The fighting was a bloodbath, the ratio of blood shed to territory gained worse even than on the Western Front for most of the war. The soldiers advanced up mountainsides, climbing over the corpses of their own dead, and into previously unimagined technology—poisonous gases, barbed wire, machine guns, grenades—their own military police’s guns trained to their backs, forcing them forward.
This went on, day in and day out, for more than three years.
They fought in a wintry wasteland of the snowy Alps, under the constant threat of avalanches—the White Death—that killed more Italian soldiers than the Austrian shells did. There were never enough helmets or weapons. The water bottles were made of wood and full of mold. The gas masks, which most soldiers didn’t have anyway, weren’t effective against chlorine or phosgene, which passed over battalions in poisonous clouds and left rows of crouching corpses clutching their stomachs and foaming at the mouth.
The Italian soldiers were so dehydrated because of the poor supply chain that their feet became too swollen for their boots, so they marched barefoot and frostbitten. Their uniforms were so mud caked and lice ridden that they resorted to wearing women’s clothing they ransacked from abandoned villages. They ate dead horses and rats they caught in their trenches. They shat in the same holes they slept in because they were too afraid of snipers to go to a latrine. They died of typhoid and cholera. They went deaf from explosions, lost their balance stumbling over broken ground and fallen comrades. They charged toward their deaths in total confusion. There were gruesome incidents of friendly fire.
They answered to a general who was ignorant, egomaniacal, stubborn, and indecisive, all at once, an idiot man with unchecked authority who placed no value on his soldiers’ lives. The general’s name was Luigi Cadorna, and I only write it down here because I believe his monstrosity should be more widely known. For those who might make the argument that Cadorna was incompetent, not evil, I will offer my opinion that it is the moral responsibility of the incompetent to identify their own weaknesses and not accept positions of power.
What makes the truth even more wretched is that they died for nothing at all. Whatever promises had been made to Italy for entering the war were null in the grimacing face of peace. At the end of four years of bloodshed, 1.5 million Italians had been killed, an additional seven hundred thousand soldiers disabled by injuries. There is, as with all wars, the missing statistic of how many women were raped because they lived in the contested territory. Another half a million Italian civilians died of the Spanish flu the soldiers brought home from war hospitals, the highest influenza mortality rate of any nation.
The casualties extended beyond the years of the war, extend even to today. It took Italy fifty years to pay off its war debts. The country’s economy was destroyed, and industrialization shifted irrevocably to the north, which was the kiss of death for any meaningful development of Italy’s south. It is the reason that, today, Calabria still sends its youth to work in faraway cities, where they settle and don’t come back.
SOMEHOW,ANTONIOFORTUNA SURVIVED THE WAR.
He was drafted with the very first class at age seventeen, and he lived to bring his body home, uninterrupted by bullets or shrapnel. He survived the November 1915 offensive on San Michele, where halfthe Catanzaro brigade was slaughtered. He survived his brigade’s assault on the Asiago Plateau, a disaster in which the Italian soldiers were trapped in muddy sinkholes and barbed wire, where the Catanzaro 141 lost three-quarters of its men and where the soldiers not mowed down by gunfire had to spend the freezing night playing dead among the corpses until they could escape at dawn.
They say war is a crucible, where men are forged. I would venture that a monster is forged in a crucible as easily as a man is. Some men go to war and find God; others lose God forever. Antonio was one of the latter.
But he survived.
Maybe his daughter Stella’s ability to survive death was inherited. She never liked her father, but maybe she owed him that much.
WHENANTONIOFORTUNA CAME HOMEafter four years in the army, Ievoli was too small for him. He sailed to the United States for the first time in February 1920, following in the footsteps of four million other Italian immigrants. Most of them came from the south—Sicily, Campania, Puglia, and Basilicata as well as Calabria—where Italian unification had hurt the most, where war and taxes had squeezed the already impoverishedcontadinidry. The south was emptied of adult men; in Calabria, 30 percent of households had nocapo,no male head.
Italian men emigrated because they wanted to work, to make better lives for themselves than the poverty and exploitation they had left, although there was plenty of poverty and exploitation in l’America, too. Italian laborers—almost always men, often illiterate and with no recourse to aid or advice—crossed the ocean in steerage to be herded onto trains bound for coal mines in West Virginia or for jobs laying railroad track in the forests of Pennsylvania. They left unpaved, unplumbed, deforested, and malarial villages; they left starvation, cholera, entrenched feudalism, an inescapable class system. They left their families, in hopes of reuniting with them under better auspices. They brought their love of food and orderly gardens, their languages andtheir prejudices, their mysterious triple god and their myriad saints, their rites and their songs and their pageants. They brought their worship of their mothers; they brought their mothers. In many cases they intended to go back, which made our Italian ancestors unusual among would-be American immigrants, but in many cases they never did go back, which made us the same as everyone else.
ANTONIO WAS ON THE LATE SIDEfor American admittance—if he’d been just a few years later, after 1924, when the U.S. government passed the National Origins Act and ethnic quotas were instituted, Antonio would most likely have had to pick some other destination, perhaps Canada, Argentina, Australia, or France, where many Calabresi would end up.
