Emilio De Grazia

Blood

by Emilio De Grazia

From a distance San Pietro resembled the brow of the mountain on which it was heaped, the scars on its brown walls hardened by centuries of dry winds and Mediterranean sun. Atop its steep slope the village seemed to belong to a medieval past too faded and rough to attract anyone except a few touring souls pausing to wonder why a strong rain had not washed it away. The village had seen its share of history, the centuries-old routine of its peasants interrupted first by invaders from ancient Greece and then, again and again, by Saracens from northern Africa before the Crusades. But for the past nine hundred years history had passed it by, as did the Nazi planes that saved their bombs for some worthier place. When I stepped from the train and looked up to its walls I immediately forgot the Italian cities teeming with crowds and cars to the north. From below San Pietro seemed as barren as the moon.

“Have there been earthquakes in these parts?” I asked the driver in my well-rehearsed Italian as we started up the mountainside.

“Hundreds,” he replied as he squealed recklessly around another bend in the trail leading up.

“And San Pietro has never collapsed?”

“No,” he said, “there’s never anything going on up there. Not even earthquakes bother going to San Pietro.”

“How many people live there now?”

“Half as many as ten years ago. Everybody’s gone from there. Maybe two hundred, more or less. Two hundred and one if you include Lizetta.”

“Who is Lizetta?”

“Lizetta—strega. The witch.”

“I thought all the witches were burned centuries ago.”

“Oh no,” he replied, suddenly wide-eyed. “They all live up there—in the mountain villages. The people up there are just like them, superstitious and old. They believe in the evil eye—things like that.”

“There’s none living along the coast?”

“Oh no,” he said, “we’re modern here. We have toilets, cars—everything.”

“Maybe the witches are afraid of being hit by cars.”

“Could be. I never even thought of that.”

I told him I had family still there and he nodded approvingly, his suspicion of me suddenly fading from his face. My explanation made me uncomfortable. I found it rather odd that I, almost fifty years old, would go so far out of my way to nose about the family roots. My father, a half-century American citizen, had never been back himself. America had rewarded him with factory jobs making steel in Pittsburgh and cars in Detroit, jobs that landed him a new Ford every half-dozen years and a three-bedroom suburban house. In retirement he withered on no apparent vine. He spent hours clipping the lawn and days in front of the TV, more than once frozen in a stare that carried him out the window with it. I wondered what he saw out there: his youth, the first twenty-two years of his life spent in Italy. San Pietro, a village on a mountainside. “Your father’s losing his mind,” my mother whispered to me. “He’s forgetting everything these days. He doesn’t even know the names of the shows.”

“Tell me about Italy,” I asked him once, aware that it was easy to see and difficult to watch America being spoiled by its cancerous growth.

“It’s a nice place,” he replied with a little helpless shrug. “I like it there.”

“What’s nice there?”

“I don’t know. I can’t remember it now.”

I knew it wasn’t Italy’s Art he missed, for he had never shown any interest in Art. And beautiful landscapes he took for granted too, as if he’d had his fill of them driving the highways of America. What did remain with him were names, names that still circulated around the dinner table as if they were people present and alive, particularly our DeLuca family name. There were DeLuca cousins and their husbands and wives, cousins and their children, cousins and in-laws, aunts and uncles and cousins of cousins. In particular there was my father’s younger brother Uncle Franco, who had a son my age and with my name. Giovanni DeLuca. John.

“It is always good,” the driver said as we wheeled around a curve that brought San Pietro into full view, “to come back to the place where one’s race had its origins.”

But I had other business on my mind.

My father had inherited property in San Pietro, a few acres that became his after he had been in America for thirty-six years. My mother kept reminding him that it was still his, by which she meant ours, eventually mine.

“You go there and straighten it out for us,” she said to me. “Your father doesn’t have the deed in that box of his. I asked him if the deed was in the box and for a week he couldn’t remember where he hid the box.”

The box, made of thick bronze, was hidden behind a loose stone in the basement wall. In it my father kept all his documents, a thousand dollars in cash, and old photographs.

“Without that deed,” my mother complained, “we can’t even prove we own the land.”

She made my mission clear to me: I was to go to San Pietro, take a look at the property, get the deed, and come back with advice about what to do with the land—hang on, sell, get the best deal.

