Ever ambitious, Stella spent the summer of 1935 making herselfand Cettina each apacchiana,a festival costume. They were enormously complicated, as Stella was learning piece by piece. Most women commissioned apacchianafrom a specialty dressmaker. Fathers saved up for years for a daughter’spacchiana,which would last the rest of her life, albeit with a changeable second skirt—green for the maiden, red for the married woman, black for the widow.
Well, Stella didn’t have much money, but she did have a will to conquer this task. She and Cettina were going to the festival this year—they were going all the way to Nicastro for the first time in their lives. Her neighbor Gae Felice had told her the Nicastro festival was much bigger than Ievoli’s, two days of dancing and music and vendors selling everything from anise candy to gold jewelry to painted postcards from the monks of San Francesco in Paola. Assunta had promised she would allow her daughters to go to the Nicastrofhestaif Stella could make the costumes, which seemed safely impossible, but she should have known how stubborn Stella was when she wanted something.
Stella needed a model to base her project on. Assunta’spacchianawas not ideal. It had been made cheaply the year Assunta was courting, when her father had dropped dead and left Maria with so little money for Assunta’s dowry. Instead Stella modeled her work after her Nonna Maria’s well-madepacchiana,which was nonetheless fifty years old and needed a little modernization. Her blind grandmother put on the pieces one by one, showing Stella how they must attach. Together they ran their hands over the seams, Stella studying and reconstructing in her mind, hernonnaspinning to demonstrate how the skirt should lift, how the shawl should drape. Maria’s wilted eye socket disappeared behind her cheeks as she smiled like a carefree girl.
There were many pieces to apacchiana,and Stella had to make two of each, one for herself, one for Cettina: long white underskirt, then the second linen skirt, bright green like the leaves of an orange tree, which a girl wrapped voluminously around her waist to create a bustle. Then the black wool bodice, which fell in a knee-length fringed apron. The torso must be close-fitted over the rib cage; here Stella had the opportunity to show off their figures. Black sleeves hung to the elbow, below which Stella would attach the eyelet lace she was crocheting. Above the bodice, demurely covering the cleave of the breasts, the costume allowed a single vivacious strip of red cloth to peek out from the swaths of black and white.
Cettina’s contribution to the costume was the belt. It was the width of a fingerprint and would be cinched as tightly as possible to reinforce the hourglass effect of the waterfalls of cloth. Cettina was a patient embroiderer as long as she had a pattern to follow, and Stella stitched some flowers and vines that her little sister copied in tiny detail.
The week of Ferragosto, after their pilgrimage to the shrine of the Virgin at Dipodi, Stella finished the costumes. Cettina helped her lay them out on the bed for their mother to see. Assunta wasn’t satisfied; “You have to make sure it all does what it’s supposed to do, Stella,” she said. So the girls helped each other dress. Even though they had tried on the pieces one at a time over the last few months, it still felt strange, like crossing a bridge, when Stella put on the entirety of the costume and saw the way her mother and sister were looking at her. And there was her little sister in the full regalia of an adult lady—her little sister, an inch taller than Stella herself, her bosom exploding so energetically from the tight-fitting bodice that it was impossible not to look. Well, that’s what the dress was supposed to do. Stella looked down at her own bosom, standing forth so buoyantly proud of itself. People would be looking at that, too.
“Fhijlie mie,”Assunta said. She was crying, her open-eyed tears. “My girls, you are ladies.” She touched Stella on the forehead, creating the tiny cross three times with her thumb to banish themal’oicch’before moving on to Cettina. “Now is when you have to be the most careful. Now is when everyone will be jealous.”
THEFORTUNAS LEFT FOR THENICASTROFHESTAAT DAWN,the girls sitting stiffly in the Felice brothers’ cart in their bosom-plumpingpacchianacorsets. Stella’s heart was racing with anticipationat the thought of visiting bustling Nicastro, of a festival attended by thousands of people. As the cart wended down the rutted mountain road, Stella’s breasts bounced ostentatiously—much closer to her chin than they usually were, which was both thrilling and unsettling. Men would look at her. Was that something she wanted, though? The memory surfaced, inexplicably, of her father’s naked injunction, of the way he had pinched her in the dark. As the sun rose on their party, pinking the silver undersides of the olive leaves, Stella tried to shove away the nauseating thought of her father.
