Unto the Sons Read Online Free PDF Page A

Romans.
    In Maida the countrywomen still walked with clay pots balanced on their heads, and the dust rising along the sun-scorched roads of the valley behind the horse-drawn carriages and farmers’ oxen was possibly the same dust kicked up ages before by Hannibal’s elephants, by the Norman knights who galloped through the eleventh century, and by the elaborate caravan of King Frederick II, the thirteenth-century German conqueror of Italy, whose traveling retinue included Arab dancers, acrobatic jesters, and black eunuchs who hoisted curtained palanquins containing the reclining figures and veiled faces of his royal harem.
    Most of Maida’s hillside homes leaned against one another at bizarre angles, standing crookedly on oblique foundations, and the narrow cobblestoneroads leading up and down the hill between the irregular rows of houses and shops were so curved and jagged that they could be traversed gracefully only by mules and goats.
    The people of Maida usually walked as if they had drunk too much wine, and yet despite their lurching, listing, and shifting of weight as they walked, their facial expressions never suggested that they were discomforted by the difficult footing. Perhaps they did not even know that they lived in a lopsided town; it was, after all, the only town most of them had ever seen.
    And so except for such adventurous young men as Gaetano, who frequently rode off on horseback down to the sea to watch the ships sailing back and forth between Naples and Messina, and dreamed of his escape, Maida’s citizenry seemed content to remain perched up in the village where they were accustomed to all that was awry—although they did hope and pray they would be spared another earthquake that might further alter the deformed shape of their hill town, which in the past had often been subjected to God’s fickle nature.
    Maida exists in Italy’s seismic center of uncertainty. Situated between two great volcanoes—Mount Vesuvius to the north and Mount Etna to the south—the inhabitants of Maida and its neighboring villages were ever aware that they might at any moment be flung into obscurity by a calamitous convulsion. Perhaps this is one reason why southern Italians have always been very religious, dwelling, as most of them do, on perilously high ground dependent for its stability on the goodwill of the omnipotent force that periodically reasserts its power by shaking people up and bringing them to their knees.
    One day, many decades before Gaetano’s birth, as dark clouds and cliffside vibrations moved along Italy’s southwesterly coastline toward the village of Paola, north of Maida, it appeared that a vengeful God might be anticipating the desecration of the shrine of southern Italy’s most idolized native son, Saint Francis of Paola—a prospect that panicked the villagers and led the priests to guide them to the hill site of the large statue of Saint Francis and urge them to prostrate themselves and beg God for mercy.
    Within an hour, as the desperate crowd remained huddled in prayer around the trembling base of the towering statue, the black clouds began to lift, the sky became brighter, and the earth tremors seemed to subside and then to expire entirely—having finally no effect on the landscape except that the statue of Saint Francis, which had overlooked the sea, had been slowly spun around by vibrations and now faced the village.
    The large beige stone house in which Gaetano was born in 1871 had cracked walls, slanted floors, an eroding façade, an exterior staircase that was almost scallop-shaped as a result of the countless contorting eruptions that had struck Maida through the centuries. This house, and the two tottering lodges that flanked it, were remnants of a sixteenth-century feudal estate purchased from an impoverished nobleman by Gaetano’s father, Domenico Talese, who, by the modest standards of Maida in the late 1800s, was a relatively affluent and influential figure.
    In addition to