The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

by Juliet Grames

  It was just as well Assunta didn’t know more about the execution of the skin graft. The whole precarious operation was performed in that candlelit back room by that squirrelly bachelor doctor in a mountain village without running water where the canon of conventional medical wisdom included no concept of antiseptic beyond a squeeze of lemon juice. Assunta could have no idea how fortunate she was that the doctor, with his small hairy hands and his odor of chicken skin, had left his village to be educated far away in Sicily, despite everything his father had told him was generally unsavory about Sicily, but where a medical program had been flourishing for almost five hundred years, and where skin grafting science had been pioneered.

  During her nightlong vigil outside the surgery door, on which she pounded periodically, Assunta convinced herself that her daughter was dead and that the doctor was hiding from a mother’s wrath. Delirious with her own failure—first one Stella, and now the second—she clutched her own torso, feeling the stiffened death-cold first Stella in her arms. Her hands vibrated with the memory of that morning; she felt the ringing of the church bells in the skin of her palms, which would never caress either of her Stellas again.

  When the doctor finally emerged he found Assunta lying in front of the door, half her face pressed into the unswept floor, asleep with her flaming eyes open. Each hand was a slick-knuckled fist containing a skein of her own uprooted black hair, oily from clutching. From that day on Assunta wore a kerchief over her head to cover these bald patches, and also the gray hair that grew back in, even though she was only twenty-five.

  FIFTEEN, TWENTY YEARS LATER, when Stella rolled up her sleeves before washing dishes, she would pause to mull over the scars. She never remembered her arms without them, but they were still interesting to her. Her right forearm was swathed in wrinkled brown skin, white around the edges of the skin graft, like an independent island country on an antique map. On the left arm, the scar was less obvious: the meaty outside was pinched into a scientifically precise line, straight as if it had been made with a ruler until you looked very closely to see the bric-a-brac of hand-stitching. The suture marks became more visible in the summer, when her skin tanned around them.

  She often wondered: What had made her—almost five years old, old enough to know better—put her hand into the pan for a piece of eggplant? Greed? Hunger? Curiosity? As an adult, she knew those were the three things that motivated her most often. She just couldn’t believe she would have made a mistake like that, even as a child.

  Even stranger, where had her mother been? Assunta was skittish, overloving, like many mothers who have lost children in the past. Stella had almost no memories of her childhood in which Assunta was not standing by, or over, or behind. There was no explanation for why Assunta had left her daughters unsupervised by an open fire and a vat of boiling oil—except, perhaps, bewitchment.

  MINTY BROWNNESS, HEAT. Stella’s arms were beginning to wake, throbbing where they lay on the coverlet. Even as the brownness settled over her, her newly won consciousness was already compromising itself, sparkles rising in her vision as the terror of her pain set in. It was a frustratingly imbalanced pain, the right arm burning with imaginary heat, radiating a halo of raw untouchability, the left arm rippling with the acute pinching sensation of surgically sliced skin.

  The smell of mint was the most familiar point of orientation: spicy near-rot, at once fetid and antiseptic. The second Stella had broached the world in a cloud of mint just like this one, mint her grandmother, her first human contact on the other side of the womb, had tied in a bundle around her neck. There was nothing better than the stench of mint to ward off the Evil Eye. The smell would always call up Stella’s most ineffable memories, sunset-dim walls, the oppression of sweat-tangled blankets, blood pounding in and around her—a foggy, green-brown arc of connected traumas.

  There in that double pain was Assunta, leaning over her, marking the cross on Stella’s forehead with her thumb. Assunta’s breathy whisper dipped into Stella’s consciousness, binding her into the present, to the pain that roiled and bulged as her nerves came back to life. Assunta inhaled deeply, sucking air through fluted lips so the whistle of her breath was audible, deliberate. On each exhale, she chanted voicelessly, fast, slurred lines of an eerie poem whose meaning Stella couldn’t quite grasp. It was the unfascination, the incantation to banish the Evil Eye curse that must have been fixed on her forehead.

