Streets of Gold (2 page)

The way my grandfather told it, Pietro Bardoni was always a braggart, a self-styled man of the world, a loudmouth,
uno sbruffone
. He had grown up with Bardoni, of course, and he knew him well; in a town with one main street and sixty-four houses built of stone and whitewashed stucco, it was virtually impossible not to have known everyone as soon as you were old enough to walk the cobbled streets. During the day, you worked in the vineyard. In the evening in the summer, you sat outside the town’s only bar, sat at round metal tables painted red and yellow and blue, the men smoking guinea stinkers (My grandfather always smoked those foul-smelling twisted little Italian cigars. When I was young, I used to ask him why he smoked those guinea stinkers all the time. He would reply, and I record his fractured English as best I can, “Attsa no guin’a stink, Ignazio. Attsa
good
see-gah.”) — smoking their good cigars in the awninged dusk and drinking grappa, a foul-tasting liqueur that is supposed to be good for the liver and also for removing paint from furniture, sat and smoked and talked about the grape and about the coming fall harvest.

Italy in those days — this was in the late 1880s before the grape blight — was the leading wine merchant to the world. It was only later, when the plant parasite phylloxera (
“la fillossera,”
my grandfather called it, and invariaby spat immediately afterward) destroyed most of the vineyards in southern Italy, that the French took virtual possession of the industry, and Bordeaux replaced Chianti as the most popular wine in Europe and abroad.
La fillossera
destroyed the crops and destroyed the economy as well; the land was the grape and the grape was the economy. But in the fall, when times were still good, the men would come home from the harvest and, without bathing first — there was no running water in Fiormonte, and the men bathed in well-drawn water in wooden tubs in the kitchens of their homes, and this was done in privacy, in the dark, Italian farmers unlike Scottish miners being very modest about such things as showing their privates to other members of the family, unless incest is their intent — without bathing first, the men would go to the bar, and sit outside under the blue-striped awning and talk about how good things were, and how blessed they were, and then caution each other about speaking of their good fortune aloud lest someone, God alone knew who, would put the Evil Eye on them.

When I was born blind, Mary the Barber ventured the opinion that the Evil Eye had been put on my mother when she was pregnant with me. Filomena the Midwife clucked her tongue and said No, it was my mother’s experience with the Chinaman thirteen years ago that had been the cause of the tragedy attending my birth. It was my Uncle Luke who first told me about the Chinaman, but my grandfather was the one who later related the story to me in detail. My grandfather told me everything. To my knowledge, he never lied to me. I loved my grandfather very much.

He would sit with the men of the town in the good days — oh, he was perhaps fourteen or fifteen at the time; he did not come to America until 1901, when things became really unbearable — and he would watch the girls go by in their long cotton dresses, and with the younger men of the town he would exchange secret desires, always careful never to impugn the reputation of anyone’s sister, because in southern Italy, that was — and
is
— ample reason for murder. And yet the talk was there, the talk always rendered harmless by distance; the girls they wanted to fuck lived in Rome or Venice or Milan, but never in Fiormonte — though the girls of Fiormonte paraded with eyes downcast like nuns, contradictorily ripe asses twitching provocatively. My grandfather was a very handsome man, to hear him tell it, with black hair and dark brown eyes and a nose he said had Sienese influence (I knew the shape of his nose, I explored its contours with my fingers many, many times; it was not unlike my own, hawklike and thin; it could very well have had its origin in Siena — there goes my Milanese cloth merchant theory), and tall in comparison to the other men of the village, five feet eight inches. His father and his grandfather before him had worked in the vineyards, and had he stayed in Italy, I would probably be working the vineyards now, though God knows what Fiormonte is like today. It may be bustling with machinery and factories, for all I know. It was not that way in 1970, when I went back to find my grandfather, and to find my roots.

