And he left to go drink with his friends.
Stella did not need to say good-bye to her father because the carriage for Napoli took him away so early in the morning she could pretend she was still asleep. She assumed, relieved, that she would never have to see him again.
Part II
Youth
I wanted to come to America because I heard the streets were paved with gold. When I got here, I learned three things: One, the streets weren’t paved with gold. Two, the streets weren’t paved at all. Three, I was expected to pave them.
—“OLD ITALIAN STORY,” ELLIS ISLAND
Cchi vue, a vutte chjina o la mugliere mbriaca?
Which do you want, a full bottle or a drunk wife?
—CALABRESE PROVERB
Death 4
Drowning
(Immigration)
DECEMBER 9, 1988, when she was just short of sixty-nine years old, was when Stella Fortuna almost died for the eighth and final time, the episode our family refers to as the Accident. As you already know, some things were never the same after her lifesaving lobotomy. Since her prefrontal cortex had been removed, she no longer had inhibitions or impulse control. When she pinched an adorable child’s cheek, she might draw blood. She refused to wear any color but red. She developed a compulsive need to mop up standing liquid—so, for example, one must not leave her unattended with a bowl of soup, or she’ll ball up her paper napkin and stick it right in. Worst of all, Stella woke up from her coma in a furious rage at her sister, Concettina.
I have a lot more to say there, but that’s for later. For now I want to tell you one strange little story.
Since they’d arrived in America and learned that a birthday was a thing to be celebrated, the Fortunas had always celebrated Stella’s birthday on January 12, the birthday listed on her passport and her social security card. When she woke up from her coma, she was adamant that her birthday be changed to January 11. She struggled with the words to explain; her language skills were coming back only slowly. She got frustrated, clammed up, and scowled. She told them she wouldn’t go if they held a party on January 12. The family had rented Mount Carmel hall; they would have to eat the deposit. “My birthday is the eleventh,” Stella said. End of conversation.
Crazy Stella, with her red outfits and her perforated reality. Everyone threw up their hands; they moved the birthday party up one day. What were they going to do, argue with her? Every year since then, for the last thirty years, they’ve laughingly gathered for “Stella’s new birthday” on January 11. They tap their temples and roll their eyes. “Who knows what goes on up there.”
In Ievoli, I went to the comune office to pull the family genealogy. The registrar officer was most generous with her time, photocopying the whole long family record, which dated back to 1826.
You, clever reader, know already what I saw next, in the eeriest moment of my life. There, on that registry next to the name Mariastella Fortuna (seconda): the birth date 11 Gennaio 1920.
Stella Fortuna had been born on January 11, not January 12. So after her Accident, Stella woke up crazy. Except on this one point, her birthday—a point on which she was correct, and everyone else was wrong.
Why had she let her family make that mistake for all those years? And what, after the Accident, made her finally put her foot down and correct it?
I visited Auntie Tina after I returned from Calabria and asked her if she had any recollection of when or why her sister Stella’s birthday was changed.
“It was always January twelve,” she told me. The fact that the birth registry mistake matched crazy Stella’s new birthday, she said, was just a coincidence.
But it wasn’t a coincidence. Tina misremembered. Which can happen, when a person lives with a revised history for so long it erases its antecedent.
Stella, crazy Stella, knew the truth, when no one else took her seriously. What other truths were locked in her head? What else were we misremembering?
HERE, AFTER MUCH RESEARCH, I am able to present to you the explanation of why Stella Fortuna’s birthday was changed, and why she kept it a secret for so long—forty-nine years—that even her sister forgot it. It is also the story of the fourth time Stella Fortuna nearly died, when she almost drowned during her attempt to emigrate to the United States.
The fourth death is the most controversial, because it is the most ambiguous—the danger was only recognized long after it had passed. It may not be completely truthful to list it among the almost-deaths. It’s the best legend, though, and sometimes a good legend is truer than the truth.
