The Lost Father

by Marina Warner

  ‘But I was curious when I met Cati myself for the first time that trip to California, after your father died, when was it, four, five years ago?’

  ‘Yes, five years ago.’

  ‘I was sitting with her at one of the parties they gave for the family because it was the first time so many of us were reunited, and I asked her about my father. You had always been so interested in the whole story of the duel. She flew off the handle. She said, “Are you accusing me of the death of your father?” And she shut her face tight, and turned her back, and wouldn’t say another word. It was a surprise to me, that she got so het up. Caterina was the sweetest one in my father’s family, another mother really to my sisters in America, she looked after the children when our mother was coping with Lucia and having me. So I couldn’t press her on the subject, she had pulled herself right in, shell door slammed, and I didn’t want to upset her.

  ‘Here is Rosa,’ you added, pointing to a figure sitting between Lucia and her husband in an earlier group photo, black and white. ‘I should have asked Rosa, but you know, she was pretty far gone when I saw her last She was almost blind, and mountainous. There’s diabetes in our family. You must watch out, by the way.’

  Rosa in old age had permed her white hair and wore specs with chains looped and falling on either side of her face, which gave her a rather doggy look; you could see that her hands, folded in her lap, were swollen, the knuckles dimpled. ‘It might have been Rosa he fought over, I suppose. It’s a long time ago. Though of all our family, she was the only one who had no looks.’ You peered again at the photograph. ‘If she was standing up, I’d be sure, because Rosa was short, which is why she looked like a mountain on the move when she got so fat with diabetes. But you can’t see that here.

  ‘Actually, it may be Caterina.’ You tapped the snapshot. ‘With her glasses on. Glasses do change people.’ You sighed, and pushed your own back up on to the bridge of your nose. ‘How true that saying is, Men never … how does it go?’

  I looked at the photographs. I was trying to understand.

  Tommaso dropped his gun, then picked it up again, it was too precious to throw away; besides, Davide would want it back. He ran over to him where he lay on the floor of the quarry, and called out to him, gesturing with the gun.

  ‘Idiot,’ said one of his seconds, pulling him off. ‘Can’t you see? You’ve got to get away from here.’

  They had to make him disappear quickly, hoisting his army kit and folding his marching orders, with not a word outside the circle of those who already knew; the carabinieri would say nothing, they would not want to get into trouble in the town for squealing; but if the report travelled, there would be trouble: duelling was punishable by years of hard labour since the King of Naples’s law of nearly a hundred years before.

  (In those days, in the Church of the Holy Shroud in Naples on Good Friday, the Cavaliere della Fokaterra had challenged a Maltese to fight to the death merely for offering holy water from his ungloved fingertips to the lady the Cavaliere was accompanying to Mass. The Maltese had run him through, but the Fokaterra name was covered in glory. It was only a coward who would settle an insult in court, the process recommended by the law.)

  Tommaso was shaking the tears out of his eyes as he was hurried away, and tossing his head. He slammed the side of his face hard, in self-punishment, once, twice, and then again, and the company saw his grief. Regret plays an important part in gallantry, for any gloating can undo all gallantry’s fine work; the victim’s courage must inspire a noble compassion in the victor. Obligations are due.

  Davide lay on the stone floor of the quarry, where his face was all soft and crimson like a burst fig; he could not speak his last wish, to Tommaso or to anybody else, and so Tommaso, twisting in the arms of his helpers, left him, glorying in his escape yet pitchy too, inside, with the horror of it. ‘He’s dead, he’s dead!’ called out one of the ragged children who’d tagged on to the small crowd.

  ‘He’s got him, boom!’ shouted another, dancing away, pointing two fingers at his own head, and grinning.

  There are more words for tomorrow and the day after in the south of Italy than anywhere else in the world; some languages have no future and others no past tense, but in Ninfania the present indicative could be replaced by the future without doing violence to the language people speak. Everything there will happen; nothing happens. A people with a future possesses it only in dreams.

