Death 5
Rape
(Marriage)
THE FIFTH DEATH BEGAN IN A DREAM.
One July morning in 1941, in the hanging lavender of predawn, Stella Fortuna rose from the bed she shared with Tina, leaving her sister to her last minutes of wet late-sleep snoring before their grueling day in the tobacco fields.
Stella took their ceramic washbasin to the kitchen, filled it with warm water, and brought it back to their nightstand. This was the girls’ beauty area, safe from the hectic imperialism of the boys’ barging and odors. This morning in her dream—for this was a dream—Stella watched her own face in the scuffed blue mirror nailed to the wall above the basin as she guided her washcloth over the areas that needed the most attention. She didn’t recognize herself, but that didn’t seem strange.
She only realized the man had entered her room when she heard the door tick closed. At first she was annoyed; she wrapped one arm across her breasts and cupped the washcloth between her legs, waiting for the man to apologize and depart. He did not—he stood solidly, his outstretched arms creating a cage between Stella and the door. In that moment, she understood he was not in her room by accident.
Stella called out, “Tina!” The tenement walls, so permeable when her brothers were shouting, seemed to absorb her voice. “Tina!” But Tina was not there—something that would only ever happen in a dream.
The man lifted a finger to his lips. He was a gray shadow in the stingy light, but his black irises were shiny. Stella felt a cool ripple under the skin of her buttocks, where his gaze had fixed. She was helplessly exposed.
Racked by trembles of revulsion, her naked dream body buckled uncontrollably. (In the real world, her sleeping self spasmed, kicking Tina hard in the thigh.) The man crossed the floorboards that separated them, his calloused palms encasing her. The touch was sickening but sensual; Stella felt a tingle of response in her flesh. At the same time, her stomach began to throb, low and tight behind the suture scars. No man with a calloused hand had ever touched her skin like that. How did her dream self know what that touch felt like?
He gripped her shoulder, turning her toward him. She tried to resist, but her limbs were sleep-paralyzed, disobedient. She mashed her concealing arm so tightly against her chest that one of her breasts was forced out from under it. In sickened dismay she saw her areola spring free, her frightened nipple curling inward.
Her fear rallied her. Not bothering to hide her nudity anymore, she shoved him away with all her might. There was nowhere else to go, so she climbed into the window frame. She parted her legs for the shortest possible interval, then quickly crouched into herself, enduring the unfamiliar sensation of air sweeping over her most private skin. The man was shaking his head, stepping toward her again. Everything was wrong, so wrong, perversely wrong. His hands closed around her arm.
Her vision was whited out by panic. She struck out and lost her balance, felt herself tumble sideways. Her chin hit the floor and her jaw jammed up into her skull, teeth singing with the reverberation. The hands tightened, and she screamed. The world was invisible; she could only feel—hands on her arms, then her leg, the beads of blood rising, the bruises beginning to form. The dream shattered. She was awake.
The dim early morning in the bedroom was the exact same lavender it had been in her dream; Stella’s senses stuttered. “Tina!” Her father’s bellow. “What the hell are you doing?” Above her, curling rags ringing her sister’s swollen face. The fallen rod on the floor by her legs; one blue cotton curtain threaded through the two sisters’ arms.
Stella felt her shoulder muscles constrict around the pain in her socket. She realized the hands clenching her arm were not the dream-rapist’s but her sister’s, gripping so fiercely she left white ovals in the shiny pink of Stella’s burn scar. Stella reached up to touch her jaw, and the skin leapt with fiery tenderness.
Her father’s silhouette crossed the shadowy room. “You little bitch.” He hooked his elbow around Tina’s neck and Tina went careening toward the wall, catching herself against the bed just in time to receive the back of his hand across her face. “Little whore. What the hell were you thinking?”
Tina sobbed, incoherent. Stella lay dazed on the floor by the window, her body surveying its various pains: the bruises on her arm, her tailbone, her cheek; the bleeding open skin in her gums; the torn feeling in her shoulder. Their father loomed, enraged as ever, waiting, exhaling wet, irregular breaths into his mustache. Long seconds passed as Tina gasped and coughed into her nightgown. She was not going to answer.
