The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

by Juliet Grames

  In the portrait, nineteen-year-old Assunta casts the impression of a much older woman, with her full bosom and weathered face. She wears a long-sleeved black dress and the kind of hangdog expression one sees in so many photos of her immigrant contemporaries. She’d felt nervous during the sitting, disoriented by the photographer’s instructions. Antonio, meanwhile, is a vaudeville patriarch with his square-buttoned vest and handlebar mustache. The first Stella, the lost bambina, is strung between them like a rosary, her Christ-like pigeon toes propped over a small standing table. The photo is an eerie one: the first Stella’s face in the black-and-gray is melancholy and unbabyish, with deep shadows under her dark, unfocused eyes. She has the look of one who has passed through the vale of frivolous youth and is relieved she will not have to tire herself with it again.

  Assunta and Antonio never again took formal portraits of their young children. It was expensive, for one thing, but more importantly they had learned their lesson: not to commemorate something that hadn’t yet committed itself to the flesh. Assunta couldn’t escape the idea that, by taking the first Stella’s picture, by which they would remember her, she and Antonio had doomed their daughter to die.

  ASSUNTA WAS A WOMAN of great faith. But at the death of her daughter she was challenged. She had lost the love and light of her life, the precious little girl into whom she had poured herself, the most beloved baby in all of Ievoli, who had delighted Assunta with her cleverness and affection, whom she had gone hungry for, who had cuddled her in their lonely basement and been her companion for the long seasons she hadn’t known if her husband would return. Assunta could not conquer her grief, and so at this darkest hour of her life she lost not only her daughter but also, for a time, her God.

  She was to believe that for baptized Christians, the paradise that awaited was vastly better than life here on this squalid earth. If she were truly faithful she’d have nothing to grieve, because her departed daughter must be endlessly happy now. She was to believe that God did as God willed in taking Stella, and God made no mistakes.

  But she struggled with this, she struggled. She couldn’t stop herself; she missed her daughter bitterly, she could not shake the thought that Stella was gone forever, and no amount of praying gave her spirit any comfort. As a result Assunta feared her own faith, and that in turn made her fear the faith she had given her daughter, and that made her question whether either she or her baby would ever be allowed into paradise. Yet even with this urgent pressure to correct herself so she did not shut them both out of God’s heaven, Assunta could not make herself stop crying.

  News had reached Ievoli of the influenza, which had appeared in the battlefields and spread all over Europe as soldiers trickled home, one last war-born misery to shred already suffering families. Suora Letizia explained the influenza to Assunta when she came to the Fortuna house to pray with the grieving mother. Two other Ievolitani succumbed to flu-like symptoms; the diagnosis made sense, considering Antonio might have carried the disease home with him.

  “You must stop blaming yourself,” the suora said. “It would have not made any difference at all if you had gone to Feroleto to get the doctor. Not even the smallest difference,” she repeated, because we Italians say things many times and with many words. “You might have caused yourself great harm, running around in the dark in the rain, with all the brigands in the woods who might have taken advantage of you or killed you or both.”

  In an ungodly passage of soul-searching, Assunta wondered how, if her baby had died from influenza Antonio had brought back from the war, she would ever forgive her husband for surviving to come home. Why could he not have been one of the eleven Ievoli boys to fall on Asiago Plateau? If he had died, her Stella would still be alive.

  Assunta lulled herself to sleep playacting in her head a negotiation with God, where she traded Him her husband in exchange for her daughter. She would have to explain this unwifely fantasy at confession someday, and would do grim penance, but until then she imagined and reimagined the scenario, just in case her mental fervency could somehow effect this kind of reconciliation in real life.

  STARTING AGAIN AFTERWARD—it’s impossible, if you think about it.

  “Don’t think about it,” Maria told her daughter. Maria had lost many children of her own—four beautiful full-term babies, every one lost during labor because before Suora Letizia came to Ievoli there was only the stupid doctor who didn’t know how to deliver breech babies. “Just do it. It’s the only way.”

