The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

by Juliet Grames

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  IEVOLI WAS A SECRET that had kept itself for two hundred years. Like most other Calabrian villages, Ievoli was poor and deliberately inaccessible, with no roads to connect it to any other village, only donkey paths cut into the mountains’ discreetly bushy mimosa and mistletoe. The Ievolitani didn’t have much, but they were safe from the barbarians, the invaders, the outside world—from everyone but one another. Well, and the brigands who lived in the forests, stole the occasional goat, and accosted travelers. Another reason not to leave the village.

  The men of Ievoli were contadini, day laborers who followed the sun to whatever field was in harvest, whichever rich landowner was paying. They had no land of their own. The men earned just about enough to keep their families alive, as long as their wives provided all the food from their terraced mountain gardens and as long as their children went to work in the fields as soon as they were smart enough.

  Calabria is a land of improbable mountaintop towns like Ievoli, their streets so steep that to walk up them is nearly to crawl on one’s hands and knees. The Calabresi built these inaccessible villages defensively. For two thousand years, Calabria was besieged—by Romans, who stripped away all her timber; Byzantines, who made the whole region Orthodox; North African Saracens, who made it Muslim; castle-building Normans, who made it Catholic; Bourbons, Angevins, Habsburgs; and, finally, Italians. Each wave of conquerors slaved, pillaged, feasted, and despoiled, thrashing their way through the lush olive and citrus groves with their swords out, splashing blood and DNA over the fertile hillsides. Our people fled the pirates and the rapists and the feudalists, taking refuge in the mountains. Now nesting in these absurdly steep villages is a way of life, although the threats of malaria and Saracens have abated somewhat these days, depending on whom you ask.

  There is evidence of the conquerors’ passing in the faces of the Calabresi, a many-colored people, in their languages and their cuisine. The landscape is studded with Norman castles as well as the ruins of Greek temples built three centuries before the birth of Christ. The Calabresi carry on, unmoved, among these remnants of past conquerors, for they have never been masters of their own homeland.

  STELLA FORTUNA IS LIKE MOST WOMEN in that you can’t understand her life story if you don’t understand her mother’s. Stella loved her mother more than anything in the world, tough Stella with her cold stony heart. But everyone loved Assunta. She was a saint, as every person who remembers her will tell you—and there are people who remember her still. In Italian mountain villages, hearts are strong, and those who survive life’s surprises live a very long time.

  Assunta was born in Ievoli on the feast of the Assumption of the Most Blessed Virgin, Santissima Maria, Madre di Dio, August 15, 1899—hence her name, Assunta, from the word Assunzione. She was a devoutly religious woman, the kind who prayed extra to make up for the fact that her husband did not. There were lots of such women in Ievoli; I suspect there still are. Assunta was raised by her mother, Maria, to have pure, all-sustaining faith in Jesus Christ and in God’s heaven, where she would someday ascend after death if she did exactly what the priest told her to. Assunta was no casually obedient churchgoer; she believed. At mass, especially when she was in her early teens, in those hormonally violent years of incipient womanhood, she was often overcome with emotion when she contemplated the suffering heart of the Most Blessed Virgin and would begin to sob in her pew. Assunta had voluminous, spectacular emotions that only grew more impressive as she got older. Her weeping displays were one of two reasons her daughter Stella would vow never, ever to cry, and kept her vow for forty-eight years.

  Now the reason Assunta married Antonio Fortuna when she was only fourteen years old—on the young side even back then—was because her father died suddenly, leaving his women in a tight spot. No matter how hard a contadino works the padrone’s land his whole life, he owns only his labor; when he dies he most likely has nothing to leave behind for his wife. Assunta had very little dowry, and the longer she lived with her widowed mother, the less they would both have. It would be better if Assunta were the responsibility of another household.

  But it also seemed that she was ready for marriage. She had a matronly aspect about her, not least because of the aforementioned bosoms Stella would inherit from her. Assunta had a nurturing presence and an assuredness of carriage. She had a memorable face, with large dark eyes shaped like upside-down crescent moons that cupped her round cheeks. She was a striking womanly girl. When neighbor ladies came to visit they started thinking about which of the young men in the village she might marry, or maybe a young man from Galli or Polverini or Marcantoni, where so-and-so had an eligible cousin.