Antonio turned on Stella. “What the hell is going on?”
Stella pushed herself up to feel the flat safety of the wall against her back. She tasted blood, and located with her tongue the fissures where teeth had been.
“She tried to push you out the window?”
Tina’s head popped up, and she lifted an arm to protect her teary face. “No, Papa, she was trying to jump out the window. She was going to kill herself. I was just—”
“You shut up!” Antonio was leonine, roaring, his curling hair wild in shadowy silhouette. “Stella, I asked you did she try to push you out the window? You were fighting?”
Stella’s stomach rippled, a residue of the trapped feeling from her dream. “No.” Speaking was difficult; her mouth was swelling fast. “No, Papa, it was a dream.”
“A dream? A dream?”
Stella swallowed a mouthful of blood. “A bad dream.” She felt the burly arms closing around her naked rib cage again. “There was a . . . a bad man, and I was trying to get away.”
“She was going to jump out the window, and I stopped her,” Tina put in. “She was about to fall, and I pulled her back down.”
From Antonio’s disgusted expression, Stella could tell he didn’t quite believe them. “What kind of idiot are you, Stella?” he said finally, still loud enough to be heard down the hall. “You going to kill yourself over a bad dream?”
A sunflower of yellow fury burst in her mind, and she blurted, “A man came into this room to rape me, Papa.” The word “rape” had the effect she intended; Antonio’s forehead tightened in a fur of eyebrows. She stood, pulling down her nightgown and rubbing her sore shoulder. “I was scared to death. I have a right to get away from a man who’s trying to rape me.”
Stella could see that Antonio was turning this over. She forced herself to meet his eye steadily.
“Ah, mannaggia.” If he was swearing, the violence was over. “What was all the screaming?”
“That was Stella,” Tina said. “That’s what woke me up, thanks to God, or I wouldn’t have seen her about to fall out the window.”
Assunta came into the tiny bedroom then, her field kerchief already knotted over her hair. “What’s happening? What’s the matter?”
Tina had conquered her tears. “Stella dreamed she got raped, Ma. She tried to jump out the window.”
“Raped?” Her mother’s voice was shrill enough to cut through Stella’s nausea.
“It was a dream, Ma.”
“Who was it?” Assunta was patting Stella on her shoulder and breasts, verifying she was still intact.
“Yes, who was it?” Tina echoed.
The sisters’ eyes caught like magnets. The sparkle in Tina’s eyes struck Stella as lascivious. She averted her gaze, stared into her lap at the bruised heel of her left hand. This was the kind of conversation that could escape her control.
“Who was it?” Tina said again. She had never been artful in her voyeurism. “Was it a colored man?”
At the words “colored man” the dream appeared again in Stella’s mind’s eye. She saw the rapist’s dark eyes flashing, the stretch of flannel over his shoulders. And the words were right there; it was so easy to deflect the truth, she did what so many other Italian Americans before and after her have done: she blamed a black man. “Yes,” she said. “A colored man.”
“Who?” Excited, Tina knelt beside Stella, clasping her shoulders. “Was it the delivery man from the
shop?”
“Was it one of the Jamaicans from the truck?” her mother suggested. “Was it that man Donny?”
“No.” Stella felt sick enough already from this ordeal; she didn’t want to think about what would happen if her mother and sister fixed on a name for the imaginary culprit. “Just some regular colored man.”
Antonio began to shout again. “You’re never to talk to colored men. If I catch—”
“Papa!” The room fell silent at her shout, and Stella was relieved. She was on the verge of vomiting. “Get out of our room. We have to get ready for work now, or we’ll miss the truck.”
For a moment, Antonio looked like he might raise his hand to show her what speaking like that to her father got her. Instead he turned for the door, and Assunta followed, sniffling faithfully. As Tina closed the door behind them, their father called, “I’m gonna nail that window shut.”
As the sisters stood near the blue mirror, Tina dabbing at the cut on Stella’s cheek with the wet washcloth, Tina whispered, “Tell me the truth, Stella. Who was it? Was it Donny?”
