again, to look for another new beginning. This time they took to the rails and crossed the North American continent, the swollen rivers and ocean-like prairies, the jagged mountains and frosted deserts. There were Italians working in San Francisco, where it never snowed. There were factories needing men, women, and children with fast hands and strong backs, and rumors of little island neighborhoods where their countrymen sat on the sidewalks and spoke their idiom.
Her father wheezed and slumped over their belongings during most of the journey, a man folding into himself as if preparing for his own death, while she observed the passing world with a certain detachment and imagined her heart encased in the ice of North America. Lazaro seemed too weak to walk on the hilly streets of San Francisco, but somehow they both found work in a leather tannery their first week in California among dozens of other Italians. A year and a half into this miserable job, when Rose had just turned fifteen, they joined a strike, and father and daughter stood among their countrymen while a cavalry of mounted police trotted toward them. After the first screams and deadly blows the crowd scattered, and Rose tried to pull her father along, but he fell and wouldn’t get up and told her to leave him there. She knew that his broken heart was no longer strong enough for America, and that the horses would soon crush him, and she cried with impatience, Papa, get up! Then she saw a man coming to help, and she thought he was Gratiano, the criminal of her childhood reveries, stooping to support her father. A dark-eyed and agile man, tall and angular in an old-country-style coat and fedora, threw Lazaro over his shoulder and ran as if delivering potatoes to a king. Rosari struggled to keep up with him, the man she would marry later that year, a peasant newly arrived from Calabria named Giuseppe Verbicaro, the man she would have seven children with; and as she ran a sudden breeze came off the bay and tossed her hair loose from its braid, and a sudden heat melted the ice around her heart, and the sound of the horses’ hooves faded away, and her lungs filled with the sweet and mischievous air of the new world.
THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION
Giuseppe
For most of her life, for nearly one hundred years, Rosari referred to 1906 as the year of three catastrophes: the Great San Francisco Earthquake, her father’s surrender to catarrh, and her marriage to Giuseppe Verbicaro.
Giuseppe would love and abandon and confound her for fifty years. On the day he rescued her father from the riot police, he carried her heart off as well. He looked a lot like Gratiano the criminal, but there was something forever impenetrable about the man. There was about him the baciagalupe, the kiss of the wolf. He was lean and hungry and ferocious as a wolf, but he was loving and gentle, too, when he wanted to be. Who could predict Giuseppe? He was a volcano sleeping one moment, erupting the next.
Unlike her father the barber, unlike herself, Giuseppe had no education and few words. Printed words were like ants on a tablecloth, numbers something you grabbed with the tips of your fingers. He was twice her age when they met, an old wolf prowling strange, foggy hills for food or women, who knew? He worked the leather tannery and he carried towers of baggage and shined shoes in hotels for the rich, and she thought he knew only three or four words in English and maybe only fifty in Italian. In a breadline, the week they met, he was barely able to say, Stew, please.
They married in the courthouse when she was five months pregnant, and lived with her father, who wheezed under his blanket. Their first child, a boy named Giuseppe, was stillborn, and they all wept for two days until the earth split in pieces under their feet, and the city caught fire.
The earthquake made their beds skate and block the door. Rosari, Lazaro, and the Benedetti family, who shared the room, howled as the building swayed like a ship with the escape hatch blocked. By the time they made it outside, Telegraph Hill was on fire.
Giuseppe was shining a rich man’s shoes in front of the Majestic Theater on 9th and Market when the seismic convulsion changed his life forever. With a mixture of terror and awe he witnessed the enormous brick edifice, with its roof seventy-five feet above the floor, burst open like a pig on a spit. He stood holding his box of rags and wax as the theater collapsed, as the clay bats missed his head by inches, by a miracle. America was burning and falling around him. God was telling rich and poor alike: He was not pleased.
Rosari never knew that Giuseppe communicated with God because he never mentioned it. He was stoical, conciliatory. The death of his namesake babe was a punishment from the Lord, as was this earthquake. God spoke to Giuseppe in signs, and the destruction of San Francisco was meant to show him by way of example how to make money in America.
Rubble needed to be cleared. Charred and half-toppled houses needed to be demolished to open lots for new buildings. Giuseppe was not a big man, but he became enormous in his strength. He was sinewy and tall for an Italian peasant, and he could swing a sledgehammer like an ape. He sold the box and shoe wax and became a wrecker.
The city smoldered, the family moved to a basement on Columbus Street, and Giuseppe made money by way of destruction. He attacked houses and toppled them like trees to make room for new construction. He chopped down buildings with a hammer, destroyed banks and offices. He removed the citadels of the rich from the face of the earth, returned the broken towers, wrought of brick and wood, to dust.
And as he worked they had six children, and America went to war with Italy, and wine was illegal to buy. Giuseppe became the father of Narciso, Francesca, Ludovico, Grazia, Mary, and Joe, and he destroyed buildings by day and made wine in his backyard with a cast-iron press by night. He took off for work out of town for months at a time, leaving Rosari to care for the children and the invalid father, who wheezed and barely moved. He wandered and found work and came back with money, rarely telling Rosari what he was about. Whenever he could, he took the oldest boys out of school to clear piles of rubble, but Rosari put her foot down with the youngest. She kept little Joe in class because she knew he had a gift.
The family moved to a house on the Southern Pacific tracks in the East Bay, and Giuseppe planted a garden and bought chickens, rabbits, and a goat. He bought property for fifty dollars at county auctions, worthless swamp that some attorney on the East Coast didn’t bother paying the tax on, and his family went without groceries for a month. In Italy, only the wealthy land barons could own property, but in America, Giuseppe was no longer a peasant. With the help of his literate children, he signed ownership contracts, magical documents stamped with gold seals.
The tales of his strength grew among family and neighbors. Giuseppe would break walnuts on his biceps and bend dimes with his teeth. He broke the bones of three men who tried to steal his money in Oakland. There was nothing on earth he couldn’t move when he was angry. A family in Richmond, hearing a ferocious noise of growling and shrieking, stepped outside to witness an entire house moving down the street. Giuseppe had jacked it onto skids and was pushing it to a vacant lot.
By the time America went to war again with Italy, Giuseppe’s sons had made a business of building instead of wrecking, and he found himself wandering more and more in the hills of San Francisco, drinking with old Italians and listening to God. He often felt directed by God to visit certain places or do certain things, and this was how, somewhere in midcentury, his private thoughts took on strange biblical proportions.
When Giuseppe was seventy-nine years old he decided to marry Maria Guadalupe Diego, a seventeen-year-old prostitute from the Latino barrio of the Mission District. He stepped out of Molinari’s on Columbus, a little tipsy, and stood on the steps of the church overlooking Washington Square. This was when he first got the notion that God wanted him to remarry, as he stood on the steps and watched the pigeons circle the spires and fluted alcoves overhead. And even though Giuseppe was currently married, God told him it was time to do it again.
Maria was working North Beach when she spotted Giuseppe shuffling across the park in a forty-year-old, three-piece, pin-striped suit. Two months pregnant by God only knew which salesman from Tulsa or sailor from San Diego, she heard the child speak to her and express its desire to live. This was three days before Mañuel and one of his girls were supposed to take her for the abortion. She lay on the grass in Washington Square watching a cloud the shape of a woman’s face while two men played a flute and a clarinet, and the child said, I want this from her