The first time Antonio emigrated, he knew nothing about where he was going. He spoke no English, but he wasn’t worried. He had learned in the Austrian Alps, where the officers and the men they commanded had barely been able to communicate with each other, to think of self-preservation as a physical choice, and he was a strong man.
Antonio was lucky, because others had already paved the way for him. By 1920, there were microcities of Italians embedded in every American metropolis. For those who had emigrated one generation earlier, the dangers had been acute. Without knowing how to read or write, Italian men signed away their souls, at the mercy of their employer’s unregulated sense of humanity. Many were killed by overwork, accidents, and explosions. Some simply disappeared. Some were prey to the nascent Italian American organized crime syndicates that flourished by creating protection and extortion rings among their own disenfranchised and fearful countryfolk.
But as I said, Antonio was lucky. His boat arrived at Ellis Island. Over the years of human history, many people have made the choice to get on a boat to go to a strange and hostile place—can you imagine the desperation they must have felt in order to step onto that boat knowing there was a chance they would not reach their destination? Mostrecently, these people have been emigrants trying to get into Italy, not emigrants trying to leave, and their passage is no easier or safer than that of their antecedents. Thousands of refugees from Syria, Libya, Eritrea, Somalia, Ghana, and Nigeria have died off the coasts of Italy in the last ten years, capsized, drowned, sunk in flames. History marches on, and names and destinations change, but not the injustices we let one another suffer.
ANTONIOFORTUNA ARRIVED INNEWYORKin February 1920 on a ship called theProvidence.You can see for yourself, if you like—it’s right there in the Ellis Island manifest.
He had sailed from Napoli with an army buddy from Catanzaro named Nico Carbone. When the young men arrived in Napoli, they had no friends in the world besides each other and only a notion that by going to l’America they would be able to become rich men. They’d obtained prepaid tickets and labor contracts from apadroneand spent the spring and summer laying railroad track in western Pennsylvania. I can only assume this first period in America was difficult, because Antonio sailed back to Italy as soon as he could afford to.
He returned to Ievoli in November 1920 with the clothes on his back and a change purse of American coins. He had very little to show for his time in America; he’d barely been able to pay back his passage debts. But he had learned many things about how the world works, and he was alive. The railroad hadn’t been worse than the war. It hadn’t been worse than Tracci.
The second time he emigrated, Antonio did not fall for apadronescam; he paid for his own ticket using the stash of money from his first trip. He found his own way to a railroad job, seeking out the Reading office in New York’s Pennsylvania Station. He knew enough English this time to explain that he had some experience. He got a job right away rebuilding the mid-Atlantic corridor.
His second trip was even shorter than his first, because Antonio rushed home for the birth of his first son—you already know thatstory. But this time, there were witnesses to his time in America. One of them was a soft-spoken, dapper Abruzzese man named Tomaso Maglieri. Tomaso was twice Antonio’s age and only two-thirds his size, but they were on the same track-laying team, digging, clearing, anchoring the sleepers and connecting the rails. Antonio Fortuna and Tomaso Maglieri had little in common, but Tomaso, too, had served on the Austrian front.
In May, after they had been working together three months, Antonio and Tomaso received letters from Italy on the same day. Antonio’s letter said that Assunta was pregnant; the baby was due in October. Tomaso’s letter said his wife, Cristina, had been safely delivered of a baby boy on Easter Sunday. She had named him Carminantonio.
“Maybe you will have a daughter,” Tomaso Maglieri joked, “and someday my son will marry her.”
“No, the first two were daughters, so this one must be a son,” Antonio told him. “But your son Carminantonio can marry my Mariastella.”
“Eh, an older woman!” Tomaso laughed. “Every man’s dream. Here, let’s shake on it right now, and then we won’t have to worry about betrothing them later.”
Tomaso and Antonio didn’t see each other again for twenty years. They didn’t keep in touch, and probably never thought of each other in the interim. It was all a joke, I think—we all think. Well, Carminantonio “Carmelo” Maglieri always loved a good joke, even if Stella didn’t have the same sense of humor.
WHENANTONIOFORTUNA MADEhis third trip to the United States, he joined his old army buddy Nico Carbone in New York City. Nico lived on Mott Street in Little Italy in a windowless tenement rooming house in which eight young men took turns in bunk beds and cots. There was a job on Nico’s construction crew waiting for Antonio when he arrived; Manhattan was sprouting like a vegetable garden in June, buildings stacking on top of one another, and there was plenty of workfor Italian boys. Over the next seven years, Antonio built a bank, a church priory, a subway station, and a palatial stone edifice that turned out to be a university dining hall.
In the blizzarding colder months, when New York paused its frenetic contracting, Antonio hung around the Elizabeth Street bars with Nico. The Roaring Twenties were Antonio’s own roaring twenties and, to be blunt, he forgot his family. He wasn’t used to fathers who loved their children, and it didn’t occur to him to love his. Between construction jobs and protection sidelines, he must have been making quite a bit, but he sent none of it home. While Assunta was jarring every last wrinkled fruit so her children wouldn’t starve through the winters, Antonio was growing fat on beefsteak and the bathtub gin they served in the speakeasies. He spent what was left on women.
