The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

by Juliet Grames

  Assunta did her best. She got by; her baby grew. When Stella got too big for her infant dress, there was no cloth to make her a bigger one. Instead Assunta stitched together old kitchen linens, and Stella learned to walk in a dress that had once wiped the table. Around them, the whole village grew thinner. The farm animals dwindled and disappeared, even the ones that wouldn’t normally be eaten—the donkeys, for example; Calabresi love their donkeys more than they love their wives, as the old song goes. Even Maria’s old ciucciu did not survive the war. I’m not sure what happened to her—I can’t imagine Maria or sentimental Ros killing and cooking her, but I’ve also never gone hungry.

  The dark years passed, and Ievoli prayed. One by one, the new widows and grieving mothers replaced their red pacchiana skirts with black mourning ones.

  THE WAR AGAINST AUSTRIA ENDED on November 3, 1918. A messenger on horseback rode to all the parishes along the road from Nicastro with the news. At sundown the bells rang in the campanile of each church so the countryside echoed with the thanks of the living and the prayers for the dead. Ievoli had lost eleven young men—a terrible price for a tiny hamlet to absorb. One family, Angelo and Franceschina who lived off the road to Pianopoli, lost all three of their sons as well as two nephews, one on his side, one on hers.

  Assunta and Ros took little Stella to Feroleto to meet the train that was carrying home the soldiers. Assunta wasn’t sure what time it would arrive and was afraid of being late, so the women headed out at dawn. There was no donkey to help with Antonio’s bag this time. Stella walked half the journey on her own stubby legs and let Assunta carry her for the remainder.

  Assunta was quietly panicked about seeing her husband. She wasn’t sure if she remembered what he looked like. She sang to Stella, bouncing the little girl on one hip to quell her own nerves. The station was crowded with women and old men, almost everyone clothed entirely in black. While they waited for the train, Assunta walked with Stella up and down the cobblestoned chiazza, which curved around the mountain like a barbican keeping strategic eye on the valley below. Assunta and Stella peered in the artisans’ shops. The bambina greeted the shopkeepers politely, buon jurno, like she’d been taught, and the artisans laughed and said how smart the little girl was, benedic’, God bless.

  The train arrived shortly after the bells of Santa Maria had rung ten o’clock. It had been traveling all through the night and the night before that, a grueling slow journey from Trieste to Rome and then to Napoli, stopping in each village to unload veterans and caskets. Finally the train had made it to Calabria, the farthest part of the peninsula from where the war had been, to deposit the last of the survivors. The returning soldiers from Feroleto, Pianopoli, and all the smaller surrounding towns filed off the train. Assunta searched their faces, wondering with a fresh lurch of terror which was Antonio. They all looked like they might have been him, and yet none of them looked exactly right.

  Assunta stood dumbly, but clever Rosina called out Antonio’s nickname, “Tonnon!,” and a man was striding toward them. This Antonio looked like the older, leaner brother of the Antonio Assunta had married. His face was taut and his silhouette reduced. He was no longer the strapping, meaty young man who had gone to war. But he exhibited no visible scars except, if you looked closely, the perpetually flaking patches of skin on the tops of his ears from an old frostbite.

  “Antonio,” Assunta said. She tried to smile, but she hiccupped with tears. She hadn’t remembered him as handsome but here he was, so handsome, strong though thinned, darkness sparkling in his amber eyes. She had her man back when so many women would never see theirs again. God forgive her for enjoying his absence.

  He kissed her cheeks, left then right. He had many days’ stubble on his face. “Is this my daughter?” he said. He kissed Stella’s cheek. “Mariastella, my daughter.”

  Stella turned away and buried her face in Assunta’s chest. Ros laughed and grasped Antonio’s arm so he would bend over to kiss her cheeks. “She’s shy,” Ros told him. “But she’s very happy you’re home. Aren’t you, Stella, my little star?” Stella peeked at her aunt Ros, but wouldn’t look at her father. “She’s been talking about you all morning, saying, ‘I’m going to see Papa soon, where’s Papa,’ haven’t you, Stella?” It was the kind of lie that aunts tell.

