Unto the Sons (3 page)

Most embarrassing to me were those moments when, on entering the apartment unannounced after school, I saw reflected in a mirror, opposite a small alcove, the bowed head of my father as he knelt on the red velvet of a prie-dieu in front of a wall portrait of a bearded, brown-robed medieval monk. The monk’s face was emaciated, his lips seemed dry, and as he stood on a rock in sandals balancing a crosier in his right arm, his dark, somber eyes looked skyward as if seeking heavenly relief from the sins that surrounded him.

Ever since my earliest youth I had heard again and again my father’s astonishing tales about this fifteenth-century southern Italian miracle worker, Saint Francis of Paola. He had cured the crippled and revived the dead, he had multiplied food and levitated and with his hands stopped mountain boulders from rolling down upon villages; and one day in his hermitage, after an alluring young woman had tempted his celibacy, he had hastily retreated and leaped into an icy river to extinguish his passion.

The denial of pleasure, the rejection of worldly beauty and values, dominated the entire life of Saint Francis, my father had emphasized, adding that Francis as a boy had slept on stones in a cave near my father’s own village, had fasted and prayed and flagellated himself, and had finally established a credo of punishing piety and devotion that endures in southern Italy to this day, almost six hundred years after the birth of the saint.

I myself had seen other portraits of Saint Francis in the Philadelphia homes of some of my father’s Italian friends whom we occasionally visited
on Sunday afternoons; and while I never openly doubted the veracity of Francis’s achievements, I never felt comfortable after I had climbed the many steps of the private staircase leading to the apartment and opened the living room door to see my father kneeling in prayer before this almost grotesque oil painting of a holy figure whose aura suggested agony and despair.

Prayer for me was either a private act witnessed exclusively by God or a public act carried out by the congregation or by me and my classmates in parochial school. It was not an act to be on exhibition in a family parlor in which I, as a nonparticipating observer, felt suddenly like an interloper, a trapped intruder in spiritual space, an awkward youth who dared not disturb my father’s meditation by announcing my presence. And yet I could not unobtrusively retreat from the room, or remain unaffected or even unafraid as I stood there, stifled against the wall, overhearing during these war years of the 1940s my father’s whispered words as he sought from Saint Francis nothing less than a miracle.

2.

Q
uite apart from his patriotic activities with the Ocean City shore patrol throughout World War II, and his pro-American speeches to the local Rotary Club, which would soon elect him its president, my father was silently terrified by the Allied forces’ successful invasion of Sicily in 1943 and their inevitable plan to move north up the Italian peninsula against the Nazi and Fascist troops who were encamped in and around the southern region of his birth.

His widowed mother still occupied the Talese family’s ancient stone house in the hills with most of my father’s kinfolk, except those who were soldiers at the front, associated with the Germans against the advancing Allied ground units and bombers.

The southernmost part of Italy was virtually indefensible, my father conceded to me at breakfast after reading in
The New York Times
about the fall of Sicily; it was the fragile toe of the Italian boot, an exposed area where the slanted farmlands and jagged hills descended from the higher northern peaks and were surrounded almost entirely by unguarded bodies of water. To the east was the Ionian Sea, to the west the Tyrrhenian,
and to the southwest was the Strait of Messina, which scarcely separated the southern tip of Italy from the island of Sicily.

Although my father’s village—Maida—was sixty-five miles northeast of Messina, it was precariously situated. The curving coastlines of the Ionian and Tyrrhenian seas cut deeply into the mainland, so deeply that Maida’s population of thirty-five hundred people was clustered in beige stone houses on the rocky interior of the narrowest part of Italy. The distance between the two coastlines here could be traversed by a motorist in little more than an hour; and adding to Maida’s vulnerability to invasion, my father said, was a wide plateau below its western slope that could serve as a passageway or attacking ground for great numbers of troops traveling with heavy equipment. Indeed, this land had already been the scene of a brutal battle between the soldiers of France and Britain during the era of Napoleon Bonaparte.

