THE SECONDSTELLAFORTUNA’Ssecond death was probably the most dramatic—eviscerations generally are. It all came about because poor Assunta, who had been abandoned by her husband and without alirato her name, had suddenly come into just a tiny bit of relative prosperity and tried to use it to make life richer for her children. Poverty is dangerous, but prosperity, too, can be deadly, especially when a person blinds themselves to its pitfalls.
Prosperity was what Antonio had hoped to find in America, and Assunta didn’t begrudge him that goal, although he could have sent money home, as other emigrant men did. Just a little bit of money would have made such a difference.
How much time has to pass before it’s safe to say a husband has forgotten his family? It’s hard to know where to draw that line.
Za Ros was Assunta’s stand-in husband. As luck would have it—or as God would will it—widowed Rosina no longer had anyone but Assunta’s family to devote herself to. Ros was seventeen years older than her sister. She was a tiny woman, not much bigger than her nieces and nephew, the perfect size for them to adore. She was stern but gentle, a much more organized disciplinarian than Assunta, and gave patient instructions on how to do things like squash lice or gently collect an egg from a chicken without getting pecked. Stella loved to impress her aunt and hated to disappoint her.
In 1924, Ros’s two grown boys, Franco and Lorenzo, had left to seek their fortunes in southern France. Rosina was all alone in her marital home at the top of the mountain by the churchchiazza.After one last summer silkworm harvest, Ros decided to move in with her mother and to give her struggling sister the house and the plot of land adjacent to it.
Assunta had protested, of course. “Where will your sons live when they come back? Where will they put their wives?”
Ros shrugged. She had a feeling they would never come back toIevoli. That was not the way the world was turning lately. She helped Assunta tie up her belongings in linen bundles they balanced on their heads to carry up steep via Fontana.
Ros’s late husband had built the house for her just before the war in the more modern style, with a ten-foot ceiling to let good air circulate and to keep the interior cool in the summer. Its walls were made of mortar and river rocks that had been hauled up from Pianopoli on the backs of donkeys. The walls of the house were five inches thick, built to withstand earthquakes like the one that had leveled much of Calabria in 1905. There was a shuttered window on every wall, nails on which Assunta could hang pots, and a double bed that would do until the children were larger.
The new house was the break Assunta needed. Since her marriage she had grown food for her family in her late father’s smallortodown below the cemetery. Now she had room to grow enough wheat that her family would have bread all the time; it wouldn’t matter if she could afford to buy flour. Wealth would beget itself; it’s that initial purchase that is the hardest for women like Assunta, with armfuls of babies to nurse and no spare moment to earn aliramore than they need to keep their families alive.
Now she could have a whole chicken roost of her own. She could have a pigsty.
In 1925, when the pig peddler came around just after Easter, Assunta bought two piglets. They were the size of her hand, snuffly as puppies, with wagging rumps and bright, black eyes in their patchwork faces. But in nine months they would each be six hundred pounds of cured pork—prosciuttoand fat-streakedcapicolo,spicysuppressatasausages she would encase in the pigs’ own intestines and slice up for her children for lunch. Assunta had eaten meat twice a year—a chicken at Christmas and goat at Easter—for her whole life, but her children would have meat every day.
Pigs, Assunta learned, made you work for the treasures of their haunches. They ate like, well, pigs. They grunted with pleasure whenthey were fed and with annoyance when they weren’t. And they were disgusting. They were as smart as dogs, with intelligent human eyes, but they did their business wherever they were standing, rolled in it, and ate out of it if Assunta didn’t watch out. She cleaned the pen every morning, which required extra trips up the mountain to the cistern above the church. If she missed cleaning the pen, even for only a day or two, it started to reek, a sour unholy smell, the air so thick and putrid that walking through their enclosure made Assunta think of swimming in a vat of the urine of a sick old man. The smell sank into clothes fibers and couldn’t be scrubbed out; it gamboled across the alley and into her kitchen, ruining her own taste for her cooking. This was the year Assunta became vigorous about rubbing down her household surfaces with lemon—the lemon helped disguise the smell of the pigs.
By summer, the pigs were too big to feed with leftovers alone, and she had to ration out potatoes for them. In December, on her sister-in-law Violetta’s advice, Assunta went to the trough and morosely scattered all the precious chestnuts she’d harvested that fall, sweet crunchy pearls before the swine. Violetta promised the chestnut meat would make the pigs’ flesh white and tender with fat.
