And when he was silent, she added, “For crying out loud, men do this kind of thing all the time to women, especially these days. Now, can’t we just enjoy ourselves?”
They made love for a last time on a hot Sunday evening, and in the days that followed, his spirits were so low that he loathed himself—and this would get him in trouble over the years—for a tendency to feel easy attractions and to fall in love too quickly.
— Another Reunion —
And there had been the day in June 1943, before Emilio was to report for service—boarding a troop transport in Philadelphia and heading out to Fort Myer—when another reunion took place in the house, with those sisters who had been away converging on Cobbleton. Olga, Jacqueline, and Maria had been living in New York, working now and then for War Bonds and USO shows, entertaining the soldiers with a musical review that revolved around the compositions of Gershwin, Berlin, and Harold Arlen, though sometimes they would also perform a song like “La Vie en Rose” and on occasion, when they knew that in the audience there were some Cuban and Puerto Rican boys from New York, they would perform songs like “Perfidia.” Sarah in Philadelphia and Helen in New York had gone to work as nurse’s aides, and Margarita, who had moved from the house in which she had lived with Lester to become a boarder in a house in the factory town of Warrenville, near Philadelphia, with her sister Veronica. They had gone to work together in a parachute factory, her evenings taken up with night-school courses in Philadelphia, as in those days, divorced and past forty, she had begun to think about becoming a schoolteacher. They all came, and Irene, too, turned up with her butcher husband and her three children, arriving with a carton of steaks, which did not sit well with Nelson, who always carefully observed the war rationing. (He also maintained, in the spirit of the cause, a modest Victory garden—growing potatoes, corn, lettuce, onions, and tomatoes—and made it a practice to allow servicemen and their dates into the jewel Box for free.)
All the sisters except Isabel were present that afternoon, Marta and Carmen having baked a chocolate cake; their mother and father opening the house to old friends. García the butler, regal and old, and ever kind to Mariela, visited with his wife and sons (his oldest boy married to Sarah), consoling Mariela (they went walking, as they used to, in the field, Mariela as always confiding her concern for her son). The family ate a good meal and then gathered in the yard for a photograph, Nelson behind a portrait camera, with pneumatic bulb in hand, preparing to take a picture.
That day Emilio stood uncomfortably between his mother and his oldest sister, who, holding on to Emilio’s arm, kept leaning over to whisper, “I’m so proud of you,” while his mother, on the other side, clutched his arm tight, saying in Spanish, “I’m going to be praying for you every night.” Gloria stood next to Margarita in something of a state of shock, for when she had first heard about her brother’s enlistment, she withered, a slew of new and mysterious symptoms overwhelming her. The poor young woman feared more than anyone for her brother’s safety, withdrawing into a shell and feeling as if she were now locked up, as if her brother’s emergence into the world had confined her to a small and narrow closet. Posing for the shot, she was nervous, and kept hoping he would turn around and say, “Come here, sister,” but he didn’t.
— Italy —
He had been attached to the 36th Infantry Division of the Fifth Army and was among that contingent of unseasoned recruits who, under heavy fire, landed on September 9, 1943, on the beaches of southern Italy, the coastal stretch between Amalfi and Paestum. The Salerno beachhead invasion, its goal to secure the mountain road north from Salerno to Naples, left many Americans dead and wounded, the casualties mounting to five thousand in the following weeks. He knew this because he had been assigned as an orderly to a Major Strong, an intelligence officer whose job it was, in part, to collect such data. (With the ground shaking under him, bursts of red and yellow light in the night sky—not falling stars, but the shells from Panzer tanks—and the cries of mutilated, wounded men in the distance, he would roll on the ground, his hands cupped over his ears.) His job was to receive casualty reports by radio, listing the men by name, rank, serial number, and battalion, and sometimes when he’d be sitting about despondently and a detail was going about, collecting the dead, someone would call out to him: “Can you give us a hand?”
And he would, day after day.
By the time the Fifth Army entered Naples, in early October, the young soldier had so many memories of corpses—American, British, German—that every night for several months he experienced a disquieting dream in which, as if watching a film, he saw himself running through a muddy field toward the house in which he had lived with his sisters, an artillery shell exploding in his head.
