Unto the Sons Read Online Free PDF

his large farm in the valley—which contained part of another man’s olive plantation that had flown through the sky during an earthquake and, having landed intact, was successfully acquired by Domenico after a court dispute in which he argued that the airborne olive trees had been entrusted to him by the will of the Almighty—Domenico owned a wheat mill and a percentage of the local aqueduct, and operated a thriving business on the side as a moneylender. Strained by Domenico’s high interest rates, the people of Maida equated the occupation of moneylender with that of middling cutthroat—or, to use their word for it, strozzino .
    Although Domenico was married to a genteel woman named Ippolita who was descended from a large titled family in a neighboring village, her parents’ branch of that family was almost destitute; yet in Maida the people continued to address her, with a respectful bow, as “Donna Ippolita,” whereas her husband, the moneylender and new owner of an old barony, was never approached deferentially as “Don Domenico” but was referred to instead, behind his back, as “Domenico the Strozzino.”
    His awareness of such an unflattering appellation greatly rankled Domenico’s prickly pride. He smoldered within himself while maintaining his stringent business standards, and remained remote from his fellow villagers except for his once-a-year walk with them on the feast day of Saint Francis of Paola, when he helped carry the heavy statue through the narrow winding roads down toward the sloping stone sanctuary which, four centuries before, the saint himself had blessed.
    Other than this annual procession, and his attendance each Sunday at Mass—wearing a flowing cape and polished boots, and carrying his feathered felt hat with his missal—Domenico always appeared alone in public, whether on foot or horseback, coming or going from his row of stone houses on the hill that he occupied in baronial presumptuousness with his large extended family, whose affection for him rarely exceeded their sense of indebtedness. All of them worked for him—on the farm, or at the wheat mill, or at the aqueduct—and he ran his family as he did hisbusinesses, in the autocratic tradition of a medieval lord. The fact that the feudal system of masters and serfs was now outlawed in postrevolutionary Italy did not discourage Domenico Talese from trying to extend the past into the present for whatever advantage he could take of it; and much advantage could still be taken in isolated places like Maida, where the distant past and the present were barely distinguishable.
    Here the ancient superstitions and religious traditions extended through timeless days and nights, and my grandfather Gaetano—Domenico’s first son—grew up often feeling as rootless and displaced as the trees and rocks of his village. Each morning he awakened to the blacksmith’s thrice clanging anvil that beseeched the Blessed Trinity, and he half believed, as everyone claimed, that the moths fluttering through the early-evening air were representatives of the souls in purgatory. On certain holy days, and on Tuesdays and Fridays, which were days of bad luck, Gaetano watched the flagellants in crowns of thorns as they crawled up the rocky roads on bleeding knees. He was also affected, much as he sought to be different from his antiquated father, by such superstitions as the dreaded jettatura .
    The jettatura was a vengeful power said to exist within the eyes of certain strangers who, although they journeyed through the countryside with words of goodwill and courteous manners, possessed within their mesmerizing glance the glint of a curse that presaged disaster, or death itself, or some unimaginable vexation that would surely victimize the villager unless he carried an amulet to neutralize the threat of jettatura . The women of Maida, in addition to always wearing protective charms, would attempt to thwart jettatura when they perceived it in a stranger’s