Even those Italians who had been here before the war with Spain started were incapable of reading the English-language newspapers and had no idea that William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer (who, like me, was blind — though his blackout didn’t commence till 1889, when he was forty-two years old) had virtually started the war in tandem by publishing in their competing newspapers atrocity stories about the Spaniards’ cruel colonial rule. Americans (but not immigrants) had told themselves, and eventually came to believe, that the United States was genuinely concerned over the fate and destiny of all those sweaty cane cutters and raggedy-assed fishermen somewhere down there off the coast of Florida. So the war with Spain began, and we threw millions and millions of dollars into it (three hundred million of them), not to mention more than five thousand young lives, and Hearst and Pulitzer sold lots of newspapers, and the ginzoes in East Harlem went right on eating their pasta and sending their money home. Eventually, we won the war. We always win our wars, even when we lose them. And finally, we managed to put down the insurrection as well, when Brigadier General Frederick Funston boldly raided Aguinaldo’s camp and captured him in March — just before my grandfather had his teeth knocked out by Mr. Halloran of the disputed pick. Aguinaldo took an oath of loyalty to these here United States, and announced to his followers that the uprising was over. Another brilliant triumph for America, and Pino Battatore couldn’t have cared less. Pino was in love. While near-hysterical praise rang out for Funston in the streets of New York, Pino’s own rhapsodic paeans were reserved solely for one Angelina Trachetti, whom my grandfather in later years described as “la bellezza delle bellezze,” the beauty of beauties.
Angelina was five feet four inches tall, with jet-black hair and brown eyes, and a narrow waist and large firm breasts — “una bella figura,” my grandfather said. She was nineteen years old, and had come with her parents from the Abruzzi two years earlier. Her working knowledge of English was good, and she was blessed with a wonderful sense of humor (somewhat ribald at times, according to Grandpa) and a fine culinary hand. She had been sought after by countless young Italians of heroic stature and discriminating eye, and the miracle of it all was that she had chosen Pino. There was but one thing that could be said against her, and this was the cause of the only argument my grandfather ever had with Pino: she did not wish to return to Italy.
“What do you mean?” Francesco asked. “She wants to stay here?”
They were strolling along Pleasant Avenue on a mild May evening, the sounds of the ghetto everywhere around them, so much like Fiormonte; even the East River reminded Francesco of the river back home, the memory jostled only by the incessant hooting of the tugboats. The Ofanto now would be swelled with spring floods, the valley would be lush and verdant...
“Here? In America?”
“Yes,” Pino said.
“You won’t take her home to Italy?”
“No.”
“To Fiormonte?”
“No.”
“You’ll stay here?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t understand,” Francesco said.
He understood, all right. He didn’t understand it on the deeper psychological level, the breakdown of the adolescent gang and all that Freudian jazz, but he understood it in exactly the same way that I did, years later, when my brother Tony wouldn’t let me hear his record collection, and I considered him a traitor and a deserter and a ratfink bastard. Only the costumes and the geography and the languages change — the rest is eternally the same. They were both wearing striped shirts, those young men who had known each other from birth, the high-throated necks open and lacking the usual celluloid collars, the sleeves rolled up, braces showing under their vests and holding up their black trousers. They stomped along Pleasant Avenue with the gait of peasants, which they were, and my grandfather tried to control his anger at Pino’s defection, while Pino tried to explain his deep and abiding love for Angelina — but no, my grandfather would have none of it, the betrayal was twofold: to friend and to country.
I have heard my grandfather in towering rages, especially when he was railing against his first-born son, my Uncle Luke, who invariably lost his own hereditary temper during poker games. I do not believe he was shouting at Pino that night. I think his voice must have been very low, injured, perhaps a trifle petulant. The song he hummed forlornly was “Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine,” a lousy tune for a jazz solo, the essentially white chart starting with B-flat major and going to E-flat major, and a bit anachronistic for May of 1901, perhaps, when one considers that it was not published till 1929 — but Grandpa was always just a bit ahead of the times. He was a little bit ahead of Pino just then, anger having fired his stride so that he was four paces in front of his friend before he realized he was carrying on a solitary monologue. He stopped dead on the sidewalk and turned to Pino and summed it all up, summed up the whole fucking adolescent severance of boyhood ties, maybe even summed up the entire human condition in three short words: “What about me?”
“You?” Pino said. “But what does this have to do with you, Francesco?”
“You said we’d go back to Italy together, you said we’d go back rich, we’d take care of our families...”
“But my family will be here,” Pino said with dignity.
“And what about your family there?”
“I’ll continue to send them money.”
“Ah, Pino,” my grandfather said, and sighed, and looked out over the river. A solitary silent tug was moving slowly downstream. He kept his eyes on the boat. He did not want to look again at Pino, not that night, for fear that he would burst into tears and reveal that his dreams of twinship had been shattered. Those daring explorers who had sailed three thousand miles across the Atlantic in search of treasure would not return due a due to the homeland, would not relate their adventures together, one interrupting the other in his excitement, words overlapping, augmenting and expanding upon each story the other told, the townspeople at their feet, mouths agape, as Pino and Francesco exhibited riches beyond imagination — Pino and Francesco, the Weber and Fields of Fiormonte. Now it would be Francesco alone.
In the neighborhood, opinion held the match to be ill-fated. To begin with, Pino was an ugly runt and Angelina was a beauty. But more important than that, no one had any real faith in this American concept of romantic love. In Italy, a man did not choose his own bride; she was chosen for him. Picking one’s own wife was considered revolutionary, and don’t think poor Angelina didn’t get a lot of static about it from her father, who preferred that she marry the proprietor of the latteria on First Avenue and 120th — a man who, like himself, was from the Abruzzi. Her father finally acquiesced, perhaps because she was a strong-willed girl who argued with him in English, rather than Italian, thereby frustrating his ability to counterattack effectively. But even though the American concept of amore was at last grudgingly accepted, Pino and Angelina were never left alone together. They were always shadowed by an “accompagnatrice,” usually one of Angelina’s aunts or older cousins, or, on some occasions, her godmother, a fearsome lady of substantial bosom and sharp eye, who was known to have shouted across First Avenue, “Pino, non toccare!” when Pino in all innocence tried to remove a coal cinder from Angelina’s eye, the strident “Don’t touch!” being the equivalent in those days of a bellowed “Rape!” Given Beauty and the Beast, then, given too this stupid unworkable foreign idea about “falling in love” (ridiculed by Papa Trachetti, but subtly supported by Mama, who kind of liked the notion), and given the strict supervision of a gaggle of fat ladies watching every move and censoring so much as a covert glance — how could this thing succeed?