Just before I left, my father shrugged when I asked if he wanted me to bring anything back.

“I don’t know any more,” he said. “I remember the sea and all the figs we ate right off the tree. Say hello to my brother for me.”

“Don’t let them cheat you,” my mother whispered as I pulled away.

I had been cheated enough on the way. The clerk in Rome. I stared at all the zeroes on the bills he handed me, feeling suddenly rich rather than shortchanged by thirty dollars and odd change. Moments later a smiling youth was carrying one of my bags toward the train, pushing his way through the crowds, paving my way. When I turned to check the time, he and my bag were gone. Then I paid fifty-two dollars for a stuffed eggplant and two glasses of wine, my waiter complaining all the time about the price of gasoline. “The prices are special every Tuesday night,” he insisted. “Americano?” He charmed me at the door with a story was about his love affair with a New Jersey blond.

As I stepped outside I froze to avoid being kneecapped by a small Fiat, the sidewalk its only opening through the traffic.

In my hotel room that night I finally felt safe. So this was modern Italy. America out of control. I had survived another day too full of free enterprise. As I began fading toward sleep I still felt the cars coming at me, their metallic grins pressing in on me, alone on a level American field extending beyond my arms widespread on the bed.

In my dream that night I was on the side of the Greeks invading from the sea, their heroes standing austerely on the shore contemptuous of the Roman hoards. But when the battle began it soon became a rout, the Greeks stoic as the Romans, their chariots rolling, turning, swirling in Rococco curls, overwhelmed them in their waves of numbers and noise.

Now their heirs were happiest when playing by the sea. From the train heading south toward San Pietro I watched the mountains, unmoved by the commotion stirring on shore, pass in silence on my left. At the water’s edge thousands slept in the sun, or stepped from rock to rock, or sat on the sand searching the Mediterranean horizon for some boat of longing visible enough to lure them away. As Naples came in view highrises crowded closer and closer to the sea, and for long stretches businesses intruded onto the sand itself, charting small spaces for themselves and obscuring from view any sign of sea but the offshore blue. How much closer could cars and buildings come to the water’s edge, and how many more millions of souls could find a place on the beach? How long before human waves would begin turning back the ones rolling in?

On my left the mountains held their peace. Rising away from the houses crowded near the shore, the lower slopes showed their best greens, gardens carefully terraced and vineyards giving way to olive groves that thinned as they rose toward the barren rocks on high. In the distance, high atop mountains far from the shore, a few brown towns appeared, leftover acropoli from some dim Roman past too worn to have any business in the modern world. It was these towns that the crowds had abandoned for the shores. Would it not be just a matter of time—ten, twenty years—before press of numbers would require these crowds to build higher and higher on the mountainsides? Wouldn’t the brown real estate up there someday turn to gold?

Uncle Franco was slender and small, and he had my father’s face, his thick brows, intense eyes, and down-curling smile.

“You are Giovanni, my brother’s son,” he said after studying my face. “Your father was always better looking than I, so I can see why he gave you his name. How are things in America?”

After serving coffee my aunt Julia sat in a corner and smiled, her eyes aware of everything in the room but her fingers busy with the needlework on her lap.

Things were not going well in America, but my father had just bought a new Ford and the house would be paid for in three years. Things were spacious and shiny and new in America, but here, around me on all sides, the streets, walls, and houses were worn heaps made of stone, their mass weighing me down as I searched for words in a language suddenly foreign to me again.

“My father’s just fine.”

“Ah,” he said drawing me in close, “what a handsome man you are. Do you know my son? He lives in Napoli now. He should be with us now. But he is shorter than you.”

That evening my uncle and I sat on the balcony looking down the mountainside toward the sea, a thin streak of blue visible just above the rooftops of the town below. To my left stone steps led to a pigpen and its one brown pig, who grunted lazily every time I wandered by. Below the pigpen a canopy of grapevines, carefully terraced on the steep slopes, created a pathway leading to a garden, bright with tomatos, eggplant, and peppers. From the garden the steps curved gently down toward a rocky ledge.