— With Major Strong in Naples —
For many of the soldiers of the Fifth Army, the Italian campaign was a slow and hellish succession of battles north toward Rome and beyond, for the clever General Kesselring, who commanded the Reich’s forces in Italy, found the Allied strategy predictable, its generals conservative, and though often outmanned and outgunned, he had maintained a fierce defense, Allied casualties outnumbering the Germans’ three to one.
Emilio would remain with Strong and his company in Naples for seven months, his work to chauffeur his commanding officer to and from the overcrowded pensione in which they were staying (officers and soldiers dozing in the hallways), to intelligence headquarters (an ambience of strategy boards, cubicles, radios, orderlies running about, clipboards in hand). The city was in chaos, disorganization rife; the streets thick with the hungry, sanitation ruinous and typhoid prevalent, a black market thriving, and prostitutes from all over southern Italy offering themselves everwhere. Off-duty, Emilio Montez O’Brien would wander pensively in the streets, losing himself in alleys and pathways, exploring the antique chapels with their statues of the Virgin, the stones cracking and the blossoms wilted, always good-naturedly distributing candy to the hordes of children who would follow him around begging for money or whatever he might have (much in the same way that his father, Nelson O’Brien, finding himself in the American-occupied city of Santiago in Cuba in 1898, had been followed by packs of hungry children), feeling quite bad when he had to use force to discourage the boys from rifling through his pockets (and ever careful not to get too drunk on Neapolitan wine in those saloon brothels like many a soldier who, wandering drunk out into the street at three in the morning, would fall asleep in the gutter and wake the next day to find himself stripped of every cent, every document, every stitch of clothing).
Years later the names of streets would settle vaguely on his memory—he was not one to keep a diary or any other such written record—and the words Via Toledo or Piazza Olivella would descend on him out of the blue. Putting from his mind the daily arrival of bodies stacked in linen bags on lorries, he would remember instead the impression that he was in a purgatorial city of many languages and accents—walking along and hearing, for example, all kinds of English, as spoken in the Southern drawl of soldiers out of Mississippi, or in the dialect of Britishers from Manchester, who, to his ear, spoke English as if their mouths were filled with bread. Then, in the cafés, he would hear French spoken by contingents of troops from the French colonies, from Madagascar to Algiers, their language falling as strangely on his ears as his mother’s Spanish, and he would wonder what his sister Maria (or Jacqueline or Olga), who had spent time in Paris before the war and who had developed something of a European worldliness about her and an impressive ability for languages, might have thought. (Once, while visiting his sisters in their West End Avenue in New York, he overheard Maria on the telephone to Paris, speaking an idiomatic French, sprinkled, he had thought, with endearments, and so fluently that he felt like an awkward small-town boy; all he knew of French was “Mon cher,” “Bonjour,” and “Magnifique!” which he’d heard her saying as a matter of course.)
But there was also Italian—all kinds of dialects spoken in that city, Calabrese, Sicilian, Neapolitan, Roman, Tus
can, Milanese, accents all awhirl to his ears and sounding vaguely like Spanish.
He was in a bar, too, when he overheard some GIs speaking Spanish. It had intrigued him enough so that he walked over, bought them drinks, and introduced himself, getting drunk enough with them to confide that his mother was Cuban and that he had fourteen sisters. One of the GIs looked him over and declared, “Yeah, well, holy shit, you don’t look it!”
And feeling accused of being a liar, he produced from his wallet a picture of his mother sitting on the porch of the house in Cobbleton (a shot that he himself had taken), dark-haired, dark-eyed Mariela with her Andalusian face and deep pride. (“Very nice,” one of the soldiers had said.) He’d surprised himself by going into an explanation of how the family bloodlines had converged or split among his many sisters, citing that, for example, his second-oldest sister was blond and quite Irish in her looks but that she had settled into a marriage in Cuba and spoke a beautiful Spanish, while his sisters Marta and Carmen, who much resembled their mother, looking, in the parlance of the day, like pretty little señoritas—like him, they did not speak Spanish.
One of the soldiers, Raúl was his name, asked him, “How come you didn’t?”
“Well, I came out of a small town in Pennsylvania and there just weren’t many Cubans or Puerto Ricans around.”
“But what’s the matter, you never spoke to your own mother?” And: “What, were you too good?” And that had flustered him.
“I just hadn’t given it much thought.”
