The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

by Juliet Grames

  Antonio Fortuna

  She had not heard from him since he had left with his declaration that he didn’t need her if she didn’t want to be a wife to him. She’d thought her world was safe from his further interference—that she would live as a white widow in her beloved village and raise her children in peace. She had Suora Letizia read the letter to her until she had it memorized, but she didn’t write back. Maybe if she didn’t write back, Antonio wouldn’t be able to send for her.

  THE FOLLOWING SPRING, Nonna Maria was splitting firewood behind her house when the ax blade struck a knot and a wedge of wood flew up and hit her in the eye. It was a strangely precise hit, fast and clean. The pain was delayed by shock, and it took Maria several moments to figure out what had happened. She dropped the ax in the dirt as the pulsing in her face became more intense. It wasn’t until she looked at the ground and saw her own eye there looking back at her, round and yellow and surprisingly large, that she understood.

  She bent down and picked up the eye between her finger and thumb, turning it over in her hand—it filled her whole palm. With her eye in one hand and her walking stick in the other, she climbed up the hill, calling, “Assù! Assù, I have a problem.”

  It was the first family medical emergency since Stella’s bludgeoning in the schoolyard. This time, Assunta sent Stella down to Feroleto so Maria wouldn’t be left alone.

  “You’ll have to get the doctor to come up here, Stella,” Assunta said. “Do you remember where his house is?”

  Stella was sure she could find it. “What if he won’t come?”

  Assunta shook her head. “You have to make him come, no matter what.”

  While Assunta put Maria’s eye in a bowl of water to keep it moist, Stella tied up her skirts and went hurrying down the mountain. A work detail sent by the government in Catanzaro had put a proper road in, including a bridge that stretched over the gully to Feroleto, but Stella stuck with the donkey path she knew.

  She found what she was looking for by instinct. There was the doctor’s house, with its yellow stucco finish, seven doors up on the left side of the cobblestone road that ran through the center of town. The nameplate said DOTTORE and underneath that MASCARO AGUSTINO. She hadn’t known the doctor had the same name as her mother.

  The house was empty, but Stella knew where to go next. It was the afternoon rest hour, and pretty much all of the men in the entire town were gathered in the chiazza in front of the bar, their backs to the valley. Some looked at Stella askance, but no one asked what she wanted. Thinking of her grandmother bleeding at Assunta’s kitchen table with her eye in a soup bowl, Stella took a large breath and bellowed, “Duttore! U duttore è ca?” She remembered the good Italian she had learned in school, appropriate, she thought, for this public occasion, and tried again, “Il dottore è qui?”

  The men fell silent as they took their own inventory, but the doctor was not there. Then a fellow with a large gray mustache remembered the doctor had gone to Nicastro to restock his medical supplies. Stella would just have to wait.

  Stella sat in front of the chestnut tree in the middle of the chiazza, where she wouldn’t be able to miss the doctor if he passed. The men chattered around her, but her blood was ringing in her ears and she couldn’t hear anything they said. It was possible her nonna would die. Time and again she considered running back home to be with her grandmother, and each time she heard her mother’s voice: “You have to make him come, no matter what.” So she waited, fingering the ribs of the suture scars on her left arm, wondering if the doctor remembered sewing her up, even though she couldn’t remember it herself.

  Stella was lucky, because it was two hours to Nicastro and the doctor might have decided to stay the night, but in fact he only kept her waiting an hour and a half.

  “I’m Stella Fortuna,” she told him. “You saved me three times and now you have to save my grandmother.”

  He was probably tired from his travels, but he followed her back up to Ievoli as the bells of Santa Maria Addolorata were ringing the first call to evening mass. Maria was lying on Assunta’s bed with a folded cloth pressed over the right side of her face. Stella’s stomach clenched at the sight of it; although she couldn’t quite place the memory, she remembered viscerally the feeling of pulling away a bandage; she pictured the doctor removing the cloth to reveal blood squirting afresh from her grandmother’s socket.

  This did not happen. It had been a clean wound, as wood-splitting wounds go. The doctor rinsed the raw flesh with a solution that caused Maria to jerk back in pain. He rebandaged the socket with a white cloth that he secured by tying a handkerchief loosely around her head.

