Unto the Sons (33 page)

During the time Giuseppe Gagliardi spent in Pizzo and Vibo Valentia attending the funerals, he refrained from expressing any opinions about the king’s administration—not entirely because he was afraid of being overheard and reported, but also because as a banker Giuseppe was appreciative of the efforts the king was currently making to ameliorate the economy through a more aggressive approach in international trade. At the remodeled port of Naples there had been under Ferdinand II an impressive increase in the number of merchant ships afloat and the volume of business conducted—indeed, in the last year the king could boast that his ships had carried to foreign ports two-thirds of the realm’s domestic produce. At factories in and around Naples there was record production of such popular export items as gloves, soap, perfumes, coral ornaments, silks, earthenware, hats, and carriages. The king had made Naples the first city in Italy to have a railroad system. After opening the first line from Naples to Portici in 1839, Ferdinand would extend the tracks farther north to Caserta in 1843, and to Capua in 1845—and he hoped to reach Rome in his lifetime, although the Pope remained rigidly opposed to any trains entering the Eternal City or the Papal States. The Pope believed
that a train’s noise, filth, and monstrous unsightliness would mar the lovely panorama of the countryside and disturb the contemplative mood of those kneeling in the pews of churches.

While Giuseppe had not yet seen a train—he had not been back to Naples since their introduction—he had quickly and unequivocally accepted the Pope’s lowly opinion of such conveyances, which was shared by everyone he knew; and he was therefore much surprised to hear a spirited advocacy of the rail system expressed one night by the guest of honor at a dinner party he attended in Catanzaro some time after returning from the funerals. The guest of honor was a petite young woman from Naples who wore a white lace dress and was named Teresa Mazzei.

Giuseppe had been invited to the dinner by a banking colleague in Catanzaro who was married to Teresa’s older sister, and it was this sister whom Teresa had come from Naples to visit. When Giuseppe had been introduced to her he was not immediately taken by her physical appeal or charm, although she seemed pretty enough and sufficiently sociable by any standard. It was rather her enthusiasm that appealed to him, her blithe spirit and outgoing manner that would have been considered risqué among country maidens in Italy; but she was clearly a citified woman beyond the measure of country convention, and she was also young enough for her exuberance to be accepted by her older dinner partners as a genuine part of her nature and not merely an attempt to command their attention.

And yet she did command their attention during dinner, and after it as well, by her humorous accounts of current social activities in Naples and by her optimistic assessment of the role the railroad would play in helping Naples to maintain its position as a leading world capital. She described the festive opening of the new terminal building, glowing with stanchioned gaslights that had only recently removed the city’s streets from centuries of dim dependence on candles, and she reveled in the fact that the terminal’s iron rafters had seemed to reverberate with the voices and instruments of the performers from the San Carlo opera house, assembled near a platform to serenade the passengers, who climbed aboard wearing long dresses and tailcoats. While she admitted that she would not go for a train ride wearing the white dress she had worn on this evening of her sister’s dinner, Teresa said that the black soot flying from the locomotive had not been as pervasive as she had expected, and that none of the frightening jolts and sudden turns along the tracks could diminish the thrill of the adventure.

Giuseppe left the dinner that night imagining he would never see Teresa Mazzei again; and had it been left to his personal initiative, he
probably never would have. Much as she held his interest, he assumed that she would soon be returning to Naples and to suitors who were far closer to her age than the thirty years that separated the two of them. But a few weeks later her brother-in-law at the bank asked Giuseppe to join Teresa and her sister at a picnic lunch in the country one weekend, adding that they would come by for Giuseppe and would ride out together.

The weather for the outing was bright and balmy, and during the short walk after lunch Giuseppe was able to speak more intimately with Teresa, although he still felt awkward with a woman so young, and his response to her lighthearted commentary and banter was expressed mainly with avuncular bemusement. When she casually mentioned that she was extending her stay in Catanzaro, Giuseppe still did not think it appropriate for him to propose that they meet again, but he was quite pleased when her brother-in-law proposed it for him.

