Immediately Stella’s heart was pounding in her ears again. Her fingers tingled numbly on her ticket stubs. She made herself laugh, as if he were joking.
“Take off your dress and get in the bed,” he repeated. “You’re not my wife until you do it, and I’m returning home with a wife.”
“No,” she said, turning her back on him. The knife was far away, and he was coming toward her; she could hear the compressions of his feet in the plush carpet.
“You’re my wife, Stella. Wives do what their husbands tell them to. And now I’m telling you to take off your dress.” His fingers closed around her upper arm.
“Get your dirty hands off of me,” Stella said, twisting out of his grip. She could have opened the door to the hallway and run down the stairs, but instead she did what was most familiar and ducked into the bathroom, throwing her weight against the door to close it. But no—he had jammed his foot in, he was forcing it open. She fought back with all her strength, her high heels sliding on the shower-wet tile floor, her mind white with panic. He was so strong—she was nothing in comparison. The door opened, inexorably, and he was there in the bathroom with her.
He shoved her shoulder so she spun around, her face to the mirror. He used his left arm to hitch her elbows behind her back; her shoulders twinged at the strain. He kept her pressed to the sink with his pelvis against her rear end as he yanked her dress up over her hips, then roughly jerked down her girdle and stockings. It took a long time, because the elastic was strong; when he tried to tear it, it pulled taut against her tenderest flesh.
Stella was trapped in her dream—it was the same listless helplessness, the hands rough and unstoppable as her mind sank into lassitude. Cold marble pressed against her belly, and she stared at her meaningless face in the mirror through that strange, terrifying moment of skin chafing skin, a dry, uncomfortable contact rub that was only a prelude to the real pain. Her mind was empty, a sleepy wipe the gray-white color of a dream.
You hold on to it so tightly and so fearfully for so long, and then it’s gone so quickly, like a pot of water emptied into a stream.
She felt her own blood dripping down her left thigh in a fast-moving pearl, the sink marble heating up against her belly. Carmelo’s face in the mirror bore an expression of intense concentration as he thrust, thrust, and thrust toward a deliberately speeded conclusion. His liquid followed the pearl of blood down the same trail of her left thigh,and as Carmelo pulled away from her with a noisy sigh she looked down to see pinked-up semen had landed on the white tile floor, milky-clear like the albumen of a fertilized chicken egg. As Carmelo left the bathroom, shutting the door on her behind him, Stella knelt to the ground and began to clean up the sticky mess with a fold of toilet paper.
Part III
Maturity
Fhijlii picciuli, guai picciuli; fhijlii randi, guai randi.
Little children, little problems; big children, big problems.
—CALABRESE PROVERB
U lupu perde llu pilu, ma no llu vizzu.
A wolf may lose his fur, but never his vices.
—CALABRESE PROVERB
Chi sulu mangia sulu s’affuca.
Those who eat alone choke alone.
—CALABRESE PROVERB
Death 6
Exsanguination
(Motherhood)
ONE MORNING INSEPTEMBER 1954,Stella Maglieri woke up alone in the bed she shared with her husband; he’d left for his 5A.M. shift at the electric company several hours earlier. Dawn lay tangerine-orange on the slats of the venetian blinds. Stella stared at the sheet where it pulled taut over the perfect ball of her belly. Inside the ball was her restless fifth fetus; if she delivered it alive it would become her fourth child. In the crib beside her was her third baby, ten months old and fussing; in the converted closet were her first and second, stacked in bunk beds. As she watched the sun slide over her stomach, a voice sounded in her head:You are nobody.
For a moment Stella lay frozen, wondering if there was someone in her house. The voice was as clear as a factory boss on the claxon.You are nobody.But she hadn’t had a boss in six years, and besides, the voice sounded just like her own.
You are nobody,it said again.
And she wasn’t.
THIS IS THE STORYof the sixth way Stella Fortuna almost died, of motherhood.
***
BEFORE THE MOTHERHOOD, THOUGH,there must be the pregnancy, which happened pretty much right there in that Montreal honeymoon hotel bathroom. The fact was, Stella Fortuna, who had survived five near-death experiences, had endured the thing she’d feared even more than death. This time, no one had any sympathy for her.