  “You need to rest and let it heal,” the doctor said, looking Maria in her good eye. “Don’t touch it, whatever you do.” He said to Assunta, “The most important thing is to prevent it from getting infected. There’s a lot of open skin there”—he circled his hand in front of his own eye—“so lots of opportunities for infection unless you keep it very clean.”

  Assunta nodded. “Understood,” she said, although words were difficult.

  “What do I do with my eyeball?” Maria asked. Her voice, Stella thought, sounded just like it always did.

  The doctor shrugged. “Whatever you want.” And he left to go home to his wife for dinner—at least he was married now.

  BY THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON Nonna Maria’s whole face had become hot to the touch and it was clear the doctor’s warning about infection hadn’t been an idle one. For five days the house was full of the scent of mint and purifying chamomile blossoms, which Assunta boiled in the water she used to clean Maria’s wound.

  The infection passed, but not before it had spread to Maria’s left eye. When her fever finally lifted, she was completely blind.

  AFTER MARIA LOST HER SECOND EYE, Assunta prayed nervously for guidance. She received no specific revelations, and after hemming and hawing she paid the Pianopoli postman Mancini to write a letter for her to Antonio in Hartford. In it, she explained that she could not leave Ievoli because her mother was blind and would die if there were no one to take care of her. She was sorry that she couldn’t obey him about coming to America but she would always be his wife, married before God. She stuttered when she had to say this to Signor Mancini, and she left the post office crying.

  Antonio never replied to the letter. In fact, he never wrote to Assunta again.

  THERE WAS NO MONEY COMING from America for the Fortuna family. Meanwhile, around them Ievoli was built up and emptied out as young men headed to Argentina and France, sent money home, then came back to take away wives. The women of the village bought things at the store with money that came to them by post; they no longer went barefoot, or without undergarments.

  Stella watched the culture of the village change around her as she entered her teens. Her neighbors grew chubby and made bigger tithings; the church was stuccoed and painted yellow, its chiazza refurbished with round flagstones. Families built new two-story houses. Mandevilla climbed neatly up their charming pastel façades and children stayed in school until they knew how to read.

  Meanwhile, the Fortunas still had Assunta’s house at the top of the hill, a cube of stone with naked mortared walls. Everything up here was just a little shabbier. The Fortuna children sat barefoot in the last pew at mass. Stella looked down from her mother’s mountaintop garden onto the neighbors below, neighbors she had the suspicion were looking down on her mother.

  Stella was old enough to see her run-off father as the source of their hardship. Well, they didn’t need him or his American money. Stella and Cettina pulled their own weight. They harvested green olives in September and black olives in January. In March and April, the sisters picked oranges in the hills down around Feroleto. After oranges were done, the spring was devoted to their home garden. July was taken up morning and night by the baco da seta, feeding and then boiling the silkworms, and then there was a rest, for the feast of the Assumption in August, and then it was back to the olives.

  In bet
ween the olive harvests, they worked Don Mancuso’s chestnut farm. The girls arrived at dawn to beat the squirrels, who were formidable opponents. The sisters scoured the stringy grass around the bases of the chestnut trees for the spiky, pea-green husks of ripe fruit that had fallen during the night. They flicked the burs into baskets with a stick so as not to prick themselves. When the basket was full they would dump their findings on the harvest blanket, then shuck them and toss the empty burs into the woods, where they couldn’t be confused with tomorrow’s harvesting. They were allowed to keep one-quarter of what they picked; the rest went to Don Mancuso’s overseer, Pepe.

  The girls each had a pair of old chestnutting mittens their Nonna Maria had given them. The inside was stitched with a rectangular patch of cracked leather. The mittens weren’t impermeable, though, and the girls’ fingers and wrists were always red with pricking. Cettina shucked quickly and gruffly, as though she took pleasure in the pain, and Stella would surreptitiously flick the trickier unsplit burs to Cettina’s side of the blanket, letting her sister do the dirtiest work. Cettina was either stupid or contrary enough that she never complained about it.

