WHAT WAS THERE TO DO?
The Fortunas turned around and went home.
At the Napoli station, Stella counted coins for the return fare. She’d had mixed feelings about going to America, but now that theyweren’t going anymore she was subdued by a sense of futility. Dumping all their earnings into that dirty ticket man’s palm just to go back to where they had started—what was the point?
Cettina, whose face was glinting with nervous sweat, was thinking the same thing. “So many things we could have bought instead,” she whispered to Stella, in that whisper that could be heard ten paces away. “So many pairs of shoes.”
“We don’t need shoes,” Stella said darkly. “We have nowhere to wear them.”
***
THE WORST PART OF BAD NEWSis sometimes not the bad news itself but having to explain the bad news over and over again, to have to endure the reactions of people who are sometimes well-meaning and sometimes only pretending to be well-meaning, and sometimes not even that.
A big mistake. Whose mistake? And no one could fix it? Did you try everything? Why didn’t you do this, or that? All that money. What a waste. What is your husband going to say? He’s going to be so angry, what will you do?
Yes, other people are sometimes the worst thing in the world.
At least the Fortunas had somewhere to live, since they had been unable to sell the house on such short notice. But being back was strange. They had only been gone for a few days, but Ievoli now seemed small and pitiful. Stella had seen a train, a sea, a city; she had encountered businessmen, whores, and thieves. Ievoli was both the only safe spot in a maelstrom of disparate fates and also no longer enough to keep her safe from it.
THREE THOUSAND MILES AWAY,Antonio Fortuna was irate. He had paid extra money to have Signor Martinelli handle all the paperwork so that it would be sure to be done correctly; instead it had been absolutely done incorrectly. Had it been Antonio’s own handwriting that was to blame? He had been the one to decide on “Maria” instead of “Mariastella,” which sounded long and un-American to him. He had thought a common name like “Maria” would make processing the immigration papers easier. Had he introduced the error by trying something new and not quite true? Had he been scammed?
After five years of waiting in the visa queue, Antonio’s efforts had failed. But he was Calabrese; his head would only become harder and harder until it cracked like a pumpkin. He refiled the paperwork, painstakingly hand-lettering the forms. It was May 1936; if the mysteriousvisa lottery took as long as it had last time, he might be reunited with his children, one of whom he’d never met, by 1941. By then, three of them would have achieved majority and would need to file separate requests for adult passports. But that wasn’t something he could plan for, so he sent the papers off to molder at the bottom of whatever office pile they would molder in for almost too long to do any good.
THE NEWS ABOUT THEMONARCHreached Ievoli in July. The ship had been lost at sea—caught fire in the middle of the Atlantic and went down with all hands and souls.
“You almost died again, Stella,” Giuseppe pointed out. “You almost drowned in the ocean. Now that’sfourtimes you almost died.”
She hadn’t even known her life was at stake until two months after the fact.
Assunta said many rosaries for the people on the boat. She couldn’t get over the thought that she had sat among the dead in Signor Martinelli’s office, that those little babies who had played on the floor by her feet were at the bottom of the sea.
“God gave you the mistake with Stella’s name to save you,” Nonna Maria said. “God bless. It seemed like a bad mistake at the time, but it was really a gift from God.”
Stella thought of the prayer she had said kneeling in the church that last Sunday before they left for Napoli. Had she called down the hand of God? She thought of her visit to the cemetery to say good-bye to her little lost sister, the seizure of regret she had felt at the idea of leaving her alone. If the Fortunas had been lost at sea, not even their remains would have been able to keep the little ghost company.
On a windy Sunday afternoon Stella snuck out of the house while Cettina was busy with her weekly hair wash and delousing. Stella had questions, and she needed to be alone to ask them. She hurried down via Fontana to the cemetery and stood in front of Mariastella’s grave, arms crossed protectively in front of her chest. The eeriness of her previous visit had dispelled, but not her sense of danger.
“I know you’re there,” Stella said to the cold marble plaque. There was, naturally, no response. “I just want to know one thing. Did you sink that whole ship just so you could get me? Did you kill all those people because you hate me so much?” She waited in the silence for as long as her patience lasted. “Or was it the other way around?” she asked. “Did you save me by messing up my passport?”
