Unto the Sons (34 page)

She had seen the man during Mass, kneeling alone a few rows ahead of her, engrossed in his missal. In the dimness of the church she had the impression that his head was tonsured, but now in the daylight she could see that his graying reddish hair was in fact cut extremely close to the crown, and that he had a pleasing though serious face with firm skin and a florid complexion. He appeared to be about thirty, and he now stood rather commandingly behind the priest, seeming restless as the priest carried on an animated conversation with Michelina.

Finally, bowing with apologies, the elderly pastor smiled and extended his hand to Ippolita, as Michelina presented her. Then the pastor, again begging forgiveness for the forgetfulness that he cheerfully attributed to age, reached out and gently held the arm of his companion and brought him forward.

“This,” the pastor said to the two young women, “is my friend Domenico Talese.”

16.

A
fter a courtship that was in part fostered by Michelina—who encouraged Ippolita’s mild flirtatiousness while predicting a bleak future for spinsters in an impoverished south bereft of eligible men—Domenico Talese overcame his seminarial aversion to women by proposing that Ippolita become his wife. They were married in mid-November 1868 in the church where they had met, by the pastor who had introduced them.

The maid of honor was Michelina, who could now contentedly depart for Argentina knowing that her young cousin would not be alone in Italy. The best man was Domenico’s brother-in-law and the foreman on his farm, the jovial and partly deaf Vito Bevivino.

Vito’s wife was Domenico’s older sister, Carolina, a gaunt, graying, intense woman dominated by dark moods and fathomless superstition. She never wore necklaces, bracelets, or earrings that were not inlaid with amulets to protect her from the evil eye; and she never appeared in public wearing anything but black dresses and mourning veils, even when she
went to church to marry Vito. On that occasion she explained that she was still haunted by the rock slide two years before that had crushed her parents and older brother; but she was known to have cloaked herself in mourning attire long before that tragic occurrence.

Like her mother before her and like many of her countrymen, Carolina was a conspicuously devout individual whose sense of reason was shaded by ancient Greek sophistry and notions of medieval diabolism; she identified mainly with the gloom in the Gospels, the vengeance of the Creator, and the omnipresence of death. To hear anyone express a personal compliment or interpret an event as a favorable omen would alert her to the possible presence of the invisible
jettatura
. Had she not married Vito Bevivino, who was deaf to her despairing words, she might have found comfort in walking among the flagellants who bloodied the pathways to every southern shrine, or singing in the choruses of professional wailers who were ever in demand in the dark sunset of this fallen kingdom.

Domenico was not unaffected by her elegiac temperament. He had always been emotionally close to his older sister, who had brought him up as a boy during the frequent absences from home of their tubercular mother. His sister had taken him to Mass each morning, and had later recommended him to the monsignor as a youth called to the cloth. She had stalwartly supported him during his doubting days at the seminary, and had calmed his rage against God after the accidental death of their parents and brother. Though eccentric and ethereal, she was equally strong-willed and dependable. Domenico knew that there was no one more dependable and trustworthy in his life than Carolina, his last surviving sibling. His trust in her extended to his belief in the validity of her spiritualism, in the divinity of its essence, for it sprang from a fear that they shared equally, a fear so disturbing and shamefully personal as to seek redress only in heavenly guidance and protection.

Domenico believed with his sister that the two of them might indeed be living under the influence of a curse. It was she who had passed on this foreboding suspicion to him shortly after he had left the seminary after his parents’ death. Before that she had for years kept her suspicions to herself, suspicions that had arisen in the form of a rumor she had overheard as a young girl in Maida. Once she had overcome her timidity and approached her father—but he had so vehemently denied the rumor, Carolina later told Domenico, that she had come away concluding that the story was probably true, adding that her father had begged her never to discuss the subject with anyone. But she had nonetheless shared it with
Domenico: the rumor that their late father’s father, a man named Pasquale Talese, had been born the son of a priest.

