The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

by Juliet Grames

  In the murky twilight that comes an hour before dawn, Assunta heard the infant Angela start to fuss. There was maternal murmuring from the far side of the bed, and then fabric sliding against skin as her mother sat up to soothe her. Assunta heard the familiar wet sounds of a baby suckling, barely audible over the steady, damp snoring of Mariastella the elder, who Assunta was certain was not awake. The baby Angela wasn’t thirteen-year-old Mariangela’s sister; she was her daughter.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Antonio and Assunta set off for Ievoli as soon as it was light enough to see the road. Assunta was desperate to be home. She wanted to strip off all their clothes and check the baby for lice and fleas.

  As they followed the donkey path through the gully between the villages, Assunta got up the courage to say to Antonio, “I didn’t know your mother died when you were little.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Antonio turned away from her, glaring into the olive valley. “My mother didn’t die. My mother cooked you dinner last night.”

  Stella was heavy in Assunta’s arms, dozing on her chest as they walked. She, like Assunta, must not have gotten any sleep in the stinky crowded bed. Assunta shifted her daughter’s weight and tried again. “But yesterday Mariangela told me that . . . that the, the new baby is named after her dead mother.”

  Assunta waited nervously until finally her husband said, “Mariangela had a different mother than I did, but my mother is the one you know.”

  That made even less sense. Unless—had Antonio’s father had a mistress? Was Mariangela a bastard? But Antonio was not going to say anything else on the topic. “Here, give me the baby, we’ll get home faster.” He took Stella in his arms and picked up the pace so that Assunta had to trot to keep up.

  ASSUNTA TOOK OFF STELLA’S contaminated dress and put the little girl straight to bed when they got home. She would have liked to lie down herself, but Antonio had gone out to replenish their firewood and he would want a hot lunch when he came home.

  Her day was haunted by the revelation of the night before—her unmarried adolescent sister-in-law suckling an unexplained infant. The ungodliness was shocking—Mariangela, who had been such a sweet little flower girl only five years earlier, had let some man do the job to her. Assunta was frightened by the very notion of sex before marriage, a mortal sin, a soul-killing betrayal of a girl’s grace before God—she was frightened even though she could never commit the sin herself. And a girl of Mariangela’s age, too? Assunta had been almost fifteen when she’d married; she couldn’t imagine enduring that milestone any younger. At twelve she had been a child, without even her monthly bleeding. How had little Mariangela gone so far astray?

  Assunta was sick to her stomach by what she now knew, and didn’t know, about her husband’s family, wary of their morals and their seedy habits. She kept herself moving, shedding her Tracci dress and putting on the nicer dress she usually saved for mass. Leaving the baby sleeping, she hiked up to the cistern at the top of via Fontana, where she scrubbed all their dirty clothes on the rocky bottom of the laundry trough. The cold mountain water numbed her fingers. She didn’t have any soap this year, because there hadn’t been spare olive oil to make any. But now that Antonio was home things would be better. To shatter her own black thoughts, she said out loud several times, “The war is over. It’s a new life. The worst is behind us.”

  When Assunta got home, Stella was still sleeping, poor thing. Assunta hung the laundry on the line that stretched over the widow Marianina’s chickens. She went back up to the fountain to fill her cooking pot with water, then stoked the fire. She peeled a handful of roasted chestnuts and dropped them in the water, added chopped potatoes, dried pear, and a sprinkle of salt. She filled a bowl with persimmons from the tree in the yard—the fruits were just in season—then sat at her table, feeling anxious. Antonio would come home for lunch and they would learn how to live a life together. They had done it before, albeit not for long. She felt like she was getting used to a completely new husband, as if there were no history or existing affection between them.

  She thought about this as the church bells of Santa Maria Addolorata sounded the quarter hours. It was not only Antonio, she decided. She was a different person than when he had left. She was a mother now, and understood the thing that mothers understand, that nothing in the world is more important than the tiny breaths of your child—not obeying your husband, not romance or desire or even one’s own physical self. To be a good Christian wife she would have to remind herself to prioritize the needs of her husband the way she had done naturally before, when there had been nothing more important than he was.