“The young men are all gone,” my uncle said, “and now the girls leave too, as soon as they’re eighteen years old. First they all went to America. Now they move north—to Napoli, Salerno, Torino, Milano. All this land,” he said as he waved his hand over the mountainside, “is going wild the way it was before any of us came here. Nobody wants to work the earth any more. Here in San Pietro there are fewer than two hundred of us left. So the land is all going wild again, worthless. Like the young people who leave. You should see them when they return for the August holidays. They have no respect for anything here. They have their new cars and motorcycles. They sit on the square in front of St. Bartolomeo and make noise all night. They drink and curse and who knows if they take drugs. That’s all they do. And now I hear they walk around nude on the beaches too.”

“Do any of them ever return here to work, start business?”

“Never,” he replied. “They come to stay a week or two in August because it’s close to the sea, but nobody ever comes back to stay.”

“Where is my father’s land?” I asked.

“There.” He swept the mountainside with his hand. “Everything you see now, down to that house just past the olive trees. All the terra marina. My father gave him the most beautiful land, the land facing the sea. All worthless now.”

“Was he Grandfather’s favorite?”

“No. Your father abandoned everyone when he went to America, even his mother and father. But he was the oldest son.”

He fell silent as the colors of the sun setting behind us spread a red robe over the streak of sea visible below.

The Via del Popolo was the town’s main street. It was the only street in town. On both sides houses, their walls patched again and again, rose from the edge of the street like a crowd edging in for a better view of some silent parade. Small balconies projected over the street, women, most of them widows in black, looking down over wrought-iron rails. On the balconies flowers brightened the brown weight of the walls that seemed to narrow as one looked down the street toward St. Bartolomeo's church, its facade looming like a hard uncompromising mind.

My uncle took me by the arm. “Come, let’s go on a little walk tonight.”

He strolled slowly with his head held high, as if proud to be hosting a guest conspicuously American. He nodded a good evening to a stooped woman in black looking down from her balcony.

“Is this your nephew from America?” she asked as she leaned down for a better look, her mouth breaking into a grin showing three teeth in front.

“Yes,” Uncle Franco replied.

“Tell your mother I haven’t forgot. And remind her the curse is still on her.”

“Who is she?” I asked as we passed, aware that she was still watching me.

“Don’t you know? She is the aunt of your mother’s best friend, my cousin Domenico’s god-mother. She and your mother quarrelled when they were young. She thinks your mother married a man too good for her.”

“What’s her name?”

He pulled me in close and whispered. “Lizetta DiSanti. She is the witch. They call her lizerta. She can make medicines—from flowers, roots, even from boiled mud. Believe me—it’s true. But if she’s against you, don’t ever look her in the eye.”

He tugged on my shoulder as a figure sporting a coat, tie, and cane approached on the left.

“Maestro Lillo, good evening one more time. Where are you going tonight?”

“Ah, my Franco, where have I ever gone? And where will I ever go now? Here we were born, here we have been all our lives, and here we go on our little walks.”

As he shrugged Maestro Lillo adjusted his coat and tie.

“Maestro Lillo,” my uncle said as he drew me in close, “I want you to tell me who this man is.”

Maestro Lillo, pressing his spectacles tight against his nose, craned his neck in for a closer view.

“This is Maestro Giovanni DeLuca’s son. It’s in the eyes and cheekbones, and you can tell from the chin. This is Maestro Giovanni’s son.”

“You see,” my uncle said to me, “he’s very intelligent.”

“Do you play guitar?” Maestro Lillo asked.

“No, I don’t play anything.”

“And your father? Have you heard your father perform recently?”

“My father? I didn’t know he played any music at all.”

“Why doesn’t he play guitar?” Maestro Lillo kept asking after we started walking away, his face crossed with perplexity.

Yes, my uncle explained, my father played guitar before he went to America, and people from other towns came on Saturday nights to hear him serenade. Maestro Lillo taught all the music in the town. And Maestro Lillo had an auncle who, until he was killed in the Ethiopian war, was the cousin of my father’s best friend.

