1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
A Biography of Jimmy Breslin
THE IDEA FOR THE SIX-day bike race came out of a meeting held in November, in Brooklyn, in the offices of Anthony Pastrumo, Sr. He is a sixty-eight-year-old man who is called “Papa” when he is at home and “Baccala” by his friends and business associates, all of whom share a common feeling toward Baccala. They are scared to death of him.
Baccala is one of the five big bosses of the Mafia gangsters in New York. He is also a very great dog-lover. Last year he bought a Russian wolfhound for his four-year-old niece so she could grow up in an atmosphere of teeth. The dog was stolen. Baccala had somebody write a form letter that was mimeographed and sent to every veterinarian and animal hospital in the New York area. It offered a reward of $250 to anybody who reported if a Russian wolfhound with specific markings was brought around for shots.
“I look to make a stool pigeon out of a dog doctor,” Baccala explained. “All he tells me is who the guy is with-a my dog. I pay the $250. I go to the guy who stole my-a dog. I speak to him nice. Then I cut out his heart and feed it to the dog.”
The bike race was Baccala’s idea. He nominated a chubby real-estate man named Joseph DeLauria to be the actual promoter of the race. DeLauria has made large sums of money fronting for Baccala in business deals. DeLauria also has received many slaps in the face when he has irritated Baccala during these deals.
Baccala’s office in Brooklyn is in a building which is listed as the home of the Lancer Trucking Company. There is no trucking company. If Baccala wants a trucking company, he will steal one from a Jew. Baccala held the meeting to deal with a dissident group in his gang: Reform Italians. The gang was headed by Salvatore Palumbo. He is known, among all illegitimate people and cops in Brooklyn, as Kid Sally Palumbo. In Brooklyn waterfront dialect, this often comes out as “Sally Kid.” He is twenty-nine and he has a power base of five cousins and sixty others who live on the South Brooklyn waterfront and work, under Kid Sally’s direction, at mayhem for the Baccala gang. For some time Kid Sally Palumbo and his group have wanted to get their hands on a major revenue-producing enterprise. Violence still pays less than any other job in crime. Baccala was of the opinion that Kid Sally Palumbo couldn’t run a gas station at a profit even if he stole the customers’ cars. But the level of annoyance from Kid Sally Palumbo and his people was becoming inordinately high. You could see that at a big meeting held to discuss the rift.
“You sit-a here, okay? you sit-a here, okay? you sit-a here, okay?” Baccala was saying, assuming his role of don cheeche. One of the major rewards for being a big shot in the Mafia is that you are in charge of seating arrangements at all restaurants or meetings. You tell everybody where to sit and keep the best seat for yourself.
Everybody in the meeting sat down except Kid Sally Palumbo.
“You sit-a,” Baccala said, pointing at a chair in the corner.
“I don’t feel like sittin’.”
“You sit-a.”
“I think I’m going to stand.”
The two glared at each other. Baccala shrugged and sat down. He is known as the Sicilian Dean Rusk. Be a little smooth and give a little on the surface now. After the conference ends amicably, send in the B-52s.
“So what you want?” Baccala said.
“Do the right thing,” Kid Sally said.
“What’s?” Baccala said.
“We got to go around with a gun with loaded bullets. What do we get for it? You get everything, we get ungotz.”
“You shut up you face,” Baccala said.
“You old guys, we got to do deuces and treys in the can and you leave the money for your kids. What’s this? You send your kids to West Point. We go to West Point, all right. Sing Sing West Point.”
“You show no respect,” Baccala said.
“I’m good people,” Kid Sally said.
“You no act like good people.”
“I’m good people!”
Kid Sally’s grandmother, Mrs. Big Mama Ferrara, had rehearsed him carefully. “You just say you good people and you take-a no bullasheet,” she told him.
The meeting broke up on that note. Baccala, watching Kid Sally and his cousins leave the office, realized they constituted political pressure. As Baccala is sensitive to this sort of thing, he decided to do something about it.
What Baccala wanted to do at first was not good. “Ciciri,” he muttered one night. The three people with him at dinner became nervous. The word ciciri means bean, but to Baccala the meaning is much deeper. The only history he knows of is the rebellion of Sicilians in Palermo in 1282 against the French. A French soldier tried to rape a housewife in front of her husband in Palermo. The husband killed the soldier and all Palermo took to the streets. They surrounded French soldiers and told them to say the word ciciri. It is supposed to be an impossible set of syllables for the French tongue to handle. So the people of Palermo, with a great shout, slit the throats of the soldiers. Baccala, who knows the story by heart, loves to talk about the part where the hero of the uprising, Nicola Pancia, boarded a French ship in the harbor and had seventy French sergeants and their wives and children thrown overboard. Nicola Pancia and his men hung over the side and cheered each time a baby drowned.