I walked the cobbled streets, the same streets he had walked as a boy, and the August sun burned hot on my bare head, and I reached down to touch the cobbles.
What you walk on in the street. Here. Put your hand. Touch. Feel.
Ignazio Silvio Di Palermo, four years old, squats at the First Avenue curb outside his grandfather’s tailor shop and sticks his hand down between scabby knees — which bleed when he picks them, he is told, though he cannot see the blood, and can only feel it’s warm ooze; You are bleeding, they tell him, and they tell him the color of blood is red, it is what runs through your body and keeps you alive — reaches down, his hand guided by his grandfather’s fingers around his wrist, and touches the street. And feels. Feels with the four fingers of his right hand, the fingertips gingerly gliding over the surface of the smooth, rough stones, and then circumscribing the shape of one stone, it is like a box, it is like the box he keeps the toy soldiers in, it is the shape of a box, and feeling where the next stone joins it, and the next, and forming a pattern in his mind, and his grandfather says
Do you see, Ignazio?
Now
do you see?
I walked that town from one end of it to the other, trying to pick out the locations my grandfather had described, finding the bar at which Bardoni had first broached the subject of leaving for America, sat there in the cool encroaching dusk as my grandfather must have done after a day’s work, and smelled the familiar aroma of the guinea stinkers all around me, and heard the muted hum of the male conversation, and above that, like the strident shrieks of treetop birds, the women calling to each other from windows or balconies, and the counterpoint of peddlers hawking their produce in the streets, “
Caterina, vieni qua! Pesche, bella pesche fresche, ciliegie, cocomero,”
exactly as my grandfather had described it to me — or were these only the cadences and rhythms I had heard throughout all the days of my youth in East Harlem?

Brash young Bardoni had sat at a table here with my grandfather when they were still boys, boasting loudly of having
fatto ’na bella chiavata
in Naples, having inserted his doubtless heroically proportioned key into the lock of a Neapolitan streetwalker, while the other young men of the town, my grandfather included, listened goggle-eyed and prayed that San Maurizio, the patron saint of the town, would not be able to read their minds. In December of the year 1900, Bardoni walked my grandfather past this same café on Christmas Day, sunshine bright on cobbled streets, Bardoni dressed in natty American attire, striped shirt and celluloid collar, necktie asserted with a simple pin (Eliot’s been translated into Braille), and told him of the streets over there in America, with all that gold lying in them, and further told him that he would pay for my grandfather’s passage, and arrange to have a job and lodgings waiting for him when he got to America, and he would not have to worry about the language, there were plenty of Italians already there, they would help him with his English. All Bardoni wanted in return was a small portion of my grandfather’s weekly wages (twelve dollars and fifty cents a week! Bardoni told him) until the advances were paid off, and a smaller percentage of the wages after that until Bardoni’s modest commission had been earned, and then my grandfather would be on his own to make his fortune in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

“But I will return to Italy,” my grandfather said.

“Certo,”
Bardoni said. “Of course.”

“When I have earned enough money.”

“Of course,” Bardoni said again. “
Italia è la sua patria.”

It had been a barren Christmas Day in Fiormonte. I have tried hard to understand what life in that village must have been like, because I know for certain that the life transposed to Harlem, and later to the Bronx, and later to the town of Talmadge, Connecticut (where I spent more than thirteen years with Rebecca and the children), was firmly rooted in Fiormonte. The family, the
nuclear
family, consisted of my grandfather, his parents, his two sisters, and his younger brother. In musical terms, they were the primary functions of the key. The secondary functions were the aunts, uncles, and cousins who lived within a stone’s throw of my grandfather’s house. The
compari
and
comari
were the godfathers and godmothers (pronounced “goombahs” and “goomahs” even by my grandfather), and they combined with the
compaesani
to form the tertiary functions of the key; the
compaesani
were countrymen, compatriots, or even simply neighbors. Fiormonte enclosed and embraced this related and near-related brood, but was itself motherless and fatherless in the year 1900, Italy having been torn bloody and squalling from the loins of a land dominated as early as thirty years before by rival kings and struggling foreign forces. Unified by Garibaldi to become a single nation, it became that only in the minds and hearts of intellectuals and revolutionaries, the southern peasants knowing only Fiormonte and Naples, where until recently the uneasy seat of power had rested. They distrusted Rome, the new capital, in fact distrusted the entire north, suspecting (correctly) that the farmlands and vineyards were being unjustly taxed in favor of stronger industrial interests. There was no true fatherland as yet, there was no sense of the village being a part of the state as, for example, Seattle, Washington, is a necessary five chord in the chart of “America, the Beautiful.” The
patria
that Bardoni had mentioned to my grandfather was Fiormonte and, by extension, Naples. It was this that my grandfather was leaving.