  Assunta did it. It was maybe the best way to get through, because it was the smallest change she could make—she didn’t even need to get out of bed, or change into clean clothes. Antonio took what he could get. Her body was sore with her sadness and she pressed her face into the pillow because she couldn’t look at her husband, who quickly learned it was easiest for everyone if he took her from behind, so they could each think about their own things. It was the most distasteful act Assunta could imagine, this loveless, angry offering of her body to her husband while her heart ached in her chest, but it was the only way that she could make another baby.

  LIKE THIS, A YEAR PASSED for the Fortuna household. Neither wife nor husband was the person they had been when they got married, because they had each been through their own version of hell. But they got by. Assunta worked hard in her garden and her house and she prayed to the Most Blessed Virgin, who had also lost her child and who understood Assunta’s heart’s pain. Her sadness never went away, but she eased, without even noticing when the transition happened, into thinking also about the new baby growing inside her.

  Antonio had come home from war a changed man. He was only twenty-one, but he was grizzled-looking, with lines in his forehead from squinting into the dry, cold Alpine air. He came home with a penchant for drink. A distaste for drunkenness is culturally typical in a place like Ievoli, where a man drinks wine in moderation all day long but would be humiliated to appear inebriated in public. War had banished this distaste; Antonio had learned to drink to blind himself.

  Assunta was mortified by and afraid of this behavior. She asked him, “But what will people say?”

  “I don’t give a goddamn what people say!” he roared. When she criticized him, Antonio enjoyed reducing his wife to tears, which was not difficult since she had an involuntary weeping response to raised voices. “You want to know something? Never once in history has anyone asked a rich man what people will say. No one tells a rich man to be ashamed of himself. So why should I!”

  That was another change the war had brought about in her husband: a fresh and boiling hatred for the gentry. The officers he’d fought under had been rich, weak young gentlemen with no respect for the peasants they were sending to slaughter. They spat on men like Antonio, and Antonio spat right back.

  “I’m fed up with this country and the stronzi who run it. There is nothing for us here.”

  Antonio had his mind set on emigrating. Men from the Nicastro area were going to a place called Pennsylvania to build railroads. He arranged his passport paperwork so he could leave first thing in the spring, right after his son was born.

  Assunta didn’t say so, but she was glad Antonio had decided to emigrate. She’d sworn to love him before God, and she wasn’t a woman to break an oath, but it would be much easier to love him if he didn’t live in her house. She wished he wouldn’t wait until the baby was born to leave. On top of her other bad feelings, she found his presence irritating. Antonio shattered the harmony of her home with his bodily desires, his entitled voice, his farts, his mustache that shed short black hairs on the kitchen table.

  ASSUNTA’S SECOND BABY WAS BORN in widow Marianina’s basement on the bitterly cold night of January 11, 1920. It was five years to the day after the first Stella Fortuna had been born.

  Antonio was disappointed yet again; the baby was a girl. “Well, there you go,” he said to Assunta. “At least you have a new Mariastella now.”

  Her heart pounding with that new-mother desperation, Assunta looked into t
he infant’s face for similarities. But even though she was just a baby, she looked very different from the last baby. “Are you my Stella, my piccirijl’?” she asked, but she felt stupid as she said it. This wasn’t her Stella; this was a different person. This was a different Stella.

  Assunta thought of all the love she hadn’t had a chance to give to the first Mariastella. This baby was her second chance. No more casual love—no more mistakes.

  ANTONIO LEFT FOR L’AMERICA three weeks after the second Mariastella was born, in early February 1920. He had signed a padrone contract to work on the railroad and stayed through the fall. In l’America, there was snow in the winter—snow as tall as a man some days—so the railroad work stopped until spring. He came home for this snowy time, when the second Stella was ten months old, but now that he had seen America, he couldn’t stand the idea of Ievoli, and stayed only through the winter. It was long enough to plant another baby in Assunta’s womb.

  CONCETTINA, POOR THING, was a disappointment from the beginning.

  First of all, she was an in utero trial to her mother. Unlike either of the Stellas, this baby had Assunta vomiting four times a day. Village ladies told Assù the vomiting would stop before she was halfway to term, and they were wrong about that. The second Stella, who was not even two years old but a precocious baby, learned to say tricky words like “Mamma malata”—Mommy’s sick—and to stroke her mother’s tummy to calm the wrath of the invisible sibling.