Still, they got along well enough, drinking, Emilio listening to their plans about what they were going to do when the bloody war ended. That’s when one of the soldiers had said he was going to work with his father running a bodega, and the other fellow said he was going to finish high school and try to get a decent job in the construction business, the two of them slipping off into Spanish whenever they wanted to say something private. (That happened when Emilio confided that he would like to be an actor of some kind, and one of them had turned to Emilio: “Oh, yeah, what are you gonna play, Zorro?”) Then the military police came into the bar, rousting the soldiers so they wouldn’t get too drunk, and they made their way off down the road.
That exchange saddened him. His lack of Spanish wasn’t something he’d think about very much, but in the days when he thought he might see action and the possibility that he might be killed had come to him (first at boot camp and then on the crowded deck of a transport ship), he started to feel regret that, for all the years he shared the same roof with his mother, he had never really gotten to know her, not in the same way as he’d known his sisters, or in the way he knew his father. His mother had somehow been relegated, in the dense activities of that household, to a minor role in his life. The afternoon he’d said goodbye, she took him by the hand and led him into the field, her phrases half in English and half in Spanish, confounding him: Si tú supieras las cosas que estoy pensando ahora mismo, y que el corazón de tu mamá está lleno de lágrimas… I want to tell you something, son. It’s just that the words don’t always come out correct. Es que yo le pido a Dios que te proteja. Te quiero mucho, hijo. I love you. Y voy a rezar cada noche por tu proteción, voy a pedir al Señor que te sostenga durante esta guerra.”
And he nodded, as he always nodded, without knowing what his mother was saying to him, and remembering their last moments (indeed, all his farewells, that difficult business of saying goodbye when he did not know if he would return), when his mother had said: “Que Dios te bendiga,” he’d felt gagged and bound by his own limitations, pulling her close and saying, “I will be thinking about you, Mama.”
***
Certainly he looked more like a man, cutting a dashing figure in uniform (some soldiers would give him a hard time, calling him “pretty boy”), but he was green and would remain so. He had survived the landing at Paestum, but the war news that came over Radio Tripoli and on the BBC, reports on the fighting as the Americans and the British converged on Kesselring’s Gothic Line, left him impatient with the general monotony of his days, when he would drive the major about and wait, drive to the mess and wait, drive him to the hospital and wait, all that time wondering about the luck of his circumstances. He’d gotten used to the sight of Vesuvius floating in a mist in the Bay of Naples and was most curious about Capri. He remembered a story that his oldest sister once read to him, some tale from a romance magazine about a nobleman who, while posing as a sheepherder, falls in love with an American tourist on Capri, at Tiberius’ villa. Some days he sat in a piazza, church bells ringing and (on occasion) the ground rumbling from the weight of tanks as they moved along on the Via Toledo, the sun feeling nice on his face. He’d take off his sunglasses, tilting his head back, and with his eyes closed enjoy a few moments of happiness. Thinking how the house in which he had once lived seemed so far away, he would feel pangs of homesickness, and the word Pennsylvania would sound like Cuba or Ireland or Mars.
Sometimes he’d get careless and lean too far back in a chair, catching himself just before he fell, and with his eyes open again and the world coming into focus—the outline of a church, the medieval roofs around him, the archways with their shadowy recesses, suddenly so new—he’d wonder, feeling a great pride in his circumstances, what his father, Nelson O’Brien, would have made of such a place. He’d imagine the kindly, slightly addled man roaming about the square with his camera and tripod in arm, looking for an appropriately artistic shot. (Behind that, a boyhood memory, Emilio in his father’s shop, looking over some very old photographs spread out before him—some of the hundreds that his father had taken during his four years in Cuba, his father telling him, “But, my God, I was so young then, and interested in everything, my boy.”)
And yes, his mother walking among some women on their way to market—not in Cuba but in Naples, or Napoli, as he’d heard it called. His mother chattering away, far from Cobbleton, in Spanish, and somehow fitting in perfectly.
He’d imagine his sisters dancing in the square.