“The baby makes-a bubbles in the water,” Baccala always says, crying from laughter.
In more recent history, each time Baccala mutters this particular word, somebody in Brooklyn gets invited on a deep-sea fishing trip from Sheepshead Bay. Out in the ocean, a rope is put around the man’s neck. The other end of the rope is attached to an old jukebox. The jukebox is thrown overboard. The man invariably follows.
On this particular occasion, however, Baccala spent a week glaring and muttering and then he called in Kid Sally Palumbo again and told him he was getting a chance to make money. A bike race.
Bike-racing is a thing out of the 1930s. It used to be called “the Ride to Nowhere.” The only thing Baccala really knows about bike-racing is that Italians ride bikes. But it was indicative of Baccala’s age that, when pressed, he went for an idea out of the 1930s instead of something modern, such as selling cocaine to grammar-school kids. During the Depression, when even fine gangsters were broke, Baccala went to a bike race at Madison Square Garden and quickly noticed that when everybody stood up to cheer they left their coats draped over the seats. On the second sprint of the night Baccala grabbed a great camel-hair from Row B, Section 205. A while later he took a black Chesterfield out of the last row of the end arena. He got into the side arena and came off with a terrific storm coat. He happened to look around, and he saw so many guys running around the arena and stealing coats that he thought he was having a vision of heaven.
Over the loudspeaker, later on that night, the announcer for the bike race said, “The score at this point…”
“Forty-nine coats!” somebody screamed from the mezzanine.
Despite the different era, Baccala was certain his new bike race would make immense amounts of money. He intended to have open gambling on it. The event would be held in a field-artillery armory in the 91st Precinct in Brooklyn. The only thing not for sale in the 91st Precinct is the captain’s bowling trophy. As Baccala saw it, the bike race would be a roulette wheel for six days and nights. He would let Kid Sally Palumbo handle the whole thing and keep nearly all the money. This would keep the fresh bum quiet.
This bike race is another example of how Mafia bosses weave their way into the fabric of society. The Mafia of New York is split into five groups known as “families.” The Baccala Family runs all organized crime in Brooklyn. The gang has been in Brooklyn longer than the Ferris wheel at Coney Island. It was formed in 1890 under the leadership of Raymond the Wolf. He ate babies. Raymond the Wolf passed away in his sleep one night from natural causes; his heart stopped beating when the three men who slipped into his bedroom stuck knives in it. Joe the Wop, who had sent the three men, took over the mob. Joe the Wop shot nuns. A year later he dropped dead while being strangled. At this point Baccala heard that three people he had known and loved for twenty years were discussing ways to take over the gang. So was Baccala. This, of course, made his three great friends become treacherous enemies. One night Baccala stepped into the Roma Gardens Lounge to visit the three people. Baccala also brought a machine gun with him. The three old friends were eating dinner. Baccala caught them with the machine gun between the veal. A waiter was so close to Baccala’s gun that he got powder burns all over the front of his waiter’s jacket.
When the police arrived, they found the waiter nervously twisting a napkin between his hands. An inspector looked at the powder burns on the waiter’s jacket.
“What shooting?” Louis the Waiter said.
For several months thereafter, whenever some hero would come into the Roma Gardens Lounge and order a meal, a hand would come up from under the table and set down a dish of veal Parmigiana.
After the machine-gunning was out of the headlines, Baccala took command of the gang. He has lasted as head of the family since 1944, which is a new record for gangsters, Brooklyn, single individual.
Kid Sally Palumbo came toward the top of the Baccala Family through personal service, great greed, and also great luck. His objectives were the power to say, “You sit here,” and money. They go together. The financial structure of the Mafia is the same as in the film industry. Ten stars walk around earning millions, and thousands of unknowns get little pieces of work here and there and mainly earn nothing. They wait for the key role to pop up.
One day, in Kid Sally Palumbo’s presence, Baccala announced he was very mad at one Georgie Paradise.
“Georgie Paradise, he’s-a no do the right thing,” Baccala said. “Georgie Paradise, he’s a rat basset.”
Kid Sally immediately got very mad at Georgie Paradise too.