  IT WAS IN DON MANCUSO’S chestnut orchard that Stella became a woman, October of the year she was thirteen. She’d been feeling sick since the afternoon before, sore in her abdomen and nauseated, although nothing ever came up. This feeling, the unique unpleasantness of a menstrual cramp, would be instantly familiar the next time it crept up on her, but this first time it was frightening and not something anyone had given her any reason to expect.

  When she and Cettina set off up the mountain just before dawn, Stella had thought she’d be able to bear it, but the pressure in her stomach had increased over the morning. She’d wondered if there was something seriously wrong with her, if maybe there was another cholera epidemic coming and she’d be the first to fall. It had, after all, been four years since the last time she’d almost died—that was on her mind lately, that her curse had been suspiciously inactive. Where was the malicious little ghost hiding? Part of Stella was looking for death around every corner—maybe this was it, today. As she stooped to pick up the chestnuts her torso pulsed with pain and she felt as if her spirit were seeping out of her body, a great weight she couldn’t see pulling her into the ground.

  At midmorning, after the sisters had gathered the fallen chestnuts and crouched on the blanket to shuck them, Stella noticed she was feeling much better. Her relief lasted only as long as she sat in one place; when she shifted because her left foot was falling asleep, she realized her leg felt damp. Her calf, which had been tucked under her, was covered in blood. Her heart pounding, she rubbed at her leg with her dirty and pricker-sore hand, thinking she might have absentmindedly scratched open her flea bites, the way her mother always scolded her not to. She was unable to discover any cut or break in her skin, but she did find that her thighs were smeared with blood as well, as if it were coming from her belly.

  Cettina had not paused her shucking. Stella was glad her sister hadn’t noticed anything awry; she couldn’t deal with Cettina falling to pieces right now. Keeping her voice calm, Stella said, “I have to go home, Cettina.” Although she wasn’t sure she would make it—what if she dropped dead right on the donkey path, like Nonno Franciscu had?

  “What?” Cettina looked up. “You can’t. We have to get these to Don Pepe.”

  “I don’t feel well,” Stella said. Actually, with each breath she took she became more certain she was going to die. “Something is wrong. I have to see Mamma.”

  “What’s wrong?” Cettina pulled herself up to her feet. “What’s wrong, Stella?” Her voice was climbing in pitch and volume.

  Stella wanted to be annoyed with her sister, but the bigger part of her wanted to cry. She had to remind herself that she wasn’t weak. She would die alone on the donkey path before she would cry. She stood up, too, and Cettina saw the blood on her hands and gasped.

  “Stella! Stella, there’s blood!” That was all it took, Cettina was sobbing.

  Fortified by her sister’s hysterics—the reminder that someone had to be the adult—Stella said, “It’s going to be fine. I just have to go home so Mamma can see if I need a doctor.” She wouldn’t need a doctor, because she would be dead, but it would be no help to tell Cettina that.

  “I’m, I’m coming with you,” Cettina said, wiping snot off her face between sobs.

  “Don’t be stupid! Finish these and take them to Pepe.”

  But Cettina couldn’t do that—she was weeping with panic at the thought of being left behind—and so the morning’s work was abandoned there for some other enterprising harvester to claim. Later Stella would wish they had at least thought to steal some of the shucked fruits, but no, a whole day’s labor wasted.

  They ran home down the mountain, which took half an hour. Assunta was sitting on the bed, nursing Luigi, who was three years old and should have been weaned a long time ago. Somewhat guiltily, Assunta pulled her breast back into her dress and stood up, leaving Luigi looking sullen.

  “Girls,” she said. “What’s the matter?”

  Cettina, out of breath from running and shuddering with tears, needed comfort and threw her arms around her mother. Stella, standing uncertainly in the doorway—would she infect her little brother?—lifted her skirts with her bloody hands, showing her dusty brown and red feet. “I’m bleeding, Mama. It’s coming out of my legs and my stomach. Everything hurts.”

  “Oh, Mariastella,” her mother said. What was that tone in her voice, reproach? How could you let this happen to you? As an older woman, Stella would revisit this vivid moment, the memory of her mother’s face, and reread the dismay: How could this have happened to my baby already? But that conclusion required the wisdom of age. In the moment itself, there was nothing to fish her out of her pool of shame as her mother, unconcerned about contagion, guided her to a stool and patted her head, making her feel young and dumb for being afraid.

