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Our children ran ragged through the streets as they always had. The most noticeable difference in the town with the men away was the absence of large bellies ripe with child. Not that some husbands didn’t return. Some of the men had merely gone to the mainland and could come home every few months. When they returned, their wives asked me for a female wash made of olive and cedar oils that Rosalia had taught me to prepare that would make it more difficult to become pregnant. I was also entrusted with the secret for the tonic, the quinine and black hellebore, that I had asked the witch for years earlier, the one that might have safely stopped my pregnancy if it weren’t so far along.
These were things we didn’t discuss openly. A woman would merely tell me, “My husband will be home in September,” and I would prepare what she needed.
I rarely heard from Gio but knew he was working in a factory in New York City and his money somehow made it across the ocean when it was supposed to. Marco was kind enough to pick it up at the bank in Sciacca when he went to the port for business. I was one of the lucky ones. Carmela Planeta’s husband went away to work in coal mines in a place called Alabama. At first, he sent money but then six months passed with nothing. Carmela asked Marco to find some way to contact the Italian consulate. It took many more months for Marco to discover that Carmela’s husband had at first fallen ill and been unable to work, and then, when he was healed, he took to drink and never went back to the mines. Carmela was essentially a widow without a dead husband, a purgatory of sorts. “I wish he’d died in the mine,” she said. We all understood her words even though we thought she would be damned for letting them pass across her lips.
Gio did well. Much better than he would have in Italy. He finally saved enough to purchase a narrow three-story house on via Benfari, a house with a proper cucina, including a tile stove with a closed hearth and a flue. The kitchen was twice the size of my mamma’s and our bedroom had an iron balcony overlooking the small giardino. I was tending to my vegetable patch one morning when Marco knocked on my door.
“Can you come with me to the port?” he asked. Our paths did not tend to naturally cross despite his marriage to my best friend. Marco was always busy with meetings in town or in Palermo or Sciacca.
Although we did not often speak, I still saw him, watched him. I glimpsed him walking through the piazza in the mornings in his three-piece suits, sweat glistening at his temples. I spied him in church in the second pew with Cettina and their children. And then I saw him in my dreams, the ones I told no one about. He visited me there more than my husband did, which I convinced myself made sense because I saw Marco in real life, and it had been two years since I had seen Gio.
Being face-to-face with Marco was a different thing than watching him from a distance, and my heart sped up as I asked him why he needed me down in the port.
“I think you can be of help,” he said. “There is an outbreak of something among the children who live near the marina. They have sores on their bodies that aren’t healing. The doctor in Sciacca is nowhere to be found.”
“Why do you think I can help them?” I said, not meeting his eyes.
“You have done so much good work here.”
I flushed at the recognition, knowing I should not let myself be proud.
“I am not sure how much I can do but if you need me to come, I will come. Let me see if Cetti can mind my children after their lessons. Will we be gone all day?”
“Most of it,” he said. “I will feed you while we are gone.” He smiled, an inviting grin, the kind that could undo a woman, and I considered telling him that I had reconsidered. But before I could say anything, I had turned and was walking to Cetti’s house to ask her to take my children.
She said yes, of course. “Tell Marco we need tuna for the feast on Sunday. He won’t remember to do it on his own, and get me some polpo too.”
There was no time to change my dress from the rough checkered smock I had worn that morning as I made the rounds of the village, the one stained in blood and vomit and everything else that could leak from a human body. Maybe I wore the smock as armor. Who would look at me dressed like this?
As soon as we were in the car on our way to Sciacca Marco peppered me with questions. How was the health of our small village, were the children strong, what could we be doing better, what did we need more of? This was his job as the mayor, as our leader, to identify the problems and find solutions. He truly cared about the answers, and I provided them as best I could. I told him the town’s children were strong and that I had seen much less sickness now that fewer men came back and forth from Sciacca and il continente on a regular basis.
“They brought the sickness with them,” I explained to Marco. He nodded as if he understood even though none of us completely knew how a disease made its way from one body to the next. I told him I had read about the transfer of germs in an old medical journal.
“Of course you did. You were always the smartest in all of your classes.” I was surprised he remembered this.
“Cetti was smart too. She never should have left school,” I replied. It was the truth.
“Yes, of course. She is very intelligent. I have been meaning to tell you it brings me joy that she has a friend as close as you. Melina did not have that and it made her perpetually unhappy.”
“Cetti is like my sister,” I said, suddenly conscious of the wind whipping my hair around my face in the open-topped car and how ridiculous that must look.
“We both miss my brother, Liuni, very much,” Marco said. “I think about him every day.”
“I know that she does too.” I did not think I was betraying Cettina’s confidence to reveal this.
“It makes sense for the brother to care for his own brother’s wife if he passes, but it is also strange, don’t you think?”
For most of my life no one had asked me what I thought. It was happening more and more lately, but I did not know how to answer his question. It was strange in some ways, but it was also the way things had always been done. And in their circumstances, Marco and Cettina’s terrible, terrible circumstances, it was the best possible solution. I had, of course, thought about what would happen to me if Gio passed. All of his brothers were gone, off in America with him, so if Gio died I would be a widow, which came with its own rules and restrictions, but I would not be promised to another man. Still, being promised to Marco, even if not in love, seemed to me a blessing. But I was not going to say all of this to Marco either.
“Isn’t all marriage strange in its own way?” It came out of my mouth before I’d had time to process it. “There is always an obligation. Gio and I have been married for years, but I hardly know him. He lives on another continent and yet I call him my husband and I am connected to him forever.”
Marco considered this thoughtfully before he replied. “I loved Melina when we married, but we were very young. Maybe I also loved how much she loved me. I still think about her now. I miss her, but I miss the way I was when I was with her too. I was young and idealistic, impressionable. I thought I could change the world with big ideas. I had no idea how much work lay ahead of me. I had no idea how tired I would be.”
I had never spoken like this with anyone but Cettina. I was hungry to hear more and hoped my silence would compel him to continue.
“Melina was so eager. She wanted nothing more than to please me. I suppose that is intriguing for a man.”
“And a woman,” I added with a smile. I knew my response came with a hint of flirtation I needed to keep at bay.
