When Maria Filippa heard in the market someone call Imma and Talia ‘those American girls’, giving a certain lash to the expression, fear had seized her; the campaign had begun before Davide died, but they had spent so much time alone together as a family in the country, far from the city’s politics and rumours, that they had not felt menaced. But now, with the farm made over to a new factor – she couldn’t have run it, not the way Davide did – she heard the bellowing from the loudspeakers in the streets and the squares when the Leader gave his views: fear settled on her.
‘The American way of life is a grease stain spreading through our people.
‘It must be stopped!
‘It must be stopped before it fouls up the fabric of ltaly! Before we lose memory of who we are! Their society is nothing but a nest of termites! An ant heap! A colony of slaves! Of millions drudging to line the pockets of a few queen bees, and their grubs, fat landlords, big bosses …
‘Who wants that here – in Italy? Who?’
He ranted from the lamp posts, from the churches, at midday and in the evening, a profane angelus summoning the passersby to homage.
‘Fascist Italy will burn their deceits and their lies and their doctrines and hurl this burden from our backs. Then the history of Italy, the real history of Italy can begin …
‘The people of Italy are erupting onto the stage of History. They are throwing the buyers and sellers out of the temple! They are becoming finally the chiefs of their own destiny!’
He’d liked the dollars well enough before; he’d shown no qualms then, when the door was open and the United States welcomed Italians, Franco pointed out, and he wasn’t the only one. But the Leader was touchy, his self-esteem was extremely fragile, as befitted a great man. Maria Filippa shivered in the street that first day she heard the new campaign, though it was sunny out: Imma, Talia, and Lucia were native New Yorkers, with documents to prove it which she wanted to keep safe. Only Fantina was born later, in Italy. She had wanted so badly to stay to get her American citizenship too. But Davide had needed her.
When she heard the Leader’s fury against America, Maria Filippa decided to take her girls out of school. Fantina had started only three years before.
Fiordiligi called one afternoon; her father had become Mayor, and she was wearing wrist-high kid gloves, cherry-coloured with pearl buttons, which he had bought for her from Naples. Lucia wanted her to take one off so that she could try it; but Fiordiligi wouldn’t oblige her, though Lucia squawked at her with such insistence that Maria Filippa had to call her loudly to come and help her pour the lemonade. Fiordiligi told Talia she had come to ask her to the gym practice every Thursday, even though she had left school.
‘We need you!’ Fiordiligi had a lisping voice, a kind of insinuation that approximated to her father’s habitual manner. ‘For the parade, when the Leader comes to Riba. We must have everyone we can, and you’re one of the best.’
Maria Filippa said, when she saw Talia’s face, ‘Of course you must take part, if they want you so badly.’ She knew too that a no was a more conspicuous act than a yes, at any time, let alone the present.
The scissors that Imma plied for Lucia’s dress for the occasion of Fantina’s name day came out to chop her hair as well that year, and Talia’s too, when, first among the daughters, they adopted the modern shingle (Lucia wanted to keep up to the minute, Talia had the practical consideration of the gymnastics display, she claimed); the same blades snipped along the lines Imma had marked up in chalk to make Talia’s black and white outfit for the event, held to celebrate the visit of the Leader to the Mezzogiorno. He was to rally the south to keep faith with him, in spite of shortages and skyrocketing prices and joblessness and the deaf-and-dumb placemen who sprang up in the town halls of his Government, like toadstools in damp corners. He told the people he had brought roads to Ninfania, and would bring still more, that he had decreed water for the arid plains and pastures and cities.
The crowd forgot that the aqueduct had been there since before the War, before the March on Rome. Everyone forgot that it was inaugurated in their mothers’ and fathers’ time; it was hard to gainsay the Leader who spoke with such authority, who led with so much chin.
