The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

by Juliet Grames

  Cettina, whose face was glinting with nervous sweat, was thinking the same thing. “So many things we could have bought instead,” she whispered to Stella, in that whisper that could be heard ten paces away. “So many pairs of shoes.”

  “We don’t need shoes,” Stella said darkly. “We have nowhere to wear them.”

  * * *

  THE WORST PART OF BAD NEWS is sometimes not the bad news itself but having to explain the bad news over and over again, to have to endure the reactions of people who are sometimes well-meaning and sometimes only pretending to be well-meaning, and sometimes not even that.

  A big mistake. Whose mistake? And no one could fix it? Did you try everything? Why didn’t you do this, or that? All that money. What a waste. What is your husband going to say? He’s going to be so angry, what will you do?

  Yes, other people are sometimes the worst thing in the world.

  At least the Fortunas had somewhere to live, since they had been unable to sell the house on such short notice. But being back was strange. They had only been gone for a few days, but Ievoli now seemed small and pitiful. Stella had seen a train, a sea, a city; she had encountered businessmen, whores, and thieves. Ievoli was both the only safe spot in a maelstrom of disparate fates and also no longer enough to keep her safe from it.

  THREE THOUSAND MILES AWAY, Antonio Fortuna was irate. He had paid extra money to have Signor Martinelli handle all the paperwork so that it would be sure to be done correctly; instead it had been absolutely done incorrectly. Had it been Antonio’s own handwriting that was to blame? He had been the one to decide on “Maria” instead of “Mariastella,” which sounded long and un-American to him. He had thought a common name like “Maria” would make processing the immigration papers easier. Had he introduced the error by trying something new and not quite true? Had he been scammed?

  After five years of waiting in the visa queue, Antonio’s efforts had failed. But he was Calabrese; his head would only become harder and harder until it cracked like a pumpkin. He refiled the paperwork, painstakingly hand-lettering the forms. It was May 1936; if the mysterious visa lottery took as long as it had last time, he might be reunited with his children, one of whom he’d never met, by 1941. By then, three of them would have achieved majority and would need to file separate requests for adult passports. But that wasn’t something he could plan for, so he sent the papers off to molder at the bottom of whatever office pile they would molder in for almost too long to do any good.

  THE NEWS ABOUT THE MONARCH reached Ievoli in July. The ship had been lost at sea—caught fire in the middle of the Atlantic and went down with all hands and souls.

  “You almost died again, Stella,” Giuseppe pointed out. “You almost drowned in the ocean. Now that’s four times you almost died.”

  She hadn’t even known her life was at stake until two months after the fact.

  Assunta said many rosaries for the people on the boat. She couldn’t get over the thought that she had sat among the dead in Signor Martinelli’s office, that those little babies who had played on the floor by her feet were at the bottom of the sea.

  “God gave you the mistake with Stella’s name to save you,” Nonna Maria said. “God bless. It seemed like a bad mistake at the time, but it was really a gift from God.”

  Stella thought of the prayer she had said kneeling in the church that last Sunday before they left for Napoli. Had she called down the hand of God? She thought of her visit to the cemetery to say good-bye to her little lost sister, the seizure of regret she had felt at the idea of leaving her alone. If the Fortunas had been lost at sea, not even their remains would have been able to keep the little ghost company.

  On a windy Sunday afternoon Stella snuck out of the house while Cettina was busy with her weekly hair wash and delousing. Stella had questions, and she needed to be alone to ask them. She hurried down via Fontana to the cemetery and stood in front of Mariastella’s grave, arms crossed protectively in front of her chest. The eeriness of her previous visit had dispelled, but not her sense of danger.

  “I know you’re there,” Stella said to the cold marble plaque. There was, naturally, no response. “I just want to know one thing. Did you sink that whole ship just so you could get me? Did you kill all those people because you hate me so much?” She waited in the silence for as long as her patience lasted. “Or was it the other way around?” she asked. “Did you save me by messing up my passport?”

  The sun beat down on her hot black braid and the wind stirred the grit between the mausoleums. Stella had known there would be no answer, but she was still frustrated. “I know you’re there,” she said again. She gave up and went home.

