And Anna Paoli had a famous last name; famous, at least, in her homeland. She was born in a town an hour by mule to the north of Ajacco, known primarily as the birthplace of Napoleon I and capital of the once Genoese, lately French territory. Her father, a gifted tailor, had remained in his hometown despite his talent – in order to care for his ageing parents and to help his brothers operate their fading farm.
Lucien Paoli remained five days a week in their little town, travelling by mule to Ajacco on a Friday morning and operating a small shop in the big smoke before returning to the farm on Sunday mornings. He would work days on the farm and nights by lamp on alterations, repairs and entirely new garments by commission. The toll on his nerves and eyes was intense, but, a resolute and stoic man, Lucien Paoli worked without complaint until the very end; and was found slouched over his foot-pedal sowing machine at the age of forty-nine. It was July, 1920.
Anna, then thirteen, had until that point spent her days carrying pails of milk, churning butter, making cheese and selling produce in the town. With no formal schooling; she’d gained her literacy and her seamstress skills slowly but surely from her father by night. She studied, after a fashion, alongside him as he worked late at night. Lucien raised three daughters in the small windows between farm work and tailoring after the death of his young wife. Anna’s older sisters were fifteen and seventeen upon the death of their father and already married. The younger Paoli girl found the notion of being ‘watched’ (as they could scarcely do more) by her feeble grandparents (who had survived their son and would continue to do so for twenty more years a piece), or by her uncles, intolerable.
She had been too young to remember the death of her mother, but her father’s funeral struck her hard. A macabre spectacle, she watched people she was sure had never known her father shuffle past his open casket, a long black line wavering and simmering in the heat. The dark troughs under his eyes, already terrible in life, took on mythical proportions in death. He was barely recognisable; almost a gargoyle, and she was sure there had been some mistake. He was alive, somewhere, and this funeral was a ghastly error. But Lucien Paoli barely looked worse now than before. The older observers politely commented that he looked peaceful, sleeping almost – as a dash of colour had been added to conceal the oncoming greyness of the skin. For Anna, her father had been figure of unending brightness and warmth; his aesthetic qualities had made little impression on her – his life force was all that had appeared. Stripped of it, she barely recognised his corporeal form.
She resolved to flee. Awakening before sun rise, even before her grandparents and uncles, Anna left a letter – written the night previous – in the bread box, knowing it would be certainly found but not soon enough to compromise her plan. She took half the franks her father had hidden beneath a loose floorboard, leaving the rest on the kitchen table as she was not sure if anyone in her family else had known of (or remembered) its location, and, with a sack of a few clothes and some vegetables, stole her father’s mule for one more journey to Ajacco with only a vague notion of heading south until she hit the sea or civilisation as Corsicans knew it. Fortunately the animal, oddly named Ruth, knew the way well.
In the cold early blue-grey light she must have seemed older, or the ticket office was still half-asleep, as they sold her passage to Marseilles, from where she went on across the Atlantic. Corsican girls grew a little faster and taller than French, making her look old enough to be a young bridge making her way to her betrothed abroad (exactly what she claimed to be when questioned).
Speaking her island village French and her Genoese dialect she struggled through customs, but a Ligurian woman employed as a cleaner overhead her and helped as best she could.
A week in quarantine proved a blessing, providing room and board and a chance to snatch some English while getting her bearings after the arduous time on the ship. She left the island with a full stomach and within metres (which remain her preferred unit of measurement well into adulthood) of the dock began to ask for “bureau de change in vicinity”, a phrase clear enough for the locals who pointed out the nearest. She stood outside the office, looking strangely dilapidated behind an armed guard, and smiled. ‘The Americans use the same numbers as us, of course’ and read the rate for dollars and franks. She walked further, to the next, and then on again, thinking it was terribly fortunate for so many bureaus to be so close to the harbour. Eventually she settled on the best rate of the four (each charged the same percentage commission) and walked in.
“One century, sixty and ten frank. How many dollars?” (She pronounced ‘one’ as ‘un’).
The man behind the counter peered down at her and she stood straight, puffing herself up and holding his gaze steadily.
“How many franks?” He spoke loudly and slowly.
“One century. Sixty. And ten.” (Check)
He grinned and wrote down the number on a page, holding it up to her; 160. She nodded. He levered numbers into his counter and ground out a receipt.
“That will come to sixty American dollars.” He wrote down 60 and showed her again. Anna shook her head violently.
“One frank, half dollar. Four venty and five dollars.” She pointed at the rates outside and the man went pale. He opened his mouth to ‘explain’ but she was already outside on the path, stunned and disgusted. “You ought to be protecting me, not him” she told the guard in furious French to no avail. In time she found a comparatively honest agent and with all the ignorant smiling confidence of a peasant girl walked the startling streets of New York with a small fortune stuffed into her socks.