The sun beat down on her hot black braid and the wind stirred the grit between the mausoleums. Stella had known there would be no answer, but she was still frustrated. “I know you’re there,” she said again. She gave up and went home.
WAITING—YEARS OF WAITING.The opposite of having only five weeks to say good-bye was having an indefinite amount of time to say good-bye, knowing you would be pulled away but never knowing when.
This was how Stella passed the ages of sixteen to nineteen—waiting. In many lives, these teenage years are the most vibrant, of greatest impact on the person one becomes as an adult. Stella watched as young men and women around her fell in and out of love, fought, bore children. She watched as they cemented their characters and their roles in society, as she and her sister sat by, waiting, waiting, waiting for news.
Months and seasons ticked by, measurable by crops, by feast days, by the increasing rambunctiousness of Giuseppe, who had plunged into the rage of adolescence and found much to challenge him in his one-room world of women, by the stretching limbs of baby Luigi, who was not a baby anymore. Stella herself had stopped growing taller when she was eleven years old, but her bosom did not stop swelling. Cettina had outgrown her by an inch, and had strong shoulders and sturdy hips—a born breeder, Assunta joked. The girls looked good, very good; Assunta blessed theircornettocharms every day to ward off the jealous thoughts of their neighbors. But what good was being the town beauty when everyone knew you were going to leave?
The girls Stella’s age were getting engaged and married. Lately it seemed like Cettina was constantly helping the brides makemustazzolito hand out after the ceremonies. The girls of Ievoli were scrambling to nail down the boys, and the mothers of Ievoli to nail down their sons by saddling them with wives and children, because the boys all wanted to emigrate. Stella watched the frenzy with aloof amusement—the girls’ machinations, the public flirting, the theatrics of one- or two-sided wooing. Immigration had imposed an inverted economy on the village marriage market—it was still the boy’s prerogative to choose what he liked, but now he expected the girls to chase him for the honor instead of the other way around. The whole charade was irritating, especially because it was not a charade, and would become many people’s realities for the rest of their lives. Stella was not friends with girls outside the family, not like Cettina was—Stella didn’t need any friends besides her mother and sister—but from afar she marveled at their desire to leave the nests they were born in and make different lives with a man. It was the way things were done, must be done, as God’s dictates about fruitful multiplication required. Stella was untroubled by the priest’s insistence that good Christian women married—after all, weren’t virgin nuns holy?—but she was alone in the village on this point. There was a piece missing inside her, the piece that all the other girls, even her sister, had.
Kind, genteel Stefano visited every Sunday that summer of 1936. It was an arduous trip, but he wouldn’t admit to tiring of it. Everyone had grown very fond of Stefano, including Stella, who had decided it wouldn’t hurt her to be nice to him because he was going to be leaving soon for the army anyway. Later she would be glad she had given him that much, at least.
IN THE AUTUMN,as Stella split open chestnut burs, she remembered her May visit to the chestnut grove, her wrong thought that she would never break the pads of her fingers on a spiny husk again. She felt foolish for not having seen that it wasn’t going to work out. The plan toemigrate had never made sense; why had they all gone along with it as if it had?
November came, and Stefano left to join the army. He sent Stella his first letter two weeks after he left. Stella was not a good reader, but she could tell Stefano was an elegant writer. Assunta kept the letter on the shelf with her special dishes, where it couldn’t be ruined, and she took it down to show anyone who came to the house.
SPRING.ARTICHOKES.BEANS.LENT.EASTER.TOMATOES.Squash. Summer. Silkworms. Mulberry harvests, long nights. Ferragosto. Pilgrimage to Dipodi, feast of the Assumption. Autumn.Fhesta,olives, chestnuts. Winter. Olives. Christmas, the feast of San Salvatore. Olives again. The pig slaughter. Fennel. Oranges, tangerines. And artichokes.
Blisters, fleas, broken nails. Mass, mass. Praying for visas, praying for blind mothers. Other girls’ weddings. Other girls’ babies. Boys disappearing, to Africa, to Rome, to France.