  Around Stella’s sickbed sat Nonna Maria, Stella’s miniature godmother Za Rosina, and her Uncle Nicola’s wife, Za Violetta, who held the unhappy two-year-old Cettina on her lap. Stella, groggy with pain, listened as her mother told her side of the story. “I don’t remember looking away for even a moment,” Assunta insisted. “It’s such a strange thing. You know I would never leave the girls alone.”

  Za Ros placed her warm palm on Stella’s head like a benediction. “Who has fixed the Eye on you, my piccirijl’?” she asked.

  Stella was still learning to identify rhetorical questions. “Cettina,” she replied, glancing at her grimacing sister. The answer came out with no forethought, but seemed like it might be correct as soon as Stella said it.

  All four women laughed quickly, saying “No, no” to shake away that bad idea.

  “Listen, piccirijl’,” Za Ros said, her voice gentle. “Saying someone cast the Eye on you means you are saying they intended you great evil, so we don’t name names, all right? Instead we ask il Signore and the saints to protect you and turn the Eye away.”

  Stella studied her aunts’ faces, trying to figure out what she had said wrong.

  “Ah, but maybe she knows, Ros,” Za Violetta countered. She was a hard, round woman with clear, mean brown eyes. “Why shouldn’t she say if she knows? Why shouldn’t she protect herself if she knows who to protect against?”

  “Violèt!” Tiny Ros’s voice rose, which was unusual. “You have to protect yourself from the whole world! Invidia is everywhere.” She lifted her hands, and all the women thought they could see the miasma hanging over them in the dust-filtered late-afternoon light. “Jealousy can come from anyone, even someone who loves you. But for you to point a finger at someone and say that they have cursed you is as bad as for you to curse them yourself. Capit’?”

  “You remember that, piccirijl’,” Nonna Maria said to Stella. “You can only name someone else’s sins if you know those sins yourself.” This was a proverb; Stella would hear her grandmother say it often. “You make sure you are good, but you don’t worry whether other people are good or not because they must make their own peace with God.”

  The mal’oicch’, as it’s called in Calabrese, the Evil Eye, is the bad atmosphere generated by suppressed resentments, jealousy with the power to wound, ruin, craze, or even kill. The mal’oicch’ is particularly dangerous for blessed or beautiful or wealthy people, who often seem to have the best and worst luck because of all the accumulated jealousy, invidia, around them. The truly good among us may experience no distress at the good fortune of our loved ones, but for the rest of us jealousy is shameful, secret, and poisonous. The Mediterranean is home to diverse ancient religions and ethnic cultures, but the Evil Eye is one thing Maghrebian Berbers, Andalucian Sephardim, Greek Orthodox, Turkish Muslims, Palestinian Arabs, and Catholics of the Italian Mezzogiorno comfortably agreed upon. In Ievoli, the mal’oicch’ was simple, sinister, and sometimes eradicable with some quasi-Christian witchcraft.

  Assunta wondered if it was true, what Rosina said, if it really was impossible to guess who might be behind an invidia without being the source of it yourself. She did not know how to protect her children against her own misjudgments, but the Evil Eye, at least, she knew how to keep away. The curse she worked, mint in hand, was a string of magical words she had learned from her mother, sacred words that could never be written down, not even here, a century later. The voiceless, sucking rhyme to which Stella opened her eyes that horrible brown morning would become so familiar that Stella would hear its rhythm in the dark when she was drifting off
to sleep. Even as an adult, especially on off-tempo nights when it stormed or was too hot or she felt that itch of unrest, she would hear her mother’s breathy chant.

  Stella never learned the charm herself; she didn’t have Assunta’s gift of open spirit, and never really believed. Without faith there are no miracles, just coincidences.

  ASSUNTA PERFORMED THE RITES, but privately she wondered if it was not the Evil Eye that had hexed her daughter. Perhaps defensively, she had convinced herself she never would have left the girls alone with the boiling oil if she had been in her right mind. Every moment of every day she felt the phantom of her dead daughter dragging on her conscience, her limbs heavy under the weight of her guilt and grief. She knew this phantom existed in her head and heart only; Assunta did not believe in ghosts, because she had restored her perfect faith in il Signore and knew that He was caring for the first Stella in heaven.

