Streets of Gold Read Free

twitching provocatively. My grandfather was a very handsome man, to hear him tell it, with black hair and dark brown eyes and a nose he said had Sienese influence (I knew the shape of his nose, I explored its contours with my fingers many, many times; it was not unlike my own, hawklike and thin; it could very well have had its origin in Siena — there goes my Milanese cloth merchant theory), and tall in comparison to the other men of the village, five feet eight inches. His father and his grandfather before him had worked in the vineyards, and had he stayed in Italy, I would probably be working the vineyards now, though God knows what Fiormonte is like today. It may be bustling with machinery and factories, for all I know. It was not that way in 1970, when I went back to find my grandfather, and to find my roots.
    I walked the cobbled streets, the same streets he had walked as a boy, and the August sun burned hot on my bare head, and I reached down to touch the cobbles.
What you walk on in the street. Here. Put your hand. Touch. Feel.
Ignazio Silvio Di Palermo, four years old, squats at the First Avenue curb outside his grandfather’s tailor shop and sticks his hand down between scabby knees — which bleed when he picks them, he is told, though he cannot see the blood, and can only feel it’s warm ooze; You are bleeding, they tell him, and they tell him the color of blood is red, it is what runs through your body and keeps you alive — reaches down, his hand guided by his grandfather’s fingers around his wrist, and touches the street. And feels. Feels with the four fingers of his right hand, the fingertips gingerly gliding over the surface of the smooth, rough stones, and then circumscribing the shape of one stone, it is like a box, it is like the box he keeps the toy soldiers in, it is the shape of a box, and feeling where the next stone joins it, and the next, and forming a pattern in his mind, and his grandfather says
Do you see, Ignazio?
Now
do you see?
I walked that town from one end of it to the other, trying to pick out the locations my grandfather had described, finding the bar at which Bardoni had first broached the subject of leaving for America, sat there in the cool encroaching dusk as my grandfather must have done after a day’s work, and smelled the familiar aroma of the guinea stinkers all around me, and heard the muted hum of the male conversation, and above that, like the strident shrieks of treetop birds, the women calling to each other from windows or balconies, and the counterpoint of peddlers hawking their produce in the streets, “
Caterina, vieni qua! Pesche, bella pesche fresche, ciliegie, cocomero,”
exactly as my grandfather had described it to me — or were these only the cadences and rhythms I had heard throughout all the days of my youth in East Harlem?
    Brash young Bardoni had sat at a table here with my grandfather when they were still boys, boasting loudly of having
fatto ’na bella chiavata
in Naples, having inserted his doubtless heroically proportioned key into the lock of a Neapolitan streetwalker, while the other young men of the town, my grandfather included, listened goggle-eyed and prayed that San Maurizio, the patron saint of the town, would not be able to read their minds. In December of the year 1900, Bardoni walked my grandfather past this same café on Christmas Day, sunshine bright on cobbled streets, Bardoni dressed in natty American attire, striped shirt and celluloid collar, necktie asserted with a simple pin (Eliot’s been translated into Braille), and told him of the streets over there in America, with all that gold lying in them, and further told him that he would pay for my grandfather’s passage, and arrange to have a job and lodgings waiting for him when he got to America, and he would not have to worry about the language, there were plenty of Italians already there, they would help him with his English. All Bardoni wanted in return was a small portion of my