Talia was smooth-jointed and flexible as an artist’s lay figure for anatomy drawing, and she won a place in the first rows of the show which the whole province put on to greet him. It was September when he came; he arrived late. Talia trotted out into the arena and jumped and kicked and swung her limbs in unison as the sun still beat down. Maria Filippa surveyed the heaving, leaping mass of girls, uniformed in black and white and moving of one accord, and could not pick out her own daughter. The young girls merged like spangles on the surface of the sea, swelling and falling back tidally as if to the pulse of a gigantic pump beneath their feet palpitating in the stadium floor. However, she knew where to look for her in the finale, at the crossing of the x in the colossal DUX they were spelling out with their bodies in honour of the Leader: VIVAT DUX! written out by the ranks of schoolchildren. But long before the event got anywhere near this expected climax, Fantina, sitting beside her mother, fainted. The press of spectators, the wait, the heat and the excitement had battered her and she fell away akimbo onto the wooden boards of the stadium benches with nothing between her and the void beneath. Maria Filippa found her heavy to pull up, and a man near them in the crowd offered his help. As they dragged Fantina’s lolling body into the clear at the end of the row where the steps led down to the entry corridor, he was looking at the child’s bare legs flopping inanimately with an attention that made Maria Filippa set her teeth like a mother cat who finds an intruder by her new litter and spits. She ordered him to fetch water, but he objected.
So she waved him off, shielding her daughter’s body from him, and he understood at last the blaze in her face, though he cast a lingering eye back at Fantina’s boneless droop, and winked as Maria Filippa pushed her daughter’s head down between her knees to bring back consciousness. A bottle was passed over to her from someone who’d noticed their trouble; Maria Filippa poured water gratefully, and dabbed at Fantina.
She said, loudly, coming to, ‘I didn’t see him.’ She felt choked for a moment with disappointment.
Maria Filippa said, ‘You’re white as flour.’ And pinched her cheeks, gently, lovingly, to put some colour back into them. ‘Never mind the Leader. You’ll have plenty of occasions to see him.’ Almost to herself, she added, ‘How you take after Davide’s family! The women in his family were given to fainting – on my side, never. I hope you don’t have their dreams too. Too much dreaming is bad for the health.’
You never did see the Leader, not until you were watching with me some old newsreels in a BBC documentary I’d taped and brought for you to comment on. I had never realised that you had never seen him in motion; his gesticulations and delivery amazed you.
In 1935, however, you still believed in him. Your mother had her doubts, but she would have been frightened to express them. She’d seen the aqueduct striding across the tableland when she came back from New York and had stared at it in admiration and remembered how her father and Davide’s had agreed it would never be built, so if she had thought about it for an instant, she would have realised that the Leader couldn’t have been responsible for its building. But she wanted to trust him more than she did, to identify him with the benefactor who had made water flow again in the south.
You were brought up in this belief too: you and your mother were hardly alone in losing hold of the discrete chronology of such events; his way of loving his people rubbed out their knowledge, his touch erased their memory, like a burn which bites into the whorled skin and obliterates its pattern, until the victims’ unique fingerprints can no longer be deciphered, and they can’t recognise any more the shape of their hands or the marks they make, or keep faith with their memories or their history, but find all stolen away into the keeping of the torturer.
The Leader stole the old aqueduct for himself. It was only pet
ty larceny, in the scale of all he stole, but in Ninfania it was a great matter. He wiped out the record of its construction, and provided another story.
Another story to live by: we have to be so careful. In my field, no one knows, not the schoolteachers, nor the folklorists, nor the parents, least of all the story-tellers themselves, whether children should hear the truth (Grimms’ cruelty – rapine, incest, starvation, cannibalism – or the Victoria version – saccharine and sentiment). I say Victorian as shorthand for censorship, for it’s odds on that we do more bowdlerising today in the interests of contemporary ethics than the Victorians did – we leave out the lopped toes and heels of the Ugly Sisters, and describe Red Riding Hood delivered safe and sound from the belly of the wolf. At the museum, I don’t have to take sides on the issue, thank God.
I just keep the archive.
