It was the first family medical emergency since Stella’s bludgeoning in the schoolyard. This time, Assunta sent Stella down to Feroleto so Maria wouldn’t be left alone.
“You’ll have to get the doctor to come up here, Stella,” Assunta said. “Do you remember where his house is?”
Stella was sure she could find it. “What if he won’t come?”
Assunta shook her head. “You have to make him come, no matter what.”
While Assunta put Maria’s eye in a bowl of water to keep it moist, Stella tied up her skirts and went hurrying down the mountain. A work detail sent by the government in Catanzaro had put a proper road in, including a bridge that stretched over the gully to Feroleto, but Stella stuck with the donkey path she knew.
She found what she was looking for by instinct. There was the doctor’s house, with its yellow stucco finish, seven doors up on the left side of the cobblestone road that ran through the center of town. The nameplate saidDOTTOREand underneath thatMASCARO AGUSTINO. She hadn’t known the doctor had the same name as her mother.
The house was empty, but Stella knew where to go next. It was the afternoon rest hour, and pretty much all of the men in the entire town were gathered in thechiazzain front of the bar, their backs to the valley. Some looked at Stella askance, but no one asked what she wanted. Thinking of her grandmother bleeding at Assunta’s kitchen table with her eye in a soup bowl, Stella took a large breath and bellowed,“Duttore! U duttore è ca?”She remembered the good Italian she had learned in school, appropriate, she thought, for this public occasion, and tried again,“Il dottore è qui?”
The men fell silent as they took their own inventory, but the doctorwas not there. Then a fellow with a large gray mustache remembered the doctor had gone to Nicastro to restock his medical supplies. Stella would just have to wait.
Stella sat in front of the chestnut tree in the middle of thechiazza,where she wouldn’t be able to miss the doctor if he passed. The men chattered around her, but her blood was ringing in her ears and she couldn’t hear anything they said. It was possible hernonnawould die. Time and again she considered running back home to be with her grandmother, and each time she heard her mother’s voice: “You have to make him come, no matter what.” So she waited, fingering the ribs of the suture scars on her left arm, wondering if the doctor remembered sewing her up, even though she couldn’t remember it herself.
Stella was lucky, because it was two hours to Nicastro and the doctor might have decided to stay the night, but in fact he only kept her waiting an hour and a half.
“I’m Stella Fortuna,” she told him. “You saved me three times and now you have to save my grandmother.”
He was probably tired from his travels, but he followed her back up to Ievoli as the bells of Santa Maria Addolorata were ringing the first call to evening mass. Maria was lying on Assunta’s bed with a folded cloth pressed over the right side of her face. Stella’s stomach clenched at the sight of it; although she couldn’t quite place the memory, she remembered viscerally the feeling of pulling away a bandage; she pictured the doctor removing the cloth to reveal blood squirting afresh from her grandmother’s socket.
This did not happen. It had been a clean wound, as wood-splitting wounds go. The doctor rinsed the raw flesh with a solution that caused Maria to jerk back in pain. He rebandaged the socket with a white cloth that he secured by tying a handkerchief loosely around her head.
“You need to rest and let it heal,” the doctor said, looking Maria in her good eye. “Don’t touch it, whatever you do.” He said to Assunta, “The most important thing is to prevent it from getting infected.There’s a lot of open skin there”—he circled his hand in front of his own eye—“so lots of opportunities for infection unless you keep it very clean.”
Assunta nodded. “Understood,” she said, although words were difficult.
“What do I do with my eyeball?” Maria asked. Her voice, Stella thought, sounded just like it always did.
The doctor shrugged. “Whatever you want.” And he left to go home to his wife for dinner—at least he was married now.
BY THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOONNonna Maria’s whole face had become hot to the touch and it was clear the doctor’s warning about infection hadn’t been an idle one. For five days the house was full of the scent of mint and purifying chamomile blossoms, which Assunta boiled in the water she used to clean Maria’s wound.
The infection passed, but not before it had spread to Maria’s left eye. When her fever finally lifted, she was completely blind.
AFTERMARIA LOST HER SECOND EYE,Assunta prayed nervously for guidance. She received no specific revelations, and after hemming and hawing she paid the Pianopoli postman Mancini to write a letter for her to Antonio in Hartford. In it, she explained that she could not leave Ievoli because her mother was blind and would die if there were no one to take care of her. She was sorry that she couldn’t obey him about coming to America but she would always be his wife, married before God. She stuttered when she had to say this to Signor Mancini, and she left the post office crying.
