No Country: A Novel (37 page)

“Maeve dear,” he said softly, “the Good Book says that. Let Bibi grow. Let her be.”

I wept in hapless isolation, unheeded, the only one who really knew where my Bibi’s happiness lay. What was so special about this outsider with his tales of aimless wanderings? I thought bitterly about this interloper, his handsome face burnt by the sun. I wish we had never set eyes on him. He was of the rootless tribe.

“Do I hate him?” I asked myself again and again. Yet there is something in him that I could not bring myself to hate. He reminded me of someone I loved, but never met in life.

No, no, it is far worse. I feared Frankie.

I can remember exactly when I decided to become a traveler. It was the day Padre Stefano hung up the tall maps on the three walls of our classroom. The graying blackboard with the crucifix above it occupied the fourth wall. I peered so close to the first map of the Atlantic that I could smell the glue which held the paper map to the cloth mounting. It smelt of resin and blackberries and shoe polish. For me it was the aroma of magic, and whisked my mind away from Boscotrecase with its tilted cobbled streets, the old piazza with the broken fountain, the surrounding fields and boulders, the vineyards. Oh yes, my head was in a swoon as I looked at the boot of Italy stepping into the Mediterranean, the slit of Gibraltar opening like a chink in a magic stone door, the enormous blue escape of the Atlantic.

My father, Gianni Talese, told me I had no business daydreaming. A day trip to Napoli was enough, he said emphatically, while my grandmother shook her black-shawled head and crossed herself.

Padre Stefano Antonelli’s maps came all the way from America.
This Jesuit priest had been born there, of Italian parents, and came to Roma as a trainee priest, then became a village priest and schoolteacher, first near Napoli, and later near the castle at Stabia on the coast before he came here. I think Padre Stefano would get homesick for America, for he began to teach English to a handful of students, including me and Pasquale, my inseparable friend, who longed to take the road beyond our village, past Sorrento, along the cliff road which led to Salerno and Messina.

Padre Stefano used to say that Pasquale Centangeli had a hundred angels in his name and two hundred naughty devils in his head. His father, Memmo, was a wiry hard man who drank, not wine, but whatever else he could get his hands on. In his pitching drunkenness, he would seek out his only son and beat him brutally. Pasquale would hide as best he could, while Memmo searched for him, beating on doors with his fist, as if he were on an urgent errand. The only one who tried to stop him was Padre Stefano. Memmo would demur, but in an hour or two would resume his stubborn search, as if beating his son into senselessness was the only anchor he had to his miserable reality.

My other friend in the schoolroom was plump, good-natured Giuseppe, already a fine carpenter, coaxing shapes out of wood even as a boy, but he found English impossible. His father insisted he join us in learning the language, for his uncles Giorgio and Armando Vesprini were already in Boston—and they planned to join them soon.

Father Stefano called me “Frankie.” And I just loved it, my American name. I planned to use it for all my adventures in the world:
Frankie Talese, traveler
.

•  •  •

M
Y OLDER BROTHER,
Michele, was apprenticed to a builder in San Giuseppe Vesuviano. Phlegmatic like our father, Michele had chosen an equally stolid betrothed, Rosaria Semmilio, who lived with her family on a farm within walking distance of San Giuseppe, next to the country road to Striano. My older sister, Daniela, had got married six years ago to stoop-shouldered and balding Dario Colletti, who lived at the edge of Napoli, just off the road to Portici.

My little sister, Lucia, I loved best of all. She went about all day with a smile on her lips. Our widowed grandmother Nonna Rosa, who had doted on her, died shortly after Lucia turned ten. My increasingly asthmatic father became sad every time he looked at her, letting her do as she pleased, but Lucia absolutely refused to go outside Boscotrecase—as if the world beyond our village where everyone knew everyone else, even the dead—was as nonexistent as her voice. She had been a quiet baby and was almost a year old before anyone realized that she was stone deaf. She learnt to do most of the chores of the house.

For me, the great unknown was the world of the dead where our mother, Gabriela, had departed when I was three and Lucia was only a few months old. Sometimes I think I remember Mamma clearly, but at other times I am not really sure. Nonna Rosa told me once that I resemble my Mamma. The next day, when I was certain no one was home, I draped Mamma’s shawl over my head and looked in the mirror. But I could only see myself. There were no pictures of her.