He made his decision on Christmas Day, 1900.

He had been toying with the idea since November, when Bardoni returned in splendor, sporting patent leather shoes and tawny spats, diamond cuff links at his wrists, handlebar mustache meticulously curled and waxed. The economic system in Fiormonte, as elsewhere in the south of Italy, was based on a form of medieval serfdom in which the landowner, or
padrone
, permitted the peasant to work the land for him, the lion’s share of the crop going to the
padrone
. (We call it sharecropping here.) Those carnival barkers who came back to the villages to tout the joys of living in America were
padroni
in their own right; a new country, a different form of economic bondage. They would indeed pay for steerage transportation to the United States, they would indeed supply (and pay for) lodgings in New York, they would indeed guarantee employment, but the tithe had to be paid, the
padrone
was there in the streets of Manhattan as surely as he was there in the big stone house at the top of the hill in the village of Fiormonte.

My grandfather’s name was Francesco Di Lorenzo.

The house he lived in was similar in construction, though not in size, to the one inhabited by Don Leonardo, the
padrone
of Fiormonte. Built of stone laboriously cleared from the vineyards, covered with mud allowed to dry and then whitewashed with a mixture of lime and water, it consisted of three rooms, the largest of which was the kitchen. A huge fireplace and hearth, the house’s only source of heat and of course the cooking center, dominated the kitchen. The other two rooms were bedrooms, one of them shared by the parents and baby brother of young Francesco — it is difficult to think of him, no less write of him, as anything but Grandpa. But Francesco he was in his youth, and indeed Francesco he remained until he had been in America for more than forty years, by which time everyone, including Grandma, called him Frank. When I was a boy, people were still calling him Francesco, though every now and then someone would call him Frank. I’m hardly the one to talk about anglicizing names, being a rat-fink turncoat deserter (Dwight Jamison, ma’am, I hope I am a
big
success!), but I have never been able to understand why we call Italy “Italy” and not “Italia,” or why we call Germany “Germany” rather than “Deutschland.” Who supplies the translation? Is there a central bureau in Germany that grants permission for the French people to call the fatherland “L’Allemagne”? I hate to raise problems; forgive me.

In any event, my grandfather eventually became Frank, and this curious metamorphosis is best revealed in the various documents my mother turned over to me when he died. A copy of his birth certificate had been requested for naturalization purposes in the early part of 1945, when the Germans were still clinging tenaciously to the northernmost portions of Italy. A duplicate certificate arrived from the south, mimeographed on a torn scrap of paper, the reverse side of which was a printed sheet of ration coupons for October of 1944 —
pane, pasta, olio, zucchero,
and
generi vari,
the staples of the Italian diet, and most certainly much better fare than my grandfather had enjoyed back in 1900.
Comune di Fiormonte,
it read,
Provincia di Potenza.
And on the reverse, the requested information, listing the birth date of Francesco Luigi Di Lorenzo as the seventh day of July, in the year 1880. In New York City, in the year 1901, a marriage certificate was issued to one Teresa Giamboglio (try
that
on your harmonica, Mr. Trzebiatowski) and the aforementioned gentleman of Potenza, except that this time his name was shortened to Francesco Di Lorenzo. His naturalization papers, dated the 27th day of April, 1945, state in ornate script lettering:
Be it remembered that Franco Di Lorenzo then residing at 2335 First Avenue in the City of New York, State of New York, who previous to his naturalization was a subject of Italy, having applied to be admitted a citizen of the United States,
and so on.
Franco
Di Lorenzo. And his death certificate (I can never think of that goddamn day last June without tears coming to my eyes) records that he died at Bronx-Lebanon Hospital in the intensive care unit after being there for less than nineteen hours. The time of his death was 11:50 A.M. on the morning of June 17, 1973. His age was recorded as 92 years, 11 months, and 10 days. His occupation was given as tailor. His name was recorded as Frank Di Lorenzo. Good old Grandpa. Yankee Doodle Dandy at last.