* * *
ANTONIO FORTUNA IS A RATHER inscrutable villain. After years of ignoring his family, why was he interfering with their lives now and forcing them to join him in America?
Antonio had his reasons, obscure though they may seem. Some of them might even have been altruistic. Nowadays, all we remember about Antonio Fortuna—rightfully or wrongfully—are the nasty things he said and did. But the whole picture is more complicated than its fragments, which are so simple and ugly in isolation. To be honest, there are sections of Antonio’s life I can’t tell you anything about; he was a forceful man but not a prolix one, and many of his secrets were buried with his bones.
Not all of his secrets, though. I know some.
TRACCI, AS YOU KNOW, was a hamlet south of Ievoli. There is a mountain-hugging road that connects all the villages like beads on a necklace. If you follow the road from Ievoli about half an hour past Polverini, you’ll get to the crumbling campanile of Tracci’s chapel, which is barely as big as a two-horse stable. Tracci no longer exists; the houses that are still standing are empty and its last inhabitants have moved away, but at the turn of the twentieth century it was home to fifty people or so. There was once a time when Tracci drew pilgrims because of its Madonna statuette, which had been known to accomplish minor miracles—she famously protected a priest who was transporting her when he was beset by wolves. Now she lives, somewhat slimy with glistening moss, in a cave cut in the mountainside. A rusted iron gate protects her little grotto, and some locals must still visit her, because there are offerings of plastic flowers nestled among the rocks at her feet.
In 1896, Antonio’s father, Giuseppe Fortuna, was eighteen years old and engaged to be married to a Tracci girl named Angela Gaetano. That September, two months before his wedding, Giuseppe went to stay with his maternal uncle Luigi Callipo in Pianopoli to help with the olive harvest. There were four Callipo first cousins; Mariastella, the oldest, was a year older than Giuseppe. Mariastella never told a soul what had happened between her and her cousin Giuseppe, whether she had been weak of will or whether Giuseppe had taken advantage of her, but eight months after he went home to Ievoli and married his fiancée, Angela, Mariastella gave birth to Antonio.
There was nothing that could be done; the baby’s father was already married before God to a good Christian woman. Mariastella’s father made his wretched daughter, still sore and torn from her labor, carry her mewling infant up the mountain to Tracci to confront the exploiting cousin. Luigi Callipo demanded Giuseppe take the baby off his hands, but Giuseppe’s pregnant wife, Angela, whose marital happiness was destroyed forever that day, refused. She became so crazed with rage or betrayal that she couldn’t stop hyperventilating and everyone was afraid she would go into early labor. Luigi demanded money in restitution for his daughter’s lost honor, but Giuseppe didn’t have any money, and neither did his father. Mariastella’s honor was the Callipos’ problem, not the Fortunas’.
For the next ten years, Mariastella lived in her father’s house, an unmarriageable ruined woman whose presence was a reminder of her abomination. Not every family would have been so cold; some would have raised their daughter’s bastard child in loving embraces and hoped for the passage of time to erase the shame. But the Callipos were strict about female virtue, and Mariastella was never allowed to forget her sin. There’s not much else I can tell you about the first decade of Antonio’s life, except that it was not a happy
one.
Angela, Giuseppe’s wife, died giving birth to her fifth child in 1909. She was twenty-six years old and such a shrunken, cowed woman that her memory was entirely lost by the time of her children’s children, who grew up calling Mariastella Callipo Nonna. For when Angela died, Giuseppe took his fallen cousin as his second wife, rescuing her from an otherwise unredeemable life of ignominy. He needed a woman to care for his four young children and Mariastella was the right choice—a chance to make peace with God over past indiscretions, to heal a family wound.
Even in 1909, Tracci was already in decline. The Fortuna house Mariastella and her son moved into was old and shabby. The well was a mile away, so it was difficult to keep the house clean or do laundry. But at least Antonio was now a legitimate son with a last name.