  Well, she had almost restored her perfect faith.

  This episode with the eggplant—this was a moment when it seemed an awful lot like she had been haunted.

  What if Assunta had brought on the eggplant attack through her own neglect—by loosening her grief for her lost Stella once she was distracted by her other, living children?

  She took out the photograph the portraitist had brought and she hung it on her wall in the corner where the sun wouldn’t fade it. She made an altar on her kitchen counter, where she kept a candle burning whenever she had money for candles.

  If there was, in fact, a ghost Assunta was trying to appease, though, this altar did not do the trick. After all, the boiling oil wasn’t the worst of the second Stella’s cursed bad luck; it was only the beginning.

  Death 2

  Evisceration

  (Growing Pains)

  THE SECOND STELLA FORTUNA’S second death was probably the most dramatic—eviscerations generally are. It all came about because poor Assunta, who had been abandoned by her husband and without a lira to her name, had suddenly come into just a tiny bit of relative prosperity and tried to use it to make life richer for her children. Poverty is dangerous, but prosperity, too, can be deadly, especially when a person blinds themselves to its pitfalls.

  Prosperity was what Antonio had hoped to find in America, and Assunta didn’t begrudge him that goal, although he could have sent money home, as other emigrant men did. Just a little bit of money would have made such a difference.

  How much time has to pass before it’s safe to say a husband has forgotten his family? It’s hard to know where to draw that line.

  Za Ros was Assunta’s stand-in husband. As luck would have it—or as God would will it—widowed Rosina no longer had anyone but Assunta’s family to devote herself to. Ros was seventeen years older than her sister. She was a tiny woman, not much bigger than her nieces and nephew, the perfect size for them to adore. She was stern but gentle, a much more organized disciplinarian than Assunta, and gave patient instructions on how to do things like squash lice or gently collect an egg from a chicken without getting pecked. Stella loved to impress her aunt and hated to disappoint her.

  In 1924, Ros’s two grown boys, Franco and Lorenzo, had left to seek their fortunes in southern France. Rosina was all alone in her marital home at the top of the mountain by the church chiazza. After one last summer silkworm harvest, Ros decided to move in with her mother and to give her struggling sister the house and the plot of land adjacent to it.

  Assunta had protested, of course. “Where will your sons live when they come back? Where will they put their wives?”

  Ros shrugged. She had a feeling they would never come back to Ievoli. That was not the way the world was turning lately. She helped Assunta tie up her belongings in linen bundles they balanced on their heads to carry up steep via Fontana.

  Ros’s late husband had built the house for her just before the war in the more modern style, with a ten-foot ceiling to let good air circulate and to keep the interior cool in the summer. Its walls were made of mortar and river rocks that had been hauled up from Pianopoli on the backs of donkeys. The walls of the house were five inches thick, built to withstand earthquakes like the one that had leveled much of Calabria in 1905. There was a shuttered window on every wall, nails on which Assunta could hang pots, and a double bed that would do until the children were larger.

  The new house was the break Assunta needed. Since her marriage she had grown food for her family in her late father’s small orto down below the cemetery. Now she had room to grow enough wheat that her family would have bread all the time; it wouldn’t matter if she could afford to buy flour. Wealth would beget itself; it’s that initial purchase that is the hardest for women like Assunta, with armfuls of babies to nurse and no spare moment to earn a lira more than they need to keep their families alive.

  Now she could have a whole chicken roost of her own. She could have a pigsty.

  In 1925, when the pig peddler came around just after Easter, Assunta bought two piglets. They were the size of her hand, snuffly as puppies, with wagging rumps and bright, black eyes in their patchwork faces. But in nine months they would each be six hundred pounds of cured pork—prosciutto and fat-streaked capicolo, spicy suppressata sausages she would encase in the pigs’ own intestines and slice up for her children for lunch. Assunta had eaten meat twice a year—a chicken at Christmas and goat at Easter—for her whole life, but her children would have meat every day.