During Easter week, Christmas, and other occasional holidays, I would plead with my father to be sent to my sister Daniela. Pasquale always accompanied me. We would wander around the raucous lanes of Napoli, but it was very hard to tear ourselves away from the harbour filled with sailors from so many different
lands. From them we heard of many ports: Liverpool, Aden, Caracas, Bombay. I knew what both of us were thinking: as soon as we were old enough, we would get on a ship and return years later when some distant harbour wind touched me in that one restless spot within, tugging me home.

•  •  •

I
WAS AWAY
with Pasquale at Daniela’s place that winter of 1905 when our father, Gianni, died, four days after Christmas. My brother Michele arrived to take me home. Over dinner, he announced his decision, as the new head of our family, in exactly two sentences: I would be taken, not to our house in Boscotrecase, but to San Giuseppe; I was to begin an apprenticeship with his master-builder.

“But I do not want to be a builder!” I burst out.

Michele continued eating, picking out a fish bone or two. With a morsel of bread, he sopped up the last of the brodetto and, with his mouth full, said, “Tomorrow, have your things ready,” as if I had remained as mute as our Lucia.

I, too, had made up my mind.

•  •  •

T
HE SHIP SAILED
south from Napoli, with Pasquale and me on board. Capri sank from view as we sailed past Stromboli toward Stretto di Messina. The next evening, the lights of Reggio rose to our left and those of Messina to the right. We were kept constantly at work, helping the crew, learning about the million things to be done on board and belowdecks. A week later, we swaggered about
in the port of Alexandria, where I bought a strand of garnets for Lucia and mailed it home. Next we sailed for Genoa, where on the first day of February1906 we found work on a ship that went to New Orleans, then on to Panama. We gave in to our wanderlust, deliberately choosing ships that sailed farthest away from Italy, to Recife and Rio de Janeiro, to Calcutta and Cape Town. Months slid by, and before we realized it, four years had passed.

I had grown a fine black beard; Pasquale preferred to shave, but was attempting a moustache. I treasured a photograph of the two of us on shore leave in the pretty port town of Montevideo, a stone’s throw from Buenos Aires. We were leaning on a short Corinthian column, before the painted canvas backdrop of a villa. The painted sun shone above, a perfect circle with its shafts drawn in straight lines.

But the real sun was hidden for days on the voyage after as the ship headed into the grimmest of storms a little north of the Caribbean islands. The waves rose and fell eighty feet, more. I remember seeing a wall of water, black and wavering, stand over the ship’s side, as if suspended. When it hit, I lost my foothold and was slammed into the metal side of the stairs to the hold. I reached out in the whirling darkness, gasping for breath. Hands—I never knew whose—pulled me into some nook of the shuddering ship. I was dizzy, choking with nausea, with a ringing in my ears when I tried to sit up. A misty rain surrounded the ship. The ocean was heaving with slow, momentous swells. So it went on for another day and night. When finally I could stagger around, I searched for Pasquale, hoarsely shouting his name again and again. The sun came up, a vivid smear on a sky of ground glass.

They finally told me that two men had been swept overboard. One of them was Pasquale Centangeli.

•  •  •

I
COULD NOT
bear to talk to anyone. When the ship reached New York harbour, I slipped away. I wanted hard soil underfoot.

In the city’s throng, I walked without purpose or direction. I sat an entire morning on the warm marble steps of the Customs House. The park nearby was full of playing children and their families. Each blanket on the grass was a hub of activity—the fathers leaning back to enjoy the sun, smoking a cigar or pipe, some even attempting a nap, the mothers keeping an eye on the children as they frolicked, calling out in a variety of languages. As I sauntered toward the Hudson, I heard an unmistakable snort of laughter, and stood facing my old schoolmate Giuseppe, larger now, his hair receding.

“Nicolina,” he whooped, turning to his wife, “it is Frankie, the pirate!” His Italian was as vividly Neapolitan as ever. “Frankie, the runaway from our Boscotrecase, come back from the dead. I almost told him how close to the truth he was, but kept silent in the face of Giuseppe’s unbridled joy, as he insisted I join him, his small daughter, and Nicolina, whom I recognized from Boscotrecase.