“I don’t know who it was, Tina,” Stella lied. “Stop asking.”
She dressed as quickly as possible, trying not to feel the rapist’s eyes on her naked back. What she didn’t tell Tina was that the man in the dream—a dream she would relive again and again over the next decade, a dream that would terrorize her sleeping patterns and haunt her waking relationships—the man in that dream who had pinned her naked in the bedroom window hadn’t been a colored man at all. It had been her father.
THAT WAS THE FIFTH TIME Stella Fortuna almost died—that was the time she almost committed suicide by jumping out of a third-story window.
The first time Stella had the nightmare was in the summer of 1941, eighteen months after she arrived in Hartford. Those eighteen months had been the easiest and the hardest of Stella’s life.
Tony Fortuna, as he was known here, lived in a tenement apartment in downtown Hartford, not the house he had promised his wife. The apartment consisted of a living room; a kitchen with a gas stove, which had to be explained; and three narrow bedrooms. There was no garden anywhere on the street—nowhere to grow tomatoes. Assunta had to buy them from the peddlers who parked their wooden carts along Front Street.
Tony said the tenement arrangement was temporary. There was a house he was going to buy on Bedford Street, in a nicer part of the Italian East Side. The owner, an old Napolitano, had promised to give Antonio two years to save up the agreed-upon two thousand dollars. “He likes me,” Antonio said. “He trusts me.”
In some ways America was better than Ievoli, even if it wasn’t what Stella had been imagining. In the bathroom was a toilet with a flush; water was somehow pumped all the way up to the third floor and swirled everything away. They ate meat twice a week—Tony insisted. Assunta had no experience with cooking meat; she had never eaten beef in her life before arriving in America. Pina Cardamone, Zu Tony’s wife, accompanied the Fortuna women to the frightening huge grocery store and showed them how to pick from the pink and red orgy of dead flesh at the butcher counter. Za Pina taught Assunta and Tina how to pan-fry a beefsteak and oven-fry pounded chicken cutlets. At first the meat menus were nerve-racking—one small mistake would ruin the whole expensive piece, and Assunta cooked in fear of Tony taking the strap to her. But she acclimated. She was an excellent cook, because she liked to eat and knew how to taste. Tina was another natural cook and would make some man a good wife—Za Pina liked to repeat that, especially and pointedly in Stella’s hearing. Stella smiled and waved Za Pina off—she didn’t let the teasing get to her. But she wasn’t going to fry a beefsteak no matter how many blood vessels Za Pina burst trying to teach her.
The other zia who came over to give them lessons was Filomena Nicotera. She tried to coach the Fortunas through her U.S. citizenship handbook; she and her husband, Zu Aldo, ran a delivery service and their English was very good. She was frequently accompanied by her daughter, Carolina, who was sixteen. Carolina Nicotera had a pointy chin and flashing dark eyes, which she rolled in an American fashion at her pushy mother. Carolina bundled Stella and Tina up in woolly scarves and took them on excursions along Front Street, teaching them the rules. She brought them a bottle of nail polish and showed them how to cut their cuticles.
Luigi was enrolled in an American school. Schooling was mandatory here until age sixteen—Stella couldn’t even imagine what children could study for that long. Luì was so small that it was months before he realized he was two years older than most of his second-grade classmates. He was “Louis Fortuna” now, but in American, the nickname “Louie” sounded just like what they had always called him anyway.
THE WINTER IN HARTFORD was like nothing Stella had ever imagined. It snowed almost every day, fat white clusters so heavy-looking, Stella couldn’t understand why it took them so long to fall out of the sky. From their drafty bedroom the girls watched a burly ragged man with a plywood board sweep snow off the buckling roofs of the shanties in the back lot.