“That dirty rat bastard Georgie Paradise,” Kid Sally Palumbo said. He had never met Georgie Paradise.
Kid Sally called a saloon where he was told Georgie Paradise hung out.
“Hey! Is Georgie Paradise there?” Kid Sally said.
The phone on the other end dropped and then it was picked up again. “Hey! This is Georgie Paradise.”
“You be on the corner in ten minutes. We got a important message from Baccala that you got to handle,” Kid Sally said.
Georgie Paradise was on the corner in front of the saloon in ten minutes. Kid Sally and three of his people, Big Lollipop and his cousin Little Lollipop and Mike the Driver, who was driving, came to pick up Georgie Paradise.
“Hey!” Kid Sally Palumbo called out from the car.
“Hey!” Georgie Paradise said. He walked up to the car.
Big Lollipop jumped on Georgie Paradise’s head as Georgie Paradise came into the car. Little Lollipop put both hands on Georgie Paradise’s throat. Sensing something unusual, Georgie Paradise began twisting. Kid Sally Palumbo took a gun out. He tried to hold the gun against Georgie Paradise’s head. Georgie moved his head around. Kid Sally’s gun slipped off Georgie Paradise’s head. Kid Sally fired three shots which went out the window. Georgie Paradise got a hand on the door and opened it and threw himself out onto the street. He began to run. Mike the Driver, who was driving, was afraid Georgie Paradise would start screaming and bring the cops. Mike the Driver put his foot to the floor so he could drive the car away. The car shot forward just as Georgie Paradise was trying to run around it. The car did some job of squashing Georgie Paradise.
The newspapers the next day wrote that Georgie Paradise had been the victim of a hit-run driver.
Baccala was elated. “You know that Kid Sally, he’s a nice-a boy,” he told everybody. “He does-a things with style. They no even investigate Georgie Paradise.”
This great doing away with Georgie Paradise made Kid Sally a corner in the Baccala Family.
This Mafia of Baccala and Kid Sally Palumbo got into American life the same way the Greeks got into Buckingham Palace. They came by boat and worked their way up. The Mafia is known as the “Cosa Nostra” in publications and on witness stands. In America today it is a federation of gangsters, ninety-seven per cent of whom are Italian or of Italian origin. The other three per cent is comprised of Irish, who run the docks; Jews, who handle the money; and Greeks, who are the most underrated thieves in the world. The members of the federation work together as well, and have the same trust in each other, as members of Congress. At a wake of a Mafia leader who has been shot six times in the head, one huge floral piece always arrives with the ribbon saying, “I’m Sorry It Had to Come to This.”
The foundation of the Mafia is its Sicilian blood. Calabrese and Napolitano bloodlines mean very much. But Sicilian stands over all. The older founders of the American Mafia refer to their group as the onorata società, or honored society. It was formed centuries ago in Sicily to protect the people from being robbed and tortured by foreigners who constantly invaded and controlled the island. Like any such organization, including the police in America, it was most responsive to the needs of the rich Sicilian landowners. Their property was most protected. The poor were robbed. Soon the rich were robbed too.
The basis of the Mafia was that it ignored all local laws, as they were laws set down by foreigners. The Mafia ruled by its own code. The Mafia liked this way of life so much that it has not given it up through the centuries. A true Sicilian in America today must smoke in the subway. Baccala himself goes three blocks out of his way for the privilege of going the wrong way on a one-way street. At the same time, the Mafia is very strict in upholding its own laws. Once a member of Baccala’s gang cheated Baccala just a little bit on profits from a bookmaking operation. Baccala took the man to a dentist’s office that night and put the drill just a little bit through the man’s tongue.
In Sicily, in one thousand years of existence, the Mafia has never been able to spread from Palermo and Agrigento on the southwestern side of the island. There is no Mafia in Siracusa or any other place on the island’s eastern coast. And today, when a Mafia member is arrested in Italy, he is treated with extraordinary disdain by authorities. In Palermo the shifting of the wholesale fruit market to a new location produced a wave of murders. Authorities indicted 118 hoodlums. A high-school gymnasium was used for the mass trial. Bleachers for the defendants were set up along one wall, and plumbers constructed a cage of thick steam pipes around the bleachers. Whenever one of the defendants would jump up from the bleachers and grip the steam pipes and shout out his innocence, policemen would reach up and smash his fingers with clubs. Late one afternoon one of the defendants, charged with cutting off a man’s head among the tomato stalls, had to attend the men’s room. Guards manacled his hands and ankles, looped a chain around his middle, and walked him like a dog. One of the magistrates, a magnificent gray-haired woman from Verona, watched the Mafioso shuffle helplessly at the end of his chain. In precise, cultured tones, the woman magistrate inquired from the bench as to why the police did not have another chain wrapped around the prisoner’s neck so he could be yanked around more easily.
