Stella was relieved that she could explain what she’d felt, that someone was going to take this fear from her. “There was a hand. Like this.” With her right hand she seized her left and squeezed so the fingers bunched together like grapes, slowly ripening before the women’s eyes as the blood swam in fruitless circles. “A hand was holding me.”
“Whose hand?” Maria asked. “Concettina’s?”
“No, Cettina was over there.” Stella gestured to her left. How freely her arms moved, without any pain! The rest of her was a burning belly. “It was an invisible hand.”
Maria and Assunta were quiet, because this sounded awfully supernatural to them. Eventually, Maria thought to take out her rosary, andthe two women started a soft chant of the Hail Marys. Cettina sat on the floor and stared up at her sister, who lay quietly on the bed and stared back. They didn’t have to say anything to each other, nor did they have anything to say. Stella had been the one who was trampled, but Cettina had had to watch it.
When the suffering child was finally asleep, Assunta admitted, “I don’t think it’s the Eye, Ma.”
Maria did not respond to this. Sitting on the bed with her palm on her granddaughter’s forehead, she frowned with half of her mouth.
ON THE SIXTH DAY,the doctor allowed Assunta to take her daughter home. It seemed she had escaped infection. After the doctor reswaddled Stella’s midriff and torso, Assunta handed him a packet oflire—his fee, the cost of the surgery, five nights’ lodging, the price of one chicken, the entire bill paid in full, no installment plan needed. The once-beloved pigs had been sold to Zu Salvatore, who ran the store in thecentro,and in whose basement their haunches were currently suspended. Between the cost of their food for the year and this set of medical bills, the pigs had almost paid for themselves.
AS THE THICK CRUSTof a scar formed over the wound that split her abdomen, Stella was bed-bound for many weeks—very trying for a child of six. During this time her godmother Za Ros entertained her by teaching her various womanly handicrafts. She taught her to embroider handkerchiefs and to crochet increasingly elaborate decorative lace. Stella, naturally competitive, focused her bored energy on mastering these tricks, then basked in the adults’ admiration. Everyone told her how clever she was.
On an unseasonably warm day in February, after four arduous weeks of only being allowed to leave the bed to use the chamber pot, Stella convinced her mother that she felt well enough to go outside. Assunta clutched her daughter’s arm as they walked the forty steps to the churchchiazza—that was as far as Assunta would let Stella go. Theystood on the plateau and looked down over the mountain together, silently appreciating the panorama. Weak February sunlight cut through the veil of gray clouds and splashed the olive valley below them, a yellow puddle of springtime between the mountains.
Stella’s ancestors had stopped here on this plateau three hundred years earlier to build the village of Ievoli because of this incredible view. From thechiazzawhere these ancestors erected their church, one could see all the way to the Tyrrhenian Sea to the right and the Ionian Sea to the left. The volcanic island of Stromboli smoldered perpetually at the edge of the lichen-green bay, and Stella and Assunta watched together as it emerged from the hazy horizon when the sun began to sink behind it.
This was Stella’s world, this mountain hers to live on despite everything that tried to kill her. Her belly aching, Stella slipped her hand back into her mother’s and they walked home for supper. But she would come back to watch the sun set again tomorrow.
Death 3
Bludgeoning
(Education)
THE THIRD ALMOST-DEATH OFSTELLAFORTUNAcoincided with the end of her formal education. It was August 16, 1929. Stella was nine and a half years old.
In general the Ievoli schoolhouse was not a very dangerous place, because the children didn’t spend much time there. In Mussolini’s Italy, elementary education was compulsory through third grade, but it was hard to enforce this law in villages like Ievoli, where there was limited benefit to sending one’s child to school.
The school was a boxlike wood and stone edifice on the far side of the churchchiazza. It had a vaulted twelve-foot ceiling and tall windows to let in lots of light, and got very cold in the winter, so there was no school between Advent and Easter. There was no school during the month of August for Ferragosto, the celebration of the Assumption, or in September, for the festival of the Madonna Addolorata—Our Lady of the Sorrows, Ievoli’s patron saint—and when the olive trees needed to be harvested.
When school was in session, there were two teachers, Maestra Giuseppina, who taught the boys, and Maestra Fiorella, who taught the girls. Maestra Giuseppina, who had finished upper school in Nicastro, was married to a university graduate she had met before the Great War. They lived in the apartment above the school, where he wrote history books while she taught the sons of Ievoli.
Maestra Fiorella was a bit of a different story. She lived alone, for both her parents were dead. She was only twenty-three but was already a spinster in the eyes of the village women, who felt sorry for her. It was not an easy life, being a spinster without hope of a match, and Maestra Fiorella really had none—there were no unmarried boys of her generation left, between the Great War losses and the wave of emigration that had made white widows of so many a Ievolitana. Besides, Fiorella wasn’t wife material. She did not know how to cook and she was a slovenly housekeeper—ladies paid calls on her duringthe afternoon siesta to appraise the level of grime on her walls and to sneakily wipe down her counter. Fiorella had terrible skin, probably a product of her constant illnesses (to accommodate which the girls’ side of the school was often closed without explanation). Although she had a patient disposition, she was not clever. She had pursued the position of village schoolteacher because it had become evident she wasn’t going to be good for much else.