It happened on a hot July morning in 1806, said my father, whose recounting of history was always accompanied by precise details; it happened after the surprise landing of more than five thousand British troops on the shingly shore of the Tyrrhenian Sea along the outer edge of Maida’s plateau.

The British troops were led by a bold American-born officer who was a native of Georgia—General John Stuart, whose property-owning parents in the American South had remained loyal to the crown during the American Revolution. After they had returned to England, young Stuart received a commission as a British officer in 1778. In 1780 he participated in the siege of Charleston, South Carolina; then the invasion of North Carolina and, finally, Virginia, where, severely wounded, he and other red-coated units under Lord Cornwallis surrendered to the Americans at Yorktown in 1781.

After recovering his health and returning to England, Stuart resumed a military career that during the following decades would see him leading British regiments, brigades, and divisions between Flanders and Alexandria in almost constant conflict with the French—culminating, after sailing with his troops from Sicily past the rock of Scylla northward toward that plateau, in the battle of Maida in 1806.

The Italian mainland in 1806 was largely influenced by the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, a fact that was not displeasing to a large percentage of Italians. As my father often said, the Italians considered Napoleon more Italian than French because he was descended from a family that had emigrated from northern Italy to Corsica when that island was ruled by the Italian republic of Genoa—which, over the protests of many Corsicans,
ceded it to the French shortly before Napoleon’s birth in Corsica in 1769.

Among the anti-French Corsican agitators during this time was Napoleon’s father, who became resigned to the French occupation of the island only after the leader of the Corsican resistance movement had been forced to flee. As a result of his father’s subsequent cooperation and politicking with the French administrators, the younger Napoleon was able to leave Corsica and receive the benefits of a higher education in continental France. And yet during his school years and swift rise through the ranks of the French army, Napoleon continued to spell his surname in the Italian style, “Buonaparte,” even after he had been appointed a brigadier general at the age of twenty-four in 1793.

It was in this same year that the British officer John Stuart became a lieutenant colonel at thirty-four; but as my father pointed out, it was much more difficult to move up within the British officer corps than the French because France was then involved with its Reign of Terror, and there were frequent vacancies created at the top of the French military establishment because of the many defections, expulsions, and even executions of aristocratic French officers.

It was during this very same year of 1793, in fact, that the French beheaded King Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette. The act shocked royal rulers around the world, but it was mourned with more personal passion in the palace at Naples, the capital city of the southern Italian kingdom, where the throne was occupied by Queen Marie Caroline (sister of the guillotined Marie Antoinette) and the Bourbon king Ferdinand, a member of a branch of the same dynasty as the fallen French king.

In addition to the sadness and anger in Naples there were grave feelings of insecurity among the ruling elite throughout the Kingdom of Southern Italy, because they were aware that in Maida, as in dozens of other villages, secret revolutionary societies were scheming to overthrow the privileged families who had ruled over the hills and farmlands since the Norman conquerors had brought feudalism into southern Italy in the eleventh century.

A Norman castle built in Maida in that century was still standing in the early twentieth, my father told me; and despite its decrepit condition, it was sometimes used when he was a child as a place of incarceration while the accused awaited transfer to a larger prison elsewhere. But the castle’s dungeon also served to remind my father how deep-rooted was the medieval mentality of his native land, how enduring were certain of its archaic methods. Indeed, the Maida valley that would be the battleground
between Napoleon’s musketeers and Stuart’s invaders in 1806—the British won the conflict after four ferocious days, and subsequently memorialized it by naming a West London district Maida Vale, after my father’s village—had undoubtedly absorbed the blood of two thousand years of warfare, going back to the days of Roman chariots and Hannibal’s elephants, of savage Magyar horsemen and Saracen pirates who, sailing toward southern Italy with clarions and trumpets blaring, filled the sunny sky with darts of poison.