  In the end Assunta married a young man from Tracci, an hour’s walk south. Antonio Fortuna was seventeen years old, a stone layer who came to Ievoli to build the new schoolhouse. Assunta saw him often, lunching with the men under the single fat, ancient tree in the church chiazza. Antonio followed Assunta with his lascivious eye when she came to the well to get water. She liked the look of him, broad-shouldered and strong, a meaty young man with a crazed cap of shiny black curls, and she liked that he expressed interest in her. She never gave him her handkerchief, however. Assunta was shy of boys and had been successfully trained to channel that groin-tightening teenage energy into concentrating on Mother Mary’s virginity while reciting the rosary. She was the kind of girl who liked love songs but never thought of herself when she sang them.

  Assunta didn’t say anything about the handsome young stone layer to her mother, because what was there to say? But it all came out in the way things do: one of the Ievoli stone layers mentioned to his wife that Antonio Fortuna, son of Giuseppe Fortuna from Tracci, had been giving the eye to Assunta, poor dead Franciscu Mascaro’s youngest daughter. Then the wife went over to pay a visit to Assunta’s mother, and mentioned the boy from Tracci—and then, well. When you talk about something enough, pretty soon it comes about. Even though Assunta and Antonio had never spoken to each other, everyone else had spoken to each of them about the other so much it seemed like they had already decided everything without saying anything at all.

  That was the whole of the courtship. It doesn’t sound like much, but it was very exciting for Assunta, who spent that winter sewing her nervous energy into her rather rushed trousseau, warming up to her mental picture of herself standing in her own kitchen surrounded by babies, enduring the premature and stomach-curdling mourning of her soon-to-be-lost virginity. There wasn’t a long formal engagement because the young men had started to be called up for obligatory military service. It didn’t suit anyone for the couple to wait until whenever Antonio might be allowed to come home, so Assunta and Antonio were married in February 1914, three months after first speaking to each other.

  ON THE DAY THEY WERE MARRIED, a rare snow came down from the Sila mountains. As Assunta climbed up the hill to the church for the ceremony, her sister Rosina used one of the table runners Assunta had embroidered for her trousseau to protect the bride’s black dress. Hailstones collected like salt in the baskets of mustazzoli cookies the flower girl, Assunta’s nine-year-old sister-in-law Mariangela, handed out to the mass-goers.

  The couple’s wedding night was spent in their new home, a basement apartment of a stone house terraced into the mountainside on the third alley off via Fontana. The basement apartment faced the olive valley, and wooden boards had been jammed into the hillside to form a steep stair leading down from the street. Antonio had arranged to rent the basement from the owner, a widow named Marianina Fazio, for terms that included Assunta’s help with the cleaning and the garden. The apartment was difficult to fumigate because there was no chimney, only the wide windows, which, when thrown open, looked out directly onto the widow’s hens and two spotted goats.

  The newlyweds’ first night in the basement apartment, the wet air was thick with the smell of chicken feathers. The exposed stone walls were damp to the touch, and Assunta lay awake for a long time, picking at the mortar with her fingerna
il and thinking about the strangeness of being so close to a snoring man, the strangeness of the night shadows in the unfamiliar corners, the strangeness of what hurt.

  In the middle of the night, there was a screaming outside their window, a human but inhuman shriek that woke Antonio and Assunta from their awkward first shared sleep. Antonio pulled on his trousers and scrambled to light the lamp.

  The awful scream sounded again before they had reached the door. It took Assunta precious heartbeats to understand what she saw through the gauze of falling snow: standing over the still-heaving carcass of one of the widow’s white goats, two gray, long-faced wolves. They must have come down from the Sila forest because of the snow—they were driven to these parts only when they were starving. Their mouths were red and their eyes small and black in their pointed faces. A gelatinous white fog filled the courtyard between them like a cloudy aspic and snowflakes caught in the wolves’ ruffs as the four of them stood looking at one another.

