For the Temple: A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem - Softcover

Henty, G. A.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1890623075 ISBN 13: 9781890623074

Publisher: Lost Classics Book Company, 1999

Synopsis

This tale follows the adventures of John of Gamala during the years of Roman occupation, political infighting, and lawlessness that resulted in the destruction of the Temple in AD 70. It puts the reader at the heart of the conflict between Rome and the greedy political groups and robber bands of Palestine.

About this title

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

For the Temple

A Tale of the Fall of JerusalemBy G. A. Henty

Lost Classics Book Co.

Copyright © 1999 G. A. Henty
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9781890623074

Chapter One

A Stranger in the Village

Terrasini, Sicily
April 1995

The birthplace of my grandparents, of the bandit Francesco "the Monk" and theblur of generations before him, is a fishing village on the Gulf ofCastellammare, twenty-five miles west of Palermo. In the blinding Mediterraneannoon, four elderly men play cards under a makeshift canvas awning as I driveslowly through the port. Their eyes closely follow my car, but nobody speaks. Inthe rearview mirror, after I pass, they are still watching. The harborcaffes are deserted at this hour. A trawler rocks gently on a northernswell. The spring air is ripe with the odors of saltwater, lemon blossom, andwild fennel.

Two years have passed since my grandfather's death when I arrive in Terrasini,almost three since his enigmatic words in a Detroit kitchen. I have a story tosort out, a riddle to unlock. Beyond that, I can't really explain why I've comehere, to a village where I know no one and have no past of my own. There is onlythat riddle with my name on it, a dead man and his killer.

In the mirror, the card players have returned to their game. I park the car andwalk out along a concrete wharf, carrying a tourist brochure. From the sea,Terrasini is a cubist jumble of pastel houses set on a cliff above the harbor.

The wharf rests on blocks of amber limestone cut from Monte Palmeto, a bareridge two miles inland that rises nineteen hundred feet into a jagged mosaic ofpeak and canyon. Quarrymen, I read, have been sculpting the brow of Palmeto forthirty centuries, since a Bronze Age tribe built their chief city on theoutskirts of present-day Terrasini. The limestone blocks in the harbor may bethe vestiges of that city, or of the antique Roman settlement Terrasinus, the"land on the Gulf." The village fishermen, who moor their boats to the enormousold stones, insist that they are the ruins of Atlantis.

My grandfather passed his childhood on the Terrasini harborside. The Monk musthave watched the shadows flee Monte Palmeto under a noonday sun. I recognizethat a setting is unfolding, that the plot and characters of my story are hiddenin this landscape.

The rectangular grid of streets immediately above the harbor is the fishermen'squarter, a dozen blocks of net-draped cottages tightly packed onto a knollbehind the chapel of Maria Santissima della Provvidenza, protectoress ofseafarers. On a map posted in front of the chapel, the quarter is identified asContrada Marina, the maritime district, but its residents have always called it"Favarotta," as did my grandparents.

It is an allusion to the secret language that murmurs under the visible surfaceof Sicilian life, a vocabulary of coded words and symbols riven from a torturedhistory. The island of Sicily has been sacked by nearly every conqueror to passthrough the Mediterranean basin for three thousand years. Ten centuries ago,when the most recent invaders were North African, Arab galleys were moored tothe amber harbor stones. "Favarotta" is derived from fawar, Arabic for"fountain"; it refers to a spring of cool water that gushes up from slabs ofrose shale where Our Lady of Providence surveys the tuna fleet.

Favarotta occupies the narrow end of an elongated wedge that encloses thevillage. Its dimensions have barely changed since my grandfather's birth.Twenty-two streets climb the slope toward the base of Monte Palmeto, cut by tenthat parallel the gulf shore. The map's focal point, stretching along aneast-west axis for a full block between the fishermen's cottages and the rest ofthe village, is the broad Piazza Duomo, lined by shady ficus trees and thecrumbling palazzi of minor nobles. Maria Santissima delle Grazie, theprincipal church of Terrasini, anchors the piazza's upper end with two belltowers.

Officially, eleven thousand people reside in Terrasini and its outlyingcountryside in 1995. At noon on the day of my arrival, the face of the villageis a sun-washed mask: narrow cobbled streets interspersed with baroque churchesand squares, houses shuttered to the meridional heat, a border of seascape andcitrus grove. Its soul is the ancestral memory, a dark grotto of whispered namesand archaic understandings etched in nearly impenetrable code.