  * * *

  THE THREE FORTUNAS LIVED TOGETHER as a family for five days.

  The day Antonio came home, they all ate lunch together in Maria’s house, all the Mascaro women and Nicola and his family. Antonio was quiet and drank copiously through the meal, then leaned heavily on Assunta’s arm on the way back up the hillside. As soon as they were inside their basement, Antonio locked the door and pushed Assunta onto the bed. He lifted her skirts and entered her without even removing his trousers. His wife, surprised, was unready and dry, and the act itself took longer than she remembered it had in the first year of their marriage, which suddenly felt like a very long time ago, a forgotten world and lifestyle.

  Assunta endured in silence, her mind tortured by the thought that little Stella was watching them, that she should stop her husband, but that she couldn’t stop her husband, not when he had been gone for three and a half years, when he’d waited this long, when this was her duty to him. Assunta had become so used to her chastity that it hadn’t even crossed her mind that she would have to give herself to her husband in the same room where her daughter slept. Would it be like this from now on? She turned her face to the wall, trying not to see Stella’s wide, inquiring eyes.

  When it was over, Antonio fell so heavily asleep that Assunta struggled against the dead weight of his legs to pull off his boots. She spent the afternoon cleaning the apartment and urging Stella to play quietly. Assunta needn’t have hushed the baby; nothing would have woken her husband.

  His second day home, Antonio slept. Well-wishers came over, wanting to kiss his cheeks and bless him and cry and ask questions about their boys who hadn’t come back or other boys they had heard about—Assunta thought this through and understood how terrible that kind of affection might be for Antonio. She closed and bolted the windows and the door to discourage visitors. Some people, of course, still knocked. She would open the top half of the door and shoo them away. “Tomorrow,” she would whisper, “or the day after.” Meanwhile she cooked so that when her husband woke up hungry he could be served immediately. She had no bread to offer him—no flour, still, this winter—and fretted over how to make a minestra from the withered potatoes and dried fruits in her stockpile. Little Stella watched her somberly. She understood the gravity of the task.

  His third day in Ievoli, Antonio was ready to leave again. “We are going to Nicastro,” he told his wife. He had a small but meaningful amount of money, active duty severance, and he had already decided how he wanted to spend it.

  It was a Thursday, and not so cold for early December. Assunta did not see why they had to go to Nicastro right then, but now that she had a husband again it was her sacred duty as a Christian woman to do as he told her. “I will bring the baby to my mother,” she said.

  “No, Mariastella must come with us,” Antonio said. That was part of the errand. “Get her dressed.”

  “She can’t walk all that way,” Assunta protested. It was at least two hours on foot; Assunta herself had only been to Nicastro twice in her life. She thought of the broad palm-lined boulevards and the strange men who would be sitting in the bars lining the corso. A terrifying place for a child.

  “I’ll carry her,” Antonio said.

  The thing he had in mind was a family portrait. It had become an obsession of his during the snowy days in the Alps. Some men had brought photographs with them, and by the end of the war Antonio remembered what other men’s wives looked like, but not his own. He had decided that when you have a family you should have something to show for them.

  The Nicastro portraitist fit in a sitting for the Fortuna family even though they didn’t have an appointment, which wasn’t something Antonio had thought of. The photographe
r was used to people like Antonio, bumpkins from the mountain villages who showed up at his shop with only word-of-mouth notions about what would happen there. Between all the boys going off to war and all the emigrants sailing for the Americas, people needed tokens to remember one another by, and he had been doing a lot of business even through the privation of the last few years.

  Many of the people who came to be photographed were poor and even their best clothing looked shabby, so the portraitist kept a chest of clothes, four women’s dresses in different colors and sizes, two full men’s suits, and lots of children’s outfits, since sometimes men brought their whole large family. He didn’t charge extra for use of his costumes; he didn’t want people complaining that the photograph he’d taken looked bad, even if the reason was the appearance of the subject rather than the quality of the photo. The portraitist showed the Fortunas how they might pose and suggested they do their best to keep the baby still; they would only have one shot.

