Ros clucked her disapproval of this idea, but Cettina said, “She’s cursed.”
Now Ros laughed. “Cursed, or haunted? Is it a ghost or a hex?”
Stella shook her head, which pulsed with pain. “I don’t know,” she said. Her voice was like a goat’s bleat.
“Maybe both,” said Cettina.
AFTER THE DOOR BLUDGEONING INCIDENT,Stella never went back to the schoolhouse. Neither did Cettina. At the end of their formal educations, at ages nine and seven, respectively, they’d learned how to make the letters of the alphabet. They’d learned some basic Italian. They could perform a Roman salute. They could add and subtract numbers, which their mother had already taught them at home, and they could sing Maestra Fiorella’s favorite songs. They’d learned that it was important to segregate boys and girls, and that when resources were limited, the boys should get them first. They had learned by their teacher’s example how to force charity, manipulate favors, and not feel guilty about taking advantage of any situation. Some of the lessons would have more impact than others.
***
THE WEEK AFTERSTELLA’Sthird almost-death, Antonio Fortuna showed up in Ievoli unannounced. His wife hadn’t heard from him in seven years. Assunta tried to hide her dismay, but she couldn’t fool Stella.
It was the first time Stella was old enough to remember her father’s visit. In general he created a very strong impression on her that life was better without acapo famiglia,a man of the house. His voice and smells were too big for their one-room home. He did not talk to his children much, but when he did have something to say it was always at the top of his voice. The girls endured rump-smackings for unladylike offenses, like running in the house and speaking at the dinner table. These had not been punishable before, and Stella’s pride smarted and temper soured under Antonio’s new regime.
Stella had been told she loved her father and that her father loved her, but now that they’d met they were two differently sized strangers with nothing in common except Assunta. Stella wasn’t sure Antonio even knew her name, for the number of times she’d heard him say it. Most of all she disliked the change he effected in her mother. Assunta’s face was pinched and her eyes drooped; she seemed simultaneously annoyed and exhausted. She cleaned up his extra messes and bowed her head when he shouted at her. She must have been lonely, because Za Ros and Nonna Maria no longer stopped by to visit. In general, the house was a dour, joyless place. Stella was exactly old enough to wonder what the point of having a husband or father was, when he seemed to be a source of arbitrary disorder and suffering.
I fear that the timing of Antonio’s visit was very bad indeed. I wonder how Stella’s life might have turned out differently if she had had a father earlier, when she would have been too young to be critical of his dominion; whether she might have grown into a teenage girl with more predictable desires who would have seen romance and marriage as a prize to be won and not a sentence to be endured.
The most disgusting thing about her father was watching him use her mother’s body. It happened almost every night, in or near the second bed Antonio had built against the northern wall of the house on the first day he came back to the village. Stella was used to nestling into Assunta’s fleshy bosom to be petted and caressed to sleep, but now her mother slept in the new bed on the other side of the room, and Stella would be dragged out of sleep by the whisper of her mother’s voice:Tonight, again? Aren’t you tired?orBe quieter, the children will hear you. These susurrations would blend into other noises, slap-slapping and suppressed grunting that Stella could hear even over her brother’s and sister’s heavy sleep-breathing. And Stella would watch whatever she could see, because it made no sense to her why her parents did this same meaningless thing over and over again, her father’s yellow buttocks bobbing in the light of the summer moon and her mother’s thighs jiggling in the wrinkles of her gathered nightdress. When she caught a glimpse of her mother’s face in the dark, it always wore what looked like an expression of worry.
The week before the annual Ievolifhestaof Santa Maria Addolorata, the Blessed Lady of Sorrows, was when the Thing happened. Somehow it had not happened before, in all the nights Stella had sucked on her cheeks and watched her father do the job to her mother—but that night, he looked up mid-exertion and he caught his daughter’s eye. Stella’s gut seized and she pressed her face into the mattress and pulled her arm over her head, but it was too late. When he finished with Assunta, Antonio came over to the children’s bed.
“Tonnon,” Stella heard her mother whisper from her bed.
“One minute.”
“Let them sleep.”
Peeking under her armpit, Stella trembled in sickened fear as she saw his bare legs come to a stop in front of her bed.
“I know you’re awake,” he said to her. “You little pervert.”
Stella felt like she was going to vomit. She had heard the word before, although she wasn’t sure what it meant. She tried to lie completely still.
“Look at me,” her father said. Stella didn’t move.
“Tonnon!” Assunta called with more urgency.
“Quiet, woman.” His feet shifted on the floor. The black hairs on his calves were as wiry as a pig’s. “Mariastella. Look at me or I’ll whip you till you’re dead.”
There was nothing for it. Pretending she wasn’t about to be sick, Stella removed her arm from her face and pushed herself up to prim sitting position. She couldn’t make herself say anything but she scowled up at her father. In front of her face was his penis, which she forced her eyes away from, although it shone slickly in the gray starlight from the window.
Antonio looked down at her for a moment. “You like to watch? Eh?” He grasped her chin and stepped closer so that the odor of his groin, sweat-thick and ferric, filled her nose. “You like to look at your papa’s thing? Why’s that? You like to dream about men’s things? Are you growing up to be a little slut?”
Stella bit on the inside of her cheeks. Her mouth was sour with bile and she swallowed back a semi-solid reminder of her dinner.
“Are you gonna be a slut?” He dug his fingers into her jaw; Stella never cried, but the crush of his grip brought tears to her eyes. “You better not be.”
“Antonio, leave her alone.” There was an edge of panic in Assunta’s voice. “She’s just a child.”
“A child whose mother has been raising her to be a slut,” Antonio said. “Good thing I got here when I did. No daughter of mine is gonna be a slut. You hear?”
Stiff with terror and fury, Stella said nothing. She focused on fighting down the bile, on willing the tears pooling in her eyes to be reabsorbed.
“I said, did youhearme?” Antonio repeated. Then in one abrupt motion, he bent over, jammed his hand up the skirt of her nightdress, and pinched the tight, delicate skin of her private area. Stella cried out in shock as much as pain.
“Antonio!” Assunta shrieked.
