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I said nothing. That was a mistake. I should have expressed joy. In my silence he rolled another cigarette as I gazed over the rippling fields and the sea wondering what he knew of my life. Did he want to take me away from here because he’d heard rumors about me and Marco? Was it because of my work, the shame of having a wife who earned money doing a man’s job? These were questions I could never ask. I could not even manage to say, Why now? because it would be understood as disobedience. So I nodded like a mute idiot, hating myself for my silence. He continued.
“The situation here is not improving. I probably hear more of the news than you do.” In his voice I heard great condescension. “The unification of Italy continues to do nothing but destroy Sicily and Sicilians. It has been much worse since the Great War. The northern Italians are our new conquerors. And worse, now all of Europe steals from us and gives nothing in return. There is much anger here and many believe there will be another war and Sicily will suffer. They won’t even let us speak our language!”
I knew what he spoke of. Marco and I talked often about the rise of the militant journalist Benito Mussolini and his new political movement, which was trying to marry the desire for socialism in the peasant class with the kind of nationalism befitting a unified country. Mussolini’s supporters called themselves the Blackshirts and formed sects called the squadristi. They attacked anyone they believed to be anti-Italian, which included those who saw ourselves as Sicilians first and Italians only when necessary. I had treated several men who were attacked by the squadristi in Sciacca for daring to fly only a Sicilian flag and speak only in dialect. Mussolini wanted to force us all to only speak proper Italian. He was smart. By stealing our language, he could steal our voices. The squadristi used torture, sometimes even on children, to gain information about who was loyal. And, as always, us regular citizens were caught between the politicians and the mafiusi. We all knew the violence would only get worse.
But I feigned ignorance about all of it and nodded for my husband to ramble on.
“I have opportunities for us. I have been working hard and made many connections. I no longer owe any debts to the men who helped me get on my feet when I arrived in New York. I have enough saved to bring you and the boys and my mamma. If we sell our house in town, we will have enough money to purchase a small amount of land and build a house in a city outside of New York. Lots of us have been moving there.”
“We would not be living in the city of New York?” I asked. Not that it mattered. Not that New York was any different from any other city in America to me.
“The work is hard in the city, and we are still poor by their standards. Any apartment we could afford would be small. You would need to work too. But if we move to Scranton in Pennsylvania that would not be the case. And if there is more money, I can invest in a small business I can pass down to the boys. That’s why you need to sell that land that was given to you by the mayor. That extra money could support our family for generations.”
This was why he’d come home. I had stopped responding to his queries about selling the land with the clinic on it. I didn’t even know if I had the power to do it. Marco had given me a flimsy deed that declared the land be used for a hospital. I never went to a bank or met with an official.
Gio grabbed both of my hands and stared into my eyes. He was begging me for something for the first time in our lives and I remembered the young man I once held through the night as he cried about the horrors he’d experienced in the sulfur mines. I wondered what he had seen and done in the new country that I hadn’t bore witness to.
“You will never need to work again if we sell that land. You can stay home and care for the boys the way I know you have always wanted to but couldn’t because I was gone. We will have more children in the United States. I know you needed extra money and that is why you worked. It is my fault.”
I tried to quiet Rosalia’s voice in the back of my head. You will do more than I ever could. That would not be the case when I joined my husband in the strange city of Scranton. I would be put back into my place in the home. He would keep asking for more babies. My intellect and my talent would wither. I would slowly die.
I kissed him on the mouth then, the correct response from a wife who is given the gift of being cared for by her husband, of not having to work, of getting to leave for a new life in America, the land of every immigrant’s dreams. “It is complicated. With the land. It was given to me to be a clinic. I will need to talk to Marco and he is not here. He is very sick. But I will see what I can do. We should get back to the house and back to the boys.” Gio spun me around when I turned away from him, more violently than I expected.
“I am not asking you, Serafina.”
“I know that, Gio.” I wrenched my arm away from his grip. He did not have it in him to grab at me again and I quickened my step back to the house, taking the longer route through town, knowing Gio did not want to call attention to himself yet.