  When the church bells sounded one o’clock, Assunta checked on Stella. Should she wake the little girl up to eat lunch? Assunta felt her daughter’s forehead, which might have been a little bit warm. She thought of the heavy air of the poorly lit hut in Tracci and her anxiety increased. She decided to let Stella sleep.

  Antonio came home with more wood than Assunta would have guessed one man could carry. He stacked it in the yard, then sat and ate the food Assunta presented to him. He didn’t compliment her cooking, but he didn’t complain, either. Then he went out again—perhaps to catch up with the men at the bar.

  Assunta cleaned up her kitchen and tried to wake her daughter. “Aren’t you hungry, little star?” Stella finally opened her eyes, looking as disoriented as any unhappily wakened baby. “Let’s have some soup,” Assunta said. She collected Stella in her arms with a blanket wrapped around her naked torso—the bambina’s linen dress was still drying outside—and brought her to the table. Stella fussed and only took a few mouthfuls of potato. Assunta helped her daughter use the chamber pot, although there wasn’t much, and then put Stella back in bed, wondering if she felt warmer than she had before.

  It looked like rain, so Assunta pulled the laundry in to finish drying by the fire. Her anxiety had taken over her mind now, so she worked her way through the rosary, chanting as slowly as she could make herself, concentrating on the Virgin and her grace. She was about two-thirds of the way through when her sister, Rosina, came over, and they finished the recitation together.

  Ros felt the baby’s head. “I don’t think she’s well, Assunta.” She performed a cruce under her breath and took some of the mint from the bundle on her neck to crush against Stella’s forehead to drive away the Evil Eye.

  “What should I do?”

  Ros studied the baby. “Babies have fevers all the time, poor things, you know that. It might just go away. Get her to drink some gagumil’ and wait two hours. If she gets warmer, though, you will want to get the doctor.”

  Assunta was unsure. “If I have to go to Feroleto, maybe it would be better to go now.” There were two more hours of daylight; Assunta could take Stella to Feroleto, where the closest doctor was, before dark, although being outdoors in the wet December air might be the worst thing for her. Assunta could go to Feroleto alone and fetch the doctor to come back to Ievoli, but she couldn’t even imagine how much a house call would cost. She didn’t have any money; she would need Antonio to come home so she could ask him for some to make that plan work.

  “Listen, Assù. You try the first thing first, and then if you still need to go to Feroleto, you go.” Diminutive Ros reached up to put her child-size hand on her younger sister’s shoulder, and Assunta could feel her calming warm palm through the fabric of her dress. “Don’t worry about things ahead of time or you’ll make bad decisions. If you need to go, you’ll know. And then you go.”

  Rosina went back to collect her herbs and returned with Maria in tow. They brewed a tincture of chamomile, dried lemon peel, and anise to dispel whatever badness might have collected in little Stella’s blood. Stella sat up with her grandmother and aunt for a while, docilely sipping and smiling at them as they sang some of her favorite songs, holding her little hands and pinching her feet. But Stella looked listless, her eyes sunken and sad, so Assunta clothed her in her now-dry dress and put her back in bed. Maria and Ros sat with Assun
ta, crocheting and listening to the rain, until Antonio came home, when they filed out.

  For dinner Assunta served the leftover minestra, which she had expanded with some carrots and an onion. They ate in silence, Assunta tortured by her nerves. Antonio gave off the sour smell that came from hours of drinking, which under normal circumstances would have made Assunta unhappy. Tonight she was too anxious about her daughter to worry about her husband.

  After she’d cleaned the plates up, Assunta checked again on Stella, whose forehead was shockingly hot to the touch. The change was so drastic that Assunta gasped out loud. “Antonio,” she said when she found her voice. “We need to go to Feroleto. We need to get the doctor for Stella.”