Antonio was thrown together with four half siblings. Mariastella would drop another two babies before she became too plagued by prolapse and uterine infections to be a desirable sexual partner to her husband. She would in fact die of a urinary tract infection in 1950, at age seventy-three. No one recognized the signs of blood poisoning, even when she walked around in the chiazza wrapped only in her blanket and the skin God gave her. Everyone just thought she was crazy.
That was forty years on, though. In the meantime Mariastella had children to raise, food to grow and cook, water to fetch, laundry to wash in the cold stream. She was not destroyed by her circumstance, as Angela had been. But she was a very hard woman, hard as the cast-iron pan she used to discipline her children and stepchildren.
I KNOW IT BECOMES DIFFICULT to follow our Calabrese family stories because of all the repeat names. Our family trees are taxonomically mind-boggling, Linnaean nightmares with roots not quite numerous enough to support their trunks, where an unwholesome bloodline can be muddled by overlapping names. In the Fortuna family, you don’t have to go far back to find tangled roots—they are right here, in the generation of Antonio’s siblings.
Giuseppe Fortuna and his family lived, as you already know, in a one-room house with one square bed. The children were made in that old square bed, and then they had to sleep in it. Of course it became too much, but it became too much incrementally, a little at a time, each of the children growing one pound bigger, and then one pound more, a swelling symphony of fat baby limbs and sharpening toddler elbows. It is hard to isolate the breaking point, the day things went too far. It is especially hard when you have no spare money for more furniture, or anywhere to put it. Sometimes the best solution is to just think to yourself, Sure, it’s getting bad, we’ll have to do something about that, and go back to the cycle of the plow and exhaustion and sleep.
Did you wonder why Antonio Fortuna, the restless, the playboy, had gotten himself married to Assunta Mascaro when he was only seventeen years old? Now you know why. Marriage was his easiest solution for escaping that dingy, grotesque house and the communal bed. Not everyone else was able to escape it.
This is the core fallacy of the famous southern Italian sexual jealousy, the poetic inspiration for the world-renowned machismo, the revenge knifings and the disciplinary patriarchy. There was no need to be jealous of a spouse or inamorata. There was no bed for them to be unfaithful on, no moment of the day not full of back-hunching blister-rupturing physical labor. The place a woman was most likely to have the job done to her was at home.
In the summer of 1918, Antonio’s half sister Mariangela gave birth to a baby girl, whom she named Angela. The mother was twelve years old; the father was one of her two brothers who were still living at home, either Anto or Domenico. It was impossible to say which for sure.
Despite her lost virtue, eventually Mariangela was able to find a husband; we pretend virginity is everything, a woman’s only asset, but the truth is the only thing about a woman that matters is whether she can work. None of Angela’s still-living half siblings, who are much younger, seem to know what happened to her after the war, when she vanishes from any written historical record. (To be frank, it is not easy to bring her up as a topic of conversation; even my most forthright interlocutors have steered the subject away from her.) I wonder if Angela ever left the village where she was born, and if she did, whether the story of her origins followed her. I wonder whether she went on to have children with too few great-grandparents. I wonder if she struggled, or if it was all just taken in stride, the way things are and always have been.
I AM CURIOUS ABOUT a few other things, but there is no one to ask. For example:
How was Mariangela allowed to be raped? How, above all, did their parents not know what was happening? Or did they know and turn away? Did Giuseppe, the patriarch, beat his sons for their atrocity, or did he beat his daughter for giving up that one precious asset?
And then—what happened? Did they go on all living together, and for how long? Did Mariangela have to go on sharing a bed with her rapists? How did her attackers live with their shame as they watched it bear fruit?
And then—did the rapists suffer as a result of their behavior? Or was this a youthful transgression—boys will be boys, let’s all try to put it behind us? Does a rapist look at his infant daughter with love? Is there a desire to protect, to care for, when the same man-boy felt no such desire to protect or care for the infant’s mother? How, exactly, do the laws of humanity work in a situation like this?