I met them one-by-one as we strolled up and down the Via del Popolo: my second cousin Alfredo, the brother of one of my father’s best friends; Antonia Sesti, my mother’s aunt, who nursed my mother through a terrible fever in 1932; Guido, Antonia’s son-in-law, who remembered the day my father and mother left for America; Pasquale, Domenico’s cousin, who loved to hear my mother sing; Maria Posa, whose husband Onofreo just died; Salvatore Rocco, my grandfather’s second cousin on my mother’s side, and Pina Saveria, Giacomo Ferri, Teresa D’Orio, Marco Stefano, Maria and Mario Tomassi, Anna Testa, and Gloria D’Angelo—all cousins and second-cousins, brothers and sisters-in-law of uncles and aunts, friends of sons and daughters themselves cousins of parents who once upon a time walked in the Via del Popolo with the young man and woman who were Esterina and Giovanni DeLuca, my mom and dad.

After our walk Uncle Franco and I sat down to a tomato salad, hard bread and a glass of wine while Aunt Julia, in her chair, watched my every move.

“I didn’t know there were this many,” I said.

“This is nothing,” he replied. “Most have left and never come back, and higher up in the mountains the old ones are living alone. And you have never met my son Giovanni, who has your eyes.”

Early the next morning the question came out of the blue: “Your father sent you here to find out about the property?”

“No,” I said with a conscience cleared by literal truth. “But I would like to get from you the deed to the land.”

“So you want to take this land back to America with you.” He smiled. “You should remind your father about how things are here. Here we are a cursed race. We have always been poor, and now there is no one left but a few. All these mountainsides you see once were terraced and worked by hand. We knew every plant and tree by heart, and we cursed them when they did not grow. And we cursed when a passing cloud failed to give them a few drops. And maybe all that cursing is why we have been such a cursed race ourselves, satisfied to pick only the food we ate that day, knowing we were reducing by so much what we had the next. We dried figs for the winter months and fed the leftovers to the pig, even the water we washed our dishes with. And at Christmas we killed the pig and made sausage to last the winter months. In this way we ate what we refused to eat, hoping the pig’s blood and flesh would purify our table scraps for us. This is the way we do things here, the way of your grandfather and his fathers before him, the way it has always been.”

“What is the land worth?”

He dismissed the question with his hand.

“To me this land, all my father’s land, even as I stand on it, is already passed, a memory. How much would you pay for my memories? Here I was born, here I worked all my life, and here I will die. Here on this land my thoughts circle and circle like the pig we keep penned up all year until Christmas comes again.”

“What value would you place on the land?”

“It is worthless to me. I will never work it again.”

Don’t let them cheat you, my mother’s voice said. If the land is worthless to him, he will want to buy it for a rock-bottom price.

“But what would be the going rate, given real estate prices in these parts?”

“What can it be worth? All the young people are gone. The land is overgrown with so many weeds only the snakes know their way in and out. What good is it to anyone now?”

In my mind I saw the sunbathers crowding the beaches up and down the coast. How long before they would begin bulldozing their way further and further up the mountain slopes, planting new highrises where once my father and uncle planted their olive trees.

“Progress,” I said, “will make it valuable some day.”

“Not to me,” he replied. “I will tell you the truth. I would like to buy your father’s piece of land, but I will not pay you even half of what it is worth.”

“A few of your memories might be worth thousands to me.”

“But will you ever come here to live where my memories lived? Will your father’s land ever be more than a piece of paper forgotten in a drawer in America?”

“But your son someday may return.”

He shook his head no. “I am more than half-certain he never will return, and that is why I will never pay you even half of what it is worth.”

He was either twelve or seventy years old, weaving his bicycle wildly between the strollers on the Via del Popolo.

“Bruno, you rascal!” Uncle Franco yelled at him as the boy sideswiped me, motor-mouthing at high speed.

Bruno turned as he pedalled away, his eyes closing as his mouth curled into a grotesque smile. “Brumm, brumm, brumm!” he said, spitting his exhaust at us.

I laughed. “Who is that silly boy?” I called him “boy” because his face, strangely gnarled, offered no clue to his age, and his head seemed small and shrunken like that of old men who have seen too much sun.

“That is no boy,” my uncle replied. “He’s a monkey.”

Bruno had wheeled around and was bearing down on us again.

“Get out of here, you monkey! Go somewhere else before I slap you across the face!”

At the last moment Bruno swerved past again, this time sticking his tongue out as he spit his exhaust at us.

