“Well, thank you.” Assunta brought Giuseppe over to her sister-in-law. “Give your auntie a kiss, Giuseppe.” He complied, then smiled. “There’s a good boy.” He didn’t talk much yet, but he was already the most outgoing of her children. Assunta put him down on the floor again. “Now go put on your pants.”
Violetta wiped the crumbs from her hands on her skirt. “You wantto take some out to the pigs now?” she asked the girls. She handed them each two crusts.
“Should we feed the pigs, Mamma?” Stella asked, her voice meaningful—I’ll only do it if you tell me, Mamma.
Assunta tried not to laugh. What a sharp little thing she was, with her sharp little face! Like an adult, and with the wickedness of an adult. “Yes, yes, go feed them,” she said. “Then come back in and we’ll fix some lunch.”
There was absolutely no reason to worry about her daughters as they stepped out into the wintry sunshine.
The two girls entered the pigpen without trepidation; the pigs, as anticipated, approached for fondling. Cettina offered up her ends of bread, and they snouted it, making piggy noises. They bumped their rib cages, which would soon yield deliciouspancetta,into the girls’ torsos, the roiling force of their body weight inexorable. When one had finished with Cettina’s bread, it turned to Stella, black-ringed eyes level with her collarbone. For some reason, at the wet snuffling of the pig’s nose against her wrist, Stella recoiled. In an inexplicable spasm, she clenched her hand and pulled back her right arm.
The second pig caught on that there was bread being withheld, and it rounded on her. The two pig heads pushed into her chest as they fought for the elusive crust. Stella felt herself pushing back, the forward pressure becoming less playful and more defensive.
“Pigs, Stella,” Cettina said. Her spit-wet hands were bunched in her skirt, her eyes wide. “The pigs.”
Stella realized that she had only to release her bread, and the pigs would take it and leave her alone. So she let go. Or at least, her brain made the decision to let go. But her hand stayed clenched. In that initial moment of betrayal, as Stella wondered what was wrong with her body, one pig or the other pushed her to the muddy ground, where she landed on her back, her spine reverberating with the fall. The pigs began to step on her, clamor over each other in a gnawing, snorting ruckus. Stella stared in shock at her hand. It was as though—and shewould remember this exact sensation for the rest of her life—another hand was wrapped around hers, squeezing, so the bread was trapped tightly within the binding of her little fingers.
There was silence in the courtyard as Cettina, stiff with confusion, watched, as Stella fought her own hand and the pigs fought each other. It was Stella’s scream that ripped through the damp post-rain air and brought Assunta and Violetta running, a piercing, full-bodied child scream as the pigs chewed and stepped one then the other over Stella’s abdomen, which split and poured forth its contents, just like the pigs’ own abdomens were destined to be split to make and fill sausage casings.
THENCE CAMEASSUNTA’S SECOND RUNdown the mountain to the doctor’s. This trip was so much more hopeless than the first—her daughter’s stomach had cracked up the middle like a boiled chestnut, and the pigs had done some heavy mixing of intestines and mud.
On this tromp down the mountain—her daughter’s torso swaddled tightly in once-white kitchen linens, now a frightening vibrant red—it seemed obvious that these were Assunta’s last moments with her second Stella, and over the stupidity of a crust of bread from her noxious sister-in-law. She gasped for breath, tasting blood in the raw back of her throat, fought for balance on the steep, muddy donkey path. “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee,” she rasped into the wet winter air, over and then over again—the rest of the rosary eluded her. She was certain her daughter had been cursed.
That afternoon and night, during the washing and stitching, and the next day while they waited to see if infection had set in, Stella lingered at a point of acute danger. The intestines—the doctor identified them for the sober Assunta, who had never butchered a mammal and wasn’t sure of the frothy substance that had come out of her daughter—had survived the trampling somehow intact. The doctor, with his now-familiar smell of chicken skin, washed the innards toremove dirt, pushed them back in with his bare fingers, and stitched up the bloody mass of tissue with a needle and thread, just as Assunta would have darned her blouse. Stella’s eyes were open, dry and staring, throughout the procedure. No one, including Stella, knew whether she was conscious or not. A number of ribs had been broken, but neither lung had been punctured, as the child was evincing no blood from her respiratory tract. The doctor credited the suppleness of the childish bone structure, which had apparently accommodated the crushing weight of the pigs instead of snapping in fatal places like the neck or spine. He explained that the real test, now, would be to see whether any poisons had already infested her cavity. If she should survive the week, it would remain to be seen whether her female nest had been ruined, whether as an adult she would be able to conceive or give birth.
