goose step that Mussolini had introduced in the hope that his soldiers might look and act more like the bellicose Nazi troops whom the Duce envied and revered.
But unfortunately for the Duce, he could not turn Italians into Germans; and their battlefield performances from the outset of the war most often embarrassed him. His forces had hardly gained enough mileage against the weakened French in 1940 to be worthy of an armistice—France’s yielding to Italy had more to do with Hitler’s strong desires than with Mussolini’s timid invaders—and the Italian army proved equally inept after attacking Greece in 1940 (where the Italians again needed German help). And Italy was no more persevering in the African campaigns that followed from 1941 through 1943; every Italian advancement in the desert was followed by military blunders and setbacks, including one in Ethiopia, which allowed the British to transport back to his palace and his throne the deposed emperor, Haile Selassie. While an exasperated Mussolini could only conclude that Italy’s generals and soldiers were unworthy of his leadership, a more plausible explanation was perhaps offered by The Christian Science Monitor’s correspondent in Rome, Saville R. Davis, who observed: “It is not possible to fight modern battles with an army of conscientious objectors.”
The national Italian persona, individualistic in the extreme, simply could not be regimented into a war machine by Mussolini or probably anyone else. At this point in their history, the people of Italy were beyond regimentation. Anyone who doubted this had merely to watch Italian soldiers marching in a parade: they were rarely in step. The average Italian conscript saw no reason to fight in World War II. In World War I, there had at least been the longtime animosity toward Austria, dating back before the Risorgimento. But whom could they be convinced to hate in World War II, especially after Italy had gained so little after the costly triumph of World War I? The Italian people had no real quarrel now with the French, or even with the British, whose country had long enriched Italy with friendly tourists and admiring travel writers; and certainly no quarrel with the United States, the locale of myriad Little Italys generating the income that kept multitudes of Italians from starvation. It was also true that Italian men, by their very nature, are averse to impersonal killings, which was what a soldier was expected to accomplish, and what most countries’ conscripts adapt to doing quite readily. But as trigger-happy as the average Italian male might be in avenging a personal affront—some other man’s winking at his girlfriend; seducing his wife; stealing his sheep: three offenses that many hotheaded Italian men would punish with equal vigor—the same man would instinctively absent himself from the impersonal bloodletting that was endemic to battlefields occupied by clashing infantrymen, machine-gunners, and tankers. If he had learned anything from Italian history, it was that today’s enemy will be tomorrow’s friend; and that in conflicts fought at the behest of kings, or dictators, or politicians, there was very little that was worth dying for.
There were, to be sure, Italian males who were exceptions to the norm, and many of these were employed by the Mafia—in which perhaps most of Italy’s natural-born “soldiers” were enlisted, and in which there still might exist the residue of the predatory blood that once flowed through the veins of Roman warriors. The mafiosi were, if nothing else, the Italians most capable of “impersonal” killings—bringing death to absolute strangers if need be to fulfill an order from a capo mafioso, who routinely passed it down from above. Many of the better Mafia soldiers had immigrated to America after their civil rights in Sicily and southern Italy had been curtailed by the frequently lawless raids of Fascist lawmen. But when Mussolini required a reliable gunman, as he did in 1943, he was, ironically, obliged to purchase an expensive contract killing via a Fascist deputy to a Sicilian-born Mafia boss in Brooklyn, whom the Duce’s law enforcers had banished from Italy as an undesirable citizen. Shortly after the boss had reviewed the contract, and received a lucrative down payment, he approved the order and relayed it down the ranks to be carried out by one of his soldiers, a sharpshooter of Sicilian origin named Carmine Galante—who efficiently did his job. After stalking for a few days the man whom Mussolini had come to abhor as a political nemesis in the United States, and wanted to have eliminated, the mafioso Galante finally confronted the man on a dark street in lower Manhattan and pumped bullets into one of his lungs and his brain.
Carlo Tresca died almost immediately.
46.
Adolf Hitler’s control over France from the spring of 1940 into the summer of 1944 meant that Antonio Cristiani, as a citizen of Italy, was free to travel back and forth across the French–Italian border; and he often arrived in Maida with bundles of gifts that brightened the spirits of the melancholy townspeople, w
ho greeted him sometimes with outbursts of cheering that, whether he deserved it or not, he thoroughly enjoyed.