  WAITING—YEARS OF WAITING. The opposite of having only five weeks to say good-bye was having an indefinite amount of time to say good-bye, knowing you would be pulled away but never knowing when.

  This was how Stella passed the ages of sixteen to nineteen—waiting. In many lives, these teenage years are the most vibrant, of greatest impact on the person one becomes as an adult. Stella watched as young men and women around her fell in and out of love, fought, bore children. She watched as they cemented their characters and their roles in society, as she and her sister sat by, waiting, waiting, waiting for news.

  Months and seasons ticked by, measurable by crops, by feast days, by the increasing rambunctiousness of Giuseppe, who had plunged into the rage of adolescence and found much to challenge him in his one-room world of women, by the stretching limbs of baby Luigi, who was not a baby anymore. Stella herself had stopped growing taller when she was eleven years old, but her bosom did not stop swelling. Cettina had outgrown her by an inch, and had strong shoulders and sturdy hips—a born breeder, Assunta joked. The girls looked good, very good; Assunta blessed their cornetto charms every day to ward off the jealous thoughts of their neighbors. But what good was being the town beauty when everyone knew you were going to leave?

  The girls Stella’s age were getting engaged and married. Lately it seemed like Cettina was constantly helping the brides make mustazzoli to hand out after the ceremonies. The girls of Ievoli were scrambling to nail down the boys, and the mothers of Ievoli to nail down their sons by saddling them with wives and children, because the boys all wanted to emigrate. Stella watched the frenzy with aloof amusement—the girls’ machinations, the public flirting, the theatrics of one- or two-sided wooing. Immigration had imposed an inverted economy on the village marriage market—it was still the boy’s prerogative to choose what he liked, but now he expected the girls to chase him for the honor instead of the other way around. The whole charade was irritating, especially because it was not a charade, and would become many people’s realities for the rest of their lives. Stella was not friends with girls outside the family, not like Cettina was—Stella didn’t need any friends besides her mother and sister—but from afar she marveled at their desire to leave the nests they were born in and make different lives with a man. It was the way things were done, must be done, as God’s dictates about fruitful multiplication required. Stella was untroubled by the priest’s insistence that good Christian women married—after all, weren’t virgin nuns holy?—but she was alone in the village on this point. There was a piece missing inside her, the piece that all the other girls, even her sister, had.

  Kind, genteel Stefano visited every Sunday that summer of 1936. It was an arduous trip, but he wouldn’t admit to tiring of it. Everyone had grown very fond of Stefano, including Stella, who had decided it wouldn’t hurt her to be nice to him because he was going to be leaving soon for the army anyway. Later she would be glad she had given him that much, at least.

  IN THE AUTUMN, as Stella split open chestnut burs, she remembered her May visit to the chestnut grove, her wrong thought that she would never break the pads of her fingers on a spiny husk again. She felt foolish for not having seen that it wasn’t going to work out. The plan to emigrate had never made sense; why had they all gone along with it as if it had?

  November came, and Ste
fano left to join the army. He sent Stella his first letter two weeks after he left. Stella was not a good reader, but she could tell Stefano was an elegant writer. Assunta kept the letter on the shelf with her special dishes, where it couldn’t be ruined, and she took it down to show anyone who came to the house.

  SPRING. ARTICHOKES. BEANS. LENT. EASTER. TOMATOES. Squash. Summer. Silkworms. Mulberry harvests, long nights. Ferragosto. Pilgrimage to Dipodi, feast of the Assumption. Autumn. Fhesta, olives, chestnuts. Winter. Olives. Christmas, the feast of San Salvatore. Olives again. The pig slaughter. Fennel. Oranges, tangerines. And artichokes.

  Blisters, fleas, broken nails. Mass, mass. Praying for visas, praying for blind mothers. Other girls’ weddings. Other girls’ babies. Boys disappearing, to Africa, to Rome, to France.

  Waiting.

  And waiting again.

  And again.

  * * *

  THREE AND A HALF YEARS WENT BY. It was late October 1939. The world was going to war, and I really can’t tell you how Antonio managed to secure visas for his family in the precious last batch before all emigration was halted. Some of the people I’ve interviewed assume that money must have changed hands.