But in America, where violence is loved and respected in all sectors, the Mafia leaped and spread to every major city and its suburbs as the nation grew. When the protection-minded Mafia people came to America, they found the landowners had so many guards it was ludicrous. The National Guard shot down women and children during a strike against a Rockefeller mine in Ludlow, Colorado. The fiercest dons of them all threw up their hands in defeat and admiration. “No can match,” Giuseppe (Extreme Unction) Magaddino of the Kansas City outfit said. The Mafia was left with only the poor to protect. As only so much can be taken from the poor by terror, subtler methods must be used. Sell women or narcotics or the chance to gamble or whisky to the poor. So the Mafia originally became a national success during Prohibition, as evil everywhere flourishes under repression. Then there is the matter of Americans relying on a dedicated lawman and lifetime bachelor named J. Edgar Hoover. He is the head of the FBI. The original job of the FBI was to prevent interstate crime, the foremost practitioners of which are the Mafia. But in the years of Hoover the Mafia grew into a crime cartel and an FBI arrest of a Mafia member was rare except on the FBI radio programs and, later, television shows. Hoover himself kept announcing that he did not believe there was any such thing as the Mafia. The answer can only be either that Hoover was a member of the Mafia or that he regarded Communist literature on 14th Street in New York as far more dangerous than narcotics on 108th Street. So many FBI agents penetrated the Communist Party that meeting halls became referred to as “the squad room.” The agents, graduates of Catholic colleges in the North or dedicated Southerners, both varieties of which can be counted upon to hate Communism and suspect its presence everywhere, always have been helpless around the Mafia.
“Don’t we have anybody who infiltrated this organization these people have?” the new United States Attorney General asked at his first FBI crime briefing.
“We’ve tried, but we’ve had no success,” the assistant director handling the briefing said.
“Why is that?” the Attorney General said.
“Well, we do have several agents who could pass for Italian, but each time one of them gets close he is asked for the names of all his cousins,” the assistant director said.
Hoover knows better than anybody that stool pigeons, not electronic eavesdropping, are the backbone of law-enforcement. Hoover himself would be merely another retired cop at the racetrack if a girl hadn’t once called him up and told him what movie John Dillinger was at. Yet for decades Hoover had no contacts around or within the Mafia, and the Mafia grew into a part of American life. Of course, even with a clear field, the Italians in the Mafia never have come close to the magnitude of larceny committed here by English Protestants, but they have been formidable, given the limits of education and intelligence.
And now, here, in Brooklyn, the Mafia was starting to stretch out and wrap its tentacles, as the newspapers write it, around another part of American life. The Six-Day Bike Race. And Joseph DeLauria was presenting himself around town as a bike-race promoter. He rented an armory, put his name on letterheads, contacted a booking agent in Rome, and awaited other ceremonial duties. The real job of putting on the show, getting the track built, and organizing the gambling was left to Kid Sally Palumbo and his people.
THE COLD WIND FROM the mountains ran through the stone streets that have no trees. When Mario Trantino came out of the house into the early-morning emptiness, the air forced his eyes to widen. The street was an alley built on a sharp hill, which started in the center of town and ended in the rocks and mud where the hill became the start of a mountain. The alley ran between attached two-story stone houses which were pastel-colored but tiny and dirty inside and with running water only in the daylight hours. The narrow sidewalks were lined with cars parked half on the sidewalk. A new gray Fiat was in front of Mario’s door. The auto-rental agency where he worked had given him its best car, at an employee’s rate, for his trip. It was a fine car, but all Mario cared was that the machine knew enough to move. He despised cars. His job was apprentice mechanic and handyman at the auto-rental agency, but he really considered himself a young artist.
