Streets of Gold (4 page)

In less than an hour, they decided to go to America together and seek their fortunes.

It remained only to discuss financial arrangements with Pietro Bardoni.

For my grandfather, America in the year 1901 was a hole in the ground and a room in a tenement flat. The hole was to become New York’s subway system. The room was rented to him by an Italian family that had arrived five years earlier. My grandfather worked twelve hours a day, six and sometimes seven days a week. He left for work at five in the morning, and did not return to the building on 117th Street till seven at night. During those long winter months when he was learning the city and struggling with the language, and trying to make friends among the Italians already there, he rarely saw the sun. The room he rented was part of a cold-water flat, the last room in the railroad layout, its single window opening on an air shaft. There was a huge coal stove in the kitchen, but Luisa Agnelli did not bank its fires until she awakened at seven, long after my grandfather had left for work, at which time she would begin preparing her husband’s breakfast. Her husband was a bull of a man who had grown olives near Taormina, and who now owned the ice station on 120th Street and First Avenue. His name was Giovanni, and he suspected that my grandfather was trying to make time with his squat and ugly wife, even though she was constantly chaperoned by three squalling brats who slept in the room next to my grandfather’s, two of whom took delight in urinating into his shoes if he made the mistake of leaving them on the floor instead of sleeping with them under his pillow.

The neighborhood into which my grandfather moved was a ghetto in every sense of the word, though he never referred to it as such. To him it was
la vicinanza
, the neighborhood, nine blocks long and four blocks wide, unless one chose to include the short stretch of Pleasant Avenue, a decrepit slum today, but aptly and justly named for 1901, a wide, tree-lined esplanade with a commanding view of the East River.
La vicinanza
ran from 116th Street on the south to 125th Street on the north, and was bounded on the east by the river and on the west by Lexington Avenue. Beyond Lex were the Negroes; Francesco quickly learned to call them “niggers,” as part of the naturalization process, no doubt. The blacks were not to begin their own mass immigration northward till 1920, and in the following decade the population of Harlem (
their
Harlem) would rise by 115 percent. But they were there in 1901, too, and already they were niggers to someone who himself wasn’t even a second-class citizen but merely an alien with a work visa.

The ghetto was not too terribly strange to Francesco. The language he heard there day and night was the same Italian spoken by the peasants in Fiormonte and the urban dwellers of Naples; the food he ate was the same food he had eaten when times were good in Fiormonte, the area crammed to bursting with grocery stores selling pasta and cheeses and salamis and fresh olive oil; chicken on the leg to be had at the market on Pleasant Avenue, seven cents a pound, claws tied together, bird hung upside down on the white-tiled wall, throat slit, white feathered wings flapping and splattering blood, cleaned and plucked by the poultry man; fresh pork sausage from the
salumeria
on 118th and First, ten cents a pound;
cannoli
and
cassatine
and
sfogliatelle
from the
pasticceria
on the corner of 120th Street — there was much to eat in this golden land (though it was not so golden to Francesco, who worked in the darkness twelve hours a day), and all of it was prepared in the coarse southern Italian style, heavy on the garlic and spices, “
bruta,”
as it was once described to me by a saxophone player in a Roman nightclub. The sounds were familiar, the smells were familiar, even the signs on many of the stores were in Italian, as foreign to him as were the signs in English because he could read or write neither language. Except for the constant noise of the transportation facilities, which seemed to Francesco to express the tempo and the spirit and also the manners of the city — the jangling, rattling streetcars on First Avenue, the metallically clattering elevated trains rushing along ugly steel viaducts on Second and Third Avenues — he might have been living in a neighborhood in Naples.