  There were three passports this time: a wife and dependent children visa for Assunta, Giuseppe, and Luigi, and two solo adult visas for Mariastella and Concettina. They were to sail on December 16 from Napoli on a ship named the Countess of Savoy. Antonio had bought second-class tickets; they would not sleep in steerage, as he had, but would come over to their new home in style. The voyage would take seven days; he would meet them on December 23 at New York Harbor.

  Za Ros’s older son, Franco, who lived in France, bought the house on via Fontana so he could give it to his son, who wanted to come back to Ievoli to find a wife. Stella knew Assunta was happy the house was staying in the Mascaro family, even if she had gone from owning a house to having nothing at all with a few strokes of a faraway man’s pen. That is how things work, so. Why worry about it?

  “Whatever happens,” Cettina told their cousin Cicciu, “please. You cannot let Zu Franco cut down the lemon tree.” She pointed out the window at the little lemon tree that stood in the sunny spot between the house and the stable, the one she had planted when she was a little girl.

  “Of course they won’t cut down the lemon tree,” Cicciu told her. “That would be bad luck.” They did, though, of course. They cut down all the trees and filled in all of Assunta’s land to build houses they sold to other men’s sons.

  Assunta and her four children made a shopping trip to Nicastro at the end of November with a packet of money Antonio had sent them. Everyone was to buy a traveling outfit. Nine-year-old Luigi was adorable in his first good shirt and a pair of brown short pants. Stella and Cettina picked out ready-made dresses at a shop, dark blue dresses the seamstress assured them were appropriate for American sea travel, with wrist-length sleeves that would cover Stella’s scars. Assunta could not be talked into any color but black for herself.

  From the post office in Nicastro, Stella sent a note to Stefano’s mother in Sambiase so that Stefano would have the Fortunas’ mailing address in America. He had been deployed with the Infantry Division Catanzaro to Africa. During his years in the army, Stefano had written letters periodically, although Stella never wrote back. She didn’t know what to say, and besides, her writing would only have been an embarrassment to her. When he’d joined the army, Stefano must have thought he’d be out already by 1939; Stella couldn’t believe he had imagined he would be twenty-two and Stella almost twenty and still neither of their futures had come about. Stella prayed for him, but he was so far away, in a place she couldn’t contemplate, and her prayers felt empty and directionless. Or maybe it was that her prayers felt tainted—tainted by her secret hope that the army would keep him away indefinitely, that she would never have to be his wife.

  STELLA DID NOT VISIT the cemetery the second time she left Ievoli forever. She counted down the days until December 14, when they would catch the train for Napoli, and she kept thinking, tomorrow, I’ll go. But she didn’t.

  NAPOLI WAS WETLY COLD IN DECEMBER, damp winds gusting off the open harbor and sticking to the shabby waterfront buildings. Stella felt no wonder this second time in the port city. She had not been able to shake off her sense of hopelessness, that there was still a great thing that was going to go wrong. She was queasy with nerves, thinking about the last attempt they had made, of all hands and souls at the bottom of the sea.

  The Fortunas arrived in Napoli on the evening of December 14. They went first thing next morning to the ocean liner’s ticket office. The tickets were in order, and the names matched the passports this time.

  When the ticket agent showed Stella her visa, she noticed the birthday written next to her name: 12 GENNAIO 1920. She was about to point out the mistake to the agent—her index finger was already hovering over the page—when her heart started pounding crazily in her chest at the idea that she would be the reason, again, that the entire family was turned away. No, Stella, she told herself. No one needs to know. She had to cough to cover the words that had half emerged from her throat. “Scusi,” she said politely.

  She didn’t say anything to her mother or Cettina about the mistake on her visa, not until they were safely through the immigrant processing at New York Harbor—either of them might have been unable to cope with the news. By then it was already on all of her government-issued paperwork. January 12 was her new American birthday.

  AFTER ACQUIRING THE TICKETS, they went to the doctor’s office for the medical certificates they would need to board the ship. The line snaked out the door and into the chilly street, but the Fortunas only waited half an hour; the examination was very quick, an inspection of eyes and tongue and a general up-and-down.

