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I thought again about how none of what Fina said coincided with my family lore. Our family stories never talked about how she was just fifteen when she got married, or how she got pregnant before then. They only detailed the dutiful and faithful wife and mother who waited for my great-grandfather to make his fortune in America. Patiently waited. She was Penelope waiting for Odysseus for twenty years. I mentioned this to the women and they scoffed. As Fina had said, the Greek myths were still very much alive in this ancient place where so many of them were born.
“I do not think Penelope stayed saintly and chaste while Odysseus was gone. I think Penelope fucked,” Giusy said.
“For sure Penelope fucked,” Fina agreed.
I should have known I could sidetrack them so easily. I tried to make sense of it all as I summarized it out loud. “OK, so I’m an American, a foreigner, and that could be a problem. And the woman who once owned this land, my great-grandmother, may have been a witch who was murdered under mysterious circumstances, which may make some people skeptical of her right to the land, and by proxy my right to the land.”
“Also the fact that when the land was given to her, women didn’t own land on their own. All of their property was their husband’s property,” Giusy said.
“It still belonged to my family then.”
“True.”
“So what is the problem?”
“Let us explain some things to you, American.” Giusy pointed one of her still-broken fingernails at me.
This was exactly what I’d been waiting for. “Please do.”
“We’ve always been a poor island. But our people never minded. If we were poor in the eyes of the world, we were rich in other things. We had good food in abundance. We had good families. We didn’t need much. The island always provided for us. But the invaders who ruled us wanted money for their beautiful cathedrals and their wars. There were taxes and then more taxes. Only once we were taxed did we realize that we were poor in terms of money. The invaders and foreign rulers also bled our land dry. And then when Italy became one kingdom—”
Fina interrupted. “Especially when Italy became one kingdom.”
“The north sucked away all of our resources. No poor Sicilians could make even a modest living. Eventually many of our men left for the mainland and for America to make the money to keep the land that we loved. So many men fled that entire villages were left to the women. A million men left this island.”
Giusy raised her glass in salute to the exodus. “Astarte!” That strange word again. “It was glorious in many ways. You should hear some of the older women tell the stories they heard from their mothers and grandmothers. For the first time women broke free of the bonds of marriage and motherhood. They taught themselves to read and to write and do math and run businesses, all because they had to support their families and step in while their husbands were an ocean away.”
Fina chimed in. “For the first time in their lives they were free.”
“No one was getting them pregnant once a year. But it couldn’t last. It couldn’t last because eventually the men made enough money to bring their wives to America.”
“Some returned,” Fina added.
“Some men returned. Regardless of whether the husband came back, or the wife joined him in America, the women who had gotten to learn and work were forced to become wives and mothers again and nothing else. Everything they’d learned was useless. They were back in their homes.”
“Having more babies.”
“Cleaning and cooking.”
“And miserable.”
“But not Serafina.”
Now it was my turn to interrupt. “Because she was murdered.”
The waves crashed in a moment of silence. “Which is worse?” Giusy asked. “A life of servitude or death?”
“I’d say it was death.” The answer was merely a reflex. But I thought about my own reaction when I learned I was having a second child I wasn’t ready for.
“You could also say that she escaped a fate that would have been worse than death for her,” Giusy said. “That she did not have to follow her husband to America and just be a wife again. Here in Sicily she was a healer and a landowner.”
“OK. But how did Serafina get the land in the first place?” I tried to get us back on track. “Who was Marco Domenico, the one who allegedly gave her the land?”
Fina reopened the book and carefully searched for an entry.
“Domenico, Marco. Here is his first wedding to a woman named Melina Vitale. I have looked her up. She died very young. And then a second wedding. To a woman named Cettina. And here is his death. He was also young. Forty-five.”
“What else do you know about him?”