Usually the girls’ lessons consisted of themaestra’s reading aloud from her primer, omitting the words she didn’t recognize. The passages were mind-numbing and often unintelligible, what with the missing words and the fact that the primer was written in Italian, which was very different from the Calabrese language the girls spoke at home. There was only one broken slate for everyone to share, so after the morning reading the children who had taken the trouble to come to school that day—because, let’s be honest, it is not always convenient to come to school, especially when there is a good chance of discovering the teacher has not come, either—would take turns writing the letters of the alphabet on the slate. Since Fiorella disliked math, the girl students never learned multiplication or geometry. This was too bad for Stella, who was good with numbers; she probably would have caught on quickly.
Stella started going to school the Easter of 1927, when she was seven. Assunta had wanted Stella to wait until Cettina was big enough to go with her. The sisters sat at one desk and kneeled together on pebbles in the corner when themaestracaught them whispering to each other. Stella was smart and enjoyed being admired and envied by the other students. But themaestra’s lessons were boring, so sometimes she and Cettina would only pretend to go to school. They’d dress, kiss their mother good-bye, then spend the morning picking cherries off other people’s trees, or sitting on the rocky ledge above the algae-filled cistern trying to catch the bergamot-green lizards that peeked out to sun themselves.
When they did go to school, the school day lasted from 9A.M. untilnoon; sometimes they adjourned earlier. During chestnut or strawberry season, Maestra Fiorella would have the whole class stump out to the fields and collect fallen fruit, which she’d take home for her own dinner. The children were not supposed to tell their parents about this kind of recess, but of course people caught sight of the little girls all marching out of thechiazzatogether, and the parents gossiped unhappily about how Fiorella was stealing their children’s labor when she was supposed to be teaching them. No one stepped in to stop her; it would have been too awkward a conversation.
ON THE OTHER HAND,Maestra Giuseppina, who taught the boys, was a devout fascist. Every morning when she stepped into the classroom at five of nine it was expected that the littleragazziwere already assembled in a row in their matching uniforms to perform the official salute to her and to the picture of Mussolini on the wall. But at least the boys learned to read.
THERE WERE SO MANY THINGSa girl needed to learn at home, anyway—cooking, horticulture, the tending of baby siblings, cleaning. There was endless needlework—linen to be spun, clothing to be stitched or mended. A girl needed to prepare her trousseau, all those bedsheets and kitchen linens and underwear she’d need for her marriage, and she started working on that grand project when she was nine or ten. That was the age, too, at which she would start taking part in the village’s cottage silkworm industry, which would occupy her twenty-four hours a day for the month of July.
But for a little girl, the most important education of all was spiritual, so that she might grow up to be a good Christian wife and mother. Stella and Cettina had started catechism classes after Easter of 1928, when Stella was eight, a little on the old side, and Cettina was six, a little on the young side.
Catechism classes met on Saturday afternoons in the vestry by the church. In 1928 the teacher was Signora Giovannina, who owned thepeach grove, and who felt the great weight of the responsibility of all of these children’s immortal souls if she couldn’t knock the fear of God into them.
Stella was good at catechism. She memorized the incantations and Bible verses as easily as she remembered folk songs. Cettina was not so good. She struggled to remember things from week to week. When Stella tried to whisper her sister prompts, Signora Giovannina yelled at Cettina, which made Cettina freeze up and abandon any thought that might have been in her head. This was a tricky moment; Stella hated watching her little sister suffer, but if Stella tried to help it would only get Cettina in more trouble.
Stella always thought of what her mother had told her—that she had to look out for Cettina, that Cettina was just little, not smart like Stella. It was hard to tell as they grew up if Cettina actually wasn’t smart, or if it was just that she could never quite catch up with her older sister, even though she was always expected to follow by her side.
They were old enough now that their adult characters had emerged out of their baby fat. Stella already realized what kinds of things the women in the village said about her, and what kinds of things they said about her sister. They said Cettina was a good girl, an obedient girl, a hard worker, a bit of a brute because she had no common sense. Stella, meanwhile, was pretty and sharp—quick, clever, and hardheaded,capotost’,the most stubborn and willful little girl anyone had ever seen. She was proud to be called all those things. Stella wanted to be tough. She had survived, against all odds, two near-death experiences. She liked to think of herself as harder, stronger than anyone else around her.
TheysaidCettina was the better sister, but secretly they all were more interested in Stella. Stella was nine years old, but she had already realized that. And as much as she loved her sister, she did not mind it one little bit.
