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Her left turn took me aback.
“Can I show you something?” Giusy asked.
“Is it what you were going to show me last night?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve been waiting all morning for it.”
The piece of paper she had brought out at dinner was now stained with tiramisu and espresso. It was a photocopy of something that looked like a police report all scribbled in Italian. Official-looking type marched across the top—Polizia di Municipale, Commune di Caltabellessa. Thick lines redacted entire sections.
The words swam in front of my eyes. 18 luglio 1925, Omicidio. Murder. I sucked in deep breaths trying to calm the intense emotions welling up inside of me.
“Do you want me to translate it?” she asked.
“I can do it.” I focused harder on the page and translated in my head. I didn’t want to hear the words out loud.
I read about an unnamed witness who discovered the female victim approximately half a mile from town. A hand-drawn map had an actual X marking the spot. According to the witness, the woman’s body was tied by the neck to a stake outside the entrance to a small cave. Come una capra ha portato al massacro. Like a goat led to slaughter.
I couldn’t stop until I reached the end. As Aunt Rosie used to say, When you’ve stepped in the shit you’ve got no choice but to keep walking until you get home to clean yourself up. I kept reading.
She was naked from the waist down. Her left ankle was shattered with something heavy, possibly a rock. There were slash marks from a dull knife up the insides of both of her thighs. Her midsection was partially sliced through, purple bruises on her neck, a smashed windpipe. Strangolamento? Strangulation, followed by a question mark.
Whoever blacked out the document did a piss-poor job. The name of the victim was missing from the top of the page, but not the bottom.
Victim Age: 32
Name: Serafina Forte
EIGHT
SERAFINA
1914–1917
The men kept leaving Sicily. Thousands of them, hundreds of thousands, maybe even a million. During our years of scarcity, our men heard about the opportunity to make more money in a year in la Mérica than they could make in a lifetime at home. Wages for laborers were thirteen lire a day in New York City compared to just one or two lire in Sicily. For years American businesses had been running advertisements in our national newspapers with headlines screaming: how to become a millionaire in the united states and your destiny is in your own hands in america. The ads came from factories, coal mines, and construction companies. Brothers followed brothers, nephews followed uncles. Many said that the enchanted land enticed them like a seductress. They scraped together money, two hundred lire, to book passage on ships called the Sicilian Prince, the Saturnia, the King Albert, the Archimede.
The exodus came late to Caltabellessa. It had been happening in the provinces around us for decades. And from those towns we had heard the horror stories—the men who refused to come home, the ones who disappeared. We heard of Sicilian politicians begging men to stay, putting the fear of God in them by telling them they could never protect their family’s honor from an ocean away. When platitudes didn’t work, they started rumors of cuckolded men and their wanton wives who sought solace in another man’s bed the day after a husband’s ship crossed the Atlantic. Priests preached that wives and daughters left by their husbands and fathers would turn to prostitution. But still the men left.
In Caltabellessa we didn’t weep when the men left. We didn’t complain. We believed the stories from other villages were myths or exaggerations. The hope for a better life, a life with some money in our pockets, allowed us to turn a blind eye to the warnings. That is not to say things didn’t change for us. Everything changed. Before long there were so many men gone that women had no choice but to take on the jobs they had left behind. When Carmelo the baker sailed across the Atlantic his wife, Paola, simply took over baking and selling the bread. And so it went with the cheesemonger, the ferrier, the cobbler, even the gravedigger.
The leaving was gradual, until one day the women looked around and realized we outnumbered the men. The old men remained. One of my favorite proverbs rang truer than ever: With old men and flowering cabbages... there is nothing left to do. The younger men who worked for the criminal families stayed. They took even more control over the local citrus farms because there was big money in lemons and limes, allegedly from the British and American navies, which had more ships than ever before and more sailors to keep healthy. The mafiusi also continued to purchase all the foodstuffs and the medicine in the nearest cities and then sold it back to us in the village at enormous black-market prices.
When the Great War came to the continent we Sicilians were slow to get involved. Some of the remaining men fled to the Nebrodi Mountains and hid from the generals who came to the smaller towns looking for recruits. The men who had already gone abroad to la Mérica were making more money than ever because they stayed and worked in the factories when the American men joined up with their army. Our lives in the villages were impacted little by the continental war. It is terrible to say, but if anything, we were better off because the money kept coming in.
Marco was one of the few honest men who stayed in Caltabellessa. There were grumblings that he was soft for not avenging Liuni’s murder, but he remained steadfast in his belief that violence was no answer.
“I will avenge my brother’s death by making lives better, not by taking them,” he insisted. “Sicilians too often cover our fears and insecurities with violence and it does us no good.”
He became mayor, replacing Accursio as everyone had expected he would. Soon he was one of only a handful of men between the ages of fifteen and fifty left in the village.
Gio’s money came to me every month along with short notes about his life in the big city. With him gone I was free to spend my days as I wished. My children were no longer babies. I had more time to read the books that Maestro Falleti had borrowed for me from the library in Sciacca, to care for my mother as much as she would allow me, and to accompany Cettina when she took little Liuni to the witch for his treatments. My life was quiet and simple and often terribly dull.
At four years old Liuni remained small and sickly, but he got better with each passing year. Cettina doted on all her stepchildren, but Liuni the most. When Cettina came down with an illness that kept her in bed for a week I offered to take the little boy to the witch on my own. Cetti was so weak she agreed with a small nod and no words before falling back to sleep.
I ran into Marco on my way out of her house, our bodies colliding with one another. We both laughed and he offered to walk me and his son to the edge of town. Even though the rest of the village remained wary of little Liuni, often making the sign of the cross at the sight of him, Marco never treated him any differently than he did his other children. He lifted the little boy onto his broad shoulders and tickled the bottoms of his feet, making him squeal with delight as he held on to his father’s thick hair like the reins of an ox.
It was one of those perfect summer days when the sandy African winds skipped up the mountain from the sea, filling the air with the sweet smell of brine. Marco chatted easily with me about the town’s affairs, about how frustrating politics continued to be in Palermo and on il continente. He spoke to me like an equal, like I was a man. I envied Cettina for having such a thoughtful and intelligent husband even though I knew she never saw him as that kind of partner. As far as I knew the two had never consummated their marriage. Cettina told me she once tried to seduce him out of a sense of duty, but he gently rebuffed her and she never tried again. They lived as brother and sister, and Cettina did not care because she got to become the thing she desired most; she got to be a mother.
