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We walked along a narrow pathway of stones with putrid water flowing on either side. Agata skipped, the phone bouncing in her hand, creating ominous shadows on the dark walls.
“In here.” She quickly darted down another tiny tunnel. I had to stoop but her head wasn’t even close to touching the ceiling.
“Where are we?”
“The catacombs. The Capuchin Catacombs to be exact.”
I gripped the wall to steady myself and found a handhold in the rock. Agata whipped her phone around to illuminate my fingers gripping the eyeholes of a whitewashed skull. I screamed. The sound echoed off the walls and then disappeared down the long dark hallway. The heads of the dead were everywhere, lining the walls, covering the ground like cobblestones.
“Most of these tunnels have been closed to the public for a long time, ever since the child mummies were discovered.”
“The child mummies?”
“You never heard about them? They are in all the guidebooks. Hundreds of child mummies. Many of them so well-preserved they look as though they are merely sleeping.”
The image was horrific and twisted my insides. “Why were they mummified?”
“No one knows. Some say their mothers couldn’t bear to put them in the ground, but I don’t know if I believe that. The mothers back then were used to the death of their children. The average Sicilian woman would give birth to ten children by the time she was thirty and half of them did not make it. Women loved their children, but they couldn’t be precious about them. I think most of the children here in the crypts belonged to wealthy foreigners who had easier lives than the Sicilian peasant women, so they had the privilege of mourning. But we will not see the child mummies tonight.”
“Why are we down here?”
Impatience laced her tone. “I told you. I have something to show you.”
She ducked so low I had no choice but to get on my knees and then on my belly and suddenly I was crawling on the ground to make it through an opening no bigger than a toilet seat. I heard a squeaking, felt the claws of a rodent dig into my back, and I let out a small cry.
“I want to go back.”
“You’ve come this far.” Agata reached behind her to grip my massive hand in her little one. “Come on. You’ve got this.” Her words reminded me of Aunt Rose’s old encouragement and I kept going.
Through the hole was a long and narrow room, so deep I couldn’t see to the end of it. The light tapered into the shadows. The walls were no longer covered in skulls but drawings. Agata paused in front of one and pulled a small penlight out of the folds of her pants to supplement the light from her phone.
An intricate scene on the stones depicted a group of nuns wielding what appeared to be garden tools, scythes, and pitchforks as weapons. A scrum of terrified children hid behind their flowing black skirts as an angry mob of men tried to break down a wall between them.
“The sisters of Saint Accursia protected the children born of a mother’s affairs from the cuckolded men who sought to kill them. The women of Sicily have always kept track of our history in spaces like these, caves or tunnels beneath the ground, spaces where it was safe to share our stories.”
I ran my fingers along the wall.
“Less than five percent of women were literate even a hundred years ago, so it’s nearly always pictures and oral history. The women gathered here to tell their stories. Here and places like this.” She sat alongside one of the walls and for the first time I noticed there were raised stones on the floor, seats.
“These meeting rooms are the heart of my current research, which, of course, will never be done,” Agata explained. “There will always be more to learn and more to say about these places where women have been gathering in secret for thousands of years. I worry about publishing it at all. Am I betraying them if I do? Am I betraying their memory if I don’t? Look at this one. This is Saint Agata, my namesake.”
I inspected a drawing of a young woman, a child really, cowering at the foot of a grown man.
“This is from the third century AD. As a young woman Agata resisted the advances of a Roman prefect sent by the emperor Decius to govern Sicily. He raped her and tortured her, slicing off both of her breasts. She was imprisoned. Not him. Her. Then she was sent to die at the stake, but right as they were about to light the match an earthquake rattled the ground and knocked the executioner off his feet. She died in prison and now she is the patron saint of women who have been raped. Just the fact that we need to have a saint for such a thing in this country.” Agata shook her head.
“Why are you named after her?” Before the words left my mouth, I knew it was a story I didn’t want to hear. But Agata delivered it with little emotion.
“My mother was raped by a very rich man when she was thirteen. She ran away from her home. Rape wasn’t a felony here until 1996, and besides, he was rich and she was poor. He wouldn’t have been convicted even today. She made it to a nearby village, where a stranger brought her into her home and kept her safe for a few months. That woman had a cousin in Caltabellessa and my mother went there to give birth. She took her own life soon after I was born. I was an orphan in the village, bounced from house to house. In one of them I met Luca and we quickly became the best of friends. Giusy took care of us, like a big sister. We were a little gang. Luca married me as soon as he could to save me from the same fate as my mother. A woman with no real family is never safe. He worked and worked to pay for me to come here to go to school.” Her voice stayed even as I reached out to express acknowledgment for all that she’d been through, but she brushed my hand away and bounced over to another section of the wall, another drawing. “But this next one is my favorite, the most important, the basis of most of my study.” She traced her finger along the outline of a voluptuous winged woman. “Astarte.”
Where had I heard that name before? Had I heard that name before?
“It sounds familiar.”
“You wouldn’t have heard of her. Astarte was an African goddess, probably predating the Greeks. She was Canaanite or Phoenician in the beginning. Goddess of love, sex, war, and hunting. The worship of her traveled along the trade routes. She was a goddess of self-defense and also of female conquest. Massive temples were built to honor her here in the island’s western towns like Erice and Trapani and Sciacca. When the Greeks came to the island some scholars say that the worship of her disappeared, but her followers would never have let that happen. The women kept her alive. They knew assimilation was the only way to survive and continued to worship the ideals of Astarte, her bravery, independence, passion, through temples to the Greek goddesses Artemis and Aphrodite, and then the Roman Diana and Venus. Eventually, when the Christians came, the women transferred Astarte’s spirit and her strength into the Virgin Mary. This is how Astarte lives on. It is one of the reasons that the island’s women were so quick to accept the idea of the Virgin Mary. We transfer the love of our previous goddesses into acceptable figures for whatever time we are living in. Astarte remains alive in all of us Sicilian women.” Agata pushed up the sleeve of her shirt to reveal a tattoo of the goddess on her forearm, her breasts bare and powerful in their nakedness, the horns sprouting out of her forehead so sharp they looked as though they could impale an enemy in a single blow, the massive wings curling toward Agata’s elbow. I remembered where I saw this image: Fina’s tattoo. The same woman, same horns. And the name. It was the toast that Giusy and Fina gave before we settled down to the meal at Luca’s restaurant. I could hear the clink of their glasses as if they were with us. “Astarte.”
“Is this some kind of cult?”
“It is more a way of life, a spirit, a story we pass down, a way of reminding ourselves that the only way for a woman to survive in this world is to help other women. The stories get passed down through some of the families, but they were lost for many generations until I began much of my research. Old manuscripts talking about the Astarte legends were some of the first things I studied when I began to search for the stories of forgotten women. There is a place like this one near Caltabellessa, in the cave by the Norman castle. All of us used to play there when I was a girl. That’s where I discovered some of the first drawings.”