I know that eventually Anto ended up moving to California, and Domenico left for South America, but no one is sure where. Perhaps the brothers were driven out for their bad behavior, or perhaps, as Mariangela told Assunta, they had been avoiding the draft. The siblings did not keep in touch.
This history is taboo, so no mention must be made of it, under any circumstances.
Except I know as much as I do, which goes to show you only certain secrets are for keeping. I admit I haven’t been able to quite figure out the difference between the two. Maybe that’s why I’m writing this.
THAT, IN ANY CASE, was the childhood Antonio Fortuna was leaving behind—when he married and moved to Ievoli, when he left Ievoli for war, when he left again for America. I’m not saying Antonio Fortuna wasn’t a monster. I’m just telling you where the monster came from.
AS MUCH AS HE WANTED to escape his upbringing, Antonio did not go to war by choice. He was conscripted, like most of the five million Italian men who fought.
It is hard to read about the Great War in Italy. Hard to read because material is hard to come by—the truth was obscured by Mussolini, buried under propaganda—and also hard to read because the facts are devastating. The price of the war was absurd: hundreds of thousands of men sent to die over a few miles of unarable snowy mountains at the Austro-Hungarian border.
The fighting was a bloodbath, the ratio of blood shed to territory gained worse even than on the Western Front for most of the war. The soldiers advanced up mountainsides, climbing over the corpses of their own dead, and into previously unimagined technology—poisonous gases, barbed wire, machine guns, grenades—their own military police’s guns trained to their backs, forcing them forward.
This went on, day in and day out, for more than three years.
They fought in a wintry wasteland of the snowy Alps, under the constant threat of avalanches—the White Death—that killed more Italian soldiers than the Austrian shells did. There were never enough helmets or weapons. The water bottles were made of wood and full of mold. The gas masks, which most soldiers didn’t have anyway, weren’t effective against chlorine or phosgene, which passed over battalions in poisonous clouds and left rows of crouching corpses clutching their stomachs and foaming at the mouth.
The Italian soldiers were so dehydrated because of the poor supply chain that their feet became too swollen for their boots, so they marched barefoot and frostbitten. Their uniforms were so mud caked and lice ridden that they resorted to wearing women’s clothing they ransacked from abandoned villages. They ate dead horses and rats they caught in their trenches. They shat in the same holes they slept in because they were too afraid of snipers to go to a latrine. Th
ey died of typhoid and cholera. They went deaf from explosions, lost their balance stumbling over broken ground and fallen comrades. They charged toward their deaths in total confusion. There were gruesome incidents of friendly fire.
They answered to a general who was ignorant, egomaniacal, stubborn, and indecisive, all at once, an idiot man with unchecked authority who placed no value on his soldiers’ lives. The general’s name was Luigi Cadorna, and I only write it down here because I believe his monstrosity should be more widely known. For those who might make the argument that Cadorna was incompetent, not evil, I will offer my opinion that it is the moral responsibility of the incompetent to identify their own weaknesses and not accept positions of power.
What makes the truth even more wretched is that they died for nothing at all. Whatever promises had been made to Italy for entering the war were null in the grimacing face of peace. At the end of four years of bloodshed, 1.5 million Italians had been killed, an additional seven hundred thousand soldiers disabled by injuries. There is, as with all wars, the missing statistic of how many women were raped because they lived in the contested territory. Another half a million Italian civilians died of the Spanish flu the soldiers brought home from war hospitals, the highest influenza mortality rate of any nation.
The casualties extended beyond the years of the war, extend even to today. It took Italy fifty years to pay off its war debts. The country’s economy was destroyed, and industrialization shifted irrevocably to the north, which was the kiss of death for any meaningful development of Italy’s south. It is the reason that, today, Calabria still sends its youth to work in faraway cities, where they settle and don’t come back.
SOMEHOW, ANTONIO FORTUNA SURVIVED THE WAR.
The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna Page 10
