Streets of Gold (3 page)

But Francesco he was in 1900, and it was he who shared the second bedroom with his sisters, Emilia and Maria, respectively fourteen and ten. Emilia snored, but he never told her this, lest it spoil the hours of pleasure her own reflection in the glass brought her. Her light snore filled the small room now. He put on his eyeglasses. It was shortly before dawn, and the paneless window high on the wall over Emilia’s bed, covered with a stretch of goathide rubbed to translucent thinness, admitted enough early light so that he could see the beds of both his sisters, and the carved wooden chest on the wall opposite, and the wooden chair beside his own bed, and beyond that the open door of the archway leading into the kitchen, brighter than the bedroom now because its larger windows faced east, toward Bari and the Adriatic. He was twenty years old, but he leaped out of bed with all the excitement of a five-year-old, and went immediately to the arch and looked into the kitchen. The
presepio
stood in one corner of the room. He went to it slowly, as though uncertain he had seen correctly (or, more properly, uncertain that what he had
not
seen was truly and validly not
there
to see), and then turned away in disappointment. Shivering, he went to the woodbox in the opposite corner and took from it the brush he had scavenged the night before. He lay this upon the grate in the old stone fireplace painted white and streaked with soot, and twisted under it a yellowed copy of the
Corriere della Sera
which his father had brought back from Naples two months ago, when he’d gone there looking for work.

Wood was scarce; well,
everything
was scarce. He carried three huge and treasured pine logs (but this was Christmas) to the grate and carefully placed them on the tinder to form a distantly related cousin to the
presepio
standing in the corner of the room, a skeletal isosceles pyramid with four shelves. The bottom shelf contained tiny wooden figures representing the Holy Family, which his cousin Renato had carved himself and brought as a gift three Christmases before, when times were better: Joseph and Mary and the infant Jesus, the Three Kings standing in the manger in adoration of the newborn Christ, shepherds and sheep and angels and a camel, all meticulously carved by Renato, who was excellent with his hands and could do such things. The three top shelves, reserved for gifts, were empty.

Francesco struck sparks from his flint into the nest of tinder, and then stood up and watched the spreading stain of fire on newsprint, heard the sharp crackling of the dried twigs, folded his arms across his narrow chest and stared at the flames as they grew like malevolent weeds around the pyramid of logs. His hair was black and curly, he had thick black eyebrows, and he wore rimless spectacles he had bought in the open market from the stall of Luisa Maggiore, about whom many rumors were spoken in the village — none of which he believed or repeated. He had picked and searched through the mountain of eyeglasses on her stand, until he had found a pair which he felt added a touch of distinction to his face without robbing it of its handsomeness. He had worn glasses since he was four years old, but his eyesight stubbornly refused to improve; even the glasses he had bought from Signora Maggiore two years ago were now too weak for his faltering vision. He could not see five feet ahead of him in the morning unless he fumbled first for his glasses on the wooden chair beside his bed, and put them on before throwing back the coverlet and setting his feet on the cold stone floor.

The room was warming.

No longer chilled, he gave recognition to the hunger that had been gnawing at his belly long before he woke. It was still barely light outside, the sun was just rising, he supposed it was close to five in the morning. December in southern Italy, from what my grandfather told me, is normally a dismal time of the year, rain drenching the roads and turning the tiniest patches of soil into quagmires. The sky was clear that Christmas Day, the sun came blushing through the mountaintops as though embarrassed by its absence of the past few weeks. He had been hungry when he’d gone to bed the night before, had tossed hungrily in fitful sleep, had awakened hungry, and was still hungry. But he knew that all the food in the house had been jealously hoarded for this day of days, and he did not know whether he was supposed to touch even a crust of hidden bread. He trembled again, not from the cold this time, but instead from a feeling of helpless anger and frustration — why
la fillossera
? If there was truly a God,
why
? Hugging his slender arms across his chest, he stood trembling in his flannel nightshirt before the blazing fire, and wondered if his father would shout at him for having used the wood so early in the morning, before anyone else was awake.