  Assunta spent August bedridden in the sopping sweat of the afternoon, on her knees in the garden in the earliest hours of the morning in an attempt to weed while it was cool enough, leaning over to fertilize the potatoes periodically with another dribble of vomit. She sobbed to her mother that she hated Antonio, who had left her alone to die of his seed, that she would never survive this pregnancy. Maria rubbed Assunta’s back and reiterated her thesis that this was a strong, tough boy.

  Antonio came back from l’America again in October 1921 to witness the birth of his first son. He’d been home for a week when Assunta went into labor. The cramping started as she was brewing Antonio his morning coffee, the contractions lasted through the afternoon, and the pushing started around midnight. Suora Letizia, Rosina, and Maria were in attendance, of course, and so was Antonio, because there was nowhere for him to go at that hour to get out of the women’s way. He sat impatiently through the last hours of labor, his rifle loaded so that he could fire the traditional two shots to let the village know an heir had been born.

  “Mannaggia!” Antonio swore when the baby issued forth sporting a tiny pink vagina. He seized his gun and stomped outside. Rosina and Suora Letizia, who was wiping the baby clean, exchanged looks as the too-close sound of rifle shots—two of them—reverberated through the house.

  “Guess he didn’t care that she wasn’t a boy after all,” Suora Letizia said placidly.

  The girl baby was completely bald. “She looks like a bug,” her father said when he came back in.

  “Antonio,” Rosina chided.

  “She’s my little bug, Tonnon,” said Assunta. “Muscarella mia.” She was very tired; the baby was big and she was torn from the delivery.

  The infant was supposed to have been named Giuseppe, after Antonio’s father. Since that name wasn’t going to work, Assunta said hopefully, “We could name her Maria, after my mamma.”

  “No!” Antonio would have said no to anything at this moment, even something he didn’t have a stake in. “She’ll be Concettina, after my mother’s mother.”

  Assunta was too tired to argue.

  STELLA WAS A YEAR AND NINE MONTHS older than Cettina. When they were babies, this meant that Cettina always seemed to be many steps behind.

  At first, this was difficult for Stella, the way it is always difficult for an older sibling to be saddled with a younger, stupider one who can’t transport itself or communicate, and whom everyone is paying attention to because it is so helpless. Sibling jealousy, the oldest human interaction after that of husband and wife—just read the book of Genesis.

  Jealousy is, though, the most harmful human emotion—the thing that must be safeguarded against at all costs. Assunta knew the destructive power of the Evil Eye and did her best to discourage any jealousy she spotted among her children.

  “You have to watch out for Cettina,” Assunta told Stella. “She’s just little. She’s not smart like you. She needs you to protect and help her.”

  “Concettina muscarella,” Stella replied.

  “That’s right. Our little bug.” Assunta helped Stella stroke the baby’s soft dark head. “Our little bug.”

  “My little bug,” Stella said.

  Assunta laughed. “Certo, she is your little bug. But you have to look out for her always.”

  IN FEBRUARY OF 1922, Antonio left for l’America again, again leaving a baby in his wife’s belly. This one did turn out to be a boy who could finally take his grandfather Giuseppe’s name, but Antonio was no longer charmed by the idea of fatherhood and hadn’t bothered to come home for this one. In fact, he didn’t bother to send money to his wife, either, or even to write and let her know he hadn’t fallen into a ditch and died. Assunta, who was twenty-three and had three infants under three years old, learned as many new lessons about resourcefulness as she had during the war.

  This was how the years passed. Assunta tended her three living children and prayed for the deceased one. She stitched their clothes and scrubbed them, washed out their diapers and kept them fed with bread she baked from flour she ground from wheat she grew in the garden she tended. She preserved and pickled and salted and stored so they would never go hungry, even when there was nothing. To keep them warm through the winter she gathered firewood on the mountain and carried it home tied up in a linen cloth she balanced on her head, with Giuseppe strapped to her chest, Stella holding her left hand, Cettina her right. Assunta dug her own stones out and turned her own soil and pruned her own trees and drew her own water from the well five, ten times a day to cook and clean.