“I’ll be poor company,” I said, but Giuseppe swept me along, fairly singing with joy as we walked to his home, which was not far. As I entered, I saw a picture of Mount Vesuvius on the wall. It was a familiar print, sold everywhere in Napoli, common in homes from Portici to Salerno.

“Will you be in New York long, Frankie, or off on another ship?” asked Giuseppe, handing me a glass of wine he had overfilled.
No
, I shook my head to all the queries, and lifted the glass. “To Boscotrecase,” I said.

“Lucky Frankie,” he continued, slurping his wine and swishing
it about in his mouth. “Vesuvius erupted and took Boscotrecase and everything around it. But you and Pasquale were off seeing the world. So where is he?”

I stared at my glass of wine, but its garnet hue seemed to turn into something far darker. I sat down abruptly, spilling some of it. “Pasquale drowned,” I told Giuseppe as he stood shaking his head.

“And Boscotrecase?” I asked him.

“You don’t know!” he was incredulous.

The moment was a teetering droplet of rain on a sill. Then I asked him, “Lucia? Michele? Everyone?”

Yes
, he nodded,
yes
.

I got up and left, abandoning Giuseppe, the waiting dinner, my childhood in Boscotrecase. “Stay with us,” Giuseppe called after me as I stumbled downstairs. “Come back to us, Francesco, please,” shouted Giuseppe from the top of the stairs. I did not know where I was headed.

I had wanted to discover the world. Frankie Talese, Traveler. I got what I wished for. Only the doors behind me had shut in ways I could not begin to comprehend.

•  •  •

T
HE TRAIN RACED
upriver, its glint to the left of me, then made its way up the undulating landscape of green hills and wide valleys. When it stopped at a station, I got down on an impulse without caring to find out its name. To outdistance a burden whose phantom weight wearied me, I walked. Beyond a long meadow, I drank at a cistern which sat like an oblong cup under the sky. Dozing against a sagging fence, I watched a flock of wood doves flit from a bank of trees to sit at the edge of the same cistern to drink.

I spoke to no one for two weeks, walking without purpose or direction, resting when I wanted, an invisible visitor to this great and strange land of the living. Someday all these people would be dead and others would live, doing everyday things on these very fields and streets. Nobody noticed me, nobody spoke to me, no one needed me.

I woke under some maple trees to the first seep of dawn, and the sparrows and cardinals were stirring overhead. I lay next to a stone fence, watching for the sun. A squirrel came out twitching its tail and watching me. From a piece of bread I took from my satchel, I made a pellet, and flicked it. The creature picked it up, rolling it in its front paws for better purchase, and ate it avidly. From a crack farther down, now peeped a tiny snout from its rock hideout. The mother moved there, unafraid and in full sight of me, and nursed her baby in the growing light.

I sat there wondering what such minutiae could mean in my life, until it dawned on me that. I was being tutored about the small things on the earth, having had my eyes on the desolate vistas of water for so long.

•  •  •

I
STRODE PAST
fields of corn and wheat. It was nearing harvest season. I walked until I was footsore, and in the late afternoon I lay down and slept under a flowering tree near a farmhouse until I woke to a tickle on top of my head and then my toe. I sat up with a start, still half asleep, thinking Pasquale was teasing me, and full of longing to talk to another human being. Two piglets which had been examining me, head and toe, trotted away as fast as their plump legs could carry them. I could not help laughing out aloud, sitting on the calm green earth below the broadleaf tree.

Then I noticed a young woman, her sleeves rolled up, looking at me with curiosity. Her eyes were pale blue and her hair was unruly and flaxen.

“Where did you come from?” she said, not at all put out by my presence.

“Most recently,” I said, “Buenos Aires. But I was born near Naples.”

I could see that I had not made any impression at all. “You know—Buenos Aires, in South America?” I repeated.

“Sure you have!” she said, tossing her head. “If you are looking for work, you’re in luck. We could use extra hands for the milking.” She gestured at the barn with her head. She had picked up one of the piglets as if it were a pet.

“I’m Bibi. What’s your name?”

“Frankie,” I said in my best accent.
I have finally arrived in America
, I thought. “Frankie Talese.”