Several subsequent dinners, all proposed by her brother-in-law, made it clear even to the reluctant suitor that
he
was being courted; and while he delicately expressed his concerns to Teresa’s brother-in-law, he remained receptive to her presence, even to the point months later of accepting her invitation to come to Naples to meet her parents. After Teresa had welcomed him at the gate of their large stone house on the outskirts of the city, and had escorted him through a corridor into her father’s library, Giuseppe saw before him a trim, gray-haired smiling man of exactly his own age whose dark eyes and general physiognomy bore a striking resemblance to his own.

Giuseppe and Teresa were married in 1846; and in the spring of the following year, in a newly acquired house a few miles downhill from Catanzaro in the direction of Maida, there was born a daughter, whom the couple named Ippolita. In the choice of the name Teresa deferred to her husband, who had been uncharacteristically decisive in proposing it, even though it had not been a name in either of their families. It was the name of a woman Giuseppe’s late mother had often referred to, who had given her a dowry of gems on her wedding day.

The child Ippolita grew up in a kingdom beset by political chaos and warfare, and in a home of personal tragedy and sadness. When Ippolita was two, in 1849, her mother nearly died of an infection contracted while bearing a stillborn son; and before her recovery Teresa learned that her father in Naples had been imprisoned for treason, and was marked for execution, because of his alleged membership in a Mazzinian underground society that had been plotting against King Ferdinand. Such cliques were now proliferating in the kingdom, encouraged by the fact that the followers
of Mazzini and Garibaldi had just invaded and conquered Rome, and killed the papal prime minister and the Pope’s personal secretary, having already forced Pius IX to flee southward to the city of Gaeta, in the protective realm of the Spanish Bourbons.

The provincial capital of Catanzaro was disturbed almost daily by public demonstrations and violence, as the police and royalist crowds battled with antimonarchists who circulated leaflets attacking Ferdinand’s oppressive regime and advocating a coup d’état. Giuseppe arranged a transfer out of Catanzaro for himself and his family in 1850; he became a director of four small banks along the western coast, one located in Pizzo, and acquired a secluded house with high walls near the sea that he hoped would provide a salubrious atmosphere for his wife’s recovery. But Teresa only descended further into despair on learning of her mother’s fatal heart attack after the execution of her father. This melancholia would remain with Teresa always, and young Ippolita would never know her mother as the carefree and cheerful woman who had attracted her father in their courting days.

Ippolita’s father sometimes took her to Vibo Valentia to visit his relatives in the Gagliardi family. The current patriarch was Luigi’s thirty-year-old grandson, Marquis Enrico, who controlled the local grain and fishing industries, served on the town council, and was running for mayor. Like the late Luigi, who had married his stepmother’s daughter, Enrico had not ventured far in finding a wife. He had married his niece.

When Ippolita was eight, in 1855, her father gladly accepted Enrico’s suggestion that she be tutored along with the other children who were assembled each day in a classroom in a wing of Palazzo Gagliardi, next to the family chapel; and for the next five years, until she was thirteen, she spent more time with the Gagliardis in Vibo Valentia than she did with her own parents in Pizzo. Her father was on the road most of the day, traveling by carriage to the banks under his supervision, and her mother, now a chronic depressive, was under the constant care of a nurse. Sometimes Teresa, still in her thirties, was lucid and even cheerful, but then her voice would trail off into a jumble of inaudible words, or she would remain silent for hours and even days.

Giuseppe now divided his time as valiantly as he could among his disturbed wife, his demure daughter, whom he visited daily, and his banks, which were slowly declining along with the Bourbon regime that was their foundation. The sudden death in 1859 of the cruel but astute Ferdinand II accelerated the demise of the Bourbons, because the crown passed to his twenty-three-year-old son, Francis II, who was incompetent.
Tall like his father, and with a long nose and thin lymphatic countenance topped by close-clipped black hair, the young king displayed his superciliousness to his embarrassed court on the very day of his coronation.