Antonio never replied to the letter. In fact, he never wrote to Assunta again.
THERE WAS NO MONEY COMINGfrom America for the Fortuna family. Meanwhile, around them Ievoli was built up and emptied out as young men headed to Argentina and France, sent money home, thencame back to take away wives. The women of the village bought things at the store with money that came to them by post; they no longer went barefoot, or without undergarments.
Stella watched the culture of the village change around her as she entered her teens. Her neighbors grew chubby and made bigger tithings; the church was stuccoed and painted yellow, itschiazzarefurbished with round flagstones. Families built new two-story houses. Mandevilla climbed neatly up their charming pastel façades and children stayed in school until they knew how to read.
Meanwhile, the Fortunas still had Assunta’s house at the top of the hill, a cube of stone with naked mortared walls. Everything up here was just a little shabbier. The Fortuna children sat barefoot in the last pew at mass. Stella looked down from her mother’s mountaintop garden onto the neighbors below, neighbors she had the suspicion were looking down on her mother.
Stella was old enough to see her run-off father as the source of their hardship. Well, they didn’t need him or his American money. Stella and Cettina pulled their own weight. They harvested green olives in September and black olives in January. In March and April, the sisters picked oranges in the hills down around Feroleto. After oranges were done, the spring was devoted to their home garden. July was taken up morning and night by thebaco da seta,feeding and then boiling the silkworms, and then there was a rest, for the feast of the Assumption in August, and then it was back to the olives.
In between the olive harvests, they worked Don Mancuso’s chestnut farm. The girls arrived at dawn to beat the squirrels, who were formidable opponents. The sisters scoured the stringy grass around the bases of the chestnut trees for the spiky, pea-green husks of ripe fruit that had fallen during the night. They flicked the burs into baskets with a stick so as not to prick themselves. When the basket was full they would dump their findings on the harvest blanket, then shuck them and toss the empty burs into the woods, where they couldn’t be confused with tomorrow’s harvesting. They were allowed to keepone-quarter of what they picked; the rest went to Don Mancuso’s overseer, Pepe.
The girls each had a pair of old chestnutting mittens their Nonna Maria had given them. The inside was stitched with a rectangular patch of cracked leather. The mittens weren’t impermeable, though, and the girls’ fingers and wrists were always red with pricking. Cettina shucked quickly and gruffly, as though she took pleasure in the pain, and Stella would surreptitiously flick the trickier unsplit burs to Cettina’s side of the blanket, letting her sister do the dirtiest work. Cettina was either stupid or contrary enough that she never complained about it.
IT WAS INDONMANCUSO’Schestnut orchard that Stella became a woman, October of the year she was thirteen. She’d been feeling sick since the afternoon before, sore in her abdomen and nauseated, although nothing ever came up. This feeling, the unique unpleasantness of a menstrual cramp, would be instantly familiar the next time it crept up on her, but this first time it was frightening and not something anyone had given her any reason to expect.
When she and Cettina set off up the mountain just before dawn, Stella had thought she’d be able to bear it, but the pressure in her stomach had increased over the morning. She’d wondered if there was something seriously wrong with her, if maybe there was another cholera epidemic coming and she’d be the first to fall. It had, after all, been four years since the last time she’d almost died—that was on her mind lately, that her curse had been suspiciously inactive. Where was the malicious little ghost hiding? Part of Stella was looking for death around every corner—maybe this was it, today. As she stooped to pick up the chestnuts her torso pulsed with pain and she felt as if her spirit were seeping out of her body, a great weight she couldn’t see pulling her into the ground.
At midmorning, after the sisters had gathered the fallen chestnuts and crouched on the blanket to shuck them, Stella noticed she was feeling much better. Her relief lasted only as long as she sat in one place;when she shifted because her left foot was falling asleep, she realized her leg felt damp. Her calf, which had been tucked under her, was covered in blood. Her heart pounding, she rubbed at her leg with her dirty and pricker-sore hand, thinking she might have absentmindedly scratched open her flea bites, the way her mother always scolded her not to. She was unable to discover any cut or break in her skin, but she did find that her thighs were smeared with blood as well, as if it were coming from her belly.