“Monkey!” Uncle Franco shouted after him. “You miserable curse on us all!”

“Cursing is a curse,” said a voice behind us, “sure to make the miserable more miserable.”

The man approaching us doffed his hat as he raised a finger to instruct, his owlish face, graced by a white beard, according well with the tight-fitting grey sportcoat that seemed out of place on the street during such an ordinary hour. He could have been forty or fifty years old.

“Maestro Polichiccio, a good evening to you.”

“And this is your nephew from America?”

“Yes.”

“Better not make him miserable. Misery loves company, there are many companies in America, and you thereby could make America very miserable.”

“Logical.”

“And when we agree we never have to eat our words. Thus we have more food and thereby reduce our need to work. Don’t you agree?”

“All these years, Maestro Polichiccio,” my uncle said in mock disgust, “I ate in order to work.”

“Unless he loves his work who then is the monkey, Maestro Franco, the boy making the playful noises on his bike or the man who works all his life in order to work?”

“That boy is a curse on this town and a monkey for sure.”

“But can a boy be a monkey, or a monkey a boy?”

“Maestro Polichiccio,” my uncle said under his breath, “you know as well as I do: When a man has two wives, one of them his daughter, and when he begets a child on his own daughter, he is taking too much liberty. He is not a man but a pig.”

“The boy Bruno whom you call monkey, then, should also be a pig. But that would be illogical, and if we were illogical we would have to eat our words, and if we ate our words we would starve for there is nothing in them, and if we were starving we would have to work harder in order to eat. It is all not good.”

“No good, no good,” Uncle Franco agreed.

“I always liked you,” Maestro Polichiccio said to him, thrusting out his hand to shake with me, “because you have such a poetic mind.”

At the far end of the Via del Popolo, Bruno was gathering steam for another pass at us, his mouth already motoring in second gear.

“All the way here from America,” Maestro Polichiccio said to me, “to visit your family. What an honor to have you here. I was but a child when your father left for America. Here we still are, primitive, all unchanged.”

Bruno was aiming his bike straight at me when Maestro Polichiccio stepped out to ward him off.

“Bruno! Bruno DeLuca!” he yelled. “Those of us on this street cannot always get out of your way. Isn’t there some better trick for you to play?”

Bruno hesitated a moment before charging straight ahead.

“The wheels of Progress,” Maestro Polichiccio mumbled as we stepped aside.

As he sat across the table from me I looked at Uncle Franco again: his greying hair and skin dry and cracked like the soil he had cut with his hoe all his life. He was more Arab than Greek. On his rough hands the bones and tendons were visible, his veins rivulets running down his arms to his fingertips. When it rained here did the water run off the mountain into deltas spread like hands into the sea, and did the red-brown runoff diffuse itself as it spread seaward until it washed onto the North African shore? Saracens had invaded this land many centuries ago. Had their fathers come from deserts to the east, flushed out of some garden by a Tigris or Euphrates flood, or from deepest Africa, some rain forest where men and monkeys eyed each other with curiosity as they sat in trees?

“Giovanni,” my uncle said to me, his eyes confused, “why are you looking at me that way?”

“Because you bear such a resemblance to my father,” I replied.

The next morning I walked the land alone, my father’s land mine to inherit or sell. I say I walked the land, but I am not sure whose land my footsteps traced. There was no telling where it ended or began, no markers or visible boundaries, a fact that forced me toward the center of the slope where I had some assurance that the ground I was on was safely mine. From there I could see the coastal town below, the new houses there not visible from San Pietro, their upper windows like the eyes of invaders peering over a ridge for an opportunity to move up. Around me on all sides were olive trees, their gnarled trunks twisting out of the ground, and here and there fig trees spread their broad leaves in careless canopies over wide areas of ground. One fig tree stood out, its huge trunk girdled by elephantine bark, its branches forming a wide umbrella over the wild grass topped by small white flowers that covered the ground. Hidden vines entangled my legs as I walked.

Here and there I saw signs that this once-upon-a-time was cultivated earth—the stubs of olive limbs neatly sawed off, lines of hardwood posts perhaps used for stringing grapevines, and a set of stone steps that appeared and disappeared in the undergrowth. I stopped under the big fig tree and plucked a green one from a branch. As I split it open a milky substance oozed onto my hand, and I discovered the pink flesh of the fruit sticky and sweet to the taste.