While I was always impressed with my father’s vivid depiction of history, my attention sometimes wandered during these long and frequently repetitive lectures conducted after dinner amid the soft but often distracting sounds of Puccini and Verdi rising from the scratchy glass records of my father’s old Victrola. And yet his intensity made me aware of his almost obsessive need to tell me about himself, to explain and perhaps justify himself as he described his past and traced his odyssey along the Tyrrhenian Sea to Paris and later across the Atlantic Ocean to the Jersey shore, where he now had me as his captive audience. To me he could confess his anxiety and, possibly, guilt, or at the very least expose a side of himself that his tailor’s taste for appearances would prevent him from revealing beyond the walls of this mirrored apartment.

Ironically, while I was failing an American history course in parochial school—where I was also subjected to ethnic slurs hurled by a few Irish Catholic boys whose older brothers had just participated in the conquest of Sicily—I was becoming, under my father’s tutelage, a reluctant scholar of the history of the southern tip of Italy, which, if my father’s worst fears materialized, would soon be blown off the map.

Perhaps that accounted for his determination to enlighten me about it, so that I might survive, as he had, to keep its obscure history alive in the retelling—and to take pride, as well as solace, in associating Italy with the rich chronology preceding its alliance with Nazi Germany.

3.

T
o hear my father tell it, and I have heard it often, the south of Italy flourished long before the rise of the Roman Empire and the birth of Christ, and in his native village of Maida and its surrounding region—which
extends south of Naples down through ancient hills and valleys to form the toe and heel of the Italian boot—there occurred historical spectacles and scenes that constituted many centuries of human experience at its worst and best, its most barbaric and aesthetic, its most destitute and luxurious.

A word synonymous with luxury and sensual gratification—
sybaritic
—derives, my father told me, from a pre-Christian city north of Maida called Sybaris, which was founded in 720
B.C.
by enterprising Greek colonists who combined a thriving economy with a penchant for self-indulgence and comfort: Sybaris’s bright streets were shaded with awnings; its leading citizens regularly bathed in saunas tended by slaves; and its women appeared at sumptuous banquets wearing gold circlets in their hair, high-heeled shoes imported from Persia, and low-cut gowns that revealed part of their breasts.

South of Sybaris on the eastern shore of southern Italy was the more cerebral city of Crotone, populated by such intellectuals as Pythagoras and by a restrictive administration that became so envious and contemptuous of Sybaris that in 510
B.C.
it attacked and looted it, set it afire, and, after diverting the course of the Crati River, submerged the entire city under water and mud.

My father’s own hillside village was assaulted and plundered several times during the pre-Christian era, once by the Greek king Pyrrhus of Epirus—a man best remembered for annihilating many thousands of Romans in the Pyrrhic victories that destroyed most of his own troops as well. Spartacus also passed through the territory of Maida in his clashes with the Romans, and the anti-Roman campaigns and rebellions joined by most southern Italians later brought about cruel Roman retaliation upon the south: temples were demolished, women were raped, farms were torched, and so many trees were cut down for Roman shipbuilding and other purposes that the southern hills were eventually denuded. Rocks and mud began to slide, lakes became stagnant, and the water became malarial.

The water was
still
malarial at the time of my father’s birth in Maida in 1903, and this fact, in addition to the villagers’ eternal fear of seafaring invaders, probably contributed to the hydrophobic tradition that persists in my family and was transferred to the New World by my immigrant father, who, oddly, settled along the south Jersey shore near the sea that he shunned. And it was there that I grew up in the late 1930s, watching the waves with trembling fascination, but never in my entire life did I dare learn how to swim.

That my father had crossed the Atlantic Ocean to come to America had at first seemed to me an extraordinary triumph of courage over timidity, until he confessed one day that he had been terrified and seasick during the turbulent voyage and had prayed constantly to Saint Francis for survival. Although none of my father’s three brothers had followed him to America—they remained in Maida with their hydrophobic mother and sister—my father’s father, Gaetano Talese (whose name I inherited after my birth in 1932, in the anglicized form “Gay”),
was
an atypically fearless traveler, although his five trans-Atlantic voyages had less to do with his love of the sea than with his contempt for the land he was doomed to inherit in Maida.