Sicily was familiar to me from periodic assignments dating back to the lateseventies, when I'd begun covering organized crime as a wire service reporter. Iknew the general history, a few of the local tales, and a lot of what wasdirectly connected to the murder trials and political scandals that brought meto the island on professional business. But I had never spent more than anafternoon in Terrasini.

The idea had materialized gradually in the year after my grandfather's death: Iwould take up residence in the birthplace of my namesake, a village where threeof my grandparents had also been born and the fourth was raised. I would learnwho killed the Monk, and why. I would find out what my grandfather's wordsmeant.

For two and a half years I put off this trip and prepared for it at the sametime. I had to make a living, I told myself; I couldn't drop everything to chasedown a riddle. But I knew, at heart, that it was just a matter of time.

I bought books on Sicily wherever I found them, straightforward tourist guidesand obscure academic studies in English, French, and Italian, until I'daccumulated a respectable library. I hoarded vacation days, letting them pile upuntil I could take off for a couple of months. Then I locked up my office at theSan Francisco Chronicle bureau in Paris and headed south across Franceand the Italian border to Genoa, where I boarded a car ferry for the 750-milevoyage to Palermo. Not precisely my grandfather's voyage in reverse, but asymbolic approximation.

Three hours after I arrived in Terrasini, I checked into a dusty guest housejust behind Maria Santissima delle Grazie. My room had a sagging, ornatelygilded matrimonial bed, a small wooden desk, and one chair, and a shower whosetemperature shifted unpredictably from scalding to ice cold. There was no phone.The windows opened onto a narrow balcony directly under the church towers; theirbells struck every fifteen minutes around the clock, in great baritone pealsthat rattled the window frames. Four strokes at 4:00 P.M. One at each quarterhour, two at the half hour, three at three quarters.

The bell towers overlooked the western turn of Terrasini's passeggiata,the evening promenade in the piazza. By unspoken consensus, teenagers ruled itfor two hours, starting at five. They strutted in unruly knots, clusters of boysshouting insults at each other and ogling clusters of girls. At the stroke ofseven, the teenagers promptly disappeared and were replaced by young familiesand older strollers, the men still with men and the women with women, glidingarm-in-arm past the church and the piazza's five caffes and three socialclubs.

The protocol was rigid. The first time I joined the passeggiata, sweptalong on a teenaged wave as the bells rang six, I noticed that the men sippingamaro outside of the Circolo Contadino and Di Maggio's Caffe remainedpinned to their chairs. An hour later, one of the Di Maggio clients rose fromhis seat, introduced himself in English, and walked me through several circuitsof the piazza, explaining the rules. He had spent seventeen years in Michiganand New York, learning the ways of life in the United States through trial anderror, and felt sorry for me. His name was Michele Cortese, but he said he'd begrateful if I called him Mike.

"Reminds me of America," he explained.

Mike was to become my closest friend in Terrasini, my guide. I needed both. Iwas a stranger in the village, with a trunk full of books and a fuzzyagenda.

The most simple biographical facts were missing when I began the search for theMonk. I knew that he had had at least two sons, my great-grandfather Giuseppeand his elder brother. But I had no idea where our family had lived inTerrasini, no idea when the first Francesco had married, no idea if there hadbeen other children.

Indeed, I had no idea when he was born or when he had died — only that themurder occurred after Giuseppe was baptized in 1864, with his father inattendance. And I only knew that because the baptismal certificate from MariaSantissima delle Grazie lay amid the yellowed documents that Grandma Angelinahad hidden inside the furniture upholstery during the early stages of herdementia. We found it after her death in 1984, along with a cache of unpaidbills from J. L. Hudson's Department Store and the sheet music from love songsshe played on the piano.

My grandfather took the answers I sought to the grave, leaving me with animprobable hope that the Monk and his killer had not been forgotten on the Gulfof Castellammare.

So I took a step back and began the way a reporter should have, surveying theground, taking notes, asking more questions. The who, where, when, and why thatmight bring a riddle closer to a coherent account, to a killing and itsmotivation.