  In their hotel, they shared the bread Cettina had packed. Cicciu took them out for a walk in the evening, but they were all anxious about getting lost in Napoli, so after ten minutes he brought them back. It was a long, dreary evening. The three women lay head to toe in the sour-smelling bed; Giuseppe and Luigi slept on the floor and made restless sounds all through the dark night. When the knock on the door came before dawn the next morning, Stella was awake, head aching.

  It was Cicciu, but he hadn’t come to tell them it was time to take their things down to the dock. No—he was holding a newspaper, and his face was red as a cherry pepper. There it was, across the front page—Stella felt like she had been waiting for the headline Cicciu read out to them. Mussolini had halted all transatlantic voyages; the country was preparing for war. No more boats would be departing from Napoli harbor. No more Italians would be allowed to leave.

  The ticket office was already thronged with people by the time the Fortunas got there. The clerk would not give anyone their money back, dismissing threats and curses with a weary wave. Everyone needed to settle down, they were trying to see if the ship might be allowed to leave, even though the orders from Rome seemed unambiguous. Hours dragged on and panicked anger stretched into exhaustion. People sat on trunks, strutted, shouted, picked fights. There were some women weeping, although for once Assunta wasn’t one of them. Stella watched her mother’s shrewd eyes and wondered what she was thinking, if maybe she was hoping to be sent back to Ievoli a second time.

  They waited in the drafty ticket hall all day for news. Assunta sat on her trunk, because the varicose veins in her legs, which had never stopped swelling after Luigi was born, were sore from standing. Stella braided and unbraided Assunta’s long hair. Luigi was a good boy; he worked off his bored energy walking in laps around the ticket office, and eventually squatted on the floor to nap with his head in his mother’s lap. Giuseppe, meanwhile, was nowhere to be found. Stella imagined him running free on the streets of grungy, crime-ridden Napoli. She wondered how far he could possibly get in this city where things cost ten or a hundred times what a person expected them to.

  “What if the boat leaves while he’s gone?” Cettina said.

  “Would serve him
right,” Stella replied.

  When the bells sounded in the piazza outside for evening mass, the ticket agent made everyone leave. “Come back tomorrow!” he shouted over the murmuring, fretful people. “Same time, same place. The boat leaves tomorrow morning, eight o’clock.”

  Would-be passengers, stupid or intractable with mind-numbed exhaustion, looked dully at one another, trying to decide if they were going to trust and obey. The agent’s boys made rounds, shaking dozers awake and repeating the instructions in loud, slow Italian to old people and country bumpkins.

  The hotelier checked them back in for another night; luckily he had two rooms, which the Fortunas paid for with the coins the ocean liner agent had given them. Cicciu offered to go out and buy them some food, but Assunta waved him off. She knew he needed what he had to get back to Ievoli. They went to bed early without supper.

  “What will we do if the boat doesn’t leave tomorrow?” Cettina whispered to Stella. She didn’t whisper softly enough, because Luigi’s heavily lidded eyes slanted toward his sisters. “We don’t have any more money for a hotel for another night.”

  “Don’t worry,” Stella said, making her voice deadly serious. “It will be fine, although we might have to sell Giuseppe to the organ grinder.”

  “The what?” Cettina, always a little late on the pickup, was taken aback.

  “You know, the man with the little monkey in the chiazza,” Stella said.

  “Oh, that’s terrible, Stella,” Cettina said. Stella was rolling her eyes at her sister’s obtuseness when Cettina added, “You know Giuseppe is too old to be an organ grinder’s boy. We’ll probably have to sell Luì instead.” The sisters shared a smile as Luigi squealed into his mother’s skirt.

  For the second night in a row Stella stared at the black ceiling as Cettina and Assunta snored on either side of her. She was jealous of them—they could blubber themselves to sleep when they were tired, knock themselves out like babies with their own intemperate emotions. The blood vessels under Stella’s eyes pulsed and her head rang with exhaustion, but God gave her no gift of peace of mind. Instead, hallucinating through the night, she saw an ocean that stretched forever and she imagined a boat breaking to pieces and disappearing into the waves.