  Antonio came over to the bed and tested Stella’s temperature with his rough hand. Assunta swallowed at seeing his big, indelicate fingers on her daughter, but Stella didn’t stir.

  “It’s just a fever,” Antonio said. “It will pass. If she’s not better tomorrow I will go to Feroleto to get the doctor after mass.”

  Assunta remembered what Ros had said to her—that if she needed to go, she would know. She knew—she knew. She needed to go to Feroleto. She said so.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Antonio said. “Listen to the rain. Do you know what time it is? It’s not safe to go out this late at night.”

  “Antonio, please.” Assunta was sobbing. She realized her husband would not respect her for crying, but she couldn’t stop herself. “She needs the doctor. I will go, I’m not afraid.”

  “The doctor might not even come at this hour!” Antonio shouted. “You think I am so rich that we can have the doctor make a nighttime house call whenever the baby gets a fever? Are you crazy?”

  Assunta swallowed a mouthful of air and wiped her tears and snot from her face with her sleeve. “You don’t understand,” she said, fighting to keep her manner unhysterical. “You’re not her mother. I know. I know she needs a doctor.”

  “I’m her father,” he countered, “and I know that this can wait until the morning.”

  “I—”

  Antonio’s fist was in the air. He didn’t strike Assunta, it was only a gesture, but the conversation was over. He turned away from her and went back to the fire.

  “Sit down,” he said to her. “Relax. You’ll see, it will pass. If it doesn’t, I’ll get the doctor in the morning.”

  Assunta didn’t know what to do. She crawled into bed with Stella, pulling off her dress so that she could press her daughter’s hot flesh to her own, hoping she could draw the fever into herself instead. Stella lay against her, fiery with baby heat, for a little while, but then moaned and pushed herself away. Assunta cried, stuffing back her hyperventilation so as not to upset the baby or aggravate her husband’s pique. Her tears sounded loud to her as they dropped onto the mattress, hissing as they were absorbed into the linen fibers of the bedsheet.

  The same thoughts ran again and again through her terror: the brigands, the rain, the long dark road to Feroleto, the fact that Antonio thought of himself as a parent although he had never lived with his daughter, so his faith in his own authority was false. Should she have fought him harder? She felt that every word she had said had been poorly chosen, every decision she had allowed to be made had been wrong, but she couldn’t think of what she could have said or done instead.

  Assunta remembered watching the soft orange of dawn appear in the cracks of the windows, so she must not have fallen asleep until after day had broken. But fallen asleep she had—how?—deeply asleep, after two nights of sleepless exhaustion and panic. When Antonio shook her awake, the bells of the church were ringing the loud call to mass. It must be almost ten o’clock; she would have missed the rosary recitation. Before she had even opened her eyes her hand stretched, per habit, out toward Stella and met the cold flesh of her daughter’s arm.

  Assunta jolted upright, wide awake and livid with fear. Antonio was gripping her shoulder—his fingers bruised her.

  “Assunta. The baby is dead.”

  THIS IS NOT THE STELLA FORTUNA who would survive seven (or eight) deaths. This was the first Stella, her older sister and namesake. This was the Stella who died.

  * * *

  THERE IS A THEORY—a controversial one, depending on your religious sensibilities—about why the second Stella nearly died so many times in her life. Some people wonder if she was haunted by the ghost of her dead sister, the first baby whom she replaced in body and in name. It isn’t a very Catholic thing to believe in ghosts, and those of purest faith would never consider the idea—or so Assunta told herself, and prayed harder.

  The second Stella would live out the first’s aborted narrative and play out all of the ugly scenarios her sister demurred by dying so tragically young. It is easier to remember the first Stella as the perfect little girl she was than to imagine the real person she never had a chance to be, a real person like the second Stella. A woman who grows to adulthood is often a damaged thing; the first Stella might have grown up to be beaten by her husband, or might have been caught stepping out on him; she might have turned out to be unchristian or unattractive, petulant or flatulent, embittered or stupid; she might have died early of something else, anyway. Lived-life stories end in decrepitude, resentments, and squandered opportunities; in crumbling faculties, unrecoupable disappointments, in loneliness. This—the ugliness of reality—is the gap in the story of the two Stellas, the first, who died at age three and a half, and the second, who wouldn’t die at all.

