Dedication
For Wendell, Dean, and Paulina
Epigraph
And in that place of abundance
Believing he had been wronged . . .
He ate the fruit to his great regret, his eternal damnation.
—SERAFINO DELLA SALANDRA,
ADAMO CADUTO (ADAM FELL), 1647
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Cast of Characters
I: PLEA Chapter 1 All the Knots Come to the Comb
Chapter 2 Dark to Dark
Chapter 3 Public Mockery
Chapter 4 In the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
Chapter 5 You Have the Face of the Gallitellis
Chapter 6 Go Back to America and Leave the Dead in Peace
Chapter 7 A Turned-Up Nose Is Worse Than Hail
Chapter 8 You’ll Never Be Sated with Bread and Olives
II: DISCOVERY Chapter 9 The Truth Always Rises to the Top
Chapter 10 Take a Coffee
Chapter 11 The Crypt of the Original Sin
Chapter 12 There’s No Two Without Three
Chapter 13 Wild Things
Chapter 14 In the Mouth of the Wolf
Chapter 15 Gypsies, Gypsies, Gypsies
Chapter 16 Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Wednesday
Chapter 17 Thinking on Your Feet
Chapter 18 Faithful Home
Chapter 19 Cupa Cupa
Chapter 20 With Snow You Get Bread, with Rain You Get Hunger
Chapter 21 Don’t Spit in the Plate Where You Eat
Chapter 22 Pinecones for Brains
Chapter 23 Eccolo
Chapter 24 Go to Cool
Chapter 25 Don’t Tell the Farmer How Good Cheese Is with Pears
Chapter 26 Empty Crib
III: TRIAL Chapter 27 Puttana
Chapter 28 Take This Body, Take This Blood
Chapter 29 Far from Town
Chapter 30 Way Out
Chapter 31 Recoil
Chapter 32 Song of the Prisoner
Chapter 33 To Every Bird, Its Own Nest Is Beautiful
Chapter 34 One Face, One Race
Chapter 35 Departure Is Nothing More Than the Beginning of the Homecoming
Chapter 36 Last Supper
Chapter 37 Get on the Train!
Chapter 38 Count Your Nights by Stars, Not Shadows
Chapter 39 Come Here
Chapter 40 See Naples and Die
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
About the Author
Also by Helene Stapinski
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Cast of Characters
NOW
HELENE
MA: Helene’s elderly mother, the keeper of family legends, who travels with her to Bernalda, in the province of Matera.
DEAN: Helene’s firstborn.
PAULINA: Helene’s young daughter, also known as the Secret Weapon.
WENDELL: Helene’s husband, whom she leaves behind in New York City.
BEANSIE VENA: Helene’s career criminal grandfather, who tells the story of Vita to Ma.
ANGELO TATARANNO: Bernalda’s town historian, who helps search for the murder.
ANTONIO SALFI: Bernalda’s genealogist.
MARIA GALLITELLI: A neighbor and possible long-lost cousin.
MARIA NATALE: The kind downstairs neighbor, a widow who is best friends with Miserabila.
MISERABILA: The unhappy, unhelpful woman who lives around the corner.
LEONARDANTONIO GALLITELLI: Another possible relative and disgruntled neighbor.
CARLO LEVI: Physician and author of Christ Stopped at Eboli, Helene’s bible and guide.
LEO: Beach bar owner and distant cousin.
FRANCESCO: Local lawyer whom Leo enlists to help find the murder.
IMMA: Young Bernaldan writer hired as a researcher.
GIUSEPPE: Farmer from Marconia also hired as a researcher.
MIMMO AND VIRGINIA: Imma’s parents.
CARLA: Italian friend from Jersey City who introduces Helene to Giuseppe.
ANNA PARISI: Italian writer who knows the history of Bernalda.
EVARISTO: Policeman in Pisticci who helps with research.
THEN
VITA GALLITELLI: Helene’s great-great-grandmother, alleged murderess from Bernalda.
FRANCESCO VENA: Helene’s great-great-grandfather and alleged murderer.