  When you talked about the past, I sometimes thought I should write down what you said throughout as if we were still counting on it happening, some time, tomorrow, the day after, on and on, to the hereafter.

  There, in the hereafter, it will turn out of course that Davide isn’t dead: he will return to his tomorrows, a revenant, after a fortnight of delirium. The doctor who was summoned could do nothing about extracting the bullet without endangering Davide’s eye, at the least; his powers of motion, cognition, speech were at risk too. The doctor refused to operate.

  At last however will come a surcease of fever, and Davide will open his eyes and see his own future in place again, ahead of him, and will find that he has become, in a small-town fashion, a figure of a hero.

  In his hereafter, where he now steps, his granddaughter, Fantina’s child, will close her eyes tight and imagine him for all her worth; she will fill notebooks with these imaginings and her mother’s memories of him and of life both with him and without him. She will see him with Maria Filippa, his wife, and in America, and afterwards, back in Ninfania. At the time of the duel, Maria Filippa is living with her family in Dolmetta on the coast, a twelve-kilometre ride in the pony cart from Rupe. She wears round glasses and comes up to the crook of Davide’s arm. She will agree to give up the young man who has been courting her in favour of Davide, who has been coming to see her, often walking down the road to the sea in the morning and returning at night. (The doctor has recommended gentle, rhythmical exercise.) Cousin Sandro – Davide’s maternal grandmother’s godson, so no blood relation, but still family – will be coming over from America in time for the wedding, it turns out (quite by chance) and they will marry in the Cathedral of San Corrado in the harbour, the Norman Byzantine church which looks like a Cubist painting, white planes stacked against the cobalt Adriatic, the junctures fretted blue with shadow. When they are photographed in the Riba studio on the Via Sparano to commemorate their wedding, they will choose for the backdrop the painted view of the sea, wavelets like chevrons and a dolphin leaping, because it seems closest to the actual memory of the ceremony in the cathedral on the harbour. This is when their relatives will say, laughing, how together they look like a definite article, she so small, he so tall, just as in the word il. Davide will love her smallness, he will tuck her into the skinny bow of his body and she will fit there like an egg.

  Cousin Sandro will not have been telling lies in the letters he has been writing from New York, and before that, from Panama, and before that from Argentina. The bosses are paying $1.50 a day in America, not such good money as the 20 cents an hour he was earning on the canal, but still, New York is, well, New York. You could never see another city like it for construction, underground, above ground, on any ground. He will not have been lying: he will have enough money with him to buy the Small Farm just inland from Dolmetta, the same farm Davide will lease from him eventually, the house with the pigeon turrets where Davide and his wife and his daughters are staying that May day still in the future when Davide will leave for Riba to collect the rent. On Papà San’s behalf, then too.

  But in those days, back in 1912, the year Davide and Maria Filippa marry, Cousin Sandro will stay with them waiting for the birth of their first baby, a boy, whom Davide will call Pericle, and then they will all leave together, spurred by Sandro’s talk of work in America. Rosa will be promised to Pino, another cousin, who is waiting in New York for a Ninfanian girl, and her misfortunes will no longer matter. Caterina for her part will be married to cousin Sandro. She will call him Papà San, for he’s twenty years ol
der than her, and has agreed to wait till she is sixteen before they marry.

  Papà San – they’ll all learn gradually to call him this, his American name – will advance Davide the money for the passage; and will tell him he will combine all manner of things on his behalf in the big city. He will tap his cheekbone, just below the eye, and rub his forefingers together at right angles to sign how close he is, how rubbingly intimate he is to the deals that get dealt on Mulberry Bend. Davide will have a headache, but he will struggle to show enthusiasm and willing, though somehow, since the shooting, he has troubles with his energy; it comes and goes, like water from the new aqueduct, in dribbles, never gushing. In Naples, where they travel to catch the steamer, he will buy Pericle a pair of black kid boots on the Via Toledo, though the baby does not yet need shoes. Davide fancies the row of buttons on the scalloped edge of the little vamps that fasten across his soft plump feet like napkins over hot bread rolls. When Davide embarks, he will be one of the few immigrants (a minority of twenty per cent) who is sufficiently well-to-do to gamble on being able to provide for women too. That is really Papà Sandra’s doing, and they are all sensible of his providence, especially Rosa, above all Rosa, who has come back to keen-eyed consciousness and is so glad that she is not being left behind to be a companion to Nunzia. (Nunzia is glad too.) Rosalba scrutinises Pino, her betrothed, in the photograph. At least beside Papà San he looks a sprig, with a lean ivory hairless face like a carved statue of St John the Evangelist. She has the paper where Tommaso Talvi wrote his name, with the one word, ‘Avanti!’, ‘Forward!’ She hopes Pino won’t take it away from her, she won’t let him if he wants to; she hopes he will understand.