Anna had the good fortune of happening upon a small Catholic church operated by a group of Genoese immigrants. The Genoese, once citizens of a proud and prosperous republic, found themselves lost in America, a minority of a minority, swamped by a horde of southerners who remained the closest thing to home in a strange land. Their church observed all their particular variations and idiosyncrasies; replicating perfectly the practices of the dominant sect of their native land. They were delighted to find in the New World someone from their former colony and accommodated her as best they could at short notice. She spent her first night there, sleeping on the floor with her sack of clothing serving as bedding, alongside the confessional which she took for a cloakroom.
She was told the following morning that the church was small and could not provide her board for long. She ate onion soup silently in the priest’s kitchen as he explained his younger brother was a tailor and in need of an assistant. She halted, the spoon suspended between her and the bowl, and beamed. America was paradise! She would work making dresses and suits, without a cow or bucket in sight. A stable address also meant the ability to correspond with her sisters. With finances the priest’s brother, Enzo Querci, was a miserable character, a penny-pincher of the most militant variety, but he was an honest man and generous with his skills. Anna’s abilities made an impression on him and he took a barely-disguised delight in helping her enhance them. She roomed in his attic, much to the chagrin of his wife, and three years later departed abruptly after he made a wine-sodden proposition of a carnal nature.
Anna had been left bitterly disappointed by the circumstances of the sudden end of her time at Enzo’s store. She wondered if his lessons had been driven by kindness or repressed lust; but (as some small consolation) concluded it was the former. For his part, the tailor regretted the catastrophe more so than Anna – and, though it was liquor that had seen him fall so low, he learned nothing; imbibing himself to sleep most nights after she left. Within fifteen years he drowned his rare gift for tailoring and not long after that, his life.
But Anna, aged sixteen, had built up a following among women in the neighbourhood and beyond and with her reputation and her carefully hoarded funds she found it surprisingly easy to secure a further loan from the Stabilè bank in the lower east side. She leased the ground floor at first (on a relatively cheap, long-term contract) and slept in it, using the single sink for almost all dom
estic purposes until she could afford to rent the small apartment directly above.
Six years later she had an ugly argument in a public bar with a defaulting client of this store and the man who later became her husband, a war veteran eight years her senior, intervened. They came to share that tiny apartment and almost every aspect of their lives bar one; that element of Paolo which would in time tear them to pieces.
The reconstructed Anna Paoli stood with her arms crossed as though against the cold, though there was no cold, and stared out to the great green lady and her blistering torch, and she wondered when the next letter from her sisters would come – as she too, like Judah Bauer, had urged them to flee the oncoming storm.
* * *
Comely sat on the roof with Arturo, sitting on the short side wall beside his little garden while the kid remained standing. Arturo was cheerfully tending to his garden and now and then watching the street below. It was a hot day and he was relishing it, out of his dirty coat and in an off-white shirt, brown slacks, dark braces and a peaked cap. He looked stronger already, moved with a light and easy step and had regained a little colour. Comely ate an apple – he’d brought a bag of Royal Galas for the family and Arturo had accepted them with surprising ease. Who would have guessed, Comely mused, that providing medical care and exterminating a small-time gang would establish so much trust? It was a grim thought, really, and he couldn’t disguise it as black humour. Not now.
“I can drive a truck you know.” Arturo announced without warning, a distraction Comely welcomed.
“What?”
“The truck – the automobile. I can drive them.”
It was not a boast, simply a declaration of fact.
“You? How can you even reach the gas?”
Arturo looked annoyed.
“It is easy.”
“How did you learn?”
“I am around yards, delivering, selling papers. Sometimes I drive a little – the drivers I know, they show me.”
“Come on kid, you drive the truck back and forth a few yards – it’s not the same. It’s harder on the road – more dangerous. And trucks are heavy – you ever turned a moving truck?”
“It’s not so hard. I am strong – in Calabria I carry wood, I carry water in big pots.” Arturo’s face contorted a little. “I carried wood, I carried water in big pots,” he amended with triumph.
“Carrying big pots – to bring water for your family?”
“Yes.” He smiled proudly.
“That’s very good – you’re a good kid. If I had a son like you; I’d…” Comely stopped. He’d never given the notion any thought before. “…I’d be a happy man.”
“Also I read a journal, an easy word for me. I read the journal about driving automobiles. I learned the system from the drivers and the journal – it’s easy; brake to stop, gas to go, turn left, turn right – change the gear.”
“I’m impressed – but you know, eleven year-olds are not allowed to drive here. It’s not legal.”
“There are a lot of things not legal, Comely.”
Comely looked at Arturo with a grim expression and it was not theatre.
“Never talk like that – you should respect the law. As a general rule, anyway. Some laws are stupid – like the Halstead Act – but most laws exist for a reason. Never, ever steal from a person or a family. Companies, governments – that’s different. Companies and governments steal so much, sometimes the ordinary citizen wants to take a little back. Forget I said that. But the important thing is; never do anything with violence – never hurt anyone. You know there’s never a good reason to hurt someone. Don’t lie, don’t cheat – be honest, be straight in everything you do. No one ever really regrets being honest, even if it doesn’t work out so well for them in the short term. Or medium term. The law… the law should be the manifestation of the people’s will. In some respects, it isn’t. When the law makes no sense, don’t simply break it – question it. When the law is unjust, ignore it. But when the law exists so people can feel safe; so an individual can go about their legitimate business without being harassed or injured or robbed, respect it. I say legitimate and not lawful because sometimes something that is lawful is not legitimate, and sometimes something that is legitimate is not lawful. That’s an important distinction to make. Am I making myself clear?”
