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Each mine employed a group of boys as young as six years old who could fit through the tunnels and carry messages between the groups of miners. These boys came from the poorest families on the island and were usually sold to the mining companies when their parents could no longer afford to feed them. Gio had taken a liking to one of the boys assigned to his group. Donnola, they called him, the weasel, because he could contort his body into the shape of even the narrowest spaces. Gio shortened it to Donni out of affection.
“Maybe I can make enough money for the boy to come to live with us one day,” Gio said.
I didn’t bother to point out to my husband that he was barely making enough money to feed the three of us.
The next time he came home Gio didn’t mention Donni or Cloru. He stopped laughing and smiling too. He stayed home for two weeks and then another. He was there when Cosi celebrated his first birthday.
“Mamma will be so happy you are here for the celebration,” I lied to my husband. “She made Cosi a little white suit encrusted with tiny pearls she’d pulled from the hem of her own wedding dress. He looks like a shiny doll when he wears it.” I told Gio this hoping he would get excited, but nothing could make him smile. We went to the one restaurant in town and ordered a feast, seating Cosi at the head of the table like the man of the family, propped up with pillows so he was nearly looking down on us. Mamma beamed at her grandson and even at her son-in-law, who she usually tried to ignore. It was a momentous day for Mamma, her first grandson turning a year old. Many of her friends’ daughters had babies who hadn’t made it through the first year—pneumonia, influenza, burns, one child who simply never learned how to swallow at his mother’s breast and starved by the time he was two weeks old. The mothers blamed themselves and the grandmothers blamed their daughters and themselves. Despite everything I had ever done wrong in Mamma’s eyes, I’d managed to keep Cosi alive for the first year and it might have been the first time my mother was truly proud of me. My papa had changed too, but his feelings for me were different from Mamma’s. Before the baby came, he had been proud of who I might turn out to be. Now he looked through me, not unlike the way he looked through my mother and her sisters. I was no longer special to him.
“Gio, when will you return to Sciacca?” Papa asked as the food began to arrive, platters piled high with olives and artichokes, sun-dried tomatoes swimming in oil, bombettes, pork necks stuffed with herbs, crushed almonds and cheese roasted over a bed of hot coals in the garden, and slabs of swordfish so fresh you could still smell the blood on the fingers of the man who brought the plate. “The mine can do without you for so long?”
“I am not returning to the mine,” Gio whispered. It was the first time I had heard him talk of the mine since he returned.
“You will stay here?” Gio shook his head and lifted a glass of wine to his thin lips. Cosi inherited my lips, full and red like the meat inside a tomato. Gio’s lips were narrow, a thin line across his otherwise unremarkable face.
A shudder of panic ran through my body as I considered what it would be like to have my husband living with me and my son every day, not the sweet, clumsy, gentle boy I’d married but this new miserable husk of a man. What would it be like to have the three of us in that one room every day and every night?
It must have been the first time Gio’s own mamma had heard of this too because she turned to him with a look of surprise. “The mine is a good job.”
“There was a fire,” he murmured. “Six of the tunnels fell down and they do not need many of us anymore. I was told not to come back.”
His mother crossed herself and pulled her son’s head to her breast, offering up a prayer to Saint Rosalia that he had made it home safe, murmuring about the many accidents in the mines.
“It was not an accident,” Gio spat. “The mine owners did not secure it properly. The tunnels never should have collapsed.” I could feel his anger like a pain seeping into my own skin. I knew without asking him why he no longer mentioned Donni.
I looked to Papa for help. He must be able to get Gio a job in Palermo working on the grand new roads. But Gio spoke first.
“There is a job for me in Calabria.”
Il continente. The mainland. “How long will you be gone?” I plucked Cosi from his throne of pillows and clutched his squirmy frame to me. He reached his fingers out to grab a fistful of peaches smothered in honey and shoved them into his mouth.
“Most of the year.” Gio’s words sent a surge of relief through my body. “There is work for me on the docks.”
“It sounds like a good job,” Gio’s mamma said.
“Auguri!” Gio’s poor wretch of a father raised his glass of wine in congratulations and the rest of the table did the same. “Auguri e figghi masculi!” I congratulate you and wish you more male children. Everyone looked at me and laughed with their mouths wide open because now that Cosimo was one year old they expected me to be pregnant again. I raised my own glass and placed a hand on my belly because that is what they wanted to see me do. The tips of my fingers curled inward, my nails digging into my skin until it was painful.
I passed Cosi to my mother, who did not notice my agitation. Only Cettina stared at me with any kind of concern and gripped my knee beneath the table. “Don’t make that face,” she whispered. “You have to pretend to be happy. You have a beautiful child, and your husband will soon have a good job on il continente. What more do you wish for? Do not be greedy.”
