Part I
Childhood
I ligna cumu su fhanu e vrasce,
e l’agianti cumu su fhanu e cose.
A fire is as good as the wood being burned;
work is as good as the people who do it.
—CALABRESE PROVERB
Quandu u gattu un c’è i surici abbalanu.
When the cat’s not around the mice dance.
—CALABRESE PROVERB
Death 1
Burns
(Cognitive Development)
THE VILLAGE OFIEVOLI,wedged into the cliff face on the highest plateau of a moderately sized mountain in central Calabria, was never very large. When Stella Fortuna was a little girl, in the days when Ievoli was at its most robust, there were only six hundred inhabitants crowded into the abutting stone cottages.But when I tell you Stella Fortuna was a special girl, I hope you aren’t thinking small-town special. Other people would underestimate Stella Fortuna during her long life, and not one of them didn’t end up regretting it.
First, there was her name, which no lesser woman could have stood up to. She’d been named after her grandmother, which was proper, but still; “Stella” and “Fortuna”—“star luck” or maybe even “lucky star”—what a terrifying thing to call a little girl. There’s no better way to bring down the Evil Eye than to brag about your good fortune; a name like Stella Fortuna was just asking for trouble. And whether or not you believe in the Evil Eye, you have to admit Stella had plenty of trouble.
“I’ve gotten out of plenty of trouble, too,” Stella would often remind her mother, Assunta. Assunta was a great worrywart, if not a great disciplinarian.
Yes, Stella Fortuna stuck out, and not only for her name. There were also her looks. At sixteen, when she left Ievoli to go to America, Stella Fortuna was the most beautiful girl in the village. She had grand breasts that trembled when she laughed and jounced hypnotically when she tramped down the steep mountain road that cut through the village center. Stella had inherited these breasts from her mother; her younger sister, Cettina, had been less successful in the heredity department and acquired only her mother’s derriere, which, it should be said, was nothing to sneeze at. Stella had clear, tanned cheeks as smooth as olives, and her pursed lips looked as pink and yielding as the fleshy insides of a ripe fig—essentially Stella was a fruit salad of Ievolitan male desires. She had her scars, it’s true, the crescent cut into her brow and the stitchmarks up her arms, but scars become alluring when you know where they came from, and in a village the size of Ievoli everyone knows everything. Stella was effortlessly provocative and categorically unaccommodating. When she stepped into the street for the evening stroll, thechiazzafell silent, breathtaken, but Stella Fortuna didn’t notice or care. The soft curves of her figure distracted ambitious men and boys from the ruthlessness of her dark eyes, and she cut down and made fools out of the unwise.
Stella’s desirability mattered little to Stella herself. She’d already decided she would never marry and didn’t care to use her looks to attract suitors. She scandalized good, obedient Cettina with her rough treatment of the hopefuls. Later the sisters would spend thirty years locked in a blood feud, it’s true, but no one in the world saw that coming, and when they were girls they were the best of friends. Prospective suitors approached them together, because they were always together.
“You have to be nicer, Stella!” Cettina would tell her sister fearfully. She was the younger of the Fortuna girls, but she worried about Stella almost as much as Assunta did. What with Stella’s bad luck, it was no wonder. “They call you a bitch!”
“Whose problem is that?” Stella would reply. “Not mine.”
Stella wasn’t exactly vain about her appearance—she had never even seen her reflection in a mirror—but it did give her great satisfaction to know she was the prettiest. Stella liked power, and her charisma was one of the greatest powers available to her, one of the few powers a young woman in a southern Italian village could possibly wield in these years between the wars.
Third, she had natural smarts. Stella liked to be the best, and she was the best at most things. She was the best needlewoman in the village; her silkworms produced the most silk and she could shuck the most chestnuts during a harvest day’s piecework at Don Mancuso’s orchards. She was quick with numbers and could make combinations in her mind; her memory was keen and she never lost an argumentbecause she could always quote back what her opponent said better than they could themselves. She was gentle with animals and even the damn hens laid more eggs when she was the one to feed them in the morning. She was not the best cook, so she did not cook at all—it was important to know your limitations and not waste time attempting to do poorly what you could have someone else do for you. Stella was quick-witted and self-sufficient, not to be trifled with or taken advantage of. She had inherited her mother’s discipline and her father’s pervasive distrust, which made her hardworking but wily. Stella Fortuna got things done. You hoped she was working with you, not against you.
Fourth—and this is what her Calabrese village respected most about her and the thing that got her in the most trouble when she left—Stella Fortuna was tough. Life had tried to take her down, and Stella Fortuna had resisted. Each bad thing that happened to her only made her more stubborn, more retaliatory, less compromising. Stella allowed for no weakness in herself and she had no tolerance for weakness in others. Except, of course, in her mother, who required special dispensations.
By the time she was sixteen, when she left Ievoli, Stella Fortuna had already almost died three times—hence all those great scars. I will tell you about the Ievolitan deaths now. They have been referred to affectionately by her family as “the eggplant attack,” “that time with the pigs,” and “the haunted door.” They’re the weirdest of Stella’s death stories, in my opinion, but of course they would be; everything was a little weirder in a remote mountain village a hundred years ago. Modernity has stripped some of the magic out of the ways we live and die.
***
IEVOLI WAS A SECRETthat had kept itself for two hundred years. Like most other Calabrian villages, Ievoli was poor and deliberately inaccessible, with no roads to connect it to any other village, only donkey paths cut into the mountains’ discreetly bushy mimosa and mistletoe. The Ievolitani didn’t have much, but they were safe from the barbarians, the invaders, the outside world—from everyone but one another. Well, and the brigands who lived in the forests, stole the occasional goat, and accosted travelers. Another reason not to leave the village.
The men of Ievoli werecontadini,day laborers who followed the sun to whatever field was in harvest, whichever rich landowner was paying. They had no land of their own. The men earned just about enough to keep their families alive, as long as their wives provided all the food from their terraced mountain gardens and as long as their children went to work in the fields as soon as they were smart enough.
Calabria is a land of improbable mountaintop towns like Ievoli, their streets so steep that to walk up them is nearly to crawl on one’s hands and knees. The Calabresi built these inaccessible villages defensively. For two thousand years, Calabria was besieged—by Romans, who stripped away all her timber; Byzantines, who made the whole region Orthodox; North African Saracens, who made it Muslim; castle-building Normans, who made it Catholic; Bourbons, Angevins, Habsburgs; and, finally, Italians. Each wave of conquerors slaved, pillaged, feasted, and despoiled, thrashing their way through the lush olive and citrus groves with their swords out, splashing blood and DNA over the fertile hillsides. Our people fled the pirates and the rapists and the feudalists, taking refuge in the mountains. Now nesting in these absurdly steep villages is a way of life, although the threats of malaria and Saracens have abated somewhat these days, depending on whom you ask.
There is evidence of the conquerors’ passing in the faces of the Calabresi, a many-colored people, in their languages and their cuisine.The landscape is studded with Norman castles as well as the ruins of Greek temples built three centuries before the birth of Christ. The Calabresi carry on, unmoved, among these remnants of past conquerors, for they have never been masters of their own homeland.
STELLAFORTUNA IS LIKE MOST WOMENin that you can’t understand her life story if you don’t understand her mother’s. Stella loved her mother more than anything in the world, tough Stella with her cold stony heart. But everyone loved Assunta. She was a saint, as every person who remembers her will tell you—and there are people who remember her still. In Italian mountain villages, hearts are strong, and those who survive life’s surprises live a very long time.