With each visit home the number of his greeters increased, no doubt because the train station’s indiscreet telegrapher, after receiving Antonio’s wired time of arrival from Paris and relaying the message to the elderly Cristianis by donkey express, then shared the information with the station’s carriage drivers, who in turn circulated it throughout the village and persuaded a growing number of local dignitaries and bureaucrats (each seeking favors from Maida’s most distinguished native son) to book carriage reservations to the terminal in time to welcome their potential benefactor. Although Antonio lacked the financial resources and political influence in either Paris or Rome to achieve most of his countrymen’s desires, he never rejected their requests or hinted that it was beyond his power to fulfill them; for what his countrymen most needed he felt compelled to encourage—the notion that anything was possible. This notion was fundamental to their religious faith, to their belief in miracles, to their strength and stoicism in times of natural and manmade upheavals. Southern Italy was a fountainhead of dark fantasies, turmoil, and hope.
Submerged but reachable by a true and probing touch, every southerner’s sense of hope was tempered by the rock-hard reality that nature progressed slowly in this part of Italy, where the planters of olive trees never survived to see the fruits of their labor, and where individuals seeking favors from high places anticipated a very long wait. But the average needy southerner found comfort in the familiarly slow process by which all requests for special treatment were lobbied by aspiring benefactors up through the hierarchy of influence-peddling bureaucrats and prominenti (people not always corrupt, but rarely incorruptible); and then further up to the levels of Machiavellian ministers and magistrates renowned for their pondering and vacillation, and their expectation that with every favor they dispensed they would receive one in return—if not today, then tomorrow; if not on earth, then in heaven.
The legacy of broken promises being what it was in this village where everything was remembered and tardiness was a venerated tradition, Antonio felt less reluctant to represent himself to his townsmen as a problem solver. It was an honorable calling in the south, one in which he really never had to solve a problem but had only to convey the impression that he was trying to solve one. Being a social-climbing tailor, well practiced in the cloaked art of appearances, made him ideal for this role; and whenever he arrived at the Maida train station he gave a command performance.
Hardly did he embrace his mother and father before he would turn to the crowds pressing around him: people who whispered into his ears, and to whom he nodded encouragingly; people who shouted reminders of past requests, which he now jotted down for the first time in his notebook, pausing to slip a few hundred-lire bills into the pockets of others as they pretended not to notice. Such gestures of kindness and hope, repeated whenever he came to town, brought merriment to this terminal most often pervaded by the gloom of black-ribboned trains bearing coffins of war victims as well as injured soldiers returning from Italy’s ill-fated campaigns in Africa, or Greece, or, more recently—as Mussolini had backed Hitler’s turnabout on their onetime ally Joseph Stalin—the bloodstained steppes of Russia. What a contrast Antonio’s arrivals were to such reminders—his leaping onto the platform with a two-handed wave after doffing his homburg, his clothing remarkably unwrinkled and his jacket lapels rouged with rosettes; his tan-and-white semibrogue footwear, buffed minutes before with a dinner napkin he had purloined from the dining car, shining as brightly as his lacquered leather valises, which two huffing porters carried behind him, along with his gift packages for his family, his friends, and a few favored bureaucrats and prominenti. After reassuring his entire constituency, and devoting more lines in his notebook to their wishful thinking, Antonio would be escorted by the town’s left-wing mayor and right-wing monsignor toward Maida’s only motor vehicle, a four-door Fiat touring car owned by the municipality and used on such special occasions as Saint Francis’s feast day procession, the most important funerals and weddings, and Antonio’s quarterly sojourns to his native village. The driver of the vehicle on all occasions was the prefect of the province, a white-haired, blue-uniformed man bearing a pistol and sword whose oldest son was currently serving with the Italian air force in Albania. When the prefect had once complained of his son’s distant assignment, Antonio had hinted that arrangements might be made to transfer him closer to home—to Cosenza perhaps, or better yet to Catanzaro. The prefect knew that this was impossible, there being no air bases located in Cosenza or Catanzaro; but appreciating Antonio’s good intentions, he made no mention of this. He also hoped he might use Antonio’s influence in other ways, for he had studied the photographs and news clippings in the window of Francesco Cristiani’s tailor shop, accounts of Antonio’s receiving many honors, including one that pictured him shaking hands with the Duce’s son-in-law, Count Galeazzo Ciano.
When this was first sighted by the baron of the Bianchi family, it brought tears to his eyes as he remembered his hopes years before to have Antonio for his son-in-law, and it might have happened if the baron’s beautiful daughter Olympia had not been too narcissistic to court, and wiser than to end up in Argentina owning a bankrupt boutique. As a sign of his enduring esteem for Antonio, the baron was always on hand at the station to greet him, expecting nothing in return except that Antonio dine on occasion at the crumbling palazzo and regale the doddering baroness and himself with amusing tales and comments about modern life beyond the surrounding mountains.
