He was drafted with the very first class at age seventeen, and he lived to bring his body home, uninterrupted by bullets or shrapnel. He survived the November 1915 offensive on San Michele, where half the Catanzaro brigade was slaughtered. He survived his brigade’s assault on the Asiago Plateau, a disaster in which the Italian soldiers were trapped in muddy sinkholes and barbed wire, where the Catanzaro 141 lost three-quarters of its men and where the soldiers not mowed down by gunfire had to spend the freezing night playing dead among the corpses until they could escape at dawn.
They say war is a crucible, where men are forged. I would venture that a monster is forged in a crucible as easily as a man is. Some men go to war and find God; others lose God forever. Antonio was one of the latter.
But he survived.
Maybe his daughter Stella’s ability to survive death was inherited. She never liked her father, but maybe she owed him that much.
WHEN ANTONIO FORTUNA CAME HOME after four years in the army, Ievoli was too small for him. He sailed to the United States for the first time in February 1920, following in the footsteps of four million other Italian immigrants. Most of them came from the south—Sicily, Campania, Puglia, and Basilicata as well as Calabria—where Italian unification had hurt the most, where war and taxes had squeezed the already impoverished contadini dry. The south was emptied of adult men; in Calabria, 30 percent of households had no capo, no male head.
Italian men emigrated because they wanted to work, to make better lives for themselves than the poverty and exploitation they had left, although there was plenty of poverty and exploitation in l’America, too. Italian laborers—almost always men, often illiterate and with no recourse to aid or advice—crossed the ocean in steerage to be herded onto trains bound for coal mines in West Virginia or for jobs laying railroad track in the forests of Pennsylvania. They left unpaved, unplumbed, deforested, and malarial villages; they left starvation, cholera, entrenched feudalism, an inescapable class system. They left their families, in hopes of reuniting with them under better auspices. They brought their love of food and orderly gardens, their languages and their prejudices, their mysterious triple god and their myriad saints, their rites and their songs and their pageants. They brought their worship of their mothers; they brought their mothers. In many cases they intended to go back, which made our Italian ancestors unusual among would-be American immigrants, but in many cases they never did go back, which made us the same as everyone else.
ANTONIO WAS ON THE LATE SIDE for American admittance—if he’d been just a few years later, after 1924, when the U.S. government passed the National Origins Act and ethnic quotas were instituted, Antonio would most likely have had to pick some other destination, perhaps Canada, Argentina, Australia, or France, where many Calabresi would end up.
The first time Antonio emigrated, he knew nothing about where he was going. He spoke no English, but he wasn’t worried. He had learned in the Austrian Alps, where the officers and the men they commanded had barely been able to communicate with each other, to think of self-preservation as a physical choice, and he was a strong man.
Antonio was lucky, because others had already paved the way for him. By 1920, there were microcities of Italians embedded in every American metropolis. For those who had emigrated one generation earlier, the dangers had been acute. Without knowing how to read or write, Italian men signed away their souls, at the mercy of their employer’s unregulated sense of humanity. Many were killed by overwork, accidents, and explosions. Some simply disappeared. Some were prey to the nascent Italian American organized crime syndicates that flourished by creating protection and extortion rings among their own disenfranchised and fearful countryfolk.
But as I said, Antonio was lucky. His boat arrived at Ellis Island. Over the years of human history, many people have made the choice to get on a boat to go to a strange and hostile place—can you imagine the desperation they must have felt in order to step onto that boat knowing there was a chance they would not reach their destination? Most recently, these people have been emigrants trying to get into Italy, not emigrants trying to leave, and their passage is no easier or safer than that of their antecedents. Thousands of refugees from Syria, Libya, Eritrea, Somalia, Ghana, and Nigeria have died off the coasts of Italy in the last ten years, capsized, drowned, sunk in flames. History marches on, and names and destinations change, but not the injustices we let one another suffer.
ANTONIO FORTUNA ARRIVED IN NEW YORK in February 1920 on a ship called the Providence. You can see for yourself, if you like—it’s right there in the Ellis Island manifest.