  Antonio, man of the house, was frozen in fear or perhaps disorientation. Assunta, who was, rightly or wrongly, not afraid of wolves, grabbed the iron fire poker from the floor, ducked under Antonio’s arm, and ran outside barefoot. “Go away!” she cried, lunging at the closest beast, who crouched and growled but gave ground before she did. “Away!” It was just as well she didn’t stand by, because for the rest of their fifty-five-year marriage her husband would almost never be around to drive the wolves away.

  Luckily for the newlyweds, the screams of the dying goat had woken the neighbors, and men rushed to the Fortunas’ aid with their own shovels and axes. By the time they had driven the wolves off, plenty of witnesses could tell the story: Assunta in her matrimonial nightgown and Antonio bare-chested in the snow, fighting off the wedding-night wolves. There might be other beasts about, so while Gino Fragale from two houses down helped Antonio gut and skin the goat carcass for the dismayed widow Marianina, Assunta brought the chickens inside and shut them in her kitchen. Then she tried to scrub away as much of the goat’s blood as she could with only snow and her broom; she didn’t want the scent luring the wolves back. Assunta and Antonio spent the rest of their wedding night listening to the flustered chickens scratching at the stone floor.

  EIGHT MONTHS AFTER THE FORTUNAS MARRIED, Antonio left to join the army regiment in Catanzaro. An army enrollment officer had come through Ievoli in the summer to make sure all the eligible men had been registered for the draft. The young nation of Italy was building an army to reassume its rightful place as a world power—you remember, that rightful place it had relinquished sixteen hundred years earlier, back when those Visigoths sacked the great imperial city of Rome. Not that Assunta had any notion of Roman history or the cataclysm that was already tearing Europe apart.

  When he left for the army, Antonio didn’t promise to send his wife letters. He could read and write but didn’t like to; Assunta could not read or write at all. She assumed he would come back to her if he lived, but only il Signore, God the Father, knew how long he’d be gone.

  Assunta, who was six months pregnant, walked with Antonio down the mountain to the railroad station, which was in Feroleto, the largest town in their cluster of villages. Maria led the donkey with Antonio’s pack tied to its back. It was not a very romantic good-bye; when the train came, Antonio kissed his wife’s cheeks, hoisted his pack, and disappeared into one of the carriages. Assunta had learned during her young marriage that Antonio was not a romantic man, although he was certainly a sexual one.

  The women stood on the platform until the train rumbled down the mountain toward far-off Catanzaro. Assunta cried silently, open-eyed, her tears sliding off her cheeks and landing on the protrusion of her belly. She was crying because a part of her was relieved at Antonio’s going away, at not having to cater to his insatiable alimentary and sexual appetites, which had become very trying when she was tired from the pregnancy. She felt guilty for feeling this way. As, the priest told her at confession, she should.

  THE BABY CAME ON THE AFTERNOON of January 11, 1915. Assunta woke up with some cramping and then her water broke as she was cleaning out the fireplace. She mopped up the mess nervously, wondering if she should waddle down the mountain to tell her mother, or if then she wouldn’t be able to climb back up via Fontana to her own house to give birth. Her anxiety over this decision paralyzed her, but luckily Maria and Rosina dropped in for a visit of their own accord. That’s what life in a village is like; if you haven’t seen someone all day, you go and check on them.

  The older women heated water and hung mint over the bed to ward off the Evil Eye. They gripped Assunta by the elbows and made her walk in circles. They helped her use her chamber pot and fed her a chamomile infusion to relax her muscles and her mind. In the late afternoon, when the contractions were starting to come closer, Ros went up to the church to fetch the nun, Suora Letizia. The suora was very holy and knew women’s medicine, even though she had never had any children herself. She had attended many births over her seventy-five years and had seen all kinds of things, babies born feetfirst and babies tangled in their cords and babies that turned out to be twins. Her lilting northern accent soothed laboring mothers. Everyone felt better with her there.