TERESINA: Vita’s mother, a weaver from Bernalda.
DOMENICO: Vita’s father, a peasant farmer.
LEONARDO VENA: Helene’s great-grandfather and Vita’s son, who traveled to America with Vita as a boy.
VALENTE VENA: Leonardo’s brother and Vita’s eldest son, who also traveled to America.
LEONARDANTONIO GALLITELLI: Vita’s brother and Francesco’s friend.
CESARE LOMBROSO: Italian nineteenth-century doctor who studied physical traits of criminals.
GRIECO: The landowner.
FRANCESCO MIRALDI: Bricklayer and Francesco’s friend.
ROCCO: Vita’s firstborn son.
NUNZIA: Vita’s daughter.
ANTONIO CAMARDO: The deceased.
I
PLEA
Chapter 1
ALL THE KNOTS COME TO THE COMB
VITA WAS A MURDERESS.
She took a life and ran.
Maybe she shot. Maybe she stabbed. No one was sure. But she took a life and ran.
She left her husband behind and crossed the Atlantic Ocean with her little boys, running from the crime. She made a home in the first place she found—an industrial city of train tracks and smokestacks and horse-drawn carriages with manure in the streets, where the bonfires burned as high as the rooftops on election night.
In the end she got hers. Boy, did she get hers. She paid the ultimate price.
Ma would tell me about Vita as we sat in our bright yellow kitchen in Jersey City, New Jersey, circa 1969. As she spoke she cooked sauce on the stove, slowly turning the red bubbling lava inside the pot with a big metal spoon, meatballs bobbing at the top. She’d dip some crusty Italian bread in the pot and give me a taste, the hot sauce burning and shredding the roof of my mouth because I was too impatient to let it cool off. Between bites, I listened, and nodded and colored in my coloring book.
It was before I had started school; those stories were my first lessons.
I saw Vita in my head: her wild eyes, her passion, long hair whipping in the wind off that ship on the blowing ocean as she held her boys tight.
Ma was a great storyteller—but nothing compared with her father, Grandpa Beansie.
He’d spent time in Trenton State, the Big House, and loved to tell us about prison life: guys who liked to crochet, guys who kept mice as pets on little leashes, men being carried off to the electric chair. His hands would shake and his knees would buckle and he would pretend to cry, as if making his way down the “last mile,” the long corridor to the execution chamber. He was a real charmer, Grandpa.
But most of all, he loved to tell stories about Vita. And he told them to my mother.
Ma could have been a writer. She had studied journalism in high school, but never went on to college because she had to work to give her mother money and then decided she wanted a family of her own (a good, criminal-free family).
So Ma didn’t tell her stories to a wide audience. She told them to anyone who would listen. And that anyone was me.
She told me everything she knew about Vita, and that was as much as anyone knew. Vita couldn’t read or write. No letters or diary entries. I had never met anyone who
couldn’t read or write. Reading was important in our apartment and a great escape from the realities of Jersey City.
Grandpa’s parents had passed the story of Vita down to him and he’d told my mother. Like a game of telephone, it was repeated from mouth to ear and mouth to ear, through the generations, changing, shifting, breathing—until it landed, finally, in my little ear. My orecchietta.
VITA GALLITELLI WAS MY GREAT-GREAT-GRANDMOTHER, THE FIRST on the Italian side to come over to America. She came in 1892 with her two teenage sons, Valente and Leonardo, my great-grandfather. Vita had had three boys, but Ma said the youngest was lost on the way over. Ma had no name, no proof. Only the story.
The myth, really.
They left for America because Vita and her husband, Francesco Vena, had murdered someone back in Matera, a province tucked away in the farthest reaches of Southern Italy. It was a place my mother and I knew nothing about, filled with such intense poverty that no one really liked to talk about it. The name Matera came from the Latin word for mother. It was the motherland, but no one in my family ever considered going back there. Tourists didn’t visit, and even Italians from other parts of the country barely knew where it was on the map.
I looked in the atlas and found Matera at Italy’s instep between Puglia and Calabria, in the region of Basilicata.
