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“Count them for me, little lion.” He counted all the way to twenty just like I had taught him.
Once we were back on the sand, relief flooded through my body. With it came a kind of satisfied exhilaration that I’d taken my child out into the sea and both of us had survived. There were brief moments like this one when mothering presented the same challenges I’d been given in school and rewarded me with the same small pleasures. Cettina poured me a glass of pear juice. “Your belly is getting big again.” My sweet friend glanced away. “It’s not fair. Gio looks at you and you get pregnant.”
“I promise that is not how it happens.” I took the drink from her. But wasn’t it true enough? I’d spent less than six months with my husband since we had been married and soon I would have three children. Getting pregnant was not work for me, not like it was for Cettina.
Cettina and Liuni had the largest wedding Caltabellessa had seen since the mayor’s daughter got married. It wasn’t that their families were particularly wealthy or important. The village simply loved the two of them. Cettina had perched sidesaddle on a mule for the hour-long procession up the entire mountain, her long wedding train dragging through the dirt behind her. The old women and men sang, wailed, and banged on goatskin drums and tambourines as the rest of us tossed wheat at the bride to wish her prosperity and fertility. For months before the big party Cettina talked of nothing but making babies and how my children would soon have playmates that we would raise as cousins. But it did not happen that month, or the month after. For the first year Liuni dutifully came home from Palermo every time the witch told Cettina that her body was ripe. She drank and ate everything the old woman gave to her, including the placenta of a goat right after it had given birth. None of it helped her conceive a child.
“He is going to leave me,” she wailed after a year. “He should leave me because I am barren and I will never give him a family.” I grieved with her each month when she began to bleed, but Liuni, sweet little Liuni, with his different-colored eyes and soft belly and pretty hands, would never leave Cetti. He did, however, start to come home less and less. But it wasn’t because of Cettina. He was busy in his last year of studies at the university in Palermo. He tried to get Cetti to join him in the city, but she had no interest in leaving the village.
“The city is poison. It is like a nasty prostitute that leads you down a dreadful road with her charm and then stabs you in the eye,” Cetti said. “We have everything we need here. This village is a small slice of paradise.”
It was not. There was less money than ever to go around. Every promise made to us by the government was broken. We were told by the mayor that all our homes would be given running water, but that never happened for most of us. We went to the public wells and springs and protected every drop like it could be our last.
The criminal brotherhoods, the ones who liked to be called “the men of honor” instead of the mafiusi, had fixed our wells when they first broke down and the government did not come to help us. But a year later the so-called men of honor took the wells over completely and charged us enormous fees for our water. No one in Palermo bothered to stop them. When crops were weak, the mafiusi gave out money and extra food to peasants and farmers while the government let us starve. But a year later they would turn around and charge us double what we used to pay for the food and then they would demand protection money from the same citizens to keep us safe from bandits who were probably on their payroll. When it went unpaid, barns were burned to the ground, or worse.
My own brothers, still boys, had set off for il continente to find work and support my mother after Papa died. But for Cetti, despite her struggles to bear children, the village would always be more than enough. She loved it with the same passion I once had to flee it.
I prodded her. “You are a crazy person for not going. I would give anything to live in Palermo.”
“You could join Gio on the mainland.”
“You know that he has never asked me to come there, and he never will. He lives in one room with six other men. They sleep in bunks. There is no space for a wife and two, almost three, babies.”
Santo began to whine. “I go in water?”
“Shhhhh. You’re too little.” Cettina wrapped her arms around him and began to cradle him like a little baby. “You are not big yet. You are still my baby. My teeny-tiny baby.”
I rubbed my belly as Cettina tenderly kissed my child on his cheek and neck and each of his ears.
“I wish I could give you this new one.” I chuckled as I said it, though it wasn’t entirely a joke. With each of my pregnancies, I felt more and more hollowed out, like another piece of me was being carved away, taking me further from the person I had wanted to be, that girl who would go to school in a city by the sea. I had once wanted to read great books and write down all my thoughts. I wanted to debate big ideas and understand why our small island, so rich in so many ways, remained so poor in all the ways that mattered to the rest of the world. Since becoming a mother, I barely had time to remember all the things I once wanted, all the lives I hoped to lead, but sometimes the desire all flooded back and I felt a small death.
I thought joking about surrendering my baby to Cettina would make her smile, but it had the opposite effect.
“Do not say something like that. You could not give away your own child.”
“I meant you would be such a good mother. And if I could give you a baby I would. I wish my baby could be your baby.”
“Your babies are my babies. They might be my only babies.”
“You will have your own little boy one day.”
Cettina ignored me and nuzzled her face into the chubby folds of Santo’s neck. “How do you know it is a he? You could be having a little girl this time. Wouldn’t that be nice? We can braid her hair and put her in little dresses.”
I didn’t have the words to explain how I felt about bringing a little girl into our village. No part of me had any desire to raise someone who would only be able to grow up to be a wife and a mother.
“I love my boys. And you love my boys. But soon you will have one of your own. I know it.”
“It doesn’t help that Melina makes babies even faster than you do.” Cettina rarely said nasty things and she never met my eyes when she did it. Instead, she let the words float out to the sea. Melina was her sister-in-law, Marco’s wife. In the seven years since Marco had been married to Melina they had welcomed four babies and now she had another on the way. Melina told anyone who would listen how she planned to give Marco ten babies, maybe more.
Cettina and Melina quietly fought one another for their mother-in-law’s affections. Cettina took Liuni’s mamma to mass every Tuesday and Thursday night. She cooked Sunday lunches even when Liuni was out of town and brought her warm bread fresh from the baker on Monday mornings. But companionship was never enough to raise Cetti to Melina’s status in her mother-in-law’s eyes and everyone gossiped about it. Cettina knew that Melina pitied her. Her sister-in-law came from wealthy people. Her father collected taxes and was rich as a pig. She flaunted her family’s money with nice clothes, braided corsets of red and gold that she would pass on to Cettina only when they became threadbare and ripped. One day Cettina overheard Melina telling Marco and Liuni’s mother that it was not a problem if Cettina was barren because she would give her all the grandbabies she would ever need.
“Melina is a nasty beast who is not fit to carry your shoes,” I had told her over and over. “I don’t even know how Marco can stand to be around her. He’s so kind and wonderful and she is truly wretched.”
Cettina pulled the end of her braid into her mouth and sucked on her hair the way she did when we were small. “She is a better wife than I am and God has not sent her the misfortunes that he has sent me.”
Cettina’s certainty that motherhood made Melina a better woman made me want to rip my own hair from my head, but I never answered when she said ridiculous things. Instead, I poured us both more to drink and lay back on my towel, letting the two little ones climb all over my body, the sand scratching at my skin, the sun burning my face. In the moment, it was a life I could love.
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