The ordeal of the January Atlantic crossing was behind him, those terrible sick days in the hold of the ship with Pino cradling his head so that he would not suffocate in his own vomit, the cooking smells of the foreigners, the Russian Jews and Austro-Hungarians already aboard the ship when it steamed into the Bay of Naples, the babbling Spaniards they picked up in Málaga before they passed through the Strait, the handful of Portuguese in Lisbon, blankets hung from sweating steel bulkheads and overhead pipes, the sounds of mandolins and balalaikas, arguments in a dozen tongues, the fistfight between the small dark Spaniard who spit phlegm into every corner of the deck and the huge Russian peasant who would have killed him had not an officer of the ship come below with a billy and knocked the Russian senseless. The stench in steerage was overpowering. The passage was costing him twelve dollars, advanced by Bardoni, but for twelve dollars (sixty-two lire!) a man did not expect to be treated like an animal. At Ellis Island, he was penned according to nationality, examined like a horse or a mule, his mouth, his eyes, his nose, his rectum, heard English for the first time, questions fired in English, and stood with wide bewildered eyes while things were done to him or asked of him, commands accompanied by hand signals, thank God for Bardoni who was waiting for him and Pino when finally they were permitted to leave that terrifying place.

Bardoni had found lodgings for Pino with a bachelor who had been in America for only six months. Francesco was to live with Mr. and Mrs. Agnelli and their three children, in the back room of their apartment, for which he was to pay two dollars and fifty cents a week. He did not know at the time, and Bardoni did not tell him, that a dollar of what he paid was going directly into Bardoni’s pocket, or that the total
monthly
rent on the apartment was only seven dollars. Bardoni was a countryman, true, but he was not above collecting his rightful tithe, and Agnelli showed no open aversion to living rent-free at the expense of Francesco Di Lorenzo (who, anyway, was trying to fuck his wife, or so went his rationalization).

Ugly Luisa’s only saving graces were a pair of large, purple-nippled breasts, one or the other of which she whipped out of her dress whenever her newborn son gave the slightest sign of needing sustenance or pacification. She was being neither seductive nor exhibitionistic. It was not unusual for the women of the neighborhood to nurse their children on trolley cars, or rocking on the stoops of their buildings, or chatting in their kitchens with cousins or aunts or goombahs or goomahs, junior sucking merrily away while the peaches were dipped in the wine. Luisa watched little Salvatore (for that was the darling’s name, Salvatore, the Savior) as though he might explode into the kitchen if she did not stick an enormous boob into his mouth the moment he opened it. With alarming alacrity and frequency, she would slip one hand into the yoke neck of her dress, yank out a breast, and shove its nipple into the little Savior’s puckered mouth. Between her infant and her husband, Luisa was kept busy; Giovanni had the habit of coming home from the ice station to compromise his lovely wife at the most unexpected hours, grabbing her from behind, both hands clutching at those prized beauties, her brewer’s-horse ass wriggling against him in protest. There seems to have been some question as to who was doing exactly what to whom. Was my grandfather truly trying to get Luisa in the hay (his eyes were weak, but certainly not
that
weak) or was Giovanni trying to entice Francesco into making an open move, which he could then revenge in the Sicilian manner, by cutting off Francesco’s balls and his own guilt-ridden, rent-free existence into the bargain?

Who knows?

My grandfather resisted all temptations. He was too busy down in the subway. He would refer to the Interborough Rapid Transit in later years as “my subway.” Until I was ten years old, I actually believed he
owned
the goddamn thing, and wondered why I was not allowed to ride it without paying a fare. Now that I am forty-eight, I realize it
was
his subway. He built it. Or at least that part of it between the Brooklyn Bridge and Fifty-ninth Street. At the time, he felt no pride in its construction. He was digging a tunnel through the earth with no conception of where that tunnel would eventually lead. Even a mole, as blind as I, has a sense of direction; Francesco had none. He knew that a train would eventually run through this muddy hole, but he had never been farther uptown than 125th Street, nor farther downtown than City Hall Park, where he was dropped into the bowels of Manhattan each morning. West Farms, Bowling Green, Borough Hall, Atlantic Avenue, distant rumored destinations of the underground octopus, were names that meant nothing to him. Francesco blindly poked his shovel and his pick into the dripping earth, fearful that the city’s streets would fall in upon him, workman’s boots firmly planted in ankle-deep mud, which was at least
something
he knew from the old country. Hearing but only vaguely understanding the words of the Irish foreman, unable to answer him in his own tongue, he was rendered deaf and dumb as well, laboring at a muscle-wrenching job that made no sense except for the weekly pay check of fourteen dollars, more than Bardoni had promised but whittled down to ten dollars a week after repayment of the cost of passage, and Bardoni’s commission, and Bardoni’s “incidental expenses,” never satisfactorily defined. From that remaining ten dollars, Francesco paid two dollars and fifty cents a week to the iceman, sent five dollars home, and kept two-fifty for himself — which was not bad in the year 1901, when a good roast beef dinner with buttered beets and mashed potatoes, chocolate layer cake and coffee cost no more than thirty-five cents.

