It was just as well Assunta didn’t know more about the execution of the skin graft. The whole precarious operation was performed in that candlelit back room by that squirrelly bachelor doctor in a mountain village without running water where the canon of conventional medical wisdom included no concept of antiseptic beyond a squeeze of lemon juice. Assunta could have no idea how fortunate she was that the doctor, with his small hairy hands and his odor of chicken skin, had left his village to be educated far away in Sicily, despite everything his father had told him was generally unsavory about Sicily, but where a medical program had been flourishing for almost five hundred years, and where skin grafting science had been pioneered.
During her nightlong vigil outside the surgery door, on which she pounded periodically, Assunta convinced herself that her daughter was dead and that the doctor was hiding from a mother’s wrath. Delirious with her own failure—first one Stella, and now the second—she clutched her own torso, feeling the stiffened death-cold first Stella in her arms. Her hands vibrated with the memory of that morning; she felt the ringing of the church bells in the skin of her palms, which would never caress either of her Stellas again.
When the doctor finally emerged he found Assunta lying in front of the door, half her face pressed into the unswept floor, asleep withher flaming eyes open. Each hand was a slick-knuckled fist containing a skein of her own uprooted black hair, oily from clutching. From that day on Assunta wore a kerchief over her head to cover these bald patches, and also the gray hair that grew back in, even though she was only twenty-five.
FIFTEEN, TWENTY YEARS LATER,when Stella rolled up her sleeves before washing dishes, she would pause to mull over the scars. She never remembered her arms without them, but they were still interesting to her. Her right forearm was swathed in wrinkled brown skin, white around the edges of the skin graft, like an independent island country on an antique map. On the left arm, the scar was less obvious: the meaty outside was pinched into a scientifically precise line, straight as if it had been made with a ruler until you looked very closely to see the bric-a-brac of hand-stitching. The suture marks became more visible in the summer, when her skin tanned around them.
She often wondered: What had made her—almost five years old, old enough to know better—put her hand into the pan for a piece of eggplant? Greed? Hunger? Curiosity? As an adult, she knew those were the three things that motivated her most often. She just couldn’t believe she would have made a mistake like that, even as a child.
Even stranger, where had her mother been? Assunta was skittish, overloving, like many mothers who have lost children in the past. Stella had almost no memories of her childhood in which Assunta was not standing by, or over, or behind. There was no explanation for why Assunta had left her daughters unsupervised by an open fire and a vat of boiling oil—except, perhaps, bewitchment.
MINTY BROWNNESS, HEAT.Stella’s arms were beginning to wake, throbbing where they lay on the coverlet. Even as the brownness settled over her, her newly won consciousness was already compromising itself, sparkles rising in her vision as the terror of her pain set in. It was a frustratingly imbalanced pain, the right arm burning with imaginaryheat, radiating a halo of raw untouchability, the left arm rippling with the acute pinching sensation of surgically sliced skin.
The smell of mint was the most familiar point of orientation: spicy near-rot, at once fetid and antiseptic. The second Stella had broached the world in a cloud of mint just like this one, mint her grandmother, her first human contact on the other side of the womb, had tied in a bundle around her neck. There was nothing better than the stench of mint to ward off the Evil Eye. The smell would always call up Stella’s most ineffable memories, sunset-dim walls, the oppression of sweat-tangled blankets, blood pounding in and around her—a foggy, green-brown arc of connected traumas.
There in that double pain was Assunta, leaning over her, marking the cross on Stella’s forehead with her thumb. Assunta’s breathy whisper dipped into Stella’s consciousness, binding her into the present, to the pain that roiled and bulged as her nerves came back to life. Assunta inhaled deeply, sucking air through fluted lips so the whistle of her breath was audible, deliberate. On each exhale, she chanted voicelessly, fast, slurred lines of an eerie poem whose meaning Stella couldn’t quite grasp. It was the unfascination, the incantation to banish the Evil Eye curse that must have been fixed on her forehead.
Around Stella’s sickbed sat Nonna Maria, Stella’s miniature godmother Za Rosina, and her Uncle Nicola’s wife, Za Violetta, who held the unhappy two-year-old Cettina on her lap. Stella, groggy with pain, listened as her mother told her side of the story. “I don’t remember looking away for even a moment,” Assunta insisted. “It’s such a strange thing. You know I would never leave the girls alone.”
Za Ros placed her warm palm on Stella’s head like a benediction. “Who has fixed the Eye on you, mypiccirijl’?” she asked.