Gae and his brother Maurizio jovially walked the whole way beside the cart, chatting with Assunta like they were old friends. The Felice boys had a knack for flirting with older ladies, and Assunta didn’t mind pretending she wasn’t onto them. She had her habitual black hair cloth tied over her head—no getting too festive—but her face was bright with excitement, which smoothed away the worry lines.
Nicastro was an ancient city, cascading down a mountain below the ruins of a Norman castle. All the streets were paved with flagstones and lined by crumbling but immortal mortared Norman walls. The centralcorsowas a grand boulevard, wide as a field. By the time they arrived, it was already roaring with hawkers and music. There were more people than Stella had seen in her life, or even imagined. Black skirts and men’s long black cloaks eddied between the carts and wooden stalls filling the cobbledchiazza. There were rich, cream-skinned girls with gold crucifixes orcornetto charmssparkling on chains that lay weighty on their bosoms, rising and falling to catch the sunlight. Stella tried to imagine how much those necklaces must have cost.
The Fortuna women walked timidly among the vendors, with Gae leading them like a friendly sentinel. Giuseppe had taken his allowance from Assunta and followed Maurizio off into the crowd, and they didn’t see that contingent again until it was time for lunch. By then, Stella had grown accustomed to the hot energy and loosened up, happy to drink wine and clap along to the music.
The throng of blackpacchiana skirtswas interrupted by splashes of unexpected color. Stella first noticed a woman in an eye-catching dress as pink as mandevilla. Stella stared—she could not even imagine what dye might make that color. The woman’s black hair was uncovered, and—Stella realized—she was coming toward them.
Assunta, who was holding on to Cettina’s elbow, also saw the woman approaching and tugged her daughters around in a quick about-face.
“Zingara,”Assunta whispered to them.Gypsy. In fact, Assunta would not have felt confident making such a pronouncement if she hadn’t overheard another woman alerting her companion a moment earlier.
Cettina’s head whipped around for a second look, and Assunta smacked her daughter’s hand.“Don’t look at them or they’ll steal your purse.”
Stella felt her heart speed. Real Gypsies. She tried to sneak a look without turning her head.
“Just look away,” Gaetano told her. “And mind your money at every moment.”
“Why are they here?” Cettina whispered.
“To beg,” Gae said. “And to take advantage of people who don’t know any better.”
Cettina’s face was red. “No, I mean, why are they here, in Nicastro, if nobody likes them? Why don’t they go somewhere else?”
“No one likes them anywhere,” Gae said. “There would be nowhere to go.”
Cettina spent her allowance on an oil-fried batter pastry. Stella watched, rapt, as the vendor dropped liquid batter in the skeeching oil, fished out the fluffed dough, dipped a spoon into a jar of chestnut flower honey—how much must a jar of that size cost!—and shook amber droplets onto the hot pastry. He served it to Cettina on a thin piece of pinewood. Cettina shared with Stella, of course.
Stella chose for herself a piece of anise candy,liquirizia. It was saltyand spicy and made her tongue curl, Stella who could chew the hottest chili peppers without shedding a tear. She browsed with longing through the wares of the cloth vendors, through tables of ribbon and glossy threads and buttons. It was good to understand what she was missing by only buying from the peddler, and also whether there were items she could haggle harder over in the future.
Assunta bought a few things: a special hard cheese; dried Sila porcini mushrooms that were said to be more delicious than meat. There was a fat bareheaded gold seller with a retinue of swarthy young men protecting his table. Assunta stopped and inspected every piece on display. She was looking for something particular.
“How much is this?” she asked the man behind the table.
Before the fat man opened his mouth to answer, Gaetano stepped forward to stand at Assunta’s shoulder, tipping his hat respectfully to the gold seller, who tersely quoted a price. Assunta looked at Gae, who nodded; it was fair.
Stella, grudgingly impressed by Gae’s gallantry, moved in closer so she could see what the prize was. It was a tinycornetto,to protect against the Evil Eye, shaped like a pepper and carved from white bone.
“This is what you need now, at your age,” Assunta said. She hadn’t turned around, but Stella knew her mother was talking to her. It was because of all that cleavage Stella had on display. “To keep away the fascinations.” Assunta asked the vendor, “Do you have another one?”
“No,signora.Just what you see here.” The vendor leaned over his own belly to point to another piece on the table. “There’s this one that’s carved bone, as well, but it’s black, not white.”
Assunta considered the piece, stooping over the table so her nose was inches from it. “It’s different,” she said.