Mario always went around town with his shoelaces untied. He did not care for this, because he always tripped on the laces. And then his arches ached constantly because he had to walk in a way that would both get him where he was going and keep the loose shoes from falling off his feet. Mario told everybody that he did not like shoelaces because this is the first way that society ties up the human personality. When people in town said he was crazy, Mario beamed. He did not need glasses, but he would take his uncle’s, thick, silver-rimmed things, and walk with the glasses perched on the bridge of his nose. When Mario had to see, at a streetcorner, he looked over the tops of the glasses. Otherwise, he kept his eyes looking down. The thick glasses hurt his eyes, so he would close them and pretend he was a blind man and concentrate on visualizing things. Mario said this kept the world from distracting him. It also kept the people in town shaking their heads and clucking. This made Mario feel it was the only way he could make people regard him as artistic.
In his town, the town of Catanzia, in Calabria, in southern Italy, there was no way for an artist to subsist or to be recognized, and his chances of developing his talent were limited. So Mario Trantino had to walk around town with his arches aching and his shoes flopping and his eyes closed, tripping over his shoelaces quite often, but his real suffering began when he had to go to work on his job. Every wipe of a cloth and every turn of a wrench at the auto-rental garage went against Mario. Near the end of a day a pain would shoot through the palm of Mario’s right hand. The pain was caused by the nail being driven through his hand and into the cross.
A woman came through the doorway curtain of the next house and smiled good morning to Mario in the cold morning air. A nannygoat with straggly hair, black-tipped with dirt, followed her. The woman put a brazier, black from fire, on the sidewalk. The brazier was filled with tree branches broken into small sticks. She stuffed a fistful of balled-up paper into the sticks and put a match to the paper. The nannygoat sniffed at the brazier and then backed up from the flames and went through the curtain and into the house. The woman was starting the morning fire to warm the house. When the paper burns and the sticks first catch, the flames are too high and wavery to bring into the house. The woman stepped away from the brazier to wait for the flames to become low. Using her skirt as a potholder, she brought the brazier upstairs in the house and put a little pocket of warmth into the morning dampness. The goats and chickens lived downstairs in the house. Mario’s house had a striped curtain, more like a bathtowel, on the door. Behind the curtain a cow stood in straw that was wet with urine. The woman stood and watched the flames. She smiled at Mario again and walked over to the gray Fiat and began polishing the fender with her wool skirt. Southern Italy is the same as the rest of the world. People stroke and polish machines while goats urinate in their houses.
In a few minutes Mario would be using this car to leave Catanzia forever. He was driving to Reggio Calabria and the 9:35 a.m. plane to Rome. At Rome he would transfer to the International Terminal and get on the 1:45 p.m. Alitalia flight to America; to Kennedy Airport in New York, to Manhattan, and to Brooklyn, and to all the great things that everybody said that he, Mario Trantino, surprise third-place finisher in the Milan-San Remo amateur bike race, was sure to receive for placing very high in, or winning, the World Championship Six-Day Bike Race in New York. If Mario failed and had to come home, he would sit down backward on the railroad tracks at Reggio Calabria and eat his sandwich and let the Naples express come from behind and do the rest.
When the letter inviting Mario to the bike race had come six weeks ago, it put a flash of brightness in his chest. The letter was from a booking agent in Rome named Rinaldi, who said he was representing an organization of American-Italian men who were anxious to bring back bike-racing to its rightful place in American sports.
In Europe only a few athletes make more than a champion bike-racer. With bike-racing in America unknown in the last twenty-five years, Rinaldi had to produce contestants at a price American promoters could afford. Rather than contact professionals chasing big fees and endorsements on the European circuit, Rinaldi went for reasonably good amateurs and pointed out to them that nobody would notice they were being paid in America. Besides, there was the free trip to America. Any dreams Mario had of becoming a great rich bike-rider were minute compared to his desire to get to America. Rinaldi wanted Mario to team with another fairly good Italian amateur, Carlo Rafetto of Milano. In his letter he said Mario had a fine chance to win. As the sponsors in America had made it plain that they were not about to turn over much money to some oily Turk, Rinaldi was booking only people learning how to ride a two-wheeler, or advanced tuberculars, from countries other than Italy. He was an expert at doing this. Once, for Rossi, the popular but slightly weak Italian lightweight, Rinaldi brought in a German with a broken hand. Rinaldi told the German that if he punched very fast with the broken hand, he would not notice the pain.
For his trip, Mario was guaranteed all expenses plus $1000 American. If his team won the race, the letter said, prizes could run to as much as $2500. There was even a chance the bike race would go on tour throughout America. When Mario took the letter to the bank to look up the money-exchange tables, the teller hung over his shoulder. The teller began shaking when he saw the amounts Mario was inspecting. The teller blessed himself and kissed his fingers. He leaned over the top of the counter and kissed Mario.
