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Weeks later Cettina banged on my door in the middle of the night. “Melina is sick. Her baby is coming. He is killing her.” I glanced at my own children, curled up together on a cot in the corner, Cosi’s arm wrapped protectively around Santo. They would be fine alone for an hour. My mother across the alley would hear them if they cried out.
It was so early in the morning the streets were dark except for a single floating wick lamp lit in the bakery.
Melina was nearly gone by the time we arrived. There was hardly a pulse. Her breath was ragged and deep, but her baby kept coming. It was much too early. Marco was sent away from the room. He screamed and fought, but his mamma and sister shoved him out the door. “This is no place for a man,” they said.
Our job at the bedside was to pray, but I couldn’t simply bow my head as la strega worked. “Let me help you,” I said. “What can I do?” She calmly told me to slide Melina’s hips off the bed and support her in an upright position. The woman’s body was limp by then. The witch moved one of my hands to apply pressure on Melina’s abdomen while she coaxed the child from her body.
The baby was very small but alive. The witch tied him to her own body with a scarf and took him away.
“She will try to make him well,” Cettina whispered, choking on her next words. “But the baby came after Melina’s last breath. The baby was born to a corpse. That means he is cursed.” She only breathed the last words but every woman in the room heard her and they nodded their heads in agreement. There was no way this baby would live. And if for some reason he did, they all believed he was destined to become a monster.
But I didn’t take to those kinds of things, the curses and superstitions. I had even stopped whispering my secrets in the dragon’s ear and I skipped the confession box as often as I could. “Stop it,” I insisted to Cettina and to the entire room. “He is not cursed. He is a miracle.” But I didn’t think that was true either, because when you stop believing in curses you also stop believing in miracles.
Cettina never mentioned any curse again and it was clear she regretted ever thinking it. Instead, she visited the witch every morning to see the baby. Melina’s own family refused the child they believed killed his mother. They were content to leave him on the edges of town with the old woman. Marco and his mother wanted to see the boy, but Cettina assured them that he should heal before they took him back. She worried that if they saw him when he was still so sickly and weak they would also believe that the child was not right for this world.
Every day the witch instructed Cettina to strip down to her underwear and hold the baby to her own skin for several hours. This, she told her, was part of the cure.
“He is getting stronger,” Cettina told me the day she invited me to come along with her. “He is drinking more milk from the goat. We mix it with cinnamon to help warm his insides. And yesterday he clutched my hand and opened his eyes. He looks just like Liuni. That is what I am calling him.”
Cettina’s affection for her brother-in-law’s child was a dangerous thing, but I agreed to visit him anyway. As soon as we arrived at the witch’s house Cettina bared her chest in front of the fire, the baby to her breast, not suckling, but nuzzling his head against her nipples as though he wished he could. His head was no larger than an apple and it flopped up and down like he was a dying fish. My heart ached for my friend. This should be her own baby rooting for milk, not the child of a dead woman. But Cettina fed him anyway, using a rag soaked in milk. She was so distracted she often forgot to eat herself and I would need to force an egg or a bit of pastina on her.
“No good can come of this,” I whispered to the old woman, who sat quietly at her polished wood table chopping green nettle and parsley with a massive knife.
The witch released a long sigh that sounded like wind whistling through the eaves of an old barn. “What else can we do? There is nothing wrong with him that I cannot fix. It is not his fault he came into the world early. He did not choose to do this to the mother. Someone will need to care for him.”
“But that someone cannot be Cettina. There are orphanages in Sciacca we could take him to.”
“The orphanages in the cities are too full and they cannot give him proper care. He would not survive there. Why can’t it be Cettina? She is his family. His aunt. She loves him. Someone will care for Melina’s other children. Someone needs to care for this child. It can be her.”
The plan seemed so reasonable. The baby was Liuni’s kin too. It wasn’t unheard of for children to be raised by relatives under dreadful circumstances. Liuni would never object if Marco didn’t want this child and Cettina wanted to raise him. I walked to the fire and took off my shoes, stretched my bare feet close to the flames, and rubbed my own stomach. I’d soon have another infant squirming in my arms. Santo could finally walk, and I no longer had to carry him everywhere I went. He could reach for things on his own, feed himself even. But soon, I’d start all over again with this next one.