Pino was less fortunate, and at the same time more fortunate. Because of his size, Bardoni felt certain Pino would be turned down for employment on the newly begun subway, and he was right. So he was sent to work in the garment district, where he earned seven dollars less per week than did Francesco, but where he worked aboveground and was able to see New York’s spring that April when it broke with a belated delicacy that took his breath away. It was Pino who arranged for their first date with two “American” girls who worked downtown with him on Thirty-fifth and Broadway.

All that suckling in the Agnelli household, all those surprise visits by the clutching iceman must have stoked something of the old Mediterranean fire in Francesco’s youthful loins, but what was one to do in a strange land where the only contacts were Italians with virgin daughters, and where the girls he saw on his rare excursions outside the ghetto spoke a language he barely understood? When Pino told him he had arranged the date, Francesco could not believe him.

“But what?” he said. “With two American girls?
Americans?
”

“Yes, Americans,” Pino said, and that quick toothy smile flashed conspiratorially. They were both remembering Bardoni’s story of the keying in Naples, and anticipating a similar adventure; it was common knowledge that American girls fucked like rabbits.

“And they said yes?” Francesco asked incredulously.

“Yes, of
course
they said yes. Would I be telling you about them if they said no? Saturday night. Eight o’clock. They live together on Twelfth Street.”

“Alone?” Francesco asked. He could not believe his ears.

“Alone,” Pino affirmed, and nodded. The nod promised galaxies.

“Do they speak Italian?” Francesco asked.

“No. But
we
speak English,
non è vero?
”

They were
not
speaking English on that Harlem rooftop where pigeons fluttered overhead in the April dusk; they never spoke English when they were alone together. They had, however, begun to feel their way around the language since their arrival, if only because they needed it to survive. Only the other day, underground, someone had shouted a command at Francesco, and had he hesitated an instant longer in obeying it, had there been the slightest gap between the shouted English warning and his immediate understanding of it, his head would have been crushed by a falling timber. I can only judge what my grandfather’s English was like in 1901 by what it was like in later years, after I arrived on the scene. What it was like was atrocious, even though my grandmother had been born in this country, and probably worked hard trying to teach him. But English to him, before he met Teresa Giamboglio, was only a temporary necessity. He was going back as soon as he’d saved enough money. A year was what he’d promised himself. A year was a long enough time for a man to burrow his way through the stinking earth. A year without the sun was a long enough time.

He and Pino boarded the Second Avenue El at 119th Street, dressed in their Saturday-night finery, feeling very American, and immediately identifiable as grease-balls by every other passinger on the train. It was a beautiful balmy evening, the windows of the train wide open, the signs warning that fine and imprisonment would be the lot of any passenger foolish enough to try expectorating through them. Pino and Francesco sat on the cane seats side by side, each carrying identical corsages they had purchased in the flower shop on Third Avenue, each sitting stiffly in unaccustomed collar and tie, each wearing a straw boater rakishly tilted. Pino kept nervously stroking and patting his sparse mustache. Neither of the two talked very much on that trip downtown. Their heads were filled with images of dainty American underthings, petticoats, and corsets, lisle stockings and perfumed silk garters — oh, this was going to be
’na bella chiavata
.

They had planned to take the girls to a restaurant suggested by the bachelor with whom Pino lived, inexpensive, with excellent food and wonderful service, where they were to be sure to ask for a waiter named Arturo, who spoke Italian. They had no plans for after dinner. Motion pictures had not yet burst upon the American scene — that was to happen two years later, with the introduction of
The Great Train Robbery
, an eleven-minute opus that changed the entertainment habits of the world. (I must tell you that I have heard nearly every motion picture ever made. I love the movies, and I have visualized scenes Pauline Kael has never dreamt of in her universe. I once went to the Museum of Modern Art to “see” a silent film because I wanted to imagine the whole damn thing just by listening to the piano underscoring. It was an exhilarating experience, even though the piano player must have studied under my grandfather’s Irish foreman.)