A Writer's Life

by Gay Talese

  I think my father left Italy with great misgivings about his homeland, disappointed with its low status as a world power, lower than that of the French, barely higher than that of the Greeks, its government in Rome unstable and inefficient and unable to adequately feed and shelter its people, and having no social conscience—driving people like himself, among the most ambitious and restless members of his generation, out of the country forever. Despite all his piety and sense of obligation to those dearest to him, my father was, in my imagined way of thinking, an inwardly angry and very selfish man when he left home, and I further believe that when he came to live in America, he blended his anger and self-centeredness into the melting pot of a nation motivated by millions of men like himself, dissatisfied and driven, coming originally from Europe, Asia, the Middle East, South America, wherever—a diverse group of newcomers who had in common a quarrel with where they had come from and who, unlike many of their relatives who remained behind, had the gall and gumption to say good-bye.

  It surely must not have been easy for these departing people to say good-bye to everything that until then had been so familiar, so understandable, so encoded in their consciousness. No matter how intolerable the situation might have been, leaving demanded a certain hardheartedness, a survivor’s mentality, a lack of sentimentality about those they loved. All good intentions and rationalizations aside, these travelers behaved little differently than deserters. I know this word would hardly resonate well within the storied walls of the immigrant museum at Ellis Island, but nonetheless I think that within the DNA of the mass migration to America there is an unromantic and primal pursuit of a better life, a propensity to extricate oneself from losing causes, a capacity to look ahead, not back, and accept new customs, a new language, and sometimes a new name. Whenever I hear America singled out for its aggressiveness and pragmatism, its mercenary zeal, its meddlesome foreign policy, or its market for violence with reference to its taste in popular culture and entertainment, I think these things are genetically linked to the passion, defiance, and anger that was brought to these shores first by the Puritans and then by the multitudes of emboldened boat people who followed them.

  After I had waited at the Sant’ Eufemia terminal for a little more than two hours, alternatively strolling around the platform and sitting down to read Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair, I heard an odd metallic sound coming over the hill; I would later learn this came from the engine powering the one and only automobile then operating in this part of Italy. It was a battered gray prewar Fiat owned by the stationmaster. And as I saw it make a sharp turn off the hillside and head down the rocky road toward the terminal, I quickly stepped off the platform and ran toward the vehicle with my right hand waving in the air. The driver slammed on the brakes and, lowering his window, poked his head out and regarded me with narrowing eyes and complete silence.

  “Americano-Calabresi,” I announced, pointing to the gold lieutenant’s bar that was pinned to the collar of my khaki shirt. He continued to stare at me, saying nothing. He was an elderly man with wizened dark facial skin, and he wore a black visored cap down over his bushy white eyebrows. I tried again to introduce myself, this time I hoped more favorably by stressing the second word: “Americano-Calabresi.” I knew from my father that people in this region identified themselves as Calabrians, not Italians. Even my mother’s immigrant parents, having left Italy half a century ago, invariably emphasized their separatism and their provincial insularity within their Brooklyn Italian neighborhood by calling themselves Calabrians—Calabresi.

  “Calabresi!” he finally repeated, his voice rising and his head nodding with what I took to be a sign of his approval. He got out of his car and slowly came closer. He was a short, slightly stooped man, whose white shirt without a tie was buttoned tight under his Adam’s apple, and he wore a frayed black cutaway from which the tails had been cut off.

  “Philadelphia?” he asked.

  “New York,” I replied, relieved and pleased that we were able to communicate.

  “Me a coma from a Philadelphia,” he said.

  I then tried to inform him of my surname, pronouncing Talese as it had always been pronounced in my home and in my parents’ store in New Jersey—Tal-lease. The old man looked at me quizzically. Then I pronounced my name as I used to hear it pronounced by the Naples-born maître d’ and the waiters who worked at an Italian restaurant in Atlantic City that my father frequently took us to on Sunday evenings. Tal-lay-zeh.

  “My name is Tal-lay-zeh,” I said, “I have come to visit the family Tal-lay-zeh.” Pointing toward the village on the hill, I continued: “They are up there.”

  “Ah, Tal-lay-zeh.” He nodded with familiarity, suddenly genial and enthusiastic. “Si, si, si,” he said, waving me toward his car. “I take you.”

  I hurried to get my bag and jacket, and, after placing them in the car’s backseat—atop a stack of freshly cut logs, and as far away as possible from a partly opened sack containing coal—we slowly proceeded up the narrow, winding three-mile road; and as we bumped along, zigzagging and at times almost stalling, I began to see various signs of human activity that I had not seen from below: people casually riding mules close to the edge of a cliff, women walking gracefully with objects on their heads, a shepherd leading a herd of sheep and his dog into a meadow.

