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We shouted a prayer into the sandy gales:
Bread and bones we are cummari to the grave,
Bread and rice we are cummari until paradise.
Closely united so that you cannot escape,
Fly, hair, go to the sea.
We were five years old.
“I love you,” I whispered to the adult Cettina in front of me.
“I know,” she said back. “I have always done my best to protect you. Remember the first time we visited old Rosalia?”
I remembered. Holding her hand as we stumbled, me nearly turning back, Cettina’s lips on my forehead as she told me to keep going. I nodded.
“Let me help you one last time.”
And she did.
I had no illusions that Cettina was being completely selfless. I believed her when she said she still loved me, when she said she wanted to protect me and care for me. But I also knew her life would be easier with me gone from the village, from Marco’s entire world.
Gio wanted me and the children to join him in the summertime, when the ocean crossing was easiest. He wrote and asked if I needed him to come to fetch all of us, but I assured him we would be fine on our own. I also told him that I would take care of selling our house in town, that I would make sure the money was transferred across the ocean before we left. That gave me four months with my baby girl, and I spent every waking moment with her and the boys. I even strapped Rosalia to me when I trained the nurses to take over my work. Eventually I bought the passage for all of us for the June 30 crossing from Palermo to the city of Philadelphia.
I sent one final letter in May. I told Gio that the sale of our house was delayed. That I needed to stay behind. This was true, but it was delayed because I had waited to meet with the notaio. I said I would send his mamma and the children ahead of me and follow them on the next ship.
Leaving my children was the impossible part. The boys were nearly grown and I kept telling myself that if we had stayed in Sicily or if I had gone with them, they would have left me to work in a matter of years anyway. With the boys I knew that I had already done my best. I had raised them, shaped them, been both their mother and their father. I was proud of the young men they had become, and I knew they could live on their own. I knew they would always remember me.
Baby Rosalia would never know me. I would never be able to tell her she was wise, brave, and kind, that she could do anything her brothers could do if she put her mind to it, no matter the constraints the world put on a woman. And yet, as much as I loved her from the moment I woke and saw her tiny body in Cettina’s arms I knew without a doubt that she would be better off if I were gone.
I traveled with all of them to the boat docks in Palermo. “Do not cry, Mamma,” Cosimo had murmured to me as he gently rewrapped the blanket around his baby sister. I had made sure that the ship that would carry my children would be able to provide for Rosalia’s nourishment by hoarding condensed milk for their journey. We also knew of another young mother, the cousin of a friend, who would be traveling at the same time. She promised to nurse my child as her own if need be, and I knew my mother-in-law would make sure Rosalia thrived. “We will take good care of her,” Cosi insisted. “And we will see you in two months. As soon as you get the house sold.”
“Yes, my little lion, so soon,” I had lied to my boy. “So soon.”
I clutched each of them furiously to me, trying to hold on to some small piece of them and imprint some small piece of me before I let them go.
Our house in town was sold within the week after they left. Once the money from the sale came, I wired it across the sea, but I kept the deed for the other land below the mountain, the one with the clinic on it, for myself. I saved it, knowing one day I would leave it to my daughter.
I thought often about Gio’s words about what my life would be like when he brought me to the new country. I would never have to work again. I did not see that as the same prize he did because I also remembered the old witch’s words to me: You will do more than I ever could.
That premonition echoed in my head every time I wavered about my plan to disappear.
“Never tell Marco what we did.” I made Cetti promise. “Let him think I’m dead. Please,” I begged her, and she agreed. He was another part of my life that I had to let go if I wanted to continue to live, and if I thought he was looking for me I’d never stop imagining the two of us together.
All of the town’s women mobilized to help us. Gaetana volunteered to be Cettina’s other eyewitness. Together they told the authorities they found my body on the top of the mountain and that they buried me themselves to spare my children the horror of what had been done to me. I didn’t know what they told the officers about how exactly my corpse was ravaged, but I was certain it would have been convincing. We knew the many ways a woman’s body could be harmed.
They filed an official police report and Leda drove me out of the village in the middle of the night. We went straight to Palermo, where I boarded a boat that took me to Rome and then to Baltimore in America.
Cettina wrote to Gio about my death. She begged him to tell the children I passed away from the flu. He promised her he would. He was already constructing their own mythology in America.
I knew that Gio never remarried, which surprised me at first. But he had become used to living without a wife for so many years, perhaps he no longer needed one. Besides, he had his mamma. I knew that he and my boys all worked in the coal mines of the Pocono Mountains, painful labor, which broke my heart, but I also knew they invested the money in a good and safe business within a few years and built themselves a nice house. I knew Cosimo became a town alderman but never married. He sent love poems to Cettina’s stepdaughter Silvia until the day he died. Vin was a wild child and then an unruly man. He fixed motorcycles in their auto body shop and then took off riding one across America. He spent the rest of his life on a commune in California with the hippies. I was delighted that Santo fell in love with a Sicilian girl named Lorenza who worked in a fancy department store in New York City. I heard he met her when he traveled to the city to see the big tree lit up in Rockefeller Center. He had three boys with her. When I learned of the car accident that took their lives, I didn’t leave my own home for two weeks. Rosalia, thank the Virgin, took in their children. My daughter, Marco’s daughter, had always been at the top of her classes. She won a scholarship to a teacher’s college and many years later she even received a master’s degree in education. All that news reached Caltabellessa and then made its way to me. Cetti wrote me letters for the rest of her life, at least one a month, and eventually we spoke on the phone, which cost us both a small fortune.
She also kept me updated on all the town news. I had always worried our greatest sin was our pride in our work and that bad things would happen to all of us women for our impudence. I was not entirely wrong. Saverina’s brother-in-law returned and took over her duties as butcher, telling her that her work was undignified for a respectable woman, that what she had done for a decade was suddenly vulgar, and when her husband died from the flu in Missouri she was left penniless. The widow Gaetana’s house was raided by highwaymen who knew she lived there alone. They took everything, including her car, and left her broken, lifeless body on the steps of the church. Ninetta became pregnant while her husband was away. Her brother-in-law had her charged with adultery and thrown in jail. His barren wife raised her child. When she was released, she packed up her things and left the town without a penny to her name. Many of our women friends were summoned to America to be with their husbands and resume their domestic labors. I often thought about seeking them out, but I knew it would only open old wounds.
The only time Cettina and I did not speak was for a month when Marco died only ten years after I left. Cetti took on the traditional ritual of mourning and did not leave the house or speak to another soul for many weeks. Marco had remained the town mayor until his final days. Cettina told me that in his last hours he tried to tell her everything about the two of us. His final words were to tell her he loved us both.
“I betrayed you,” she told me when we finally spoke of it. “I told him everything we did. How we lied. How you were alive. I told him at the very, very end, and it was worth the betrayal. He died with a smile on his lips.”