Melina’s tiny one sputtered like a drunk kitten and Cettina sighed with a kind of pleasure I’d never heard from her lips. I knew then that the old woman was right. This baby was Cettina’s. She was his mother for better or worse.
Days later, when the news came about the terrible thing that happened to Liuni, that baby was the only thing that saved my friend’s life.
They found Liuni’s body in the trunk of a burned-up car in the piazza of Piana dei Greci, a village close to Palermo. He was identified by the Saint Antonio medallion Cettina had gotten him on their wedding day and the fact that the car belonged to the town’s administrator, Franco Cucciamo, whom Liuni was supposed to be meeting with that day.
“They were after Cucciamo. Not Liuni. It was a mistake. Liuni wasn’t mixed up in all that,” Cettina insisted even as she was paralyzed by grief. But we eventually heard the opposite, mostly from Maestro Falleti, our old teacher who could never hold his drink or his tongue. Liuni was mixed up in all that. He’d moved on from labor organizing and joined forces with the politicians trying to take down the Mafia. Liuni had been delivering messages between Franco Cucciamo and the men who were trying to dismantle the crime families. It was dangerous work. Retribution often included the brutal murder of inconsequential men like Liuni to send a message.
The whole village cried for days on end. But soon Cettina’s and Liuni’s families figured out what would be best for everyone to move forward from their grief: Cettina would marry Marco. It was not uncommon for the brother to take in the widow. He needed a wife, and his children needed a mother. She was already caring for his youngest child and somehow a marriage, a blessing from God, would release the new baby from the dire consequences of how it entered the world. Marco never proposed marriage to Cettina. Her mother-in-law did.
Cettina and Marco didn’t have a wedding reception. They didn’t even go to a church for the ceremony. The priest came to their house. In the uncomfortable silence between the vows I gave Marco a reassuring smile. He was doing his best. They all were. He missed his wife as much as Cettina missed her husband. Instead of kissing her on the mouth when it was all over Cettina’s former brother-in-law, now husband, gripped both of her hands in his and said, “I’ll keep you safe and honor you for the rest of our days.”
I found Marco in his mother’s kitchen later that night. “You meant what you said, yes? You will take care of her?” I asked. He fixed his eyes on mine. “Of course. I love her as my sister. I will care for her until I die.” I knew that he meant it, both the part about caring for and protecting my friend and the part about loving her as a sister. I understood even then that Marco would never be able to see Cettina as his wife.
Everyone in town whispered about the way Liuni had been murdered and whether Marco would continue his own work in politics. He told anyone who would listen that it was more important than ever for him to take over the job of mayor of Caltabellessa after Accursio Romano retired in the spring. “I am not afraid of the politicians in Palermo or the crime families, and I won’t let anyone in this town fear them either,” he said during a speech in the piazza.
“Silly men and their politics,” Cettina said, rocking baby Liuni to sleep. Marco’s other children sat bathed and composed at her feet. “Nothing good comes from trying to fight them.”
But some things were changing, all of them for the worse. The boatyard in Calabria had laid off all workers because there was no one to buy the boats. It had been six months since Gio had been home. He felt more like a stranger than ever before. My husband hadn’t even met our third child, a son named Vincenzo.
The day I thought Gio was returning from Calabria I spent hours scrubbing the floor and cutting the boys’ hair. He never arrived. I waited the day after that too. By the third day I almost forgot my husband was supposed to return at all and went about my regular routine. Then came the knock on the door. It was strange, but also right that Gio should knock. This was hardly his house anymore. I took a breath to prepare myself before flinging open the door.
But Gio wasn’t there. His cousin Francesco stood on our stoop with his hat over his heart. I was certain he was about to tell me that my own husband was dead. But when he saw me with my newest child thrown over my shoulder he smiled and cleared his throat. “Gio has been delayed in Palermo. He is working to get papers there.”
“Come in.” I stepped aside to clear a path to my kitchen table. “Does he need papers to go back to the mainland now? What kind of craziness is this?”
“No, Fina. He is not going back to the mainland. I should let him explain when he returns. It could take all of this week for him to get what he needs though.”