King Francis stood on the carpet in front of his throne with such impudence and apathy that, as his subjects lined up to kneel at his feet and kiss his hand, he did not even take the trouble to raise it. It dangled numbly at his side as they reached for it, to bring it forward to their lips; and then it limply fell back in place, like the stuffed arm of a doll. The king did not look at the people who were paying him homage, but rather stared out into the distance toward the back of the room where the line was forming. When an old man tripped and fell as he climbed the carpeted steps to kiss the king’s hand, the king made no effort to help him, nor did he express a word of sympathy. He simply continued to gaze into the distance as the old man, with difficulty, moved away and made room for the next person to genuflect.

Giuseppe did not enjoy hearing a recounting of this incident one night at dinner at Palazzo Gagliardi; unlike his front-running kinsman Enrico, who was already in contact with the agents of Garibaldi, Giuseppe remained committed to the Bourbons. The reactionary Bourbon monarchy and its equally reactionary allies within the highest levels of the Church were at least deeply rooted to the traditions of the agricultural south—they and the south were inseparable, in Giuseppe’s view; the vast majority of southerners were simple and humble people of few needs and wants, spiritual people who condoned a hard life and even welcomed it as a properly rigorous route to a heavenly reward. The irreligious Garibaldi and the iconoclastic Mazzini, linked as they were to the industrial interests of the north, had little to offer the south—although Giuseppe did concede that the termination of strict Bourbon rule might accrue further gains for the Gagliardis of Vibo Valentia. Despite the family’s history of generosity to himself and his forebears, Giuseppe found himself resenting the ease with which southerners like Enrico Gagliardi could shift their allegiances—their loyalties were primarily to power.

After Garibaldi’s Redshirts had crossed over from Sicily onto the southern tip of Italy the following summer, 1860, and quickly began to overrun the Bourbon defenses situated to the south of Vibo Valentia, Enrico organized a militia to lend support to Garibaldi’s invaders. When the Redshirts entered Vibo Valentia, they were offered the use of Palazzo Gagliardi as their temporary headquarters. After a banquet in Garibaldi’s honor, to which the entire household had been invited, including young
Ippolita—her father stayed away—Enrico made a large financial contribution to the Garibaldini, and he received at the same time an official commission to serve as Garibaldi’s deputy in running the city until the end of the war.

The political disagreement between Giuseppe and Enrico that preceded the fall of the Bourbons was never resolved; and around the time Enrico began serving as a senator in the new kingdom headed by the Piedmontese monarch, Victor Emmanuel II, Giuseppe took his family out of the area and moved up the coast to the town of Amantea. His banks were insolvent, the days ahead seemed bleak. The entire country was now ruled by northern politicians in Turin, and to that faraway capital now flocked many of the best minds of the south, the educated and industrious elements who were qualified to play roles in the new, centralized government; meanwhile, the shattered pieces of the old Bourbon realm were picked up by the leading southern families and subverted into a neo-feudalistic economy, controlled at the top by patriarchal alliances and retained through intermarriages.

In Naples, still more than twice the size of any city in Italy, there was increased pauperism and crime among its more than four hundred thousand residents. Neapolitan industries, which had been supported by the protectionist policies of the Bourbon crown, were being undermined by the free-trade policies of northern politicians. The tracts of Church lands that had been previously designated for the poor in the countryside were most often co-opted by the entrenched wealthy families, many of whom hired
mafiosi
as their property guards and enforcers.

Giuseppe continued to live quietly in Amantea, supported by his savings and comforted by young Ippolita, while he dedicated himself to the care of his wife. In 1865, Teresa died after an attack of influenza, and a year later, at the age of seventy, Giuseppe was a victim of heart failure. Ippolita went to live nearby with her cousin Michelina, who was now her only close friend. But with Michelina’s impending marriage and emigration, Ippolita would be alone, unless she followed Michelina’s suggestion and made an application to move with her to Argentina.

The two young women had been discussing this on their way to church in Maida on that cloudy Sunday in 1867, attending what for Ippolita was a private commemoration of the first anniversary of her father’s death. After the service, Michelina waited outside the refectory door on the side of the church to pay her respects to the pastor. When the pastor came out he was accompanied by a slim, ascetic-looking man in a
dark suit and tie. Ippolita assumed that he was a deacon in the church, or the priest’s personal attendant.