  * * *

  THE BABY’S FUNERAL WAS HELD on Monday afternoon. The entire village came to the mass. Every pew was full and the foyer was packed with those who had arrived too late to find seats. Everyone loved Assunta, and their hearts were broken for her, as well as for her young husband who had only just returned from the hardships of war to this fresh grief.

  Afterward Assunta remembered nothing of the service, only that when the church doors were thrown open and the mourners spilled out, filling the chiazza to its iron balconies, the sun was beginning its wintry descent into the Tyrrhenian Sea. A black and gray storm was moving in over the mountains and a spatter of cold rain followed the mourners on the slow procession down to the cemetery, but to the west the sky was clear, and the water in the marina was a vibrant aquamarine.

  The pallbearers were Assunta’s brother, Nicola, who had been little Stella’s godfather, and Father Giacomo himself, whose priestly robe trailed through the muddied dust. Normally there would have been six pallbearers, but Stella’s little casket was so small only two were required. The casket was tied around the middle with a rope so that if one of the pallbearers were to trip on the steep path the body wouldn’t go flying out. Assunta walked behind the casket, her mother and sister gripping her arms. Maria and Rosina were both sobbing, but for once Assunta was not. She held off her grief by the force of her will because she knew that when it finally came she would die.

  A hundred mourners followed the coffin all the way to the aboveground cemetery, a walled city of marble mausoleums that stood like miniature houses on uniform narrow streets. Family members were stacked in pairs, a nameplate announcing their respective dates. There had never been a Fortuna buried in Ievoli before, and so little Stella’s remains would slide into the first shelf of an empty death house, where she would wait for her family to follow.

  Assunta and Antonio stood in front of the stone portico and received the mourners. There were many wet faces, but they pressed hands and kissed cheeks quickly so that the next in line could step through. No one wanted to be out after dark, lest they encounter the same ill air that had killed the baby.

  TWO DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, in the midafternoon, there was a knock on the door. Assunta answered in her bare feet and the dress she had been wearing for four days. On the other side of the door, with his fine leather boots standing in the mud of the widow Marianina’s chicken yard, was a man Assunta knew, but she couldn’t remember how.

  “Good afternoon, signora,” the man said, which was no help to her in pl
acing him. He had a leather satchel that struck her as particular.

  “Ciao,” she replied. She labored to concentrate in her stupor.

  “You never came,” the man said. “I was in the area—I had to come to Marcantoni for a delivery—so I thought I would stop by to save you the journey.”

  She couldn’t pretend anymore; she didn’t have the energy. “Never came where?”

  “To pick up the photograph you ordered, what do you think?”

  Ah yes, now she recognized him—the Nicastro portraitist. “We don’t need the photo anymore” was the first thing she thought to say.

  The portraitist’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. She had made him angry. “There is the matter of the other half of the fee,” he said. “Your husband only paid half up front. The other half was to be paid on receipt.”

  “Signore,” Assunta said. She could have been exhorting the portraitist or God himself. “We have just spent the last of our money burying our daughter. That’s the little girl in the picture you made for us. Capito?” She wanted nothing more than to end this conversation and get back in bed.

  The portraitist was both a human being with a heart and also a businessman who saw when there was nothing more to be gained. “I’m so sorry, signora,” he said. “Listen, I will make you a present of the photo as my condolence to you. Forget the other half of the fee.” He was pulling a brown paper packet out of his satchel. “No, it is nothing. You should have this photo of your daughter to remember her by.” He handed her the packet, tipped his hat, and left.

  SOMEWHERE, I THINK, a copy of the portrait might still exist, if the second Stella didn’t destroy it during the purge. It’s ingrained in my memory, although I admit it’s been many years since I’ve seen it.