  This was the trouble with emigration—it dismantled the patriarchy. Because really, what did Assunta, or any woman, need a husband for, when she did every goddamn thing herself?

  * * *

  STELLA FORTUNA THE SECOND’S earliest memory is of the day she almost died for the first time, the episode with the eggplant. Most of us have memories from when we are three or four years old—often foggy, impressionistic, colors or words instead of whole, solid moments. Stella had none of these. Her first memory was vivid, complete, and late: she was four and a half, and she was waking up in a shadowy brown room redolent with the sweet-rot smell of mint. She was in intense pain.

  Later in life Stella would think that it was proof of a benevolent God that He had excused her from any recollection of the eggplant incident itself. It was somewhat regrettable that He hadn’t seen fit to excuse her from its aftermath. But what kind of Heavenly Father would He be if He didn’t help us learn from our own mistakes?

  IN THE SEGMENT STELLA DOESN’T REMEMBER, Assunta was frying slices of eggplant in her cast-iron trencher—her finest possession—over her open hearth. Little Stella, just tall enough to see over the lip of the frying pot, must have reached out and pressed her fingertips into the sizzling top skin of bread crumbs, then drawn back her hand in shock at the heat. In this jolting movement, the pan tipped toward her, splashing boiling olive oil onto Stella’s right arm, oil that rushed through her dress sleeve and wrapped her from knuckle to chest. Stella might have cried out, but it is also possible she was silent, as later in life she was quietest during the worst times. Her baby sister, Concettina, was the opposite, and seeing Stella collapse by the fireplace she began to shriek for her mother.

  Assunta rushed over to find the damage already done, red florets blossoming on her daughter’s arm. Assunta tried to pull off the oil-soaked sleeve, but it had fused into Stella’s skin. When she tugged at Stella’s dress, the material resisted only slightly in her hands before springing upward, the flesh releasin
g, choosing fabric over arm, and blood spilled out so suddenly that neither of them, mother or daughter, even screamed.

  STELLA WAS UNCONSCIOUS DURING Assunta’s dash down the mountain to Feroleto. Deep in her physical memory Stella knew the waddle-jog, waddle-jog of her mother in a hurry, her wounded daughter clutched to her chest; imagined Assunta’s asthmatic breath freckling her face with spittle. The gallop was an aerobic one, three-quarters of an hour over the uneven weather-soft ground of the donkey path through the mistletoe-laced jungle of alder and ash. Later everyone told Assunta she had been crazy to take the child down the mountain, that she should have gone to fetch the doctor instead. But she worried it would be too late if she waited for the doctor to gather his things, that he wouldn’t take her seriously if he couldn’t see Stella himself. And who can say she wasn’t right?

  Assunta ran down the mountain the day of the eggplant for another reason, too—because she had not run that December day five years earlier. Because last time, she’d hesitated through the danger. Last time, she had let someone else—her husband—talk sense into her, and so she had woken the next morning to find there was no longer any reason to worry about whether the doctor was worth the expense. If this second Stella died, at least it would not be because her mother had not run.

  So—and this was a story often retold in Ievoli, because everyone likes stories about feats of heroism by distressed mothers—Assunta picked her daughter up and ran.

  STELLA REMEMBERED NOTHING of the eighteen hours she spent in the doctor’s surgery, where twice during the night she was nearly lost. Skin graft science was new and risky—it took the doctor more than an hour to explain to the frantic mother why she should let him cut into her daughter, that if he did not she might never heal and faced a dangerous chance of infection from the open wounds.

  Stella would remember nothing of the blankets they used to soak up her blood—so much from a small body! How could there be any left inside?—or her skin lifting away from her arm in tidy packets, as unresisting as late-July squash blossoms prized from their whorls. Stella would recall nothing of the graft, when the doctor sliced his knife into the good, pure flesh of her left arm and then, when he needed more, of her buttocks. Later, Assunta couldn’t quite describe the procedure the doctor had performed, as she had not been allowed in the surgery—she had been incoherent, slapping her own face and ululating with preemptive grief.