Mario took a deep breath of the cold morning air and started walking down the hill. He took long strides. At twenty-three, Mario Trantino was probably the most striking male in Catanzia. If he had grown up in a freer atmosphere than the vacantness of Catanzia, he would have been on the preferred invitation list of every party that had the chance of becoming an orgy. Mario had a proud body that was a little bit over six feet and was contained in 165 pounds. Black hair clung to his head in waves. Sideburns dropped to a point that was a full inch lower than they were on the picture of Garibaldi in Mario’s house. His face was clear and had a tone and life to it that comes from the constant breaking of sweat during some form of athletics. His dark brown eyes gleamed with excitement. His nose, just prominent enough to get into trouble with a fast-closing door, put a measure of Roman history onto his face. He wore his only suit, a tight-fitting pepper-and-salt with double vents.
On his job at the auto-rental agency, Mario took interest only at lunchtime when Savona, the fat manager, would sit at his desk and sip chocolata and play cards with Mario. Savona wore eyeglasses that were as thick as windshields. The eyeglasses would steam up in the noon heat; Catanzia was very cold at night and on both edges of night and very hot at midday, and at noon Savona would take the glasses off and wipe them. With his glasses off, Savona was technically blind. It is extremely helpful to play cards for money with somebody who is not too good at seeing.
Mario’s other small pleasure on the job was to stretch out underneath a car he was working on and pretend he was a gynecologist tinkering with Sophia Loren. When he would get tuckered out from this, he would fall asleep. His head would be on the cement that was covered with oil and grease, but this wouldn’t matter to him.
Mario had been putting things on paper since he was eight. Each morning that summer he had bicycled two miles down a twisting road to the small resort hotel on the cliff over the sea. The hotel allowed kids to put out deck chairs and run other small errands for tips. The hotel was out of the way, and the only foreign tourists ever to stay there were a childless couple from Manchester, England. The man was a schoolteacher who liked to paint. He liked vacationing on the Calabrian coast because nobody came up to him and insisted he needed a drink when all he really wanted to do was paint. At first, the kids from Catanzia formed a circle behind the man and watched him paint. They would lose interest and leave. All except Mario. When the schoolteacher came for the second summer, he had a paintbox for Mario. The little boy spent some of his afternoons sitting on the cliffs and putting colors on paper while the man painted. Once in a while he looked at what Mario was doing and made suggestions. The schoolteacher spoke fair Italian and was able to make himself understood. And by the middle of the third summer Mario was starting to pick up enough English for the beginnings of conversation. In the summer of Mario’s twelfth year the schoolteacher and his wife did not come, and the hotel never heard from them again. But the man had left his impression on Mario. The boy loved to draw and paint. In school, Mario leaped ahead of the class in English and because it was so easy he worked even harder on the subject. When somebody’s relatives from America came to Catanzia for a visit, Mario would show off and talk to them in English that was a couple of shades better than that used by the relatives.
Mario also showed off his art work. He brought a pencil sketch of Christ on the cross to the rectory, and it still hangs in the front room of the rectory. Another of Mario’s sketches was far more famous in Catanzia. Mario made the sketch when he was sixteen, and he did it carefully and slowly over several weeks of peeking at his uncle and aunt on Sunday afternoons in order to obtain an immensely detailed sketch of the two of them steaming through knockout sex. When Mario showed it around the street for the first time, so many kids collected around him and made so much noise that a fight started. A stumpy old man named Doto got up from a cane chair in front of his house and waved a stick at the boys and chased them. When Doto saw Mario’s sketch, he pretended to go into a rage. He grabbed it from Mario and told him to go to confession. Doto took the sketch and tottered down to the pasticceria and passed it around to the old men having coffee, and the old men choked and doubled up and coffee ran down their chins. Doto brought the sketch home, and he keeps it in the top drawer of his bureau. He looks at it every Sunday afternoon in hopes of being stimulated.
There was no impetus at home for Mario to do anything but work at a job. His mother had died when he was six. His father was a name on a birth certificate, put there for form. He was raised, with four cousins, by his uncle and aunt. The seven people lived on one large bed, and on three cots, in three rooms in the tiny house. Whenever Mario drew anything around the house and showed them his work, the uncle would say, “That’s nice, but come with me today and do something good. Pick up almonds with me today.” Then Mario had to go out with a burlap sack and long sweepers made of sticks and scratch almonds from the ground and into the burlap, while his uncle walked around hunting chipmunks with a .22 rifle. The family ate the animals and sold the almonds.