Assunta, weeping her silent tears, considered this last statement as she held her daughter’s hand in the doctor’s lying-in room. How interesting that this thought had occurred to the doctor now, at this moment, Stella’s blood still tucked into the creases in his hands. In the same breath, he had told Assuntashe may not survive the week,and alsoif she does, she may not be able to have children.Was it an off-the-cuff medical observation? Or was it something he’d learned to address for other village mothers, because other mothers would ask? Was the doctor’s narrative just a progression of statements, or was its implication true? Was a life without children a life at all, for a woman? Assunta would never know, as she had had children since she was a child herself. Assunta ran her mind over these questions with philosophical disinterest. Nothing mattered except that the doctor’s miracle needle might somehow, somehow have stitched her Stella back into this world.
When the bachelor doctor had left her alone with her daughter, Assunta stood over the bed and laid her hands against the sides of Stella’s abdomen, away from the stitching. Stella’s belly burned like a pot on the stove. When all the cool had gone from her palms, Assunta flippedthem, the same way she had done that night in 1918 when her first Stella had fought the fever, and when Assunta had tried to suck the heat out of her daughter’s skin with her own hands.
STELLA AWOKE TO THE HUSHof her grandmother’s voice, but she didn’t open her eyes. She felt an intense nausea and a bursting sensation in her gut. As she lay unmoving in the buttoned-up darkness, thinking about whether she ever wanted to open her eyes again, the room began to creep up on her, the nostalgic odor of unnumbered strangers’ body liquids and mint, sharp and sweet.
“Mint,” Stella said, her voice raspy. “The mint.”
The doctor, who hadn’t been sanguine about his patient’s surviving the operation, found this unnerving. Maria, however, did not.
“Yes, little mouse, the mint,” Maria said. Her granddaughter was asking for a spell to fight the Eye. Before the doctor could see what he must not, Maria wrested his candle from his hands and used it to drive him from his own operating room.
As Assunta worked the unfascination, she tried to stop herself from thinking about whose jealousy could have cursed her little daughter. This was the second time her Stella had been brought to death’s door by bizarre bad luck. Was the Eye fixed on her? Some affectionate-looking villager who was secretly jealous of Assunta’s beautiful, clever child? Or jealous of Assunta for having her?
Or was it the jealousy of a ghost, who every year was a little further forgotten by her loved ones, while her replacement shone like a star in their hearts?
THE DOCTOR DIDN’T DARE MOVEStella for at least a week, lest the barely reinstalled intestines shake loose. She would have to stay in Feroleto; Assunta could sleep on the floor. He tactfully did not mention the added expense when he delivered the news.
Antonio hadn’t sent Assunta any money in three years. While she sat by the bed, Assunta sucked her teeth and tried not to think aboutthe cost, remembering that it was thinking about the cost that had killed her first Stella.
THEY BUTCHERED ONE OFthe doctor’s chickens and boiled it in a pot. The chicken would be added to Assunta’s bill. They tried to feed Stella the chicken broth, but when she opened her mouth to swallow the broth spilled out the sides of her face and streaked her cheeks. It was as if there were a round ball of air in her throat, repelling anything that tried to pass through it. She could speak, but her throat was scratchy. Maria gave her mint to chew and this at least called forth some saliva.
“You were attacked by the pigs, little mouse,” Nonna Maria told Stella.
But Stella remembered. “No, I wasn’t. They just wanted the bread. I had bread and they just wanted to eat it.”
“Silly girl,” Maria said soothingly. “Next time you just give them the bread.”
“There won’t be a next time!” Assunta said. She knew what she thought of pigs now.
“I tried to give them the bread.” Stella’s words were puffs of air. “But I couldn’t give it to them.”
“What do you mean you couldn’t give it to them?” Maria asked, petting Stella’s head, which was the only piece of her that bore petting.
