AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Do not make this worse than it already is,” my mother said. “There will be a wedding and then there will be a baby. That is the way things are supposed to be. Do not behave as if this is the end of the world. Your soft spot for the girl is shameful. Many fathers would have killed a daughter for this kind of sin.”
I said nothing. A well-brought-up daughter, a modest girl who would make a good marriage, was a reflection of the family’s honor. Gio’s family was even less well off than my own. Given my circumstances and the role their son had played in them they wouldn’t require a dowry from my family. This, my mother made sure to tell me, was no small amount of grace.
“A good marriage for you would have bankrupted us. We do not have an extra bay mule or gold coin to our name and times are only getting worse.”
A girl’s dowry payments ruined families like ours, the ones who made only enough to get by. How many times had I heard the old sayings: “Blessed is the door out of which goes a dead daughter, and the older and uglier she is the greater the comfort” or “I have five children. One boy and four burdens.”
I bit my tongue to stop from replying that my having no marriage at all, that a life far away working as a teacher in a city would have cost them nothing.
The wedding had to be small. Everyone in town had already remarked on how fat I was. Mamma saw no point in showing it off some more. People would stop talking after there was a ceremony. I wore the church dress Mamma had worn to mass when she was with child and added a lace ribbon and my mother’s wedding veil. The ceremony and mass were just me, Gio, our parents, and the priest. Father Caputo’s breath was sweet with the smell of wine. Gio traced a shape in my palm with the tip of his finger. I smiled at the memory of the made-up constellation, the tipsy priest.
We had only a month living together as husband and wife before Gio took a job at the sulfur mine in Sciacca and stayed down in the bowels of hell scraping the minerals from the earth for two weeks at a time. When he came home I fed him and listened to his raspy breath on the nights when I couldn’t sleep because my body was too large to be comfortable in any position. No matter which way I rolled, it felt like I was crushing the baby or the baby was crushing me.
Sometimes my tossing and turning would wake Gio and he’d tell me stories about the men who worked in the mines with him.
“These men have become my cumpari, my greatest friends. I am closer to them than even Liuni,” he admitted.
He talked about a small one-eyed man named Cloru, who had seven fingers on his left hand, which meant he could play the harmonica better than anyone Gio had ever heard. Sometimes Cloru would drink too much, put on a skirt, and play the miners lullabies while he stroked their heads like he was their mother. Cloru caught a rat underground that was as large as a tiny dog and he kept it on a leash tied to his belt. He was training the rodent to dance along with his harmonica. I laughed at these stories, imagining a small man in women’s clothes doing a jig alongside a monstrous rat.
Sometimes when I laughed I got a cramp in my belly so bad I’d have shooting pains down my torso for the rest of the night. Gio would rub small circles into my lower back and aching hips.
None of my friends had yet been pregnant and Mamma would not speak to me about my aches and pains. I had no one to ask what was normal and what was strange to happen to a body about to have a child.
“We can go to see the old woman again,” Cettina said when a yellowish paste started leaking from my nipples.
“I can’t walk that far,” I said. I hardly left the house. A woman in my condition became an object of fascination and I hated it, hated the eyes on my body. By the end of it I felt obscene being out in public at all.
“I could ask her to come here,” Cettina said with uncertainty because we both knew the old woman came only when the baby was ready to be born.
The labor pains arrived early one morning while I was using the toilet, soon becoming a white-hot sharp thing that felt like someone lit fire to all of my insides. I barely made it across the alley to Mamma’s house, where I collapsed in front of her door.
I awoke on the straw mattress I had slept on as a child, stripped naked and writhing in pain and terror. My body had been trying to do the work as I slept, but something was very wrong. Mamma was in the room along with my grandmother and two aunts, the ones Mamma liked the best. Cettina stood in the corner with a red face and puffy eyes. Mamma’s fingers worked a black rosary that Papa had brought her back from the Feast of Saint Lucia in Palermo. My body felt as though it were being sliced in two and all I wanted to do was close my eyes again. My heart pounded like it wanted out of my chest. I no longer cared if I was dying; I let myself fall into the blackness. When I opened my eyes again the witch was there and all I could see was the map of wrinkles on the old woman’s face. The lines formed grooves and canyons around her eyes and her mouth, which had been touching my mouth only a second before. I realized the woman was trying to give me breath, trying to keep me alive.