***
Among the gifts he received from home was a Spanish grammar that Margarita had sent him. In a letter, he had mentioned the encounter with the Puerto Rican soldiers and she wrote back that it might make him feel better to learn something of the language. And so, in his spare moments, he began to study the book, his goal to compose a letter in Spanish to his mother. Each day he worked on it, trying to put together certain phrases (as best as he could judge), but not being bookish or at ease, and constantly distracted, he composed a hopelessly mangled letter and could not bring himself to send it. He would write a letter to the household every month, a letter to his sister Margarita (the news within to be conveyed to Veronica), letters to Olga, Jacqueline, and Maria, and to Helen, and from time to time a letter to Gloria, that one composed very carefully, as he knew that she cried herself to sleep every night with worry about him.
***
Eventually, he left Naples and was posted near Cassino—the area pacified. His sisters were happy to hear that news.
That was in August of 1944. Earlier, on May 11, the Allies, pursuing a spring offensive, had launched their fourth attack on Cassino to the north. Even though heavy bombardments had long ago leveled the town, there were new bombardments, and the Polish Corps and the Eighth and Fifth Armies, after nearly two weeks of fighting, had taken the town and its surroundings. Even earlier, in January, the Allies, thinking that the Benedictine monastery on Monte Cassino housed the German high command, reduced it to rubble, and the Germans had killed four thousand Poles defending it.
One afternoon he found himself on the parapet of a medieval tower on a hill, gathering intelligence. It was his duty to scan, with a pair of binoculars, the hills and valleys before him in search of potential enemies, Germans who might have gone into hiding, for most had long been rousted from the great fortress of the mountain or withdrawn. Yet, if he caught anything in his sights, it was a farmer leading his cow across a field, or the local priest, head bent in meditation, or a woman
and her children, buckets in hand, on their way to a well.
He was to report any activity that might be of military importance, but the days passed without incident, so much so that the summer heat and the strong scent of wisteria in the air induced in him a kind of torpor. Red poppies appeared in June. He’d remember that, and sometimes, out of boredom, he would spread pieces of bread along the tower ledges, ever happy with the descent of birds, who pecked along, getting their fill, blinked in the sunlight, and flew away. Yellow-winged butterflies rose out of the balmy fields, fluttering up beyond the umbrella pines and cypress trees to visit him in the tower, and he would wonder, What can one feed them?
Now and then he would hear gunfire—troops bored in town having set up a firing range—and from time to time the rumble of trucks making their way into the mountains. He sat there, with the apologies of his commanding officer, from six in the morning until five in the afternoon, and was happy whenever Strong, feeling compassion, used him as a driver.
Sometimes Emilio would drive Strong back down to Naples along the Via Napoli, but one day they rode up to the monastery, to view the ruins, climbing the crumbled walls from which one could see halfway across Italy. The commander, reveling in history, had been unforgiving that the Allies had bombed it—a tactical necessity at the time, it seemed. Standing on a particularly scenic spot, he handed Emilio a camera and asked, “Do me the favor?”
— Antonella, Hid Italian Love —
And what happened to Emilio in that pacified region?
As he was walking down the street of the small town where he was stationed, love hit him like a sniper’s bullet. It was toward dusk, the cobblestones rolling with the elongating shadows of the houses, the town peaceful and brilliant with an orange light, in the distance dogs barking and from the barracks window some bebop swing. Heading back to the mess, a rifle slung over his shoulders, his helmet in one hand, he was sunburned and powerful-looking—though there was a kindness and generosity about him that made him famous with the children of that town. He passed the church and, hearing the clatter of utensils, looked up: there, framed in the narrow window of a medieval house, stood a beautiful and serene woman who couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen years old, in a simple housedress, hair falling down over her shoulders, a baby in her arms, the child reaching up and touching her face. And then she moved away from the window, returning, he supposed, to the business of their evening meal. There were voices, mainly female, and although he did not understand Italian (“Buon giorno” and “Grazie” the extent of his vocabulary), he listened for her voice, sweet and mellow, and heard her saying, “Vengo subito,” and he found himself standing there for a long time, trying to pick out the gentle intonations of her voice among the others. Her voice was like a length of silk, slipping out the window and wrapping around his heart. He stood there for nearly an hour, listening and hoping that she would return to gaze out the window again. And as the heavy bronze bells of the church in the central piazza of the town had started to clang, he heard another voice, perhaps that of her mother or grandmother, saying, “Antonella! Non c’e’ piu risotto?” And again: “Antonella, hai fatto bene.” And: “Antonella, vieni qua col bambina.”
The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien Page 27