  When Davide sails for New York with his sisters, his wife and his baby, in the spring of 1913, cholera will have been streaking through the windowless bassi of Naples once again, after a remission of a year and a half since the last epidemic; there will have been riots, and there is little flour. Even rice flour is dear; medical supplies are failing, and the steamships are filling up fast, steerage and cabin class alike. Davide will be one of more than forty thousand people from Ninfania alone that year; one of a hundred and forty thousand from his home province since the turn of the decade and one of over a million and a quarter people who will be leaving Italy in those days to head through the Open Door. He will be taking along, on Papà Sandra’s advice, four giant jeroboams of the best virgin olive oil, and a dozen litre flasks to barter in smaller transactions.

  14

  From the diary of Davide Pittagora

  BAY OF NAPLES, 2 APRIL 1913

  IN THE SUMMERS following springs without rain, there was no fruit to sell – I used to stand in the stores to help Maria Filippa’s father count the weight of the harvest and set a tariff. There would be three baskets of grapes good enough for the table and of those at least one had to be handed over heaped full in tribute to the Prince of Acquaqueta – you’ll remember this, darling wife of my heart, if you read these thoughts one day, but I beg to remind you since I have tugged you up from your roots in this native countryside – yours and mine – to take you into the foreign land which they call the modern El Dorado – the valley where gold lies in the grass like flowers in spring. Although you have never raised your voice in reproach, I fear that the separation will cause you pain – I saw you weep for your family when we married – how much greater the wrench now, only a year later! And you share my misgivings, I feel, but more deeply. Yet remember how in a good season, your own father told me, the grapes lie rotting in the storerooms, unless the price falls to nothing – famine or glut, oimè!, that is what we must suffer in Ninfania, my Ninfania, land of the venomous spider and the dance that draws its poison! In America, there will be a middle way, and we will set our feet on it with courage, and it will take us to the golden land. There will be hardship, and struggle – but I will face them with steadfastness and strength, with you at my side, my own Maria Filippa.

  Papà Sandro has suffered – though he shrugs off the memories now that he has stored up so much gold and become capable of munificence. He is proud that he worked that first passage to Argentina thirteen years ago, and that he can now afford to pay our passage over the seas and preserve us from the wild beasts’ den below, where children and animals teem like mealy worms in a fisherman’s can, yet more rank – and lousy, too. Sandro has organised us into a group of six, for whom he and I are responsible – I for clean bedding, water, and shade once we are at sea; Papà San, as the family calls him, for food. It seems comfortable in the ladies’ quarters below. There are three other mothers with babies in with Maria Filippa, so they have much to talk about. Pericle sleeps peacefully in his new nautical cradle, a shawl slung under the bunk above his mother’s, like a miniature hammock–she fears that the bunk is so narrow she might crush him if she keeps him with her all night, and there isn’t sufficient room on the floor, not for the four babies. The rest of us are sleeping on deck, in a leeward corner forward, out of the smuts of the stack; Sandro managed to procure the space for us – with the help of a little present from me to the commissioners of the consular office. We have brought on board six barrels of water. I fear they might become fetid though, exposed to the air – many illnesses become scourges of these transatlantic crossings. Sandro tells how a whole shipload of men of our country, landing with bald women, victims of who knows what disease – typhoid at worst, starvation at best – persuaded the officers in New York on their arrival that they had shaved their heads to be sure not to bring lice into America (where they are of course unknown). And that otherwise they were only suffering from mild nausea.