Hoping to find evidence to expunge this hearsay, Domenico devoted much time after leaving the seminary to trying to trace the genealogy of Pasquale through municipal files and the archives of churches in and around Maida. This was difficult and time-consuming because a high percentage of this material had been misplaced or lost in the upheaval of the 1783 earthquake; and after Domenico had spent three months of perusal to no avail, his sister learned from one of the local octogenarians that Pasquale had not even been born in the Maida area, as they had always assumed, but instead northeast of Naples in the countryside near the town of Benevento.

This was in the vicinity of the seminary that Domenico had attended, and the brothers there not only allowed Domenico to return and live among them as their guest but assisted him in getting the cooperation of the record-keepers in various neighboring churches. With such help Domenico was finally able to confirm Pasquale’s birth in the outskirts of Benevento, in the spring of 1765, and to learn that the couple listed as his parents had produced three children previously. But there was no way that Domenico could confirm Pasquale’s blood ties to his father-of-record, or even determine that the latter had been living at the time of Pasquale’s birth, because the date of the older man’s death could not be found in any of the church files.

Domenico was also at a loss to explain why it was that after Pasquale had turned seventeen, in 1782, and had married for the first time—not to Domenico’s grandmother, who was Pasquale’s second wife, but to the young spouse who would die in the 1783 earthquake—he spelled his surname differently from the way it had been spelled on his birth certificate. Was this slightly altered spelling—to “Talese” from “Telese”—the careless mistake of some municipal scrivener who had issued Pasquale’s wedding license? Or had it been a deliberate attempt on Pasquale’s part to separate himself from the three older Telese children born to his mother? If this last possibility were the case, then it might have been corroborated in Domenico’s discovery of an ecclesiastical property deed indicating that in 1788 Pasquale had become the sole inheritor of two parcels of Church-owned farmland from an anonymous benefactor. Was this benefactor the clergyman who had perhaps sired him? There was no individual’s name on the deed that Domenico saw, only the seal of the rectorship and the notary; but Domenico was embarrassingly aware of the fact that one of these parcels was located in the Maida valley, and that upon Pasquale’s
death it had been inherited by his son, Gaetano—whose demise in the rock slide had made Domenico its inheritor. And now this vast and fertile acreage, together with the adjoining land Domenico had bought, constituted the main source of Domenico’s wealth.

He spent five months in this region of southern Italy where his paternal grandfather Pasquale had been born and reared; and one day, while riding his horse along a bridle path in the countryside west of Benevento, Domenico saw a small road sign pointing in the direction of a town called Telese. Having never known that such a place existed, Domenico followed a narrow winding route through the thickets and past the stumps of chopped trees until he came to a clearing in which appeared the remnants of an abandoned hamlet. It consisted of a few cracked ancient walls enclosing gardens of wild flowers and high weeds and several eroding stone buildings. This, Domenico assumed, had been the place of origin of his family clan. And while there was nothing in this soundless and wasted place that would date its inhabitation, Domenico did discover, days later, in the archives of a nearby monastery, many historical references to the hamlet of Telese.

Settled in pre-Christian times, it had been partly destroyed by the Romans in 214
B.C.
in retaliation for the hospitality its citizens had shown Hannibal; but later the community was colonized by the Romans, and still later it endured the presence of Visigoth, Arab, Norman, and other invaders. In the early 1600s, however, several minor earthquakes produced ground ruptures that created an atmosphere so noxious that for the next two hundred years the place was uninhabitable. Many residents moved to the island of Ischia, off Naples, or to more distant parts of Italy, while others remained in the general vicinity, founding a newer community of Telese several miles west of the old settlement, one that was irrigated by sulfurous waters the people believed to be therapeutic.

Domenico read that the name Telese was derived from the Greek verb
telein
, meaning “to initiate to mysteries”; and he was pleased to learn that many people from that town had become initiated into the mysteries of the Church as priests and monks, among the first being the twelfth-century abbot Alexander of Telese, a medieval scholar and author of four volumes outlining the relationship between the Norman rulers and the papacy. But nothing that Domenico read or heard during his sojourn answered the basic question about his grandfather’s paternity, nor did Domenico feel upon his return to Maida any less susceptible to the suspicions of his sister.