  The photograph wouldn’t be ready for a week. Antonio could pay half the fee now and the other half when he came to pick up the photo. Or he could pay the full cost plus an extra fee and have the photograph delivered, but the portraitist warned this might take longer, since it depended on when he had enough delivery orders to justify a trip up to the mountain villages. Antonio chose the former; he was not one to waste money when there was another option, however inconvenient.

  THE NEXT DAY, the fourth day Antonio was home in Ievoli, the Fortunas set out after lunch for Tracci to visit Antonio’s family. Antonio had Assunta pack the present they had bought in Nicastro—a pickling jar, the famous white ceramic from the town of Squillace, painted with flowers and leaves in ochre, yellow, and green—as well as anything she might want to spend the night. Tracci was an hour’s walk from Ievoli, and Assunta wished they could return after dinner rather than stay overnight. But there had been trouble with brigands lately, and Assunta hardly wanted to expose her daughter to the evil night winds that carried diseases like cholera. Only the malicious walked about after sunset, breathing the poisonous night air so that they could in turn infect others. Assunta was not malicious.

  As they walked, Assunta rehearsed things she could say to Antonio’s mother, whom she barely knew. Mariastella Callipo had come to visit Assunta and Stella in Ievoli only once during the war. The visit had been awkward; Assunta found the older woman harsh and difficult to communicate with. Antonio’s mother was the type who always wore black, although she wasn’t widowed, and even on feast days. It was a dour form of Christian modesty Assunta knew she should have admired but which nonetheless struck her as backward. Mariastella Callipo made her daughters do the same—when Assunta thought of Antonio’s family she always pictured the mother and sisters lined up in the identical black dresses and veils they had worn to Assunta’s wedding, even little Mariangela, who had been Assunta’s flower girl.

  Three years later, on this December afternoon in 1918, Assunta, Antonio, and little Stella arrived in Tracci in the middle of the postlunch siesta, when the streets were empty, silent except for muted kitchen noises, the sloshing and pounding and scraping of wifely cleanup, that filtered through the wooden-shuttered windows.

  It took a long time for Assunta’s mother-in-law to answer the door. The elder Mariastella was a tall woman of about forty with a deeply trenched brow and a squinting expression. All her hair had turned white since Assunta had last seen her.

  “Oh, you’re back,” Antonio’s mother said. She proffered her cheek for a kiss, then she gestured them into the house, where without further comment she sat down at the table and picked up an in-progress sewing project. Assunta was disconcerted by this unemotional reunion. After her son, flesh of her flesh, had been away at war for years? Had she not feared for his life, prayed for him every day, the way Assunta had?

  The Fortunas’ house was old, the kind of house they didn’t build anymore for fear of bad ventilation, with a ceiling so low Assunta could reach up and touch it. There was only one window, facing the street. On the bed that filled half the interior sat a girl jiggling a baby sibling in her lap. Assunta recognized the girl as Mariangela, Antonio’s sister, who must be thirteen by now. Antonio kissed Mariangela’s cheeks and touched the baby’s head, then left to find his father in the garden a little ways down the mountain.

  Assunta unwrapped the Squillace ceramic and showed it to the elder Mariastella, who set aside her sewing long enough to place it on a shelf. Then, feeling clumsy in the silence, Assunta said, “Did you see how big my Mariastella is?”

  It was the baby’s cue to show off a little, but she was shy. Stella clutched her skirt in both hands and twisted from side to side, staring at the floor.

  “Stella, go salute your nonna,” Assunta said. “Can you go give her a kiss?”

  Stella crossed the room obediently and her grandmother Mariastella stooped to receive the baby’s shining wet lips on her cheek. “Did you know,” Assunta told Stella as the little girl rushed back toward the safety of her mother, “you are named after your Nonna Mariastella, this nonna right here?”

  Stella put a finger in her mouth to cover her bashfulness. The elder Mariastella waved jerkily to the little girl; Assunta felt a pang of compassion for this age-toughened woman who was so awkward, even with her grandchildren.

  “And this is your Aunt Mariangela, Stella,” Assunta said, turning Stella by her shoulders to face her adolescent aunt and the infant she was rocking. “Can you say hello to your zia?”

  “Ciao, Zia,” Stella said.