  I have rosemary cordial from Mamma for myself and my dear one if she suffers from seasickness too. As for worse plagues, we must trust to Fate, and you, I know, will pray. We are due to sail tomorrow – the steamer is bursting to the brim. We can hear the animals below bleating and lowing in the dark – sometimes a deeper, angrier bellow or a wild cackle breaks out too. We should at least eat well. (Noah must have taken more than a single pair of beasts of each species, since he and his family had to eat on board. But then anyone can see God’s foresight has its shortcomings, and his providence has always seemed to me quite rash. No one would even consider a match with the offspring of such thoughtless husbandry – to create a paradise in the south, and let it become uninhabitable!)

  You would quieten me if I made such comments aloud, I know, and your sweet face darken with foreboding – but I keep counsel so as not to offend you, for I care more for your happiness, my own darling wife, than ever I care for my opinions, and that is as it should be, always.

  We are among thousands in flight from the land of the olive and the grape, the sun, wine, music – most on board are peasants – I have seen only a handful of men of liberal education and profession like myself (Sandro says this will stand me in good stead with the Americans). They reckon all southerners like ourselves are a separate and inferior race from the Italians of the north.

  Of course they are right there – in one way. We have our history, they have theirs, and red seals and embossed headings made a paper Unification, though good red blood was spilt to validate it too. But never, in the hearts of the people of Ninfania or Calabria or Lucania, or even those swindlers and cheats in Campania, never did we assent to union under the dominance of the north. Sandro warns me that they distinguish us from the northerners because we are short and hairy and analphabetic. No matter – they will soon see that I at least am none of these. But I note, on the deck and down below, in the steerage with the animals, that we seem an inconsiderable people, easily disregarded, though so numerous and so noisy. We are like the small coin easily forgotten when money loses value – as it always does. We might run through the pockets of the rich in America, like doits, like groats. Yet I feel myself so far from this insignificance that it makes my head ache to consider their ignorance. I tell myself, Never forget Lady Fortune smiles on the brave man.

  RE D’ITALIA, 3 April

  We have sai
led – can there be another sight under heaven as magnificent as the Bay of Naples? I have to admit this splendour, though the city itself is a cesspool and the people fit only to live there. But Vesuvius on the one side glowing, and the meeting of sky and sea in the strong embrace of the shore, and the islands afloat its luminescence – Ah, the beauty! the fair peninsula! It made my heart heavy to set sail! But I stood by the rail, with Maria Filippa beside me, my son in her arms, and Cati and Papà San by our side, Rosa nearby, and we waved until we could not see Franco any longer but only the flicker of the scarf he was trailing. Then that too faded, and the shore became a vapour between the scintillae of the sea and the sky, and I held my dearest beloved tight and knew that I could not have left alone as so many have done in the past. Indeed as so many are still doing on this very ship. An unutterable melancholy overcame me …

  In these waters Odysseus heard the sirens sing from the shore – I knew then that as the land receded it too was singing – but our ears were stopped up with other dreams so that we should not stay. I thought too of Orpheus who turned back to look at Eurydice as they were leaving the underworld – and the place where this happened lies near Naples too, of course. Here, she vanished from his gaze. Both these thoughts so oppressed me that tears stood in my eyes that I too might never behold our homeland again! But no! this will not be. We shall return! Yet Papà San declares he will ask for citizenship this time, so Caterina will become an American lady. As for Rosa, who knows … it would be foolishness for her to return to Ninfania. Unless her husband dies, or some calamity … Widowhood would absolve her. She was weeping, holding the rail – though her head is full of follies, she has understood the nature of her farewell. She was saying inwardly with me, I know, Farewell, farewell, land of our birth, candid and azure earth, where sirens sing, our hard mother who can also open to us in sweetness, Farewell! Or, as I hope, Till we meet again!