He did not mention the land again when we ate with the boys. Instead, Gio regaled them with stories of America, of tall buildings that touched the clouds, of immigrant men who became millionaires through hard work and perseverance. The younger two were entranced by the stories. Cosimo remained skeptical and gripped my hand beneath the table.
That night I lay with Gio as I knew he expected me to. It took only moments and passed in a pleasant silence except for the rhythmic creak of the bedposts. My husband, for his part, was satiated. I woke before the sun in the morning, leaving him in my bed. It was fortuitous that I was the first one to reach our door. An envelope had been slipped beneath it in the night and I immediately recognized the handwriting I never thought I would see again. Two sentences from Marco:
Come to Palermo. I need to see you.
—
Despite the crowds and the poverty, the intensity of everyone and everything, I loved being a stranger in a strange place.
Palermo crackled with vigor, the sounds and smells assaulting all of my senses at once.
It was a miracle I made it to the city at all. When I first read Marco’s note I dismissed a visit as impossible. I burned it after I read it and once the words had turned to ash, I tried to forget them.
There was simply no way I could go to Palermo to meet Marco. Gio would insist on coming and I could not imagine surviving any scenario with my husband and lover in the same room.
For the past couple of weeks Gio had strutted around Caltabellessa like he was a rich man in his fancy felt hat and suit, a returning conqueror. He sat for hours with the old men in the piazza puffed up with tales of his success in New York City. Gio was home for two weeks when he fell ill. Just a cough and a fever, nothing more, but it knocked at least a little of the hubris out of him. He complained that the illness came from the unsanitary conditions in our village, told me it was yet another reason we had to leave. He used it as another excuse to press me again to learn more about selling the land.
I took advantage of the opportunity. I said there were things about the deed that I could only learn from Marco and that I would have to go to Palermo. I said this only because I knew my husband was too sick and exhausted to argue or to try to accompany me. I knew he would let me go if it meant we were that much closer to getting the money.
I found a ride in a truck with the fishmonger from Sciacca who delivered fish to our village once a week and to Palermo once a month. For a few lire he said I could join. Gio had his mamma taking care of him, doting on him, making her own plans to prepare a move to America, and telling anyone who did not ask that her son was now a rich man who would be taking care of her for the rest of her days in a house with plumbing across the ocean.
The fishmonger and I stayed silent the entire drive. I was grateful that we had paid him enough money for me to sit in the front of the truck. There were three others from Sciacca riding in the back, tightly packed in with the bulgy-eyed cuttlefish.
The monger dropped me close to my requested address and said he would return to the same spot for me at the same time the next day. Marco knew I was coming. I had sent a letter and told him not to respond.
I spent an hour wandering through the streets of Palermo to prepare myself for our meeting. Finally I returned to the heart of the city, the Quattro Canti, to the doctor’s grand baroque home behind the church of San Giuseppe dei Teatini.
When Marco greeted me at the doctor’s front door, I nearly collapsed right there on the stoop. He gripped both of my arms before I could stumble, and pulled me into the most elegant courtyard and garden I had ever seen. Fan palms lined white-pebbled paths surrounding a massive marble fountain fit for a palace, not the home of a doctor. I was astonished at all of it, at Marco standing on his own two feet when he had previously been at death’s door, at the luxury of the property, at how intensely my body was reacting to being close to him again. I did not even realize tears were streaming down my cheeks until Marco brushed them away and led me to a bench. He was still far from well. He walked with a cane, favoring the left side of his body over his right. His color was off, his skin the sallow yellow of sun-dried turmeric. The most shocking change was his head. His curls were gone, his head shaved all the way to the scalp. But he was upright and mobile. He was able to steady me as I tried to get my bearings. Somewhere within the depths of the garden a door slammed and I startled.
“Dottor Lombardo is leaving to teach a class at the university,” Marco informed me. “We are alone except for the maids and the cook. But we do not have to stay here. We can go out into the city. I have been preparing for your visit for weeks, saving up all my energy. There was a part of me that could not bear for you to see me like this.” He ran his hand over the shiny skin on top of his head. “But I put my pride aside.”