Cettina was now officially betrothed to Liuni, but he didn’t make it to the party. He was in Palermo taking political classes at the university. “Liuni will be an important man one day,” my father said. “He’ll help us get those bastards out of Palermo.”
There were so many bastards in Palermo, so many bastards in charge of our island, that I was never certain which bastards my father was referring to. I had learned about politics in school from a teacher who was sympathetic to the causes of workers and peasants. Maestro Falleti had explained that ever since the Risorgimento, when Sicily was forced to become a part of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861, the rich leaders in the northern cities on the mainland had been bleeding our island dry. “Sucking the life from our blood and our soil,” he told us. “They take our sulfur, our good grain and our grapes, our fish and our meat, and they give us the lowest possible prices for it because we are all one kingdom now. But what do we get from them in return? Nothing. Sicily may have no choice but to be a part of Italy. But our people will never be of Italy. We are not Italians. We are Siciliani.” And the leaders in Palermo, according to Maestro Falleti, were not much better. They did everything they could to make sure people like us, poor peasants, did not have any control over the direction of our lives. We were helpless as the rich ruling class made life easy for their wealthy friends and taxed the poor into debt.
“Surfaru sugnu. I am just sulfur. They want us to have no control over what happens to us, no sense of self-determination,” Falleti said.
It was the first time, but not the last, that I would understand how the new unified Italian state and the rich ruling class in Palermo were making sure we rural Sicilians would always remain poor. Liuni was sympathetic to Maestro Falleti’s views. He’d been his most eager student, working secretly with the fasci del lavoratori, a group of men trying to unite the farmers, the industrial workers, the tradespeople, and the guild members in a single fasci, or bundle, to fight for less taxes, more rights, and better conditions for the common people. All this knowledge was still in my brain, now dusty and useless. The women in town did not talk of such things and the men did not talk to women about politics.
Liuni’s older brother, Marco, escorted Cettina to dinner in place of her fiancé on the night of Cosi’s birthday. He had been many classes ahead of me in school, but we knew one another because there was only one classroom for all the children in town. He had been smart but also kind. He used to help Falleti by giving the younger children our lessons when the maestro became overwhelmed or got too drunk during the day. I always tried to impress Marco with how well I could read and write. He was the first boy I ever thought of as handsome, and as a married woman I could only allow myself to take the adult Marco in with small glances. He’d been sitting next to Cettina for most of dinner but now he leaned against the doorframe, his bearing calm and curious, his jet-black hair longer than any of the other men’s in the room, nearly brushing the collar of his freshly ironed shirt. He was newly married too, to the daughter of the richest man in town. Before he left that night he came to our table and handed me a small envelope. “For the little one,” he said. It was the only time I allowed myself to meet Marco’s clear green eyes. The envelope contained ten lire.
Later that night I put Cosi in between me and Gio. I stroked my son’s silky hair until he fell asleep. He’d eaten everything we put in front of him at dinner, the artichokes, the pork bellies, the squid, and even the grilled cow tongue, proving over and over again that he was a healthy specimen of a little man.
When I woke at daybreak my husband had moved our child off the bed. Cosi was grunting and snoring in the blankets in the corner of the room and Gio was turned away from me facing the wall. His body shook with sobs he tried to keep silent. The contours of his neck and shuddering shoulders were visible in the dark. Gio always slept with no clothes. No matter how cold it was in our room he sweated through any sheet I tried to put on top of him. I flinched at first, unsure what to do. I’d never seen or heard a man cry before. My own father would never shed a tear, much less allow Mamma to witness it. Slowly I reached over to stroke Gio’s back, the way he’d done for me when I was aching and pregnant. I rubbed figure eights and then traced over the trails of my finger with light kisses. My lips fluttered up and down his spine and I felt his body relax into me. I pushed him over onto his back and brushed his tears away with the tips of my fingers.
“You’re never going back there,” I murmured, and rolled my body on top of his. I could feel him grow hard beneath me and knew this was a small way I could give him comfort, could take his mind away from the mines and the new job in a strange new world. I was terrified he would hate me for bearing witness to his humiliation, so I lowered myself down onto him and rocked my hips back and forth, finding an easy rhythm that pleased us both. My husband stared at me in scared surprise as if I were the Madonna come to life, but his tears were gone. I continued to move, closed my eyes, and tried not to think of Marco’s soulful eyes or the way his rough knuckles brushed up against mine when he handed me the envelope.
It was only a minute before I felt Gio’s wetness between my legs. He sat up and buried his face in the crook of my neck and whispered, “Thank you.” It was the first time since we’d been married that I felt I had done my duty as his wife.
My husband had already crossed the strait toward Calabria by the time my stomach started to swell again.