18
From the diary of Davide Pittagora
NEW YORK, 21 JANUARY, 1920
SANDRO SAYS I must apply to work on the construction of the subterranean train network – where so many compatriots are tunnelling. So I paid a visit to the foreman today, one Alberto Stemma, to whom Sandro had spoken on my behalf. I was directed across a wasteland strewn with splintered stone and split bricks and puddles. Stacks of dynamite barrels – empty I must think – stood to one side. I entered a hut and followed a construction worker into an open elevator which sank down into the earth. In the huge tunnel which we reached in this manner the cold was even sharper than in the air above. But some of the men were stripped to the waist all the same, a delta of grime and sweat smeared on their flesh, so vigorously do they wield their pickaxes to hew the granite lump of this city’s bedrock. The pay is 20 cents an hour, but I cannot work like an ox, even if I had been born and raised to it – my head throbbed painfully after only a few moments in these pits of hell. I asked the foreman if there were any clerical work more suited to my strength and abilities. He replied that it did not lie within his influence to place me. He was a good man, he knew my need, and he respected my face. He is from Sant’Agata dei Goti, he told me. He arrived in 1911, and maintains that Italians make the best workers, for laziness isn’t a part of their nature, and that that is why so many businesses here set up barriers against them. ‘No Foreign Labor’, that sign I know so well, is inspired by fear. Fear that Italians will accomplish things better, more quickly, with more artistry and despatch … That is why, he declared, we have to hold onto the ground already gained. ‘This is our domain,’ he said with pride, sweeping a gesture over the inferno around him, the black hole in the rock, the hellish roar of drills and falls of axes, the flickering half-light and the men bent like slaves to the yoke. I made my farewells, he could see I was of a different order, I’m glad to say. I’m no greenhorn, and it wasn’t for this that I left Ninfania, where men are treated as animals, perhaps, but not as pieces of machinery. The better life I yearned for – we all yearned for, Tommaso too – eludes us more bitterly here than ever it did in Italy. Ah! how foolishly I dreamed! Ah, Tommaso, you were right when you doubted America!
I promised the excellent foreman that I would compose a tribute for him, in gratitude for his assistance. His mother, who has joined him in his new prosperity, will celebrate her saint’s day soon. I shall say, this family are not Goths, in spite of their place of origin, but have preserved the courtesy of the antique way, in a place where Goths abound. I shall send it, with his permission, to be printed, in the Progresso Italo-Americano, though I fear it is rather an inferior journal.
I must pass now to different matters, of almost greater unpleasantness. I came home to find flowers on the table, a rare occurrence, especially in this season. When I asked for the reason, Maria Filippa blushed, so naturally I was perplexed, and then, I regret, I became angry with my dearest wife. In reply to my suspicious charges, she confessed that she had gathered them up from a back door of an hotel, and disclosed that it was one of those overnight stays for travelling salesmen. Such a low-class establishment, I’m surprised they have flowers in the lobby at all.
I pressed her, though she was crying, for she realised that she had done wrong and should have asked my permission before she undertook such a thing. I wanted to discover the truth. And it turned out worse than I had expected. The schemes women will combine when they aren’t closely watched! And the depravity which surrounds us in America makes the matter daily more urgent. It seems that Rosa – only the powers above can know where she inherited her delinquency, her heat, her perversity – has been telling my darling girl that she labours too hard at the sewing, and that she should rebel against such poor pay and long hours, and make a little business by herself. Of course Pino that husband of hers encourages her. I am the first to want justice, better conditions for the workers, my father made me aware from my earliest youth, but for women – and women going out to work – it’s different, especially in this city, with all its temptations. Pino doesn’t understand there must be limits, and naturally, he doesn’t know how to control Rosa. It’s not his fault, she comes trailing trouble (he doesn’t know how much!), but he lacks firmness. Rosa shames him, in my view, and he does not notice, his nose buried in that Nuovo Mondo or Il Martello or other pipedreams for fools about the Socialist future. They will get into trouble one day, the pair of them, with their indiscretions about workers’ rights and unions and their loud clamours for justice. I have heard all this before – even Tommaso was concerned with similar issues – but shouting never saved anyone’s skin or put bread on anyone’s plate.