There was a girl in town named Carmela and she worked at the dry-goods store, and Mario asked her to go to the movies one night and Carmela’s aunt, who was called Zia Nicolina, showed up as chaperon. Zia Nicolina did not look like a chaperon. She looked, from neck to midsection, like a cow. Her stomach looked like a steam boiler wrapped in black cloth. Zia Nicolina was unmarried. During the war, when there had been Italian and then German and then American troops in the town, Zia Nicolina had been able to take care of entire regiments. The Germans used to send a command car to pick her up. As a chaperon, Zia Nicolina was a large bulldog. At the movies she sat directly behind Carmela, with her fat hands draped over the seats between Carmela and Mario. Every time Mario shifted his weight, Zia Nicolina’s hands dug into his shoulder. “Stay on your side,” Zia Nicolina rasped. The walk home was excruciating because Zia Nicolina got between them, one hand tightly gripping Mario’s arm, and she complained of arthritis until they reached the door; then she shooed Carmela inside and told Mario to go away.
Mario endured it because Carmela was the only girl in town who seemed to find any amusement in his untied shoelaces and his eyeglass habits. One night, when he had a date to take Carmela to see a picture billed as Gangster Story, Mario arrived to find Zia Nicolina standing outside the house.
“Carmela’s sick,” Zia Nicolina said.
“Oh,” Mario said.
“You can’t see her, she sleeps,” Zia Nicolina said.
“Well, tell her I was here and that I hope she is better,” he said.
He turned to go.
“Hey!” Zia Nicolina said.
“Yes?”
“You take Zia Nicolina to the movie instead?”
A vise closed around Mario’s throat and he nodded yes, and Zia Nicolina grabbed his arm and he walked her down to the movie house. She sat next to him all night, her fat legs brushing up against his, her hand grabbing his arm when anything happened. Her face, which needed a shave, was shiny with sweat. Carmela and her family lived in a house at the top of the hill, on the edge of town. On the way home Zia Nicolina made Mario go a block out of the way because she wanted to find a hoe she said she had left in the field her family tilled. Zia Nicolina stepped into the field, and Mario, one hand on her elbow, followed her. Zia Nicolina went a couple of steps and then backed into Mario like a truck. Mario was off balance when Zia Nicolina twisted around and put her hands on the back of his neck. She fell backward, and Mario came down on top of her.
Mario despised the night with Zia Nicolina. He had a great love for the earth and the colors and shadings of ground in the sunlight, and he loved the symmetry of a girl, not just her body, but her hair and her eyes and her mouth and the depth that her face could show, and he loved his mornings up on the hills, with the sounds of his work, the tinkling of water running through the brushes when he rinsed them, the tiny sound of a pencil biting into good paper. Every morning he rode up the road winding along the mountain, pushing his legs until they were on fire and then became numb. When he could go up no more, he stopped and drew. When it was time to leave, he turned and came flying down the mountain and onto the hill at the foot of the mountain and down through the town, and he always headed for the start of the road which led out of town and while he was racing on his bike through the town he imagined he was leaving it forever. At the last corner he would turn and slow down and pedal sullenly to his job at the auto-rental agency.
Riding through the hills made him the best bike-rider in Catanzia by the time he was sixteen, and he entered and won several small races sponsored by the church societies. He entered a townwide race and won that too. Savona, from the auto-rental agency, was a bike-racing fan. The day before Mario stumbled out of high school, Savona offered him a job. Mario took the job and continued bike-racing on weekends. He began entering amateur races all over Italy. He received expenses and also placed in the first twenty finishers often enough to earn silent bonuses. He earned $200 for his first major victory, the 25-kilometer race.
He spent most of this money on expensive art paper. Mario’s drawing was put to uses of sorts around Catanzia. At a charity carnival for one of the churches he sketched faces and took in more money for the church than the weight-guesser did. Once Mario did a poster for a local bike race and a man from the race committee in Naples liked it so much he gave it to a sporting newspaper in Naples. The sketch ran in the paper, and when Mario got the clipping in the mail he walked around looking at it so much that the newsprint began to disintegrate.