  My driver’s name was Lucio. If I understood him correctly, he had been the stationmaster at Sant’ Eufemia since the war’s end, having replaced a nephew who had died in the Italian army. Lucio said he had lived in Philadelphia for four years during the 1930s, and then was deported. I did not ask him why. I did not probe deeply into his background, fearing that my curiosity might lead me beyond what he wanted me to know. I was attuned to the guarded nature of Calabrians, a distant demeanor that I also associated with some of the hill people I had met in northern Alabama and West Virginia while driving to and from home during my later years in college. And yet Lucio was surprisingly forthcoming. Perhaps this was due to his having been born and reared along the Calabrian coastline, where he had often been in contact with seafaring travelers and transients at the terminal. He said he was not personally acquainted with my relatives, but he reminded me he was aware of my name. He added that he knew people in the village who could easily arrange for my introduction.

  He stopped the car when we arrived at the town square, parking it next to a large circular fountain with a cherubic figure in the center but with no water flowing. The cobblestone square was lined with large Baroquestyle houses, most of which had cracked walls and chipped ornamentation, and on the balconies of some of the buildings were women wearing shawls, who stepped forward and leaned over the rails to get a closer look as Lucio got out of the car, I remained seated, as he had suggested, watching as he walked toward a group of men who sat along the edge of the square, playing cards on a wooden table under the tattered awning of an unattended café.

  The men stood to greet Lucio, and as he spoke, they turned and looked in my direction. One of the men then gestured up toward one of the women on the balcony, calling out to her in a loud voice. Soon a boy in his early teens came down to join the men, and, after being spoken to, the boy ran swiftly across the square toward a narrow road that led uphill, in the direction of a high-tiered row of small stone houses that seemed to be leaning against one another and clinging precariously to the side of the cliff.

  Lucio returned to the car smiling, explaining that the boy had been dispatched to get my relatives. I got out of the car and for the next fifteen minutes I stood waiting with Lucio next to the fountain. He was smoking one of the cigarettes I had picked out of a pack in my pocket and had bought at the PX in Frankfurt. I had an unopened pack in my bag that I intended to give him later. I noticed that the men had now resumed playing cards, but the women on the balcony were still directing their full attention toward us, leaning over the rails and regarding us rather boldly, I thought, not looking away when I glanced up at them but, rather, gazing back with the unflinching expr
essions of fixated crows. I wished that they would go away. I was feeling a bit uneasy now, awkward about being in this public place, awaiting a personal meeting with kinfolk whose language I could not speak and around whom I was not sure how to behave. I again thought I had made a mistake in coming here, misguided by my impulsiveness. It’s not me who belongs here, I told myself, it’s my father, my gift-giving, unsentimental father. I was merely a tourist traipsing through his past, on a furlough into antiquity, waiting in this languorous place to meet some of these strangers whose pictures were in my parents’ photo album, the album I’d kept hidden from my school friends.

  “Ah, they are coming,” said Lucio, squinting into the distance while puffing on his cigarette. Soon I recognized the boy. He was leading a few dozen men and women down the winding road toward the square, and there were also some teenagers and children trailing behind. I shifted about, readjusted my olive drab military cap lower over my brow, and peeked at my wristwatch. It was nearly 4:00 p.m. The sun was blazing, and there was hardly a breeze sweeping across the square. Although it was a spring afternoon in Calabria, it felt like a midsummer heat wave in Manhattan. The flies were everywhere, and as I looked up, I again observed the crowlike women watching me from their balconies.

  “When is the next train going back to Naples?” I asked Lucio.

  “After seven o’clock,” he replied.

  “I must be on it,” I said.

  “Si, si,” he said, “I take you.”

  Now the approaching group was so close that I could see their faces and could recognize some of the clothing they wore. As I forced a smile, two gray-haired women in the front pushed ahead of the boy and ran toward me with their arms outstretched, calling out words that I did not understand, and they proceeded to kiss me with such enthusiasm that my hat was knocked to the ground. These women were the wives of my father’s brothers, Lucio explained to me, and one of them was wearing my mother’s old primrose yellow dress. Soon my father’s brothers, my uncles—the soccer-playing ex-soldiers in Mussolini’s army—had advanced to embrace me, kissing me on both cheeks, grazing me with their stubble, and I noticed that there were tears in their eyes. They resembled my father more in person than they did in the snapshots, having the same lean features, high cheekbones, and profiles; and yet, though they were several years younger than my fifty-two-year-old father, they seemed to be older, having skin that was lined and weathered, and both men were missing a few front teeth.