He had sailed from Napoli with an army buddy from Catanzaro named Nico Carbone. When the young men arrived in Napoli, they had no friends in the world besides each other and only a notion that by going to l’America they would be able to become rich men. They’d obtained prepaid tickets and labor contracts from a padrone and spent the spring and summer laying railroad track in western Pennsylvania. I can only assume this first period in America was difficult, because Antonio sailed back to Italy as soon as he could afford to.
He returned to Ievoli in November 1920 with the clothes on his back and a change purse of American coins. He had very little to show for his time in America; he’d barely been able to pay back his passage debts. But he had learned many things about how the world works, and he was alive. The railroad hadn’t been worse than the war. It hadn’t been worse than Tracci.
The second time he emigrated, Antonio did not fall for a padrone scam; he paid for his own ticket using the stash of money from his first trip. He found his own way to a railroad job, seeking out the Reading office in New York’s Pennsylvania Station. He knew enough English this time to explain that he had some experience. He got a job right away rebuilding the mid-Atlantic corridor.
His second trip was even shorter than his first, because Antonio rushed home for the birth of his first son—you already know that story. But this time, there were witnesses to his time in America. One of them was a soft-spoken, dapper Abruzzese man named Tomaso Maglieri. Tomaso was twice Antonio’s age and only two-thirds his size, but they were on the same track-laying team, digging, clearing, anchoring the sleepers and connecting the rails. Antonio Fortuna and Tomaso Maglieri had little in common, but Tomaso, too, had served on the Austrian front.
In May, after they had been working together three months, Antonio and Tomaso received letters from Italy on the same day. Antonio’s letter said that Assunta was pregnant; the baby was due in October. Tomaso’s letter said his wife, Cristina, had been safely delivered of a baby boy on Easter Sunday. She had named him Carmenantonio.
“Maybe you will have a daughter,” Tomaso Maglieri joked, “and someday my son will marry her.”
“No, the first two were daughters, so this one must be a son,” Antonio told him. “But your son Carmenantonio can marry my Mariastella.”
“Eh, an older woman!” Tomaso laughed. “Every man’s dream. Here, let’s shake on it right now, and then we won’t have to worry about betrothing them later.”
Tomaso and Antonio didn’t see each other again for twenty years. They didn’t keep in touch, and probably never thought of each other in the interim. It was all a joke, I think—we all think. Well, Carmenantonio “Carmelo” Maglieri always loved a good joke, even if Stella didn’t have the same sense of humor.
WHEN ANTONIO FORTUNA MADE his third trip to the United States, he joined his old army buddy Nico Carbone in New York City. Nico lived on Mott Street in Little Italy in a windowless tenement rooming house in which eight young men took turns in bunk beds and cots. There was a job on Nico’s construction crew waiting for Antonio when he arrived; Manhattan was sprouting like a vegetable garden in June, buildings stacking on top of one another, and there was plenty of work for Italian boys. Over the next seven years, Antonio built a bank, a church priory, a subway station, and a palatial stone edifice that turned out to be a university dining hall.
In the blizzarding colder months, when New York p
aused its frenetic contracting, Antonio hung around the Elizabeth Street bars with Nico. The Roaring Twenties were Antonio’s own roaring twenties and, to be blunt, he forgot his family. He wasn’t used to fathers who loved their children, and it didn’t occur to him to love his. Between construction jobs and protection sidelines, he must have been making quite a bit, but he sent none of it home. While Assunta was jarring every last wrinkled fruit so her children wouldn’t starve through the winters, Antonio was growing fat on beefsteak and the bathtub gin they served in the speakeasies. He spent what was left on women.
But Antonio was reminded of his patrimony in the spring of 1928, when he attended the funeral of Rocco Scavetta, the tall, round-bellied old Mott Street grocer. The entire neighborhood came to pay respects, even the mobsters Rocco had tussled with over the years. As Antonio sat in the church’s second-to-last pew, he surveyed the hundreds of bowed dark heads and thought about his own funeral. Signor Scavetta was a man with a legacy, seven sons and two daughters, grand- and great-grandkids, and all of their friends mourned him now. Antonio understood, finally, what children were for.