Another habitual attendee of Antonio’s arrivals was the local leader of the Fascist Party, a cement mixer by trade who was born of a Sicilian mother and was therefore viewed with grave suspicion by party leaders in the north; he believed Antonio could swing a lucrative road-building contract his way on the Maida marina through influence with the Duce’s son-in-law. When the cement mixer sought Antonio’s intercession in this matter, the latter patted him on the back, gave him a hearty smile, and said he would see what could be done—knowing as he spoke that he would do absolutely nothing. As Antonio remembered well, the last time he had tried to use his influence with the Duce’s son-in-law, the graceless Count Ciano had reacted by sending three intimidating Fascist henchmen to visit his shop in Paris. One of my friends in the Italian Embassy confided that Ciano’s office thinks I’m too pro-French and therefore an enemy of Italy, Antonio noted in his diary during the spring of 1942. But in Paris many French people think I’m too pro-Italian, and naturally a Fascist.… I must remain very, very careful these days, very careful.… And very careful he remained throughout the year. So long as Ciano was Mussolini’s son-in-law, and so long as Mussolini was the Duce, Antonio’s image in Maida as being close to Italy’s ruling family would continue as a myth he would neither affirm nor deny.
The local order of mendicant friars, from whom some people kept their distance because the friars rarely took a bath, were also regularly part of Antonio’s receiving committee. They anticipated the day when he would serve as their fund-raiser—if there again came a day when the people of Maida had funds. The village had been on the barter system for years; and with the wartime rationing laws restricting everything except what was traded secretly on Italy’s flourishing black market, the mendicant friars claimed they were close to starvation, although there was rarely one among them who was not grossly overweight. It was truly impossible to starve in Maida, where vegetables and fruit grew miraculously out of rocks whenever there was the slightest whiff of famine in the air, which was discernible with the first sky battles between buzzards. But it was also true that, except for enough to eat, few people had enough of anything else.
The petrol to operate the municipality’s Fiat had to be procured periodically from the ferryboats that docked on the coast at a port where the prefect had nefarious connections. And the charcoal that burned in the braziers of the villagers’ homes came largely from the state railway, which was unaware
of the generosity of its local stationmaster. Since all wool and other fabric had been requisitioned by the army for making uniforms, tents, and other military articles, Antonio’s father, Francesco, would have lacked the material to make suits even if he had had the customers with the money or sufficient tradable commodities to afford them. Francesco, now in his middle seventies, was reduced to patching people’s worn-out clothing, or to exchanging with tailors in distant villages and trying to resell locally the unneeded garments of customers who had died before trying them on, or who had tried them on, taken them home, and died at some later date—leaving to their next-of-kin the dismal but traditional duty of returning the wardrobe to the “dead storage” rooms that existed in every tailor shop. Even in these modern times of the 1940s, with the Germans inventing rocket ships that flew over England without pilots, it was considered dangerous and disrespectful for a villager to don the clothing of the dead, whose eternal and omnipresent spirits would surely avenge such insults. It was also deemed disrespectful to profit from dead people’s clothing, either through sale or barter.
But now that fabric was so scarce even scarecrows had been divested, many tailors felt no compunctions about trading and reselling buried men’s bespoke clothing, although the tailors took care to sell only clothes of men buried far away. The term “far away” in the mountainous south usually meant any distance of more than twenty miles.
Antonio grabbed one of the gift packages from the stack the railroad porter was carrying, and handed it to a friar, saying, “Here, I’ve brought you a present from Paris.” Before the friar could say thank you, Antonio allowed himself to be shoved forward by those pressing behind him, a crowd that included the mayor, the monsignor, and the prefect, all of whom were eager to board the awaiting Fiat and proceed toward the village. If Antonio had handed the friar the correct present, and he prayed that he had, the friar would find in it the robe of a Franciscan monk who had recently died in Paris, and had earlier served as the chaplain in Antonio’s veterans’ association. The mayor’s present, which the prefect had just placed in the car trunk along with other packages, was a brand-new suit Antonio had made nearly three years before for a French deputy minister who had fled Paris days before the German invasion of 1940. The deputy minister had neither paid for the suit nor subsequently written asking Antonio to save it, and Antonio assumed that he had joined France’s other fleeing political figures in Vichy, the town in central France earlier known for its spa and health-giving waters, but presently known as the refuge for the ousted French government led by Marshal Pétain and others who had collaborated with the Germans. Many of these people had left behind in Antonio’s shop not only new suits and overcoats but also older garments that had been remodeled or altered. After storing them for so long without a word from their owners, Antonio was quite sure they would never be reclaimed. He became doubly convinced of this before Christmas 1942, when the Germans—who had hitherto limited their occupation to north central France and the coastal areas along the Atlantic Ocean and the English Channel—suddenly ordered their troops throughout central and southern France, thus occupying the entire country, including Vichy. Seeing no bright future for the forgotten French menswear that was crowding his shop, Antonio packed much of the new and used clothing into boxes and brought it to Maida to distribute to the townspeople.