Stella was still learning to identify rhetorical questions. “Cettina,” she replied, glancing at her grimacing sister. The answer came out with no forethought, but seemed like it might be correct as soon as Stella said it.
All four women laughed quickly, saying “No, no” to shake away that bad idea.
“Listen,piccirijl’,” Za Ros said, her voice gentle. “Saying someone cast the Eye on you means you are saying they intended you great evil, so we don’t name names, all right? Instead we askil Signoreand the saints to protect you and turn the Eye away.”
Stella studied her aunts’ faces, trying to figure out what she had said wrong.
“Ah, but maybe she knows, Ros,” Za Violetta countered. She was a hard, round woman with clear, mean brown eyes. “Why shouldn’t she say if she knows? Why shouldn’t she protect herself if she knows who to protect against?”
“Violèt!” Tiny Ros’s voice rose, which was unusual. “You have to protect yourself from the whole world!Invidiais everywhere.” She lifted her hands, and all the women thought they could see the miasma hanging over them in the dust-filtered late-afternoon light. “Jealousy can come from anyone, even someone who loves you. But for you to point a finger at someone and say that they have cursed you is as bad as for you to curse them yourself.Capit’?”
“You remember that,piccirijl’,” Nonna Maria said to Stella. “You can only name someone else’s sins if you know those sins yourself.” This was a proverb; Stella would hear her grandmother say it often. “You make sure you are good, but you don’t worry whether other people are good or not because they must make their own peace with God.”
Themal’oicch’,as it’s called in Calabrese, the Evil Eye, is the bad atmosphere generated by suppressed resentments, jealousy with the power to wound, ruin, craze, or even kill. Themal’oicch’is particularly dangerous for blessed or beautiful or wealthy people, who often seem to have the best and worst luck because of all the accumulated jealousy,invidia,around them. The truly good among us may experience no distress at the good fortune of our loved ones, but for therest of us jealousy is shameful, secret, and poisonous. The Mediterranean is home to diverse ancient religions and ethnic cultures, but the Evil Eye is one thing Maghrebian Berbers, Andalucian Sephardim, Greek Orthodox, Turkish Muslims, Palestinian Arabs, and Catholics of the Italian Mezzogiorno comfortably agreed upon. In Ievoli, themal’oicch’was simple, sinister, and sometimes eradicable with some quasi-Christian witchcraft.
Assunta wondered if it was true, what Rosina said, if it really was impossible to guess who might be behind aninvidiawithout being the source of it yourself. She did not know how to protect her children against her own misjudgments, but the Evil Eye, at least, she knew how to keep away. The curse she worked, mint in hand, was a string of magical words she had learned from her mother, sacred words that could never be written down, not even here, a century later. The voiceless, sucking rhyme to which Stella opened her eyes that horrible brown morning would become so familiar that Stella would hear its rhythm in the dark when she was drifting off to sleep. Even as an adult, especially on off-tempo nights when it stormed or was too hot or she felt that itch of unrest, she would hear her mother’s breathy chant.
Stella never learned the charm herself; she didn’t have Assunta’s gift of open spirit, and never really believed. Without faith there are no miracles, just coincidences.
ASSUNTA PERFORMED THE RITES,but privately she wondered if it was not the Evil Eye that had hexed her daughter. Perhaps defensively, she had convinced herself she never would have left the girls alone with the boiling oil if she had been in her right mind. Every moment of every day she felt the phantom of her dead daughter dragging on her conscience, her limbs heavy under the weight of her guilt and grief. She knew this phantom existed in her head and heart only; Assunta did not believe in ghosts, because she had restored her perfect faith inil Signoreand knew that He was caring for the first Stella in heaven.
Well, she had almost restored her perfect faith.
This episode with the eggplant—this was a moment when it seemed an awful lot like she had been haunted.
What if Assunta had brought on the eggplant attack through her own neglect—by loosening her grief for her lost Stella once she was distracted by her other, living children?
She took out the photograph the portraitist had brought and she hung it on her wall in the corner where the sun wouldn’t fade it. She made an altar on her kitchen counter, where she kept a candle burning whenever she had money for candles.
If there was, in fact, a ghost Assunta was trying to appease, though, this altar did not do the trick. After all, the boiling oil wasn’t the worst of the second Stella’s cursed bad luck; it was only the beginning.
Death 2
Evisceration
(Growing Pains)
