Antonio came back from l’America again in October 1921 to witness the birth of his first son. He’d been home for a week when Assunta went into labor. The cramping started as she was brewing Antonio his morning coffee, the contractions lasted through the afternoon, and the pushing started around midnight. Suora Letizia, Rosina, and Maria were in attendance, of course, and so was Antonio, because there was nowhere for him to go at that hour to get out of the women’s way. He sat impatiently through the last hours of labor, his rifle loaded so that he could fire the traditional two shots to let the village know an heir had been born.
“Mannaggia!”Antonio swore when the baby issued forth sporting a tiny pink vagina. He seized his gun and stomped outside. Rosina and Suora Letizia, who was wiping the baby clean, exchanged looks as the too-close sound of rifle shots—two of them—reverberated through the house.
“Guess he didn’t care that she wasn’t a boy after all,” Suora Letizia said placidly.
The girl baby was completely bald. “She looks like a bug,” her father said when he came back in.
“Antonio,” Rosina chided.
“She’s my little bug, Tonnon,” said Assunta.“Muscarella mia.”She was very tired; the baby was big and she was torn from the delivery.
The infant was supposed to have been named Giuseppe, after Antonio’s father. Since that name wasn’t going to work, Assunta said hopefully, “We could name her Maria, after my mamma.”
“No!” Antonio would have said no to anything at this moment, even something he didn’t have a stake in. “She’ll be Concettina, after my mother’s mother.”
Assunta was too tired to argue.
STELLA WAS A YEAR AND NINE MONTHSolder than Cettina. When they were babies, this meant that Cettina always seemed to be many steps behind.
At first, this was difficult for Stella, the way it is always difficult for an older sibling to be saddled with a younger, stupider one who can’t transport itself or communicate, and whom everyone is paying attention to because it is so helpless. Sibling jealousy, the oldest human interaction after that of husband and wife—just read the book of Genesis.
Jealousy is, though, the most harmful human emotion—the thing that must be safeguarded against at all costs. Assunta knew the destructive power of the Evil Eye and did her best to discourage any jealousy she spotted among her children.
“You have to watch out for Cettina,” Assunta told Stella. “She’s just little. She’s not smart like you. She needs you to protect and help her.”
“Concettinamuscarella,” Stella replied.
“That’s right. Our little bug.” Assunta helped Stella stroke the baby’s soft dark head. “Our little bug.”
“My little bug,” Stella said.
Assunta laughed. “Certo,she is your little bug. But you have to look out for her always.”
INFEBRUARY OF 1922, Antonio left for l’America again, again leaving a baby in his wife’s belly. This one did turn out to be a boy who could finally take his grandfather Giuseppe’s name, but Antonio was no longer charmed by the idea of fatherhood and hadn’t bothered to come home for this one. In fact, he didn’t bother to send money to his wife, either, or even to write and let her know he hadn’t fallen into a ditch and died. Assunta, who was twenty-three and had three infants under three years old, learned as many new lessons about resourcefulness as she had during the war.
This was how the years passed. Assunta tended her three living children and prayed for the deceased one. She stitched their clothes and scrubbed them, washed out their diapers and kept them fed with bread she baked from flour she ground from wheat she grew in the garden she tended. She preserved and pickled and salted and stored so they would never go hungry, even when there was nothing. To keep them warm through the winter she gathered firewood on the mountain and carried it home tied up in a linen cloth she balanced on her head, with Giuseppe strapped to her chest, Stella holding her left hand, Cettina her right. Assunta dug her own stones out and turned her own soil and pruned her own trees and drew her own water from the well five, ten times a day to cook and clean.
This was the trouble with emigration—it dismantled the patriarchy. Because really, what did Assunta, or any woman, need a husband for, when she did every goddamn thing herself?
***
STELLAFORTUNA THESECOND’Searliest memory is of the day she almost died for the first time, the episode with the eggplant. Most of us have memories from when we are three or four years old—often foggy, impressionistic, colors or words instead of whole, solid moments. Stella had none of these. Her first memory was vivid, complete, and late: she was four and a half, and she was waking up in a shadowy brown room redolent with the sweet-rot smell of mint. She was in intense pain.
Later in life Stella would think that it was proof of a benevolent God that He had excused her from any recollection of the eggplant incident itself. It was somewhat regrettable that He hadn’t seen fit to excuse her from its aftermath. But what kind of Heavenly Father would He be if He didn’t help us learn from our own mistakes?
IN THE SEGMENTSTELLA DOESN’T REMEMBER,Assunta was frying slices of eggplant in her cast-iron trencher—her finest possession—over her open hearth. Little Stella, just tall enough to see over the lip of the frying pot, must have reached out and pressed her fingertips into the sizzling top skin of bread crumbs, then drawn back her hand in shock at the heat. In this jolting movement, the pan tipped toward her, splashing boiling olive oil onto Stella’s right arm, oil that rushed through her dress sleeve and wrapped her from knuckle to chest. Stella might have cried out, but it is also possible she was silent, as later in life she was quietest during the worst times. Her baby sister, Concettina, was the opposite, and seeing Stella collapse by the fireplace she began to shriek for her mother.
Assunta rushed over to find the damage already done, red florets blossoming on her daughter’s arm. Assunta tried to pull off the oil-soaked sleeve, but it had fused into Stella’s skin. When she tugged at Stella’s dress, the material resisted only slightly in her hands beforespringing upward, the flesh releasing, choosing fabric over arm, and blood spilled out so suddenly that neither of them, mother or daughter, even screamed.
STELLA WAS UNCONSCIOUS DURINGAssunta’s dash down the mountain to Feroleto. Deep in her physical memory Stella knew the waddle-jog, waddle-jog of her mother in a hurry, her wounded daughter clutched to her chest; imagined Assunta’s asthmatic breath freckling her face with spittle. The gallop was an aerobic one, three-quarters of an hour over the uneven weather-soft ground of the donkey path through the mistletoe-laced jungle of alder and ash. Later everyone told Assunta she had been crazy to take the child down the mountain, that she should have gone to fetch the doctor instead. But she worried it would be too late if she waited for the doctor to gather his things, that he wouldn’t take her seriously if he couldn’t see Stella himself. And who can say she wasn’t right?
Assunta ran down the mountain the day of the eggplant for another reason, too—because she had not run that December day five years earlier. Because last time, she’d hesitated through the danger. Last time, she had let someone else—her husband—talk sense into her, and so she had woken the next morning to find there was no longer any reason to worry about whether the doctor was worth the expense. If this second Stella died, at least it would not be because her mother had not run.
So—and this was a story often retold in Ievoli, because everyone likes stories about feats of heroism by distressed mothers—Assunta picked her daughter up and ran.
STELLA REMEMBERED NOTHINGof the eighteen hours she spent in the doctor’s surgery, where twice during the night she was nearly lost. Skin graft science was new and risky—it took the doctor more than an hour to explain to the frantic mother why she should let him cutinto her daughter, that if he did not she might never heal and faced a dangerous chance of infection from the open wounds.
Stella would remember nothing of the blankets they used to soak up her blood—so much from a small body! How could there be any left inside?—or her skin lifting away from her arm in tidy packets, as unresisting as late-July squash blossoms prized from their whorls. Stella would recall nothing of the graft, when the doctor sliced his knife into the good, pure flesh of her left arm and then, when he needed more, of her buttocks. Later, Assunta couldn’t quite describe the procedure the doctor had performed, as she had not been allowed in the surgery—she had been incoherent, slapping her own face and ululating with preemptive grief.