Stella and Cettina loved the pigs, as they loved all animals—the cats who milled in Ievoli’s alleys, the sweet-tempered stray dogs who wandered around the town accepting scraps. Stella spent hours playing with the creatures, and the pigs nuzzled her like a sister. The girls would run between them, patting their rumps, climbing over and tumbling off their good-natured backs. Assunta hoped the upcoming slaughter wasn’t going to be too painful a lesson for her daughters.
THE WINTER OF 1925 INTO 1926, Ievoli was giddy in precipitation. On four separate occasions, the snow fell tall enough for Stella and Cettina to throw and kick at each other. In the mornings, before it could melt, they rolled in the shallow banks, tossing handfuls at the other children who tilted and shrieked up and down the steep, icy mountain road. Assunta was convinced they would expire of ague. Cettina’s rednose would run, but Stella never got sick, never even seemed to feel cold. Since the oil had fallen on her in the previous summer, the skin of her boiled arm and torso was constantly feverish; she loved to feel the snow soaking into her clothes. This behavior did nothing for Assunta’s nerves.
The day of the trouble with the pigs, in January 1926, a nighttime snowfall melted into dawn slush. Assunta had forgotten the laundry on the line the evening before and spent a good portion of the foggy morning taking down the clothes and rearranging them to dry in the house by the fire. Now the sun had come out, and she was hanging them back up again on the line that stretched from her roof to the pigs’ hut. The alley between them was churned into cold mud.
Stella and Cettina were standing in the doorway watching their mother hang the clothes. Stella straddled the doorframe, blocking it with her feet so baby Giuseppe couldn’t run outside. Stella had become tall over the summer, her baby fat vanishing from her taut child-thighs and her hair darkening into black curls like her father’s. She stood head and shoulders over four-year-old Cettina, her arm around her little sister’s shoulder, as it often was. Assunta realized they were staring down the alley. She turned to see her sister-in-law Violetta huffing up the hill for her daily visit, which was usually full of uncompassionate gossip and sanctimonious observations about child-rearing. Assunta felt no enthusiasm, but called across the laundry, “Stella, invite your Za Violèt inside while I finish this.”
Violetta, who was on the heavy side, paused in their lane to catch her breath. She had a tied-linen bundle clutched in one hand.
“Stella,” Assunta prompted again.
Stella pursed her lips as she watched her fat aunt gasp for air. She did not like Za Violetta, and the feeling was mutual. They had recently had a fight, which had started with Violetta telling Stella she needed to be more respectful of her elders; Stella had replied that she didn’t respect Violetta because she didn’t like her. This had resulted in Violetta’s dealing Stella a smack across the face. Stella, who did not, as arule, cry, had said to her aunt, “That’s why I don’t like you. You’re not nice.” And she had walked out the door and hadn’t come home again until Violetta was gone.
Assunta had never seen anything like it. The girl wasn’t even six. Ros, who was also visiting that day, laughed herself to tears watching.
“It’s not funny, Ros,” Violetta said. “Someone has to teach that girl respect, Assunta, or you’re going to have a real problem on your hands.”
“Ooo, she’s a tough one!” Ros said, wiping her eyes.
Now as Violetta stood in the alley, head cocked, hoping Stella would give her another excuse for a confrontation, Stella met her gaze and scowled back.
Assunta tried again. “Say, please come inside, Zia.”
“Please come inside, Zia,” four-year-old Cettina echoed, always eager to please. Stella stepped back from the doorframe to let her aunt pass.
By the time Assunta joined her sister-in-law in the kitchen, Violetta had spread the contents of her bundle on the table. Four loaves of bread, which Violetta was cutting into quarters with Assunta’s knife.
“Old loaves from last week,” Violetta explained. “I thought they would be good for the pigs.”
Assunta scooped up baby Giuseppe, who was not wearing any pants at this moment. She wrapped her elbow under his cold naked bum. “That’s very kind of you, Violèt.”
Violetta shrugged. “It’s no trouble to me. I am happy to go without for you.” Ah, there it was, the bitterness. The poor woman couldn’t even let a gift feel like a nice thing.