The history was fresher in Sicily, in place if not time. That was clear from myfirst acquisition in Terrasini, a telephone directory. The reporter's most basictool. Sixty-three family names were listed in its pages. They were, I would soonfind, the same names that had filled the village's civil ledgers in 1850. Therecould hardly be a corner of Europe where the pace of change was more lethargic.The wealth of direct connections to the past, traced by sixty-three unbrokenfamily lines, bore its enormous weight on every conversation.

Sicily, in this regard, was the antithesis of America. Ancestral memory wasinescapable here.

Two days after I moved into the guest house, I presented myself at the PalazzoLa Grua, an austere eighteenth-century baronial mansion that now served asTerrasini's town hall. My credentials were a note of introduction from Mike,with whom I'd had dinner the evening before, and the 1864 baptismal certificateof Giuseppe Viviano.

The research ought to have been straightforward: assembling a complete familytree from the municipal records and filling in the biography of the firstFrancesco, the Monk. Once I knew the dates of his birth and death, I couldundertake the much more complicated investigation of his checkered life, in thepages of police and court transcripts at the state archive in Palermo, and begintracking down the records of Domenico Valenti.

"In principle, no problem," the village registrar told me.

She was Marianna Trappeto, a former Detroiter in her mid-thirties. Like Mike,she had spent many years in America and was anxious to help.

"But in practice," she added, "there is a certain obstacle."

In principle, the birth, marriage, and death of every Terrasini native had beeninscribed in the civil ledgers by Marianna and her predecessors for fourcenturies. In practice, the bare-bones records annex on the opposite side of thetown hall square, Piazza Municipale, held almost no death or marriage ledgersfrom before 1890, a trail that would lead me barely beyond my grandfather'sdeparture for America. The oldest birth records in the annex were from the1850s, the last stumbling decade of the Spanish and Bourbon kingdoms that ruledSicily for six centuries.

The rest of the ledgers had not been lost, Marianna assured me. "They are packedin boxes somewhere...."

She promised she would try to find out more, and walked me across the piazza tothe annex. "Tanti auguri," she said, parting with an expression thattranslated as "good luck" and implied that I'd need it.

The accessible records were stored in the back room of the annex, in two openbookcases. On the far wall, a photocopy machine was buried under a pile ofnewspapers and magazines, next to the desk of a filing clerk in a rumpled cottonsuit who was finishing up a pack of Marlboros as he carefully studied the day'sGazzetta dello Sport. The phone rang, stopped, and then rang again. Heignored it, offered me a chair, and opened a new pack of cigarettes, tossing theGazzetta onto the pile.

"For the moment, I'm afraid, this doesn't work," he said, pointing anicotine-stained finger toward the buried photocopier and shrugging hisshoulders. It didn't work today (or any other day over the next year), and I'dhave to transcribe whatever material I found useful into a notebook. The ledgerswere not allowed to leave the room.

After our introduction, the clerk shook my hand with businesslike formality eachmorning at my arrival and each evening at my departure, and nodded during thepasseggiata. But for weeks we never exchanged another word.

The ledgers, huge leather-bound volumes in an atlas-sized format, were anotherexercise in the distinction between principle and practice. In principle, theywere organized chronologically, opening with the events of January and closingwith December's entries and an alphabetical index of the ledger's infants,newlyweds, or deceased. In practice, the index pages were often torn out orshredded beyond recognition because the protective leather covers had fallenoff.

The entries themselves were frequently rendered indecipherable by anineteenth-century registrar's sloppy hand or by a pen that had spewed ink blotsover the ledgers. In a single volume, there might be three or four alternatespellings of a family name: Valente, Walenti, Valenti, Vallenti. The record —which noted who witnessed a birth, marriage, or death, as well as the date andsite of the event and the immediate lineage of the subject — might be writtenin formal Italian or a phoneticized rendition of Sicilian dialect, depending onthe education of the registrar.

Some of the archive officials had been quite precise in their descriptions. The1900 birth record of my maternal grandmother, Caterina Cammarata, identified herfather as "blacksmith, Via Santa Rosalia, four children." Others were satisfiedwith a no-frills class label. On his son Giuseppe's record, Francesco the Monkwas simply described as "viddanu," the dialect term for a peasant. Manyrecords noted only the names of bridegrooms in the marriage indexes and omittedthe ages of mothers from birth certificates.

A misstep and I could wander into a genealogical maze, confronted at every turnby my own name. There was nothing remarkable in village Sicily about theexistence of dozens of Francesco Paolo Vivianos in the same generation. "Onetenth of the men in Terrasini are named Viviano, and one fourth of the Vivianomen are named Francesco Paolo," Marianna Trappeto had declared, when I told herI was looking for information about my namesake.