  “You’re going to be fine,” she said, and then those words every girl has to hear at this same barbaric, uncomfortable moment in her life: “It means you’re a woman now.” Stella felt herself flaming red from her collarbone up to her forehead as her mother showed her how to wad a rag and explained how she needed to stick it up into herself. “You have to do that for about a week,” she said. “And remember that no matter what, you must never let any man see the bloody rags. Hide them until you can clean them. You should start wearing panties now, so it doesn’t fall out. Can you make some for yourself?”

  “I can make some,” Stella said, her mind dull with her humiliation. She had nothing else to do for the afternoon, since they had lost all their chestnuts.

  As she sat on the stool, the rag jamming up inside her where nothing had ever been before—a wet, heavy reminder that Stella couldn’t control her own life—her shame began to give way to anger. Her mother had known this was going to happen—she could have given her some kind of warning. There was no reason Stella had had to crouch in the chestnut fields thinking that today would be the day she died. This one thing Stella never quite forgave her mother for.

  Cettina got her first period one month after Stella, even though she had only just turned twelve. She couldn’t stand to be separated from her sister in any way; even their womanly cycles matched. What a frustration this was to Stella—aching and indisposed at the same time every month. She knew Cettina wasn’t personally responsible for that, that it wasn’t as though she’d had a choice. But honestly.

  * * *

  CETTINA WAS GOOD IN THE KITCHEN and helped Assunta in her self-sacrificing way. Stella would watch somewhat jealously as her mother and sister giggled and chopped and stirred. Stella consoled herself with the knowledge that she was more precious to each of them because she was aloof, turning up her nose at kitchen activities. They teased her about being a princess, but they spoiled her, brought dinner to her already cut and laid out on a dish, complained to each other about how lazy she was but cleaned up after her.

&n
bsp; Well, that was all fine with Stella. She was no kitchen slave; she had other, more refined talents. She was the best needle crafter in the village. This was how Stella spent the heat of the day, her blind grandmother Maria reclining next to her on the bed incanting old rhyming stories as Stella made perfect things with her hands. The tiny complex patterns came as naturally as counting to ten to her. She made tablecloths, doilies, and dress lace, and she was so clever at it that other Ievoli girls asked for her help as they prepared their own trousseaus. Their mothers paid Stella in chickens, in cheese, in oregano pizzas big enough to cover half Assunta’s kitchen table and which Giuseppe finished all on his own when no one was paying attention. The brat.

  “Too bad none of these girls can pay you back by helping with your trousseau,” Assunta lamented. “But no one is as smart as my Stella.” This was an unlucky thing to say, so Assunta immediately performed a cruce.

  “That’s all right. I won’t need a trousseau anyway, Ma.”

  “No trousseau?” Assunta snorted. “What blankets are you going to sleep on after you’re married? Are you going to feed your husband dinner on a table with no tablecloth?”

  “I’ll never get married,” Stella said. “Not if I can help it.”

  “Madonna have mercy on my daughter.” Assunta clicked her tongue and crossed herself. “Don’t even say those things, Stella. You think it’s a joke now, but you’ll curse yourself someday if you have bad luck.”

  Stella let it drop, because there was no point in getting her mother upset. But she had already started to make up her mind about her own future. She wasn’t interested in marrying a man like her awful, braying father, or having her body torn open to bear him a child. The more she thought about it, the less she could imagine being married to any man at all.

  AFTER THE MIDDAY MEAL, while Stella stitched with intense focus by the lemon tree window, the whole of Ievoli shut itself up until the first call to mass at five thirty. Houses were silent and dark, the bougainvillea blossoms bobbing genially in the breeze the only sign of movement. The fountain, the village’s source of life, burbled unmolested by laundry-scrubbing housewives. The garden plots were as empty as if they had planted themselves, the shiny faces of the tomatoes and chili peppers glinting red on their righteous stakes. A foreign traveler passing through at the wrong time of day might think the town had been abandoned completely, that it was haunted by the ghosts of perfectionist horticulturalists.