But Antonio was reminded of his patrimony in the spring of 1928, when he attended the funeral of Rocco Scavetta, the tall, round-bellied old Mott Street grocer. The entire neighborhood came to pay respects, even the mobsters Rocco had tussled with over the years. As Antonio sat in the church’s second-to-last pew, he surveyed the hundreds of bowed dark heads and thought about his own funeral. Signor Scavetta was a man with a legacy, seven sons and two daughters, grand- and great-grandkids, and all of their friends mourned him now. Antonio understood, finally, what children were for.
Only a few weeks later, a man from Pianopoli tracked Antonio down. Tony Cardamone was the younger brother of Assunta’s sister-in-law Violetta. Since Antonio hadn’t spent much time in Ievoli since his marriage, his and Tony’s paths had seldom crossed.
The two men sat at the heavy marble-top table of one of the Mott Street cafés, drinking cloudy percolated coffee so strong its steamy aroma obscured the smell of the illegal anise liquor the proprietor had tipped in. Tony Cardamone was passing through New York on his way home to his wife in Hartford. He had worked on the railroads for a while but was settled down now with a construction job. He didn’t seem to want anything from Antonio, although Antonio was on his guard.
“When it’s time to bring your family over,” Tony Cardamone said meaningfully, “you should think about coming to Hartford. You can live in a real house, not like here, everyone piled up like chickens in a coop.”
Antonio shook the man’s hand and they wished each other well; Tony Cardamone had to catch a train home and couldn’t stay for dinner. “Come to Hartford,” he said again before he left. “We’ll take care of you. Get you set up.”
There was no particular reason for his generosity that Antonio could see. Most likely Tony Cardamone felt compassionately toward Assunta, who was, as everyone knew, a saint, and who had been abandoned for a very long time. But he didn’t press; if something was meant to be, it would be.
A year passed. In August 1929, Antonio was out at a Lower East Side saloon with Nico Carbone when they were involved in a bar brawl in which a man was killed. I don’t know whether there was any deeper history behind the episode or it was just a particularly unlucky drunken night on the town. But I know that the murdered man’s name was Johnny Mariano, that he was one of Frank Costello’s personal goons, and that it was Antonio’s knife that ended up in his ribs. Antonio escaped the scene, leaving Nico, who’d been knocked unconscious, to take the rap. Antonio hid in his landlady’s coat closet for two days until he could sneak onto a ship bound for Napoli. Nico Carbone was given a fifteen-year sentence for Johnny Mariano’s murder, but was found dead in his jail cell only two months into his incarceration. Your guess is as good as mine whether or not it was really suicide.
Antonio knew he couldn’t return to New York anytime soon, but he was chagrined to be back in Ievoli, this place he thought he’d put behind him. Tony Cardamone’s offer was on his mind as he bided the winter of 1929. As soon as he felt it was safe to set foot on American soil again, Antonio asked his sister-in-law Violetta for her brother’s address in Hartford.
***
ASSUNTA’S LAST BABY,the one Antonio planted during his final trip to Ievoli, was born in the beginning of July 1930. Stella helped her grandmother deliver him.
Assunta was kneeling in the garden, supervising as Stella and Cettina poled beans, when she felt her water break, the liquid sliding down her thigh and into the soil below her. For a moment she considered just sitting there and letting the baby be born right in her garden under the boisterous summer sun. How could she even stand up? The church bells had recently rung noon and the rag over Assunta’s forehead was crusted with dried sweat. The baking sun on the globe of her belly made her think of a round brick bread oven, the baby cooking inside. Whole minutes passed as she lingered on this thought, but she finally pushed herself up, the baby’s juice sliding down her leg. “Cettina, go tell yournonnaand Za Ros that the baby’s coming. Stella, help me inside.”
Stella, nervous with anticipation, walked Assunta back into the house as Cettina took off down via Fontana. Cettina would end up spending the night with Za Ros and the silkworms, who needed round-the-clock feeding at this molting stage; better for Cettina to be out of her mother’s hair.
Stella, meanwhile, was ten, old enough to assist with the birth. She sat her mother on a wooden stool and followed Assunta’s taut but level instructions until Maria arrived. Do this. Go get that. Assunta would not scream or cry out during the whole process, because it was best the neighbors only learned what had happened after it was all over and decided. Best not to bring down the Eye.
Stella obeyed her mother. She spread the old brown harvest blanket over the bed to catch the worst mess. She brought a fire to life from the coals, the scars on her arms pulsing in resistance to the heat. She had never seen a baby being born before, had been too young to remember the last time her mother had labored. She stared at her mother’sface during the contractions. Assunta’s skin was swollen and her eyes bright red, the veins on her temple and neck standing out. Stella was old enough to understand; if things did not go smoothly, her mother might die. She realized as she scurried up the hill to the cistern that these might be among the last minutes she had with her mother, and she fought to keep her mind calm, to move carefully but faster so the moments might not be wasted.
