Elizabeth Street - Laurie Fabiano [8]
“No, but I want to eat!” shouted Luigi.
“I hear the northerners aren’t running to join their army,” another man shouted. “A ship captain in Naples told me the northerners are leaving in droves for South America.”
It was like another firework had exploded. Voices overlapped. Hands and arms were not enough for gesticulation. They jumped up and down and acted out emotions. Someone fell off a wobbly chair. From afar, the group looked like it was engaged in a bizarre ritual dance.
“Leave their homes? When do they come back?”
“If there are no northerners in the north, let’s move!”
“Have you ever seen a Piemontese row a boat?”
The men talked until Luigi’s one-eyed demented rooster crowed midnight, and Giovanna and Nunzio stayed under the bougainvillea bush until their mothers pulled them out by their ears. Giovanna couldn’t remember if that was the first time she heard talk of people going to other lands, but from that moment on it was a constant topic.
It was unthinkable to leave your home. It was a concept, like Italy, that was too difficult to fathom. Didn’t her papa teach them that while the rulers always changed, the Calabresi remained? If no war or event in Italy’s history had forced them from their home, how could unification?
Lorenzo, Giovanna’s older brother, played with the little bit of food on his plate. The air was thick at the dining table. Concetta knew her son well. She knew he was trying to say something, and she was doing her best to stop him from saying it. Every time he started to speak or even sigh, she picked up a plate or shifted in her chair to break his concentration. Domenico peered at his son expectantly from under his eyebrows, afraid to meet his gaze.
In the past three years, Giovanna had watched her proud brother move from anger to frustration to defeat. There was a slump in his once-square shoulders, and his lean body now just looked skinny. Giovanna felt that she and her brother had aged. It wasn’t simply because he was a man of twenty-two and she a woman of twenty, but because life had become more and more difficult with each year.
When they had buried the last of the dead from the cholera epidemic, including Nunzio’s father, they thought that the worst times were over. But cholera turned out to be an overture to a tragic opera where events spiraled out of control and the audience was left trying to keep track of the villains.
The other villains were not as dramatic or forthright as cholera; they were more insidious and masked. Since the government started taxing goats, the mountain peasants had to reduce their herds. Soon there wasn’t enough milk and cheese to trade, and they had to reduce the herds further. For a while they ate a lot of goat meat. Now there was no milk, no cheese, and no goats. Then they taxed the mules, so farmers had to plow the lands themselves. One year the crops would be eaten by parasites, and the next they would die of drought. When there wasn’t enough food from the farms and people were forced to grow what they could in their yards, they taxed the gardens. Only the padroni, the large landowners, who were mainly foreigners or northerners, had farms and animals anymore. The goat herders and the farmers were reduced to serfdom on the manors of the padroni.
When the people rebelled with sticks, the northern police mowed them down with guns. The only option for many men was to become a brigand. First the sons and then sometimes the fathers left for the mountains to make their living robbing rich landowners and travelers who traversed the region’s few roads. In the dead of night, the men would scramble down cliff paths to leave money or food with their families, never staying more than minutes. When they stopped coming in the dead of night, their families knew that the police had killed them.
Lorenzo planned on marrying Pasqualina, Vittorio’s daughter, but he was waiting for things to get better. Pasqualina got tired of waiting.