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On my way to find Caltabellessa’s one taxi driver I wondered if I could make my life slightly easier and borrow Fina’s car again. I turned to head back to the hotel to find Giusy when I saw a familiar face walking toward me.
His smile widened with recognition.
Luca.
SIXTEEN
SERAFINA
1924
I was the last to hear about Paola’s death.
I had been away from the village caring for a young mother who was infected with a sickness of the lungs. Cettina was kind enough to watch my children while I was away. The sick woman’s family was very rich and their home was close to the sea.
I slept for five nights in the servants’ quarters to avoid too much exposure to the germs while I spent the days preparing tonics and applying menthol salves to the woman’s body.
When I returned to Caltabellessa Paola’s name was on everyone’s tongues, the gossip thick and chewy as lard.
Word had come from la Mérica that her husband, Carmelo, had taken another wife in New York City. The guileless coward told her nothing of this. Carmelo’s letters home, always accompanied by a portion of his wages, had been as officious and polite as ever.
But then three days ago Paola, our beloved baker, my savior that day on the farm, was abruptly informed by his mother that her husband had replaced her. Carmelo had written to his mamma and asked her to deliver the news. I could imagine the anger raging in Paola’s veins. This situation was, according to her mother-in-law, Paola’s fault. Her husband alleged that the last time he visited Sicily, an event that occurred more than three years prior, Paola had been increasingly cold to him. That she refused to drink from his glass at meals or to share food from his plate. This was evidence of a detachment that could only be attributed to Paola finding affection elsewhere and her husband more or less accused her of adultery, though he didn’t explicitly name a paramour. What was the most devastating to Paola, in addition to his lies, was his request that his two sons be sent to him to be raised by his new wife. He argued, again only to his mother, that Paola was unfit to continue to raise them in her “wild” state. His letter was incredibly civilized and rational. For him, it could be. He could accomplish all that he wanted through his mamma, never returning home to clean up his mess. Paola would be left with nothing, with less than nothing—no husband, no children, and no job. His mother was instructed to sell off the bakery.
Two nights later, believing that her honor was forever tarnished by meaningless gossip and accusations from an ocean away, Paola walked to the top of the cliffs above the village and stepped off the highest peak. Her body was half eaten by wild animals by the time she was discovered the next morning.
I wished Paola had waited even one more day, that she had confided in the rest of us women. I had to believe that despite the rumors we would have found a way to help her.
It was Cettina who told me the news when I returned from the seaside to reclaim my children. She delivered it in an impassive tone that was completely unlike her.
“She betrayed her husband,” Cettina said simply at the end of the story.
“Did she?” I pushed her. “I have never heard of Paola being with another man. And what man would she be with? There are no men here.”
“There are men in Sciacca who come up here. Men pass through all the time. She was always down there fetching her supplies. Remember what she said about looking at the handsome fishermen at the port after Stefano Parlate’s funeral?”
“She was joking. It is not possible. She has not asked me for anything to protect against pregnancy,” I said, feeling like even that was a betrayal to reveal. But you can’t betray the dead. And besides, it was true. Other women had asked me for protection, and I never breathed a word of it to anyone. I would keep their secrets because it was not my place to judge how a woman wanted to safeguard her body. Maybe they were committing adultery, maybe it was a fear of rape, a fear that was very real when there were less men of a certain age around to protect us from itinerant travelers. I had also helped several of the left-behind wives eliminate pregnancies while their husbands were away. Even then, I never asked questions. “Paola was not the kind of woman to stray. She works hard and raises her children, takes care of her crippled mamma. She bore her load with the patience of a donkey.”
“Even the donkey is an animal prone to the basest of instincts. Why would she have killed herself if she were not guilty?” Cettina countered.
“How can a woman ever prove her innocence?” I asked. I hated arguing with Cettina about anything, but especially about something so close to my own sins. I often worried she could reach into my head and pull out the terrible things I had done, the things I couldn’t stop doing.
I had met with Marco at least once a month since that night he had stitched my head. Always outside of town. It was often during the daytime, when we both had excuses to be away. From that very first night, I had known it would happen again. It felt inevitable, which didn’t make it any less wicked or any less desirable.
We said it would be the last time every time, always knowing we were lying. The first time we were truly entwined took me completely by surprise. Marco was a kind and generous lover in a way I didn’t know was possible. Being with him never felt like an obligation. He was as enchanted by me as I was with him.
How did I feel sitting with Cettina, my best friend in the entire world, a woman I loved more than my own sister, my own mother? My mind twisted itself into knots to justify my actions. Marco told me again and again that he and Cettina had not been together in that way.
Cettina had told me herself that she had no interest in sex, that all that mattered to her was raising the children, that it brought her every joy she would ever need. I believed her and for years I understood. I had felt very little in the way of desire for a long time, believing it to be something that had simply passed me by. But Marco’s touch changed all that. Where once there was nothing, there grew an all-consuming ache for the next time we could be alone, for the next time his lips would find their way to every unexplored place on my body.
I could justify all of it when I was with him and yet I hated myself when I saw Cettina, which is why I often avoided being alone with her, which made me despise myself even more. There was also the problem with her brother Carmine. He had been missing since the day the Black Hand died on the farm. There were rumors that Carmine was in trouble with the money men, the ones who worked with the man who died in my arms. Cettina had mentioned her brother only once since the incident. It was the day she examined my still-bruised torso and told me she would never forgive him and then spat on the ground next to my feet to seal her promise. But we did not discuss the details of what had happened to me. I still believed I was the only other one who knew about the man’s death that day. I thought Carmine had left town not to protect me from what he saw as a crime but rather to protect himself from blame.
My body had healed, but I never left the village alone. I always had a companion on the roads to and from town and often that companion was Marco. We took too many chances, I knew that.
There was the time he rented a boat from the harbor in Trapani and sailed us to a deserted beach on the rocky shore of an island an hour off the coast. “We should stay here forever,” he murmured. His lips skimmed my bare shoulder where the skin was raw from the sun and the sand. He laid me down on my back and kissed my breasts, my stomach, each movement deliberate and slow.
Afterward we grilled fish over an open flame before sailing back to the harbor. When we were blown off course and pushed farther and farther out to sea, I did not care if I disappeared or drowned right then and there. I was so happy and content and madly in love.
I never told anyone because the only person I wanted to tell would be the one destroyed by it. So when Cettina asked me why I had been looking so happy I told her it was because I loved the work I was doing. I loved being able to treat an illness, heal a burn, set a broken bone back into place. This was not a lie. I loved my work the way Cettina loved raising her children, and frankly my children too since they spent more time at her house than at mine. My happiness brought her great joy and she listened for hours and hours when I told her of the new advances in medicine I’d been reading about in the journals Marco had gotten for me from people he knew in Palermo and in America. I dreamed of crossing the ocean myself, not to join Gio but to train with a doctor who could teach me more advanced surgeries and cures. It was a ridiculous dream. I told Cettina all about one of my joys and left out the other.