  Pigs, Assunta learned, made you work for the treasures of their haunches. They ate like, well, pigs. They grunted with pleasure when they were fed and with annoyance when they weren’t. And they were disgusting. They were as smart as dogs, with intelligent human eyes, but they did their business wherever they were standing, rolled in it, and ate out of it if Assunta didn’t watch out. She cleaned the pen every morning, which required extra trips up the mountain to the cistern above the church. If she missed cleaning the pen, even for only a day or two, it started to reek, a sour unholy smell, the air so thick and putrid that walking through their enclosure made Assunta think of swimming in a vat of the urine of a sick old man. The smell sank into clothes fibers and couldn’t be scrubbed out; it gamboled across the alley and into her kitchen, ruining her own taste for her cooking. This was the year Assunta became vigorous about rubbing down her household surfaces with lemon—the lemon helped disguise the smell of the pigs.

  By summer, the pigs were too big to feed with leftovers alone, and she had to ration out potatoes for them. In December, on her sister-in-law Violetta’s advice, Assunta went to the trough and morosely scattered all the precious chestnuts she’d harvested that fall, sweet crunchy pearls before the swine. Violetta promised the chestnut meat would make the pigs’ flesh white and tender with fat.

  Stella and Cettina loved the pigs, as they loved all animals—the cats who milled in Ievoli’s alleys, the sweet-tempered stray dogs who wandered around the town accepting scraps. Stella spent hours playing with the creatures, and the pigs nuzzled her like a sister. The girls would run between them, patting their rumps, climbing over and tumbling off their good-natured backs. Assunta hoped the upcoming slaughter wasn’t going to be too painful a lesson for her daughters.

  THE WINTER OF 1925 INTO 1926, Ievoli was giddy in precipitation. On four separate occasions, the snow fell tall enough for Stella and Cettina to throw and kick at each other. In the mornings, before it could melt, they rolled in the shallow banks, tossing handfuls at the other children who tilted and shrieked up and down the steep, icy mountain road. Assunta was convinced they would expire of ague. Cettina’s red nose would run, but Stella never got sick, never even seemed to feel cold. Since the oil had fallen on her in the previous summer, the skin of her boiled arm and torso was constantly feverish; she loved to feel the snow soaking into her clothes. This behavior did nothing for Assunta’s nerves.

  The day of the trouble with the pigs, in January 1926, a nighttime snowfall melted into dawn slush. Assunta had forgotten the laundry on the line the evening before and spent a good portion of the foggy m
orning taking down the clothes and rearranging them to dry in the house by the fire. Now the sun had come out, and she was hanging them back up again on the line that stretched from her roof to the pigs’ hut. The alley between them was churned into cold mud.

  Stella and Cettina were standing in the doorway watching their mother hang the clothes. Stella straddled the doorframe, blocking it with her feet so baby Giuseppe couldn’t run outside. Stella had become tall over the summer, her baby fat vanishing from her taut child-thighs and her hair darkening into black curls like her father’s. She stood head and shoulders over four-year-old Cettina, her arm around her little sister’s shoulder, as it often was. Assunta realized they were staring down the alley. She turned to see her sister-in-law Violetta huffing up the hill for her daily visit, which was usually full of uncompassionate gossip and sanctimonious observations about child-rearing. Assunta felt no enthusiasm, but called across the laundry, “Stella, invite your Za Violèt inside while I finish this.”

  Violetta, who was on the heavy side, paused in their lane to catch her breath. She had a tied-linen bundle clutched in one hand.

  “Stella,” Assunta prompted again.

  Stella pursed her lips as she watched her fat aunt gasp for air. She did not like Za Violetta, and the feeling was mutual. They had recently had a fight, which had started with Violetta telling Stella she needed to be more respectful of her elders; Stella had replied that she didn’t respect Violetta because she didn’t like her. This had resulted in Violetta’s dealing Stella a smack across the face. Stella, who did not, as a rule, cry, had said to her aunt, “That’s why I don’t like you. You’re not nice.” And she had walked out the door and hadn’t come home again until Violetta was gone.