Carolina remained strongly predisposed to the notion that they were
plagued by a curse, and while there was no certain antidote she urged that they dedicate their lives to prayer and vigilance; and when, after he had fallen in love with Ippolita during the summer of 1868, Domenico informed his sister of their marital plans for the following November, his sister warned that the only safe day for his wedding would be November 18—for that date marked the tenth anniversary of the rock slide. It was mandatory that they express their obeisance to the wrath of the Lord on that day as well as celebrate the sacrament of matrimony, she insisted. Otherwise it would be disrespectful to the departed souls and their maker who had summoned them, and it might also bring bad luck in the future to Domenico’s offspring. Domenico and Ippolita were married on November 18, 1868.

When Ippolita first learned that the wedding date had been influenced by Carolina’s conjuring, she was bewildered and even frightened, having never before encountered people who were so swayed by the possible effects of ill omens or curses. But then she began to resent that her supposedly joyful day would also commemorate a disaster that had occurred ten years before. Although she was a young woman of twenty-one, she had hardly been a stranger to disasters and death; and yet this family she was marrying into seemed almost to take comfort in the resurrection of gloom. While she did not express her objections to anyone but her husband—and even to him she did not give full vent to her feelings—Ippolita was clearly appalled on her wedding day as she saw black bunting intertwined with the white streamers and flowers on the altar, and observed her tearful sister-in-law dressed entirely in black, and heard the pastor invoke the blessings of the dead parents on the couple about to be joined in the sacrament of matrimony.

Ippolita blamed Carolina entirely for the air of despondency that had been introduced to the setting, excusing her husband as a temporary victim of his vexatious sister, an uncertain man trapped between the loyalties of the past and those of the present, a smiling bridegroom in a white suit who covered his heart with the black ribbons that streamed down from the boutonniere in his lapel. His best man was similarly attired. Ippolita, of course, was dressed completely in white, as was her maid of honor, Michelina. But the two dozen guests—all of them invited by Carolina, and all of them employed on the farmlands and in the mills that she presumed to co-own with her brother—also displayed black ribbons or armbands on their clothing in deference to Carolina’s disposition.

When Ippolita said good-bye to Carolina and the other guests after the reception in the courtyard of Domenico’s house, a crucifix-walled
house that was now hers to share, she vowed that she would henceforth keep her distance from Carolina—difficult as that would be with her sister-in-law living next door. But Ippolita began by not attending Mass with her husband, since Carolina invariably accompanied him; and she also managed to live according to a schedule that ran counter to Carolina’s predictable routine: she was out shopping when Carolina was at home; she was at home when Carolina was out shopping; she always slipped in and out of her house through a side door not visible from Carolina’s windows; and she pretended to be napping whenever she heard her front door resounding with Carolina’s impatient knocking.

If Ippolita was not feeling well she kept it secret; otherwise Carolina would insist on visiting and prescribing her strange herbal remedies—while at the same time exaggerating the extent of Ippolita’s illness throughout the neighborhood. Ippolita learned soon after joining the row of houses occupied by her husband’s kinfolk and friends that the favorite subject of conversation was illness, maladies of every type—rheumatism, dyspepsia, neuritis, neuralgia, food poisoning, canker sores, tooth decay, heat prostration, frostbite, malnutrition, invalidism, headaches, backaches, heartaches, brain tumors. Not only Carolina, but most of the other neighbors as well, complained constantly and publicly of their each and every pain, as if admitting to good health would jinx them.

Fortunately for Ippolita, her self-cultivated image as a shy young bride permitted her to avoid each afternoon the circle of complaining people, all of them women at this hour, who gathered around Carolina at the fountain in the courtyard to describe and compare their latest insalubrity, real or imagined. But during the summer of 1871, Ippolita’s relationship to these women was quickly altered by a new circumstance. She was pregnant. And so noticeably pregnant that everyone was aware of it, and talking about it, and apparently very happy about it. Unfortunately for Ippolita, as a topic of conversation her impending motherhood began to rival even the popularity of ailments.