Closed off in the dingy little apartment, Stella sought distractions from her intense homesickness. She was cold and miserable and she missed her grandmother, her ciucciu, her sweet little house on the top of the mountain. Her chest ached with longing—sometimes her throbbing heart felt so sore she would have to lie down to catch her breath. But she couldn’t let her mother or siblings know. If she didn’t hold it together, none of the others would be able to, and she’d be blunting their progress into their new life. She corralled her brothers into playing card games at the kitchen table, where it was warmer than the sitting room. She organized Assunta and Tina into crocheting blankets with her to supplement the meager cotton ones Tony had on the beds. She tried to keep them all chatting so their minds wouldn’t dwell on what they’d left behind; when she couldn’t think of anything to talk about, she sang songs Nonna Maria had taught her, hoping her mother and sister would join in; if her throat was too constricted to sing, she hummed.
The cold was unrelenting, and noses were always running. Stella learned about the unrelievable misery of chapped nostrils, endemic in Hartford in February and March. The air was not the same air she had breathed in Ievoli—it pierced her lungs and her throat when she inhaled. It carried illnesses the Fortunas had never suffered before—coughing that sounded like the barking of a dog; sweating fevers that lasted for four days, head-clouding pain behind the eyes. Strangers coughed their diseases into the air at church, on the bus, in the streets, filling the wind with the malice of their individual suffering.
None of the Fortuna children owned clothing that was warm enough. Their first month, January 1940, was a parade of visits from cousins and paesan, people Tony knew from Sacred Heart Church and the Italian Society. Women brought bags of old clothes, coats, mittens, sweaters. Wearing secondhand dresses made Stella concentrate on how much her life had changed. The fabrics had been stitched together by machines, sized to fit someone else; they were tight around the shoulders or long in the arms. They were old, something someone else had thrown away, but they were still nicer than anything she had owned.
IN THE NINE YEARS SINCE the Fortunas had last seen Tony, Assunta and her children had been poor but free; now they were prisoners of his will and whims. Tony had all the money; he was the only one who could speak English; he controlled every aspect of their lives.
Stella had never taken to being controlled by anyone, ever since she was a little girl and had told her Za Violetta she didn’t respect her. Stella Fortuna was a grown-up woman now but clung to the same basic beliefs about who was worth her respect. Her father did not meet the requirements. He drank, he shouted, he was secretive about his comings and goings.
“What did you bring us here for?” Stella would shout at her father during their many rows. She fought back her fear of him and gave him lip whenever she could, for the sake of morale. “You lock us up all day like prisoners. You took us away from our home, our paese, our nonna, our relatives and friends, why? What was it all
for?”
Antonio never answered her question. He would smack her face or her ass and tell her to shut up. Or he would say offhandedly, “If you like it so much better there, why don’t you go back?” But of course that wasn’t an option. Italy was at war; the Fortunas had escaped just in time.
TONY’S PRESENCE MADE THEM ALL NERVOUS. Assunta would crack her children on the behind with her fat wooden spoon if they broke one of her rules, but it was dispassionate justice and they always knew they deserved it. Tony’s justice was mystical and anything but dispassionate, especially when he was drinking.
There was relief on the two nights a week, on average, that Tony didn’t come home at all.
The first time was in late January, when Assunta and her children had been living in Hartford for four weeks. Assunta had fixed supper and they’d waited for Tony. When he hadn’t come home by nine o’clock, Assunta gave up and served the cooled pasta. The children ate quickly. When the boys had cleaned their plates, Stella sent them to bed. Normally Giuseppe would have made trouble, but tonight they just filed out, taking the kitchen radio with them.
“Where’s Papa?” Tina asked again when the boys were gone—she had asked four times already, as if Stella knew anything more than she did.
She suppressed her irritation with her sister. This wasn’t Tina’s fault.
“Don’t worry about Papa,” Stella said. “I’m sure he’s fine. He’s a big man.” She watched her mother eat the last pieces of macaroni. Assunta’s cheeks were wet, but her eyes were small and angry. Stella picked at her ugly memory from the summer when she was nine years old—watching as her father mounted her mother from behind, grunting like an animal. She shut the memory off before it could run its full course. How had this man, with such manly appetites, made do in the decade he’d spent away from his wife? The thing Stella must have already known in the back of her mind clicked into place, and any sense of worry vanished.
The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna Page 18