Her hands were held close to her sides with palms turned upward, a gesture thatconveys the fruitlessness of a proposed task and the folly of anyone who mightundertake it.

It was the code. Sicilian parents name their first son after his paternalgrandfather and their second after his maternal grandfather, just as a firstdaughter takes the name of her paternal grandmother and a second that of hermother's mother. In anthropological jargon, the tradition is referred to as"pappanomy," and Sicily is its textbook example. Only with a third son or thirddaughter is invention allowed to play a role.

This is more than custom; it has the force of fixed, immutable law. To violateit is to break ranks with centuries of ancestors. A name in Sicily is at theexistential heart of identity: Ano's final thought in the desert, clung to asthough it were life itself.

In my own family, there were three Frank Pauls and five Angelas on my father'sside, four Salvatores on my mother's. My grandparents had nine children inAmerica. Seven of the nine had found spouses in New York or Detroit who werealso children of Terrasini immigrants, and dutifully baptized a new generationof Francescos, Angelas, and Salvatores.

As the first-born grandson in my generation, there had been no doubt about whatmy name would be. From the moment that a boy was presented to my groggy motherin the delivery room of Detroit's Providence Hospital in 1947, the family hadautomatically referred to me as "Franky." But as far as Grandma Angelina wasconcerned, my timing bespoke a miracle. For I had chosen in the womb itself, shedeclared, to make my appearance on December 3, which was nothing less than thefeast day of my saint, San Francesco — and her own birthday. "Figghiu miu,miraculu!"

It was a wonder the label didn't stick to me. Acquired nicknames, known indialect as 'nciuria, are supplied for nearly every Sicilian; had I beenborn in Terrasini, I would almost certainly have struggled through childhoodnicknamed "the miracle."

In Sicily's more remote villages, there is no point in referring to someone by abaptismal first name; only the local priest recognizes it. More effective is toask after the likes of Ammazza-Mugghieri, Ninfa la Rossa, Cicciu CinqueMille, or Facci-Lurdda: "Wife-Killer," "Red Nymph," "Cicciu Five-Thousand,"or "Dirty Face." Poor Signore Wife-Killer, the barkeep of a caffe, was aTerrasini widower who had outlived several mates. Ninfa la Rossa, mygreat-grandmother, was a fanatically devoted Catholic, "red" with religiousfervor. But the 'nciuria could also be ironic. Dirty Face was a manknown for his excessive fastidiousness. As for Cicciu Five Thousand, he earnedhis name in the Detroit numbers racket, before returning to Sicily. Cicciu is aSicilian diminutive for Francesco.

The word 'nciuria itself is derived from the Italian ingiuria,which translates as "insult," but its force in Sicilian dialect is not usuallypejorative and its function is far more complicated. On the one hand, it is apractical way of distinguishing between the scores of identically named men andwomen in a family or town. Among the nineteenth-century plethora of FrancescoPaolo Vivianos, the invention and use of "lu Monacu" was a necessarydevice, as well as a suggestive riddle.

When acquired in one's childhood, an 'nciuria can also carry the weightof a prophecy or a definition of character. Saro D'Anna, a friend of Mike's inTerrasini, had been dubbed Aceddu, "the Bird," in his infancy; at thirty, he waslight in his movements and airy in manner — visibly birdlike, a fulfillment ofthe 'nciuria that his fellow villagers regarded as entirely predictable.Just as predictable, in their view, was the fact that he had married a talkativeyoung woman known universally as Caccarazza, "Magpie."

Yet as much as the 'nciuria prevails in everyday usage, it never appearsin a church or municipal record. The result is the archival maze that swallowedme in Terrasini, the endless march of identical names. There were hundreds ofbirth records for infant boys baptized Francesco Paolo Viviano in the municipalarchives, a mind-numbing prospect. But I would know, more often than not, if Iwas on the wrong track in my research when a first son with that name did notlead back to a paternal namesake in exactly two pappanomic generations.

In principle, it ought to have worked. I buckled down to the search.

Continues...

Excerpted from For the Templeby G. A. Henty Copyright © 1999 by G. A. Henty. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Lost Classics Book Company
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1890623075
• ISBN 13: 9781890623074
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 403