His mother had been saving a handful of chestnuts for roasting with the Christmas meal. They were in an earthenware jar outside the largest of the kitchen windows, eleven of them; he had longingly counted them. If he ate one of them with his early-morning porridge, would his mother realize there were only ten remaining when it came time to roast them?

Silently, thoughtfully, he went back into the bedroom to dress. Maria, the ten-year-old, was awake. “Francesco?” she said, and blinked at him.

“Yes,” he answered. “Turn your back.”

“Did he come?” She was referring to Father Baba, the Italian bearer of Christmas gifts, an old old man with long flowing robes and a white beard and a pack on his back, not unlike our own Santa Claus though rather scarecrowish in appearance, and certainly not rosy-cheeked or potbellied or jolly ho-ho-ho.

“Did he?” she asked, when Francesco did not answer.

“No,” he said. “Go back to sleep.”

He tightened his belt, and went out into the kitchen, and put the pot of
farinata
onto the hook, and swung it in over the blazing fire, and debated once more the theft of the chestnut. Maria came padding into the room. She was not his favorite person in the world since she still wet the bed at the age of ten, and between Emilia’s snoring and Maria’s stench, it was difficult to get a good night’s sleep even if a man were not hungry all the time. The front of her gown clung limply to her now. Like a tiny galleon afloat on her own stale ocean, she flapped directly to the
presepio
and stared at it in disbelief.

“He didn’t come,” she said.

“I told you.”

“Why not?” she asked, and turned accusingly, as though he alone were responsible for the absence of gifts in the house this Christmas Day.

“Because we are poor,” he said flatly and cruelly, and then ladled hot porridge from the pot, and ate it without stealing the chestnut after all. Maria was crying behind him. He went to her. He gathered her into his arms, damp and smelling of her own urine, and’ he stroked her long black hair, and he whispered, “
Non piangere, cara,
do not cry. He will come next year. I promise.”

“Who are you to promise?” she asked.

“Why, your brother,” he said, and grinned.

“Vattene a Napoli,”
she answered, and pushed him away, and went back into the bedroom.

He was not about to go to Naples, as his sister had advised. He was about to go to America. He had made up his mind the moment he decided not to steal the chestnut. He had never stolen anything in his life, and the very idea that he had even
considered
the theft appalled him. To steal from one’s own family! No. It was not right to be so hungry. He would go to America, and make his fortune, and come back next Christmas with expensive gifts, as he had promised Maria. The thought of leaving Fiormonte excited him, and simultaneously filled him with dread.

My sons today think nothing of hopping into the Volkswagen bus and driving it out to Denver for the weekend. All of my children have been to Europe at least four times, Andrew having made the trip alone when he was sixteen. He is now in Greece, on the island of Samos, living with a girl from Baltimore. They plan to head east, to India, in search of a guru. (No, Dad, you don’t understand.
You
don’t find the guru,
he
finds
you
. Yes, son, bullshit.) The last time he went to India, lovely, disease-ridden, impoverished, starvation-gripped paradise (no offense, Madame Gandhi), he came back covered with lice, and with an open sore the size of a half dollar just above the arch of his right foot. I rushed him to the doctor and was told if he’d stayed away another two weeks, the foot would have developed gangrene and he’d have lost it. He’d been gone for eight months, dropping a line every so often, but never including a return address. I don’t know what he was looking for. I don’t think he found it because he’s heading back there again, come September. Nor do I think it’s a guru he’s seeking.

My grandfather knew what
he
was looking for, all right. He was looking for work. He was looking for money. He was looking for survival for himself and his family. He walked out onto those sun-silvered streets of the village on Christmas morning, determined to find in himself the strength and the courage to make the move. It would only be for a year, he told himself (the way Andrew told me his forthcoming pilgrimage would only take a year, after which time he will have found where his head’s at, he said, and come back, and be ready to settle down and get some good work done). Francesco would send money home to Fiormonte to keep the family alive and well, meanwhile saving money for the return trip and for whatever enterprise the family decided to begin when he came home — for certainly they would be able to choose their own future and their own destiny once he came back to Fiormonte a rich man.