My mother told me the story of Vita over and over again. She would tell it to me when we went to visit my great-aunt Katie, who would fill in some blanks with her own details. She would tell it to me as we walked over to church for Mass, which we attended dutifully every Sunday at noon. She would tell it sometimes on weekday mornings before I went to school, dressed in my blue checkered uniform, while braiding my thick, dark hair.
I figured Ma told me the stories to kill time and to distract me while combing the knots out, to stop me from flinching and screaming to high heaven as she stood over me in the shag-carpeted living room. Don’t cry, Ma would say. Vita had it so much worse. Poor Vita.
She told me that Vita’s husband, Francesco, stayed behind in Southern Italy, though his last name, Vena, traveled with my family to America. In Italy, maybe because of all the red tape involved in changing their maiden names, women kept theirs. But the children took the husband’s name. In our case, Vena.
One detail stuck in my head: my mother said the murder had happened over a card game.
It was unusual for a woman to travel to America without her husband or without him having gone to America first to scope things out. So just the fact that Vita went solo with the kids was a sign that something was a little crazy—batz, as Ma liked to say. Women were rarely in charge of their own destinies back then, or if they were, no one ever told stories about it.
In the movies of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, which my big brother loved, the Italian women were minor characters, usually in the kitchen cooking like my mother. While making chicken cacciatore, doing laundry, or combing their daughters’ hair, maybe they were wishing they could tell the stories and make the decisions and have the adventures.
But Vita was different.
Vita had left. For better or worse, like many of our ancestors. I thought about her coming through New York Harbor, without her husband, seeing the Statue of Liberty for the first time, and wondering, Who the hell is that big lady?
When I looked at Liberty myself, from my neighborhood, I thought the same thing. Who the hell was she? I read somewhere once that Liberty was based on the sculptor’s mother. What was she thinking, to make her brow furrow like that? And had she read that big tablet in her arms? A woman in mid-nineteenth-century Europe? Did she even know how to read? And did she have adventures? Had she brought her kids along, or had she left them behind for someone else to take care of, while she stood, so stoic and important, her feet firmly planted on that pedestal?
The same way I looked at that light green statue, I looked at Vita, with awe and a sense of mystery. Who the hell was she? This complete stranger whose genes I carried around with me every single day in my DNA. And why on earth had she killed someone? Maybe self-defense, to protect her children or her husband. Or was it out of hatred or revenge? My family had a very finely honed sense of vengeance and, if they didn’t get even, they could hold a grudge for decades. Little did I know this trait—this never-forgetting, obsessive sense of revenge—was going to come in handy.
WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER MY MOTHER UPPED THE ANTE WITH A NEW chapter, a cautionary tale. I was old enough to get pregnant, so Ma told me that Vita had been a loose woman—or as Vita’s own daughter-in-law, my great-grandmother, liked to call her, a puttana. (They didn’t get along.) I imagined Vita on a busy street corner, giving passing men the eye.
Maybe this explained why my family was particularly good at making pasta puttanesca, which we called refrigerator pasta. We could whip up an amazing meal out of just a few random ingredients that were on hand—as the prostitutes once did for their hungry customers.
Ma said that Vita had sons by two different men. Someone named Grieco was involved. He was either a lawyer or a lover, and somehow helped Vita escape to America.
I took my first trip to Italy in college, studying at the University of Siena for a summer. I traveled no farther south than Rome, with no interest in finding my family’s roots. I was trying to get as far away from them as possible, to untangle myself from the petty crooks and shysters who made up a good part of my family tree: the bookie uncle, the embezzling cousins, the mob consigliere, the political fixers, even a murderer or two.
After graduating, I landed a job as a police reporter at my local newspaper, my family’s crimes occasionally making their way across my desk. One day, on assignment, I walked across the construction bridge from Jersey City to the nearby, soon-to-be-opened Ellis Island museum. Out of curiosity, I checked the immigration records, but there was no trace of Vita, since she probably came under an assumed name. Maybe Grieco’s name.