Only a few weeks later, a man from Pianopoli tracked Antonio down. Tony Cardamone was the younger brother of Assunta’s sister-in-law Violetta. Since Antonio hadn’t spent much time in Ievoli since his marriage, his and Tony’s paths had seldom crossed.
The two men sat at the heavy marble-top table of one of the Mott Street cafés, drinking cloudy percolated coffee so strong its steamy aroma obscured the smell of the illegal anise liquor the proprietor had tipped in. Tony Cardamone was passing through New York on his way home to his wife in Hartford. He had worked on the railroads for a while but was settled down now with a construction job. He didn’t seem to want anything from Antonio, although Antonio was on his guard.
“When it’s time to bring your family over,” Tony Cardamone said meaningfully, “you should think about coming to Hartford. You can live in a real house, not like here, everyone piled up like chickens in a coop.”
Antonio shook the man’s hand and they wished each other well; Tony Cardamone had to catch a train home and couldn’t stay for dinner. “Come to Hartford,” he said again before he left. “We’ll take care of you. Get you set up.”
There was no particular reason for his generosity that Antonio could see. Most likely Tony Cardamone felt compassionately toward Assunta, who was, as everyone knew, a saint, and who had been abandoned for a very long time. But he didn’t press; if something was meant to be, it would be.
A year passed. In August 1929, Antonio was out at a Lower East Side saloon with Nico Carbone when they were involved in a bar brawl in which a man was killed. I don’t know whether there was any deeper history behind the episode or it was just a particularly unlucky drunken night on the town. But I know that the murdered man’s name was Johnny Mariano, that he was one of Frank Costello’s personal goons, and that it was Antonio’s knife that ended up in his ribs. Antonio escaped the scene, leaving Nico, who’d been knocked unconscious, to take the rap. Antonio hid in his landlady’s coat closet for two days until he could sneak onto a ship bound for Napoli. Nico Carbone was given a fifteen-year sentence for Johnny Mariano’s murder, but was found dead in his jail cell only two months into his incarceration. Your guess is as good as mine whether or not it was really suicide.
Antonio knew he couldn’t return to New York anytime soon, but he was chagrined to be back in Ievoli, this place he thought he’d put behind him. Tony Cardamone’s offer was on his mind as he bided the winter of 1929. As soon as he felt it was safe to set foot on American soil again, Antonio asked his sister-in-law Violetta for her brother’s address in Hartford.
* * *
ASSUNTA’S LAST BABY, the one Antonio planted during his final trip to Ievoli, was born in the beginning of July 1930. Stella helped her grandmother deliver him.
Assunta was kneeling in the garden, supervising as Stella and Cettina poled beans, when she felt her water break, the liquid sliding down her thigh and into the soil below her. For a moment she considered just sitting there and letting the baby be born right in her garden under the boisterous summer sun. How could she even stand up? The church bells had recently rung noon and the rag over Assunta’s forehead was crusted with dried sweat. The baking sun on the globe of her belly made her think of a round brick bread oven, the baby cooking inside. Whole minutes passed as she lingered on this thought, but she finally pushed herself up, the baby’s juice sliding down her leg. “Cettina, go tell your nonna and Za Ros that the baby’s coming. Stella, help me inside.”
Stella, nervous with anticipation, walked Assunta back into the house as Cettina took off down via Fontana. Cettina would end up spending the night with Za Ros and the silkworms, who needed round-the-clock feeding at this molting stage; better for Cettina to be out of her mother’s hair.
Stella, meanwhile, was ten, old enough to assist with the birth. She sat her mother on a wooden stool and followed Assunta’s taut but level instructions until Maria arrived. Do this. Go get that. Assunta would not scream or cry out during the whole process, because it was best the neighbors only learned what had happened after it was all over and decided. Best not to bring down the Eye.