Nonna Maria arrived with her pouch of mint, her face pink from climbing up the steep hillside in the midday sun. Stella felt only a fraction of the relief she wished to feel upon seeing her grandmother. Maria looked old and weak to her. Suora Letizia was away in Nicastro today; it was only the two of them, Stella and her little grandmother, to help Assunta bring the baby out.
In fact, it was an easy labor, less than five hours. But Stella, who had no context, was shaken by the experience. She was mature enough to understand that this was the one time in life when the taboo womanly area must become not taboo, when it must be exposed to other women for the baby to come out. But to see the purple-brown skin of her mother’s vagina, layered like the leathery folds of an enormous fig, part convulsingly around the hairy head of the baby—Stella was so sure the baby was dead, its head was so still for so long—and the yellow-brown snake of fecal matter that squeezed out under the baby’s head, which Maria snapped at Stella to wipe away with a rag and which was still hot and soft in her hand when she dropped it, rag and all, in the chamber pot—the slime-sealed eyes of the baby when it finally emerged, the strange blue and white cord wrapped around his little shoulders—Stella was not ready for this. She was not a child and she should have been stoic, prepared to assist in whatever way she could. It was what you did, when you were a woman; this was her induction into the secret world of adult women, and Stella’s heart and mind were rejecting its ugliness. She had seen her precious mother reduced to an animal, a sow in a sty, with no control over her own destiny in this terrible moment.
This was a formative experience for Stella. This was the origin of her second phobia, the horrifying repercussion of the first.
THREE VERY BAD THINGS HAPPENED IN 1931.
The first was that Za Ros moved to France, where her two sons had been living. “Their life is good over there,” Rosina explained to Assunta. “They will never come back here, not even to see me. So I have to go to them.”
Assunta understood missing your children—of course she did. But Ros had stood in for Assunta’s dead father, for Assunta’s absent husband. Ros was her moral fiber, who made her a better and more holy person. Assunta could not imagine her own daily life without her tiny sister. She cried from the time Ros told her until Ros boarded a train north two weeks later. She wasn’t wrong to cry—she would never see her sister again. Neither would Stella, who loved her godmother.
Ros was one of the good ones, as they say. I wonder how things would have been different for the Fortunas if she had stayed. But she made a good decision for herself. The village southwest of Marseilles where her sons installed her was a charming place where people were kind to her. Ros got along so well with the locals that she got married to a French widower, even though she was over sixty years old, and became the stepmother of five grown children. She drank grappa every afternoon of her life and lived to be 105 years old. On her centennial birthday, in 1972, the town newspaper printed a picture of her smiling toothlessly on the front page.
It was lucky for Ros that she left Ievoli when she did, because if she had waited just a bit longer she would not have been able to convince herself to go. The second bad thing that happened was in September, when Assunta’s brother, Nicola, was using a horse-drawn plow to turn over the earth to plant new trees. Nicola lost control of the temperamental horse and was knocked down, and the plow blade dragged overhis thigh. Nicola, who had none of his niece Stella’s luck, bled to death out of a severed artery no one could stanch.
So in six months, Assunta had lost her sister and her brother. Nonna Maria had lost her daughter and her son. Maria was a tough woman, much tougher than Assunta. But I think both of them only held on to sanity after Nicola’s passing because they had each other.
In December, the third bad thing happened: a letter from Antonio.
Wife Assunta
It is time for you and our children to join me here in America now. Write to me with their birthdates so I can apply for a family passport. I will send for you when the paperwork is ready.
Antonio Fortuna
She had not heard from him since he had left with his declaration that he didn’t need her if she didn’t want to be a wife to him. She’d thought her world was safe from his further interference—that she would live as a white widow in her beloved village and raise her children in peace. She had Suora Letizia read the letter to her until she had it memorized, but she didn’t write back. Maybe if she didn’t write back, Antonio wouldn’t be able to send for her.
THE FOLLOWING SPRING,Nonna Maria was splitting firewood behind her house when the ax blade struck a knot and a wedge of wood flew up and hit her in the eye. It was a strangely precise hit, fast and clean. The pain was delayed by shock, and it took Maria several moments to figure out what had happened. She dropped the ax in the dirt as the pulsing in her face became more intense. It wasn’t until she looked at the ground and saw her own eye there looking back at her, round and yellow and surprisingly large, that she understood.
She bent down and picked up the eye between her finger and thumb, turning it over in her hand—it filled her whole palm. With her eye in one hand and her walking stick in the other, she climbed up the hill, calling, “Assù! Assù, I have a problem.”