Maybe my baby will die. I did not wish it, but I let myself think it. If the baby died, my life could go back to the way it was. Maybe the school would take me back. Maybe I could leave here.
“He is backward,” the old woman whispered when she saw my eyes open. “I am going to turn him around.” She poured a foul-smelling liquid down my throat and maneuvered a stick in between my teeth and instructed me to bite down. Cettina released a bloodcurdling scream from the other side of the room as the woman reached her hand into my body, the arm going inside me up to her elbow. I felt the witch’s hand turn, could feel every muscle and tendon in her forearm scraping my insides. Then one last sharp pain, like a knife being twisted into an open wound, and I felt nothing more. Mamma cried, helpless beside me, gripping my limp hand, whispering prayers. The witch slid her hand out and the baby soon followed, a writhing purple thing. He didn’t make a noise. Someone slapped him on the back and he released a low whimper. The old woman poured another drink that tasted like dirt and blood into my mouth and began washing thick white paste from the baby. I fell asleep again and by the time I was awake the witch was gone, no trace of her left behind and no mention of her ever being there at all.
When I asked Cettina why she had left she looked at me like I was stupid, which I was when it came to the ways of the world. “She slips in and she slips out. She stays invisible to the men so that the women can go to her for what the doctor will not or cannot give them.”
As Cosimo, Cosi for short, grew I knew he was happy. I knew it because he smiled earlier than other babies and he never cried. He was so silent my mother found him unnerving and strange.
“Something is wrong with him,” she insisted. “Babies need to cry. It helps them release the demons.”
The blood boiled in my veins.
“He is thinking,” I snapped while Cettina held him. My friend came to the house every day to hold the baby and talk about her own wedding, which would take place during summer. I felt a fierce need to defend Cosi to my mother, a baby I’d never even wanted to exist, a baby I’d hoped would somehow be knocked loose all those months he lived in my body. But once he arrived and it was just the two of us living in our one-room apartment while Gio worked far away I began to enjoy the child’s silent friendship.
After the birth I sent a letter down the mountain for Gio. He sent back congratulations with extra money but stayed away for the next three months. It was for the best. Everyone knew a man was useless around a tiny baby. The winter grew frigid and sometimes we didn’t leave the house for days. I swaddled the baby tightly to make sure his legs would grow straight and then burrowed into a nest of quilts with him, rising only to grab a hunk of bread and cheese, enough to keep my milk flowing.
Taking care of the baby was second nature after helping to raise my younger siblings. But it was different with Cosi. He was a piece of me. I talked to him like I’d never spoken to anyone else, told him stories about our family and the town, told him how, initially, I didn’t want him or his father, how I’d wanted something more, even though I didn’t know exactly what more meant.
I told him how I wished I could have gone to school longer. I taught Cosi all the numbers I knew, counting everything in the room and his fingers and his toes over and over for hours on end. Somehow neither of us ever got bored of it.
When spring came, I tied the baby to my body with a tight muslin and walked him through the village. Cosi made everyone smile and they gave him presents, a crusty slice of bread to cut his teeth on, fresh whey skimmed off the milk. The cheesemonger asked both of us to open our mouths and close our eyes before placing velvety ricotta directly onto our tongues.
My husband had been a boy of fifteen when I married him. After a year of working in the mines with men twice his age and living apart from his mamma he started to grow into a man. The muscles in his arms and chest hardened. And even though he always smelled of smoke and brimstone, some nights in our bed together I began to feel a warm stirring between my legs for him, but he was always too tired to reach for me.
The stories he told were no longer sweet and funny. “It’s too hot for clothes in the mines anymore. Even a thin shirt feels like flames on your skin. We work naked most days since the air is on fire,” he whispered. His once smooth olive skin was burnt and warped on the backs of his thighs, the bottoms of his feet.