I found what seemed a stone path bounded on one side by a thick growth of small figs, and I stayed on the stones until the figs gave way to a clearing below. My heart leaped when I saw where I was—atop a high terrace wall built on a sheer rock looking down on the mountain’s lower slope. Carefully I sank down and threw my leg over the safe side of the wall. From there the business of the coastal town below came clearly into view—the cars coming and going, the railroad tracks following the coast, the lines of umbrellas on the beach, the rooftops looking like incoherent steps leading up. On both sides of me I saw more clearly the terrace walls, and above me were rows of more terraces hidden in the undergrowth—thousands and thousands of stones carefully piled to keep the mountain's good earth from washing into the sea.

How many thousands of these stones had my father’s hands piled here, one of the few places where Nature was quietly gaining back ground lost to human invaders centuries ago?

The night before it was time for me to leave I made up my mind. The land was, more than ever before, mine. Every day was another step bringing me closer to my inheritance, and the whole landscape was becoming as familiar as the people of San Pietro whose names I was beginning to learn by heart. But the land was also less mine. My father had abandoned his stonework, and I had no business claiming it as mine. I did not want to talk about buying or selling or the deed I was to retrieve for safe-keeping in America.

I resolved to quietly walk away, leave it behind me the way my father had. And when my mother required me to produce the document, well, then . . . I would tell her the land would be worth more later on, that now Italian money had too many zeroes in it. I could keep explaining the zeroes to her, how it would be better for us to wait. In time maybe she would forget about both the land and my father’s little bronze box.

I had packed my bags and remade my room to exactly how I had found it when I decided to take a final turn around Uncle Franco’s house. As I stepped out the side door the sun was setting, leaving in shadows the town and land all the way down to the coast. I swept my eyes over my father’s parcel and said my silent farewell to it. As I turned I saw the pig watching me from inside his pen. I walked over and stood by the pen, aware that the pig had not taken his eyes from me.

“You’re hungry—is that it?” I plucked a fig from an overhanging branch and threw it into the pen. The pig made short work of it.

“Ah, poor creature,” my Uncle Franco said. He was standing on the veranda behind me. “Sometimes I too have the urge to open the gate and let him go, and sometimes I want to give him everything he wants. But it is better to keep him this way. We don’t want him to eat himself to death.”

As we sat at the table Uncle Franco’s hands nervously played with his glass of wine. Whenever he finished his wine he filled my glass to the top.

“The terraces,” I asked, “who did the work on them?”

“We did—all of us. Your father and I, adding to our father’s work. It was the work of many hands.”

“And there's no cement between the stones,” Aunt Julia broke in. “Just water and dirt. Just mud. We women mixed all the mud.”

The wine, red and clear, was going to my head. I held it up to the light and swirled it around in the glass.

“Good wine, eh?” Uncle Franco said. “This is old wine. We made it years ago. I was saving it for your father’s return.”

“I think I’m getting drunk.”

“You don’t eat enough bread,” Aunt Julia said, pushing herself away from the table. “If you want to live, you have to eat bread. You should eat bread if you drink wine.”

She returned with a chunk of hard bread and a bowl of water. I soaked the bread in the water as I had seen them do and began chipping away at it. Then he filled my wineglass again.

“I talked to my son on the telephone this afternoon,” Uncle Franco said. “I asked him to tell me the truth about your land.”

“It’s not my land. It’s none of my business, the land. I don’t want anything more to do with it.”

From the bottom drawer of a cupboard my uncle produced a yellow envelope. “Here,” he said, handing it to me. “Your land.”

“I don’t want it. I’m going to tell my father that.”

He pressed the envelope into my hand. “No, it’s better this way.”

“But your son . . .”

“Bah! my son! He would build a hotel on it if he could. Then what would we have? A curse! From my grave a curse would have to be on him. Our curse, our father’s curse. It is better if you take the land away from here. Take it to America. You have lots of land there. No one will notice it.”

I took the envelope in my hand.

“Ah good. Now we have made our deal. Now let’s drink to it.”

“Like brothers,” I said, lifting my glass.