“I’ll take you,” the driver said. “Onelira, wherever you’re going.”
Stella looked at Cicciu again, saw the stress sparkling in his eyes. He was paralyzed with his own doubt.
“Come on,” the driver said, stern now. “Don’t you know how dangerous this city is? Anyone can see you are new here and will take advantage of you. Let me get you to wherever you’re staying before someone comes along and robs you or worse.”
“Onelira,” Stella said, surprised to hear her own voice. “Onelirato anywhere?” This city was massive and strange; Stella would have no way of getting them to the right place when she couldn’t trust anyone she spoke to. She had to hope the driver was not one of the evil ones.
“Onelira,” the driver repeated.
Stella looked at Cicciu again, and her cousin nodded. “Onelira,” he said, and they all got in the carriage.
Cicciu told the driver the hotel’s name and the road it was on—all information from Antonio’s letter. The carriage driver made small talk, turning over his shoulder to shout questions at them in his baffling Napolitano dialect. Cicciu and Assunta said nothing, and Stella felt obliged to answer at first, where they were from and that they were going to America. She felt increasingly uneasy about sharing personal details with this stranger and stopped responding, letting him fill the silence with his own halfhearted chatter. The moist air bore a sour tinge, like the smell that hits you when you uncover a rotten squash at the bottom of the vegetable pantry, only saltier. As they passed shops and dark alleys, her heart pounded at the notion of wasting a wholeliraon a carriage ride to the hotel, but she reasoned they never would have been able to find it on their own.
When the driver pulled his horse to a halt, Cicciu checked the name on the hotel’s sign against his paper. It took him a long time to check, Stella thought. She saw that his hands were quaking. The Fortunas climbed down from the carriage, and the driver helped them unload the trunk.
Stella took out her purse, which she had been hiding in the folds of her skirt. As she pulled out the coin to hand to the driver, she thought of Cicciu’s quaking hand and tried to quell her own nerves.
“Oneliraper person,signorina,” the driver said.
Stella’s heartbeat accelerated. She knew that was not right, a full day’s wages for this short carriage ride—he was trying to cheat her. “I believe it’s supposed to be onelirafor all of us,signore.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she scolded herself for saying “I believe,” for letting herself sound soft. She glared at him. “Sixlireis far too much money for this short journey.”
“Signorina,you are misinformed.” The driver’s deep-set eyes were earnest. “Maybe you don’t know about the road tax? All the prices have gone up these last two months. If I don’t give the officials the exact taxmoney for each person I transported I pay a huge fine, maybe lose my whole business—and they always know who’s coming through, thosecarabinieri,nothing better to do than spy on honest people all day. If anyone saw me with a cartload of six people and I can’t pay the tax—ffft.” He made a slicing gesture with his hand, as if he were cutting off his own head.
Stella looked at Cicciu, who was looking at the ground. He would not help her now. She was seething in anger and drowning in doubt—she was sure the driver was cheating her, but at the same time she wasn’t sure. And there were her sweet little mother and Cettina and the boys looking at her with wide, worried eyes. She was the one with the money. She had to make the decisions. Well, soon they would be in America; they wouldn’t need this money anymore, anyway.
She dug back into her purse, trying to find a five-liracoin. “I’m sorry it’s this way,signorina,” the driver was saying. “I know it’s hard for youemigranti,coming from the countryside where things are so different. I’m a country person myself.” She felt her pulse calming as she handed him the coin. The expression in his deep-set eyes did seem heartfelt. “But you live here in the city a long time and realize how the world works, you know?” He looked down at his hand. “And the rest,signorina?”
Stella, who had been letting down her guard, was instantly angry again. “What do you mean, the rest? Six isn’t enough for you?” She felt her family shifting in their shoes around her; felt the pressure not to make a mistake for them all. “You want to rob us of even more?”
The driver laughed, not unkindly. “No,signorina,six is quite enough. But you only gave me two.” He stuck out his palm, showing her two one-liracoins.
“Oh,” she said gruffly, feeling sheepish for her anger.Could I have been that stupid?“Sorry.” She took back a one-liracoin and exchanged it for a five-lirafrom her purse. His fingers closed around it before it could even clank against its companion. Already her doubt had set in again, but the driver leapt up on his seat and tutted his horse away.
Inside the hotel, the Fortunas stood together by the door, forming a protective ring around their trunk and bags, as Cicciu approached the desk to speak to the hotelier. They were in the right place, it seemed; there was a very long conversation between the two men. How could there be so much to explain? Stella, still jumpy from the confrontation with the driver, stood by her mother, a comforting hand wrapped around her arm, feeling Assunta’s stuttering pulse in the thick, hot vein that throbbed in the crook of her elbow. Eventually Cicciu summoned Stella to pay the hotel fare, two rooms—one for Cicciu, one for the Fortunas—for two exorbitant nights. They had been expecting this, though; Stella counted out the forty preciouslire. As she set them on the counter, she looked at what remained, that unease in her gut rising again. There was too little in the purse.
“Scusi, signore,could you tell me, how much should a carriage ride from the station be?” she asked the hotelier. “For all six of us?”
The man shrugged. “Onelira,no more.”
One lira.“But what about the...” Stella tried to remember the driver’s words. “The road tax. That the... thecarabiniericheck?”
“There is no road tax,signorina.” The hotelier shook his head. “I’m so sorry. Thetruffatoriof my city. They give us all a bad name.”
The man showed them to their rooms, where they settled in sullenly. Stella was so angry with herself she couldn’t speak. As her mother distributed their dinner, Stella poured out her purse and counted all her money. Sure enough, she was fourlireshort.
“He cheated me,” she said out loud.
“Oh, Stella,” her mother said. “It’s too bad, but there’s nothing we can do now. Fivelire, but all past.”
“No,” Stella said, the fire roiling in her belly. “He cheated meagain.IknewI gave him six, but he must have switched the coin really fast, and he tricked me into giving himanotherfive.” She was so furious—with the man as well as with herself—that her vision clouded with a silver fog. She blinked to clear her eyes and saw that Assunta and Cettina were looking at her blankly. “So altogether,” she explained, “Igave him a one-liracoin, a five-lira, and another five-lira. Even considering I took oneliraback, I still paid tenlirefor what should have been a one-lirajourney.”
Having wrapped her head around the tragedy now, Cettina gasped. Assunta clucked her tongue and said, “Madonn’.” Cicciu was intent on hissuppressata,or perhaps on not meeting Stella’s eye.
Stella took in a lungful of air. She needed to calm herself down. “How can a man be that evil? Stealing from people who can’t protect themselves?”
“The world is full of evil people, my little mouse,” Assunta said. Her eyes were red from crying about her mother, but now she was focused on her daughter. Stella tried to swallow, but her mistake was caught in her throat. “You can’t trust anyone in this world, no one but yourself. You have to know exactly what you believe, so you can stick to it. Otherwise people will always try to cheat you or confuse you.” Assunta patted the bed beside her. “Come sit, Stella, and have some bread.”
Stella turned to the wall to gather herself, but regarded her mother from the corner of her eye. Assunta’s advice to trust no one was an adage everyone repeated without thinking about what it meant. But Stellawasthinking about what it meant. About knowing what you believe—she had believed she had given the driver sixlire,and he convinced her her beliefs were wrong. It was her fault for being weak of mind and will.