For one big championship race Mario went to Rome, and he took a guided tour of the Cinecittà film studios. In one building dozens of people were sitting in an air-conditioned room and working at drawing boards. They were animating comic strips that ran on television. One of the artists, about twenty-five, had long straggly hair and wore a flowered shirt, tight chino pants, and cowboy boots. He was whistling while he cut out little strips of gray-speckled cellophane and carefully glued them over parts of the comic strip. The tour conductor was talking about the hard, precise work going on in the room. Mario jumped when he heard the word “work.” When he got back to Catanzia and was polishing his cars, he kept hearing the tour conductor say the artists were working.
When he was in Rome, Mario took a walk on the Via Veneto and dawdled in the light from the kiosks on a big corner newsstand across the street from the Hotel Excelsior. Mario’s eyes jumped when he saw an entire rack of magazines with titles: Il Giornale di Artista, The Artist, and Studio International of Modern Art. Mario liked the American magazines best. In one of them the first article was titled, “A Basic Approach to Composition.” It was written by Grant Monroe. A picture of Grant Monroe, with great bushy hair and in a T-shirt, ran with the article. The caption read: “Grant Monroe at his studio on 10th Street in New York’s East Village.” Mario read the article, which was difficult because it referred to a thing called the “Golden Section,” which is a triangular way of arranging scenes so that people look into them, rather than see a flat, straight-up-and-down arrangement. He read the magazines for months, always returning to the picture of Grant Monroe and his bushy hair, and he dreamed of meeting him one day. Then the letter from Rinaldi came, and Mario walked around with the magazine under his arm. He would go to America and see Grant Monroe and become an artist and never leave America and never see Catanzia again.
Now, in the cold air of his last morning in Catanzia, Mario walked down the hill from his house as quickly as he could and he came around a corner and went down the block toward the church, which stood facing a square.
Father Marsalano was pacing up and down with the chickens in the cobblestone piazza in front of the church. He carried a prayer book and a Polaroid camera. When Father Marsalano saw Mario turn the corner and come into the square, he brought his hand to his mouth and let out a yell. The chickens flapped up and hung around Father Marsalano’s ankles. If he could ever get them to go higher and begin flying in circles around him, he would claim he was Saint Francis of Assisi.
Eleven heads poked from doorways. Father Marsalano pointed to a boy of about seven, who was standing in his bare feet. The boy had short pants and a thin white shirt ripped at the elbows. Black uncombed hair fell onto his face. The boy came running across the square and followed the priest and Mario to the back of the church. A muddy lot covered with rocks and tin cans ran up the hill behind the church.
Father Marsalano held the camera out to Mario. The priest stepped into the lot, and the boy came through the cold mud after him. Father Marsalano grabbed Giovanni’s thin shirt and ripped the front of it. Giovanni made a face. Father Marsalano ran a hand through the mud. He wiped his hand on the front of Giovanni’s shirt and smeared the mud across Giovanni’s face. The kid’s mouth almost formed a word.
“All right,” Father Marsalano said to Mario, “take the picture.”
Father Marsalano stood with the prayer book in his left hand and his right hand on top of Giovanni’s head. Father Marsalano’s face became somber. Giovanni stuck his tongue out at the camera. Father Marsalano’s hand lifted from the top of Giovanni’s head. Then it came down hard enough to cause a concussion. Giovanni winced. Mario took the picture.
While Mario was flipping and pulling and peeling to get at the picture, Father Marsalano was on him like a blanket. The priest started saying, “Good! Good!” when he saw the picture. It was nearly as good as a Dr. Tom Dooley poster. Father Marsalano’s face was pleading. Giovanni looked only like early death.
Father Marsalano took Mario by the arm and started walking him to the back door of the church. Giovanni stood in the cold mud and made a fist with his right hand and brought his arm up and bent it at the elbow. Giovanni’s left hand slapped the inside of his right elbow. This is the classic expression of true Italian regard for the clergy, which first began to appear when Innocent IV was Pope.
Inside, Father Marsalano began writing in pen on the back of the picture:
Dear Friends Who Left Catanzia to Go to America and Become Rich, the Mother of God is watching always. So is Saint Angelo, who is the patron of Catanzia and everybody who ever lived in our town. This picture on the opposite side shows the place where your beloved church is going to erect a new orphanage. This poor little boy standing with me has no place to sleep or eat. He is very hungry now. Also very cold. Someday when we have the new orphanage which we will build this little boy will be warm and fed.
It is good to hear from you. Send me some good news in the mail. Then I will have good news for the homeless little children of Catanzia.
Yours in the Lord,
Father Giuseppe Marsalano