“No.”
Arturo said it without judgement or chagrin, but simply as a matter of fact. Comley realised he’d talked in circles and looked for a clasp to hold it all together.
“Kid – if you’re going to make your way in the world, do it right. Don’t put yourself in a place where you are always looking over your shoulder. Don’t put yourself in a place from which you can’t escape or in which you end up regretting your past. When you are going to do something, ask yourself – will I be proud of this in twenty years, or ashamed? Then your decision will be clear. That’s the law you need to follow.”
Arturo listened carefully – as was his custom whomever was speaking – and nodded.
“When can I drive?”
“Well, when you’re big enough for it to be safe. The age limit is arbitrary really.”
“Arbi-trary?”
“It has been chosen by chance, at random – without a logical reason.”
“Arbi-trary,” Arturo repeated with satisfaction.
“So, the important thing is to be big and strong enough to operate a vehicle in a way that is safe for you and the people around you.”
“So when I am big and strong enough, I work for you.”
Comely paled slightly, then considered his response.
“That will not be for a little while yet.”
“So I do something different now, for you.”
“I don’t employ children, kid. They’ve got a thing here called child labour laws, and I’m glad they do - though it’s something some people ignore.”
“Because it is unjust?”
“Because it is unprofitable. But I pay attention to it, and even if it wasn’t law it is something I would still obey. A child should be in school – not working. But you need to work, I understand that.”
Arturo looked out at the crowd of people.
“I want my brother and sister to go to the school. I don’t want them to drive trucks or sell newspapers.”
“And they won’t. Look around you kid. Some things happen for no reason at all, and life can be cruel… but sometimes destiny intervenes. That’s right. I’ve never talked about this with you before, and I have never asked because it’s none of my business and I knew if you ever wanted to talk about it you would, but I think we can trust each other, am I right?”
Arturo nodded.
“Your parents, they died in back home?”
Arturo’s eyes filled with tears and he nodded.
“You still came to America. Were you scared?”
“Yes.” Arturo struggled with the word.
“Then you’re a brave man.”
Arturo looked at him.
“People who don’t know fear are not brave, they’re just crazy. Do you think I don’t get scared? I’m scared most of the time. How old were you?”
“Eight.”
“Great God – eight? I could not have done what you did. Let me tell you that now. You had family with you?”
“My brothers, sisters – also, a cousin of my mother. Aldo. He had twenty years. He did not live with us here; he had a lady, American, but he helped us. Four months ago, he died – of a sickness. In the lungs.”
Comely guessed and guessed right that it was curable, just as it had been in Arturo’s case. Of all the rotten luck.
‘If I’d met them a year earlier,’ he thought. Then he stopped.
‘If I had met them a year earlier, what would I have done?’
He told himself he was a decent guy, even when crossed. When crossed he was hard but not indecent, he told himself. Of course he would have helped, h
e insisted.
Of course.
He asked himself; why, then, was it hard for him to figure out what to do next? He’d helped people before, but what kind of exercise was it, really? Altruism or propaganda? This was new to him – and admitting it presented him with a sickening sensation that was also new. New and unwelcome. He changed the subject.
“Would you like to go to the World’s Fair?”
“I do not know what it is about.”
“It’s about the future.”
“I worry about the present – that is enough for me.”
“Kid – the future belong to you. That’s why I haven’t gone yet. I’m old.”
Arturo laughed.
“Do you like music?” Comely asked.
“Yes. Do you know the ocarina?”
He did, and Arturo held forth on the subject, with just a hint of pride.
As Arturo spoke, Comely noticed the way the kid readily accepted the non sequitur. He wondered if it was the symptom of childlike innocence or of a defensive wish to avoid reliving his grief. He wondered exactly what a child, an eight year-old child who loses both parents, their home and their country has to do to survive mentally. What must he convince himself of? The inevitable balancing of things in the universe? Comely felt sick to consider such a muddle-headed notion. There was no balance. More to it, he was beginning to believe there was no universe. ‘Everyone always talks about the existence of heaven and hell, he thought, but no one questions the existence of Earth. Maybe there’s just a point where heaven and hell meet, and nothing in between. That would explain a lot.’
* * *
“When gods cannot be found, the people worship monsters.”
Laura looked up at her father; who stood with his hands on the kitchen counter and stared out the windows of their restaurant. He had not intended her to hear, nor to speak aloud at all. She, with one small hand on the counter – on the other side – turned to look, soon realising he was watching nothing; instead focussed on the words of the radio announcer.