Stella obeyed her mother. She spread the old brown harvest blanket over the bed to catch the worst mess. She brought a fire to life from the coals, the scars on her arms pulsing in resistance to the heat. She had never seen a baby being born before, had been too young to remember the last time her mother had labored. She stared at her mother’s face during the contractions. Assunta’s skin was swollen and her eyes bright red, the veins on her temple and neck standing out. Stella was old enough to understand; if things did not go smoothly, her mother might die. She realized as she scurried up the hill to the cistern that these might be among the last minutes she had with her mother, and she fought to keep her mind calm, to move carefully but faster so the moments might not be wasted.
Nonna Maria arrived with her pouch of mint, her face pink from climbing up the steep hillside in the midday sun. Stella felt only a fraction of the relief she wished to feel upon seeing her grandmother. Maria looked old and weak to her. Suora Letizia was away in Nicastro today; it was only the two of them, Stella and her little grandmother, to help Assunta bring the baby out.
In fact, it was an easy labor, less than five hours. But Stella, who had no context, was shaken by the experience. She was mature enough to understand that this was the one time in life when the taboo womanly area must become not taboo, when it must be exposed to other women for the baby to come out. But to see the purple-brown skin of her mother’s vagina, layered like the leathery folds of an enormous fig, part convulsingly around the hairy head of the baby—Stella was so sure the baby was dead, its head was so still for so long—and the yellow-brown snake of fecal matter that squeezed out under the baby’s head, which Maria snapped at Stella to wipe away with a rag and which was still hot and soft in her hand when she dropped it, rag and all, in the chamber pot—the slime-sealed eyes of the baby when it finally emerged, the strange blue and white cord wrapped around his little shoulders—Stella was not ready for this. She was not a child and she should have been stoic, prepared to assist in whatever way she could. It was what you did, when you were a woman; this was her induction into the secret world of adult women, and Stella’s heart and mind were rejecting its ugliness. She had seen her precious mother reduced to an animal, a sow in a sty, with no control over her own destiny in this terrible moment.
This was a formative experience for Stella. This was the origin of her second phobia, the horrifying repercussion of the first.
THREE VERY BAD THINGS HAPPENED IN 1931.
The first was that Za Ros moved to France, where her two sons had been living. “Their life is good over there,” Rosina explained to Assunta. “They will never come back here, not even to see me. So I have to go to them.”
Assunta understood missing your children—of course she did. But Ros had stood in for Assunta’s dead father,
for Assunta’s absent husband. Ros was her moral fiber, who made her a better and more holy person. Assunta could not imagine her own daily life without her tiny sister. She cried from the time Ros told her until Ros boarded a train north two weeks later. She wasn’t wrong to cry—she would never see her sister again. Neither would Stella, who loved her godmother.
Ros was one of the good ones, as they say. I wonder how things would have been different for the Fortunas if she had stayed. But she made a good decision for herself. The village southwest of Marseilles where her sons installed her was a charming place where people were kind to her. Ros got along so well with the locals that she got married to a French widower, even though she was over sixty years old, and became the stepmother of five grown children. She drank grappa every afternoon of her life and lived to be 105 years old. On her centennial birthday, in 1972, the town newspaper printed a picture of her smiling toothlessly on the front page.
It was lucky for Ros that she left Ievoli when she did, because if she had waited just a bit longer she would not have been able to convince herself to go. The second bad thing that happened was in September, when Assunta’s brother, Nicola, was using a horse-drawn plow to turn over the earth to plant new trees. Nicola lost control of the temperamental horse and was knocked down, and the plow blade dragged over his thigh. Nicola, who had none of his niece Stella’s luck, bled to death out of a severed artery no one could stanch.
So in six months, Assunta had lost her sister and her brother. Nonna Maria had lost her daughter and her son. Maria was a tough woman, much tougher than Assunta. But I think both of them only held on to sanity after Nicola’s passing because they had each other.
In December, the third bad thing happened: a letter from Antonio.
Wife Assunta
It is time for you and our children to join me here in America now. Write to me with their birthdates so I can apply for a family passport. I will send for you when the paperwork is ready.
The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna Page 11
