Streets of Gold Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    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