But I found Leonardo, thirteen, and Valente, fifteen, who arrived on separate ships in 1892—the year Ellis Island opened.
We had a couple of photos of Leonardo and Valente as adults in Jersey City, where they both lived and worked as barbers. Leonardo, my great-grandfather, looked a bit like Al Capone; he was a dapper guy with a round, pudgy face, a balding pate, full, shapely lips, and sad brown eyes. But he was much nicer than Capone. Leonardo’s brother, Valente, had a longer face and a full head of hair, but those same full lips as his brother.
No photos survived of either Vita or her husband, Francesco. But everyone said Vita looked just like my great-aunt Mary, Beansie’s older sister. She had a pretty face, but an underbite, thin lips, dark brown hair, and dark brown eyes, nearly black, like kalamata olives. So dark the light flashed off them like sparks. Like all the women on the Italian side of my family, she had soft, flawless skin. We laughed that this was due to all the pasta we cooked as mothers, the steam rising up out of the strainer and giving us facials.
Vita had the same crooked smile I had, and that many of the women in my family had, what we called our Mona Lisa smile, a hesitant smirk that didn’t give much away. You didn’t get the full-on smile until we knew you better, and then we would bend over backward for you, cook you elaborate meals, and do anything you asked. Well, almost anything.
Vita was short, not even five feet tall. We were all short. I was five feet and towered over some of my aunts. I would come to learn that this was due to centuries of poverty and no protein.
Like all the women in my family, Vita was tough but kind. We spoke, walked, and acted with purpose, usually while the men lollygagged along.
We took bullshit from no one. But we loved our men and our children and hugged them tight several times a day. We loved our sisters, but we could be catty sometimes and competitive, with a bit of a mean streak. But when it came down to it, we would do anything for them. Anything for our family, anyway. That’s just the way it was.
I TOLD MY CHILDREN ABOUT VITA WHEN THEY WERE OLD ENOUGH to pay attention. And when my
mother came to my house to visit, we told them together. Dean and Paulina had heard so many family stories by this point that another crime didn’t really faze them.
I didn’t tell the story on the way to visit Aunt Katie, since Aunt Katie was dead. And I didn’t tell it on the way to church, since I didn’t go to church anymore: I had a list of grievances with the Catholic hierarchy that was longer than the pope’s robes.
I told the family stories while I cooked and the kids did their homework at the table in our own yellow kitchen. As I stirred a big pot of sauce, meatballs floating on top, my mother and I would tell them how Vita died at the age of sixty-four.
She was hit in the head with a sock full of rocks in Jersey City on Mischief Night, the night before Halloween when all hell broke loose and bonfires raged on its dirty streets. Had she not been smacked in the head, Vita probably would have lived longer. Due to genetics, and the Mediterranean diet, the women in my family lived long lives, well into their late eighties.
We all went to visit Vita’s grave once, looking for the first clue to that family mystery. She was buried deep inside Holy Name Cemetery in Jersey City, her two sons and a couple of grandchildren piled on top of her, her name not even written on the tombstone. Just VENA.
I realized, now that I had my own kids, that my mother told me the story of Vita and Francesco over and over not just to pass the time, or for pure entertainment value, but to teach me something. Vita and Francesco had been involved in a murder. She had been a puttana. And look how it all turned out. Hit in the head with a sock full of rocks on Mischief Night. Not even a name on your own gravestone. There was an Italian saying that went, “Tutti i nodi vengono al pettine,” which meant “All the knots come to the comb.” It was the Italian version of “what goes around comes around.”
I searched for more clues about Vita and found her death certificate from 1915. It listed her birthday as August 22 and her mother as Teresina. Through a cousin, I also found the birth certificates of Vita’s sons—Valente from 1877, born in the province of Matera, in the town of Bernalda “to Vita Gallitelli, wife of Francesco Vena,” and Leonardo, from 1879, born in the neighboring town of Pisticci. The birth certificate said Vita had moved to Pisticci “for work reasons.”
Murder In Matera Page 1