  Assunta was nervous and did not want to die, which was a possibility. Maria and Ros were not nervous, though, because they had total faith in God and His will. Assunta knew she should have had this faith, too, and as she worried about dying she also worried about worrying about dying. But the baby was born absolutely without incident, with only as much pain and misery as every mother experiences in a healthy birth. It was a pink, fat little girl with a patch of black hair that covered the whole top of her head. Her eyes were light brown, like her father’s.

  Antonio had left instructions for how his child was to be named: Giuseppe if it was a boy, after Antonio’s father, and Mariastella if it was a girl, after Antonio’s mother. The child was not an hour old before her mother had shortened Mariastella to Stella. “My little star,” Assunta said, because it was too easy to say, because the baby was too beautiful.

  Maria and Ros blessed the baby and performed the cruce incantation to banish the Evil Eye. They were, as mentioned, women of total faith who trusted wholly in the saving grace of Jesus, but from a practical standpoint it never hurt to back up His good efforts with a little mountain witchcraft.

  IN MAY 1915, when Assunta’s meticulously cultivated bean garden was in full purple and yellow flower, the news arrived that Italy had gone to war against Austria. Infant Stella was four months old and splendidly fat; she had the kind of heavy-cheeked dangling baby face that sat smiling directly on her own chest. This was, needless to say, very popular with all the neighbor ladies, who came over to affectionately press those cheeks with their lips and fingers. Stella’s mother had no way of guessing how short these golden days of baby fat would be or of the privation that was coming.

  “How long does a war take?” Assunta asked her brother, Nicola, when he brought her the news.

  Nicola didn’t have an answer for this. He had avoided the draft by virtue of his age—he was thirty-five, separated from Assunta by the four babies their mother had lost at birth—but Ievoli had sent seventeen ragazzi, a generation, and no family in the village was unaffected.

  In June, the same day little Stella sat up all by herself without any help from her exuberant mother, Assunta received a letter from Antonio, which Nicola read out for her. Antonio’s division was being sent north, to the Austrian border. The letter was at least a month old.

  DURING THE WAR, there were two years of famine. The winter of 1916–17 was the harshest on record, with documented snowfall of eight meters in the Isonzo River valley, where the boys were fighting. Spring simply never broke, and winter extended into 1918, when some of the contested peaks in the Alps thawed for the first time and revealed brigades of corpses that had been buried in snowdrifts for eighteen months.

  At home in Ievoli, the abortive growing season yielded only half the usual wheat; afte
r the war tariff was collected, Assunta cried. She wished she could believe this wheat being taken away from her would somehow make its way to Antonio on the Austrian front, but as the taxman’s donkey pulled his cart down the road toward Pianopoli, she couldn’t suppress the notion that he was just another mountain brigand, extorting with a wax-sealed order from the king instead of a rifle.

  Assunta’s orto struggled in the unseasonably cold summer; potatoes were small and tomatoes refused to ripen and wrinkled on the vine. As summer withered into fall, there was almost nothing to eat. There were stories of housewives scraping the powdery stucco off their walls to replace the flour they didn’t have. But Assunta’s walls weren’t stuccoed, and they weren’t her walls, anyway.

  In her seventeen years Assunta had never known this kind of hunger. She had no money, no father or husband to provide for her, and no way to earn money herself; she could not control the weather or make the garden fruit. She felt as helpless as a child, but now she had a child. Every day seemed like it must be the worst it could get, but then sometimes it got even worse.

  Little Stella had grown into a bashful, gentle-tempered toddler who rarely cried. She took without complaint the strange and increasingly desperate things Assunta fed her: mashed fava beans one day, then a minestra cooked from their leftover pods the next. Onions fried in olive oil but no bread to eat them on. Broths made from pine bark or bitter mountain herbs. Unripe oranges she stole from the gullies off the side of the road to Tracci and which she stewed until the rinds were soft enough to swallow. Assunta boiled the last of her supply of chestnuts from the fall harvest, drinking off the thinly flavored water and feeding the nuts to little Stella only when they had turned to mush. On many days Assunta did without, relishing the growling in her stomach as proof that there was no sacrifice she had not made on the bambina’s behalf.