He did not go immediately to Bardoni; he was yet too fearful of making the final commitment. The streets of the town were empty, the sun burning off the early-morning mist. There was the aroma of smoke on the air, smoke coming from the chimney of his house, and from another house farther down the street, where another early riser doubtlessly had gone to the
presepio
in an almost identical kitchen and looked at its empty top three shelves in disappointment. He could see in the distance, growing wild in the hills into which the town was nestled, fields and fields of dry, thorny thistle. Signora Ruggiero was at the village well, drawing water. He passed her and touched his cap in greeting, and said, “
Buon giorno, Signora, Buon Natale,”
and she replied cheerlessly,
“Buon Natale, Francesco,”
and tugged at the rope holding the wooden bucket, and adjusted the black woolen shawl about her shoulders, black dress, black stockings, black hair, eyes so dark they appeared black, total limned blackness against the bright cold hard wintry light. The sun had risen over the hilltops now to stun the unsuspecting streets; it had been gone too long, there had been only damp and dismal grayness for a fortnight. He walked.

His closest friend in the village was a boy his own age named Giuseppe Battatore. Unusually short, even for Fiormonte, chubby if not actually obese (in the dear dead days, at least), Giuseppe had from the time he was three years old been nicknamed with the diminutive Giuseppino, later abbreviated to Pino. He had lost a great deal of weight in the past several years, but he had not grown an inch since he was twelve. Nor had his generally cheerful disposition been changed by the bad times that had befallen the village. Black-haired and brown-eyed (was there anyone in all Fiormonte who was
not
black-haired, brown-eyed, and olive-complexioned?), sporting a mustache he had begun growing at the age of eighteen, but which still looked sparse and patchy though he groomed it and fussed over it like a household pet, Pino had the characteristically bulbous nose of the region (so unlike my grandfather’s) and thickish lips with strong horselike teeth stained with tobacco from the guinea stinkers clamped between them day and night (it was my grandfather’s contention that Pino went to sleep with a cigar in his mouth), quick grin breaking with such suddenness that it insinuated slyness or craftiness or guile or lecherous intent, all of which characteristics were alien to gentle, soft-spoken Pino Battatore, my grandfather’s best friend. I knew Pino when I was a boy. He never spoke a harsh word to me — but then, hardly anyone ever speaks a harsh word to a blind person. That is a fact of life (
may
life, at any rate), and a rather nice one.

My grandfather talked earnestly to Pino that Christmas morning. They walked up the hill some distance from the house of the
padrone
, and sat with the gorse blowing wildly about them in the silver sunshine, and looked northward into the valley where the Ofanto rushed muddily to the sea. The Adriatic at its closest point was only seventy-five kilometers away, and they had both been to Barletta, of course, had even been to Bari, farther down on the eastern coast, and gazed across those waters to where they knew Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire began, but they had no notion of what those lands might be like. (They had seen foreign sailors in Bari once, but the Adriatic truly lacked any decent harbors, and such visits were rare.) Fiormonte was situated almost exactly midway between Naples and Bari, northwest of the arch in the Italian boot, due south of the spur in its heel. It was easier to get to Naples than to Bari because the roads were better, but the city itself cost more to visit, and besides, they always felt like farmers (which they were) when they got there. They talked now not of Canosa, the nearest town of any size, nor of Barletta on the coast, nor of the towns between there and Bari, nor even of the city of Naples, which was the largest city they had ever seen and certainly the most splendid. They talked of America. They talked of New York. Stultifyingly ignorant — neither of them could read or write their own language, but then again neither could ninety percent of the Italians in the south — blissfully naive, desperately hungry, soaringly optimistic, they talked of undertaking a month-long voyage that would begin in a horse-drawn cart in Fiormonte, take them west to the bustling port of Naples, where they would board a ship that would steam out into the Mediterranean (and here their limited knowledge of the world’s geography ended), through the Strait of Gibraltar, into the Atlantic, and across three thousand miles of ocean to a land more alien than any they might have imagined in their most fantastic dreams. The truth is they’d have been hopelessly lost even in Rome, only three hundred kilometers to the northwest, where the language would have fallen harshly on their ears, the food would have been too pallid for their coarser southern taste, the customs, the regional dress, the manners, and the mores all strange and frightening.