  After them came the others, a clutching encirclement of nephews, nieces, and varying grades of cousins—I was not sure who all of them were, although Lucio questioned them and tried to identify them for me. But no matter if they were closely related or distantly related, they all assumed the same ardent and immediate sense of familiarity with me, kissing me and pulling me toward them and placing their arms around my neck and shoulders with a firmness and presumptuousness that I found excessive and unwanted and unseemly in this public place. My instinct was to back away, but I was positioned against the ledge of the fountain, and I was also fearful of giving offense by appearing to be unresponsive to their heartfelt openness and exuberance. I was simply unaccustomed to this, not having been reared by parents who were demonstratively affectionate. While I had seen my parents greet my mother’s family in Brooklyn with Italian-style kisses during our holiday visits, such expressions of endearment were never exchanged in public, and on those rare occasions when a relative or an Italian-born friend from Brooklyn or Philadelphia came to see us at the Jersey shore—my mother, incidentally, always tried to discourage such visits, claiming she had no time for houseguests because she was preoccupied with her dress boutique—I saw only the most perfunctory form of salutation extended by my parents, such as a handclasp, a light hug, or, at most, a quick kiss on the cheek. Cold and uncordial as this may characterize my parents as being, I should explain that public kissing was considered to be unacceptable by most standard-bearing Americans in the mid-twentieth century. The Hollywood films that I saw during my high school years did not contain scenes showing kissing couples even when the actors portrayed married people; in 1954, the picture editor of the New York Times lost his job because he permitted the publication of a wedding-day photograph showing Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio revealing their physical attraction to each other while standing in front of City Hall in San Francisco—she with her head back and her mouth slightly open, and he with his lips puckered and his eyes closed.

  Since public kissing was a mark of unrefinement in conservative communities like my hometown, and since my parents effortlessly blended in with this conservatism, I came of age in a time and place where well-bred Americans were epitomized by their reserved manner and their taciturnity, their sobersidedness and other qualities that were at variance with all that was now surrounding me in Calabria and that, had I been able to manage it, I would have shunted and fended off. But my relatives would not let me go, holding on to my arms, pulling me forward, guiding me in the direction of the rows of houses higher on the hill, wanting (Lucio explained to me) to show me where they lived. And so we left the square, a procession with Lucio and I following my uncles, with my aunts flanking us, and the rest of them following us, chattering cheerfully and waving at the women who stood watching from the balconies of the big houses.

  It took us about ten minutes to climb the narrow, uneven roads. As we walked along over loosely embedded rocks, and sometimes up the stone steps that led us past the crumbling Norman castle, I considered slowing the pace a bit because of my fatigue and dehydration. But none of the others, neither the younger people nor my older uncles and aunts, seemed in the least daunted by our journey, and so I kept going and resisted the temptation to fetch my canteen, which Lucio was carrying in my bag. He had insisted on carrying it, along with my jacket. I also thought I should preserve my water for the train ride back to Naples. Lucio’s car was, naturally, of no use on these roads, and he’d left it parked next to the fountain. The doors were unlocked and the key was in the ignition. Lucio told me that nobody in this area would try to steal his car because he was well known and respected, and also nobody around here knew how to drive.

  We reached a flat part of the road and this led us into another square, which was architecturally less formal than the one below—no fountain in the center, no Baroque manors along the sides—but it was more vivacious and colorful in a helter-skelter way, with many pedestrians and footloose farm animals vying for the right-of-way while maneuvering around donkey-drawn wagons and children chasing chickens. A goat was walking down the steps of a tiny two-story house overlooking the far side of the square, and the smell of sausages rose from a coal-burning grill at the other side of the square. The church bells rang. The siesta was over, and farmers were returning to their land downhill. Several small shops that lined the square were now open for business. I wondered if it had been in one of these shops that my father began his apprenticeship, and if it had been in this square that his brothers and their friends used to play soccer after school. I thought of asking Lucio to pose these questions to one of my uncles but decided against it.

  After turning a corner and heading up a wide cobblestone path, we entered a large house that had an ornate but shattered stone plaque engraved on the lintel above the main door. Even before Lucio had confirmed it, I thought this building had been the residence of my great-grandfather Domenico Talese, a landowner of some consequence who, according to what my father had once told me, had acquired this baronial property from an impoverished nobleman in the 1880s. While my father spoke admiringly of Domenico, he did concede that the latter was a man with a minimum of friends, and when he died, he had been mourned by few people except his family, and not all of them. However, they still owned the property, and on this day of my visit I would learn that some members of the extended family lived here, including an elderly woman whom I had been brought to visit.

  She was bedridden, and as I was ushered into her room on the second floor, I was told that this was my fath
er’s mother. The shutters were closed and it was so dark that I could barely see the face of this white-haired woman who lay under the covers wearing a high-collared white nightgown, and who, as I approached, reached in my direction with her frail arms and then, with a surge of energy that surprised me, rose from her pillow into a sitting position and began to cry out toward me again and again in a shrieking voice, “Peppino! Peppino!”

  I stepped back, bumping into my aunts and uncles, who were close behind me. I was startled, unprepared for this moment. She was calling me by my father’s name! My father, Joseph, was often referred to as “Peppino” by our relatives in Brooklyn, and this nickname was undoubtedly how he was known here in Italy. But now it seemed that my father’s mother believed that I was her son! I thought maybe she was becoming senile, or perhaps she was going blind, or possibly she had misunderstood or been misinformed by the messenger boy who had come here earlier. I turned toward Lucio, who was standing near the foot of the bed. I hoped that he would offer a word of advice, but he merely shrugged and remained silent.

  “Peppino,” she repeated, softly now, beginning to cry. One of my aunts then walked hurriedly to the other side of the bed, comforting her while beckoning me closer. Awkwardly, I leaned across the bed to embrace my grandmother and hesitantly kissed her on the cheek.