  Mariangela smiled. Her hair was greasy and there was a red splatter of pimples over her forehead and chin, but her large, dark eyes were beautiful, Assunta thought.

  “What’s this one’s name?” Assunta asked, pointing to the baby, who she guessed to be three or four months old.

  “Angela,” Mariangela said.

  “Oh, almost like you,” Assunta said, wondering why the sisters had been given such similar names. “Stella, see the little baby? That’s your Aunt Angela. Isn’t that funny, that you have a little auntie who is even littler than you?”

  Stella laughed and then hid her face in her mother’s skirt. Assunta cupped her daughter’s round head, feeling the heat radiating from Stella’s scalp. “Don’t be shy,” she said. “Someday your Auntie Angela will be bigger and you can play together.”

  “Not Angela like me,” Mariangela corrected Assunta. She lowered the sleeping baby so Stella could see her. “She’s named Angela for my mother who died.”

  Assunta hesitated, looking at her mother-in-law for clarification, but the older woman was busy with her piece of linen and didn’t make eye contact. “Your mother who died?” Assunta repeated.

  “Yes, she died when I was little.” Mariangela watched Assunta intently. “I was only three. But I can remember her. Only a little bit, but I can remember.”

  Assunta’s mother-in-law stood suddenly, dropped her sewing on the bed, and walked outside, letting the bottom half of the split door bang heavily behind her. She did not like this conversation.

  “I didn’t know,” Assunta said. “I’m so sorry.” The girl said nothing further, so Assunta asked tentatively, “How did she die?”

  Mariangela looked down at her baby sister in her lap. “Giving birth to a baby, who also died.”

  “I’m sorry,” Assunta said again. “What a shame.” Was Mariangela saying that the elder Mariastella was not actually her mother? Did that make her Antonio’s stepmother, too? Was that why she seemed so cold with him?

  Assunta thought of one of her mother’s proverbs: I guai da pignata i sapa sulu a cucchjiara cchi c’è vota, the problems inside the pot are known only by the spoon who stirs it. In other words, only a family can know all its own secrets. Assunta should mind her own business, her mother would have scolded her. But her husband’s family was also her daughter’s family; didn’t that make it Assunta’s business?

  “Where are your brothers?” Assunta asked Mariangela carefully.

  “T
hey must be playing in the chiazza, I think.”

  “What about the big ones?” There were two teenage boys, Assunta knew; she wished she could remember their names—now it seemed to her strange that Antonio never spoke of them. “Are they working?”

  “They went to l’America last year,” the girl said after a long hesitation. “Mamma didn’t want them to get called to war like Tonnon.”

  Now Mariangela had called Mariastella “Mamma” despite having just said the woman wasn’t her mother. Was it possible the girl was crazy, or confused?

  Assunta let the matter drop.

  The visit passed slowly. It was the feast of San Nicola, and they all went to evening mass at the tiny Tracci chapel, a relief for Assunta because it was a way to make the tedious hours with her in-laws pass. After, they returned to the Fortuna house and Mariastella boiled water for pasta, a holiday treat for which she used the last of a precious sack of flour. The woman was finally warming up to the idea that this was a special occasion. Nevertheless, as the sun set and Mariastella Callipo cut dough into strips to twist into gemelli, Assunta regretted that it was too late for her and Antonio to take the baby home to Ievoli.

  THAT NIGHT WAS THE WORST, long hours of boredom and anxiety during which Assunta was unable to keep her eyes closed. They all lay together in the one wide bed: Mariangela against the wall, then infant Angela with Mariastella the elder, then Assunta’s father-in-law, then Antonio, and finally Assunta, rigid so as not to fall off the mattress. Stella lay on her mother’s chest and was restless all night. The little boys, Luigi and Egidio, made room for the guests by sleeping on the floor.

  Assunta was not used to so many people sleeping in the same place. The bed had the dank, clotted smell of many years’ worth of unlaundered sleep. Assunta had found a flea on her leg while they were eating dinner and now couldn’t escape the thought that the dirty bed was crawling with vermin. But she had no choice but to lie there and offer up her body to them until it was light enough to take her daughter home.