Maria Filippa is an expert seamstress, swift and nimble, and the monotony of work at the machine can do no harm to the new baby. Besides she’s indispensable to the flag company which has employed her all these years. She turned out more banners with more evenly-stitched legends and mottoes than anyone else on the machines for the Armistice Parade last year. I think you could even tell from the crowd which were my beloved’s pennants in the procession. They appreciate her worth, as do I. But Rosa informs her that she herself is abandoning piecework sewing – ‘It’s too rough,’ she told her, and she warned my Maria Filippa of trouble and more trouble, strikes and hardship and ordered her not to be a ‘scab’ – she has taken to scavenging instead in the waste of the big hotels. No better than pilfering. She promises my wife that there are vegetables and fruit and even meat and fish to be had – and flowers too, naturally–which the kitchen staff tip onto dumps or into waste bins and you can pick over the leavings like a jackal on a battlefield and bring them downtown and ‘make a bundle’.
This is how Rosa talks. She’s a quick learner. As for myself, I can hardly bear to write this down. My Maria Filippa told her she did not want to ride that far uptown. She has never been further on her own than ten blocks on either side of Crosby Street. So Rosa then shows her the hotels nearby. She introduces her to the back doors of these low-class places. Rosa inspired her to this deceit, this cunning! I should have expected it. And it transpires it has been going on for some time, and that my dearest love would think that I would be pleased.
That is why she arranged the flowers tonight, to welcome me home. She says how did I imagine she was providing us with chicken soup and fresh vegetables all round daily, for Cati and her children and Franco too when he is here and not idling in music clubs, hadn’t I noticed? Did I think that I was feeding everyone on what I brought home from writing letters to Italy on other people’s behalf at 5 cents a time? That was sufficient for me to feel that my head was exploding, and in terrible pain, too. I never thought to hear my Maria Filippa rail at me in this vein. It was not right, and I told her so, forcefully. I told her that I thought the sewing was bringing in the balance, and that no woman of my family, neither wife, nor sister, nor daughter was to behave like a slum child preying on other people’s leftovers. She then replied that it was unfair of me to reproach her. On account of the new baby coming, it wasn’t healthy for her to sit hunched over a machine day in day out, and that with this work Rosa had taught her, she could take the othe
r children out with her instead of leaving them locked up all day in the room until someone got back. She had taken the children with her! Exposing Imma and Talia to the corruption of the city, and its offending sights, sights no young child, especially not a young girl, should ever see. Here it is even more important to safeguard them than it was in Ninfania. And then, furthermore, she told me – by now, she was crying and sobbing and yelling at me so you could see something in her had already been tainted – the girls enjoyed it, and they made really pretty flower-sellers, whom no one could resist. She’d had a great success with them, and it was only with difficulty that she’d kept back the wretched chrysanthemums for our table, because one gentleman had stopped and asked most kindly of Talia if he could buy those last flowers in her basket. At this, I became speechless. My daughters, in their first bloom, used like common street girls. I could not believe what Maria Filippa my own beloved wife was telling me. She became quiet as I told her it must never take place again. Then she said, weeping onto my shoulder, trembling against me like a songbird, that she could not leave the children alone all day any more, they were too old now, they needed company and instruction and talk, and besides, Papà San had been round and frightened them, telling them that his children were healthy and beautiful, but that they were sick and plain.
So I relented. I agreed that while I continued to look for work, she could leave the flag factory and bring piecework home instead to be with the children. She dried her eyes at that and smiled at me; and soon she was chattering about her plans to teach them all the skills she knows. She has a true mother’s heart; in spite of this extraordinary lapse – for which Rosa is entirely to blame, obviously – I can reproach her nothing and my love for her remains as pure and true as it ever was.
The Lost Father Page 24