The Black Madonna

by Louisa Ermelino

  Suppose,” Zia Guinetta told her husband, while he pulled apart yesterday’s bread to soak in his coffee, “Amadeo takes a second wife, an American, who says to him,” and here Zia Guinetta changed her voice, making it high and shrill, “ ‘Why should you send all this money to family in Italy? Who are they after all?’ What would happen then?” She shuddered. “I tell you, Carmelo, what would happen. You would have to go back into the fields on Don Carlito’s estate, if he would have you, and why should he? You’re not a young man anymore.”

  Zio Carmelo coughed until his chest hurt. He gasped for breath. “I know, I know. It would be terrible,” he told Zia Guinetta. He, Carmelo Laurenzano, a man who had always held his head high, would be forced to sit in the piazza, staring across at the café, longing for a glass of anisette with a black coffee bean at the bottom that he could no longer afford. His back would be bent. And this would be only the beginning of his troubles. His daughter was coming close to marriageable age. With the family’s prospects reduced, what kind of husband could she get? A simpleton, an old man with twisted legs? Zio Carmelo held his head in his hands. “Think, Guinetta,” he said.

  “I have been thinking,” she said, coming around behind him, kneading his shoulders with her hands. “Write Amadeo a letter. Invite him here. Tell him to leave his troubles and come to Castelfondo.” Zia Guinetta put her face close to Zio Carmelo’s. She stroked his cheek with the back of her hand. “Maybe a pretty girl will catch his eye. He needs a wife, no? A mother for his son? What better thing could we do for him? He’d be bound to us then, tied to Castelfondo.”

  Zio Carmelo turned in his chair. He took her face in his hands and kissed her forehead. He called her his treasure. She brought him pen and paper and sat down next to him, pulling her chair close to his.

  Zio Carmelo wrote a letter to his nephew expressing his sorrow, his devotion, his love, and his invitation to Castelfondo. He read aloud to Zia Guinetta as he wrote. He had been to school and wrote documents and letters for the whole village. Zia Guinetta had never been to school and depended on her husband for these things. She leaned over him, her hand on his arm as he wrote.

  Figlio carissimo,” Zio Carmelo wrote, and here Zia Guinetta took the pen and marked X’s for the kisses she wanted to send to Amadeo. Zio Carmelo told her they went at the end, but she insisted he leave them where she put them. Her eyes narrowed and she bit her lip in approval when he wrote: “All of Castelfondo shares your sorrow.” Zio Carmelo blotted the ink with the green blotter he had bought from the postmaster, waved his arm over the paper, and went on: “Castelfondo grieves for the loss of your wife and infant son and wishes you would come back to the embraces of your family and countrymen.”

  Zia Guinetta made Zio Carmelo give her the envelope to seal and she put a pinch of red powder between the pages before she licked the glue with her tongue and closed the letter inside. Zia Guinetta couldn’t read or write but she knew about important things.

  Zia Guinetta grew herbs in her kitchen garden and made medicines that she stored in earthenware jars. She experimented with love potions and aphrodisiacs, but for these the residents of Castelfondo came to her back door after dark. For the medicines she took no money, but she always accepted gifts for the magic. She had a great reputation, concocting each potion separate from the others, because, she said, the fever of love was different every time.

  Although he considered himself a modern man, Zio Carmelo was glad for the red powder. He called to Tommaso to go and mail the letter. “Amadeo shouldn’t mourn too long,” he told his wife. “It’s bad for a man’s health.” Zia Guinetta agreed.

  Amadeo Pavese’s life was sad but his business was good. He had a fruit and vegetable stand that got bigger every year, until he had a store that took up half a block. His connections with the neighborhood powers filled the shelves with imported olive oil and canned tomatoes, and he thought about buying a Cadillac but he was afraid of tempting fate. He had had his share, everyone agreed, but who knew how much misfortune was enough?

  The flower signifying death was barely removed from Amadeo Pavese’s door, the last shovelful of dirt thrown on the coffin where his wife lay inside with her baby son in her arms, when the letter arrived from Castelfondo. Amadeo had only just put the black armband around his sleeve.

  In Castelfondo, even though the money from America continued to arrive on the fifth of every month, even though the amount had increased from before, Zio Carmelo worried. For the first time, Zia Guinetta’s medicines didn’t help. He lost weight, his face got small, and his nose looked big. Next to his wife in bed at night, he rolled from side to side. “The nutrice,” he said. “He mentions her in every letter. I hope we’re not too late.”

  Amadeo Pavese bought a dark green Chrysler and thought he might make the trip to Italy someday. He worked six days a week. His son Salvatore was with Teresa Sabatini, whom he paid in fruits and vegetables and a weekly envelope filled with cash. On Sunday she brought Salvatore to his father’s house, along with her son Nicola, and they played on the dark red carpet in the living room. If the weather was fine, they ate lunch in the backyard under the grape arbor or else in the big kitchen on the bottom floor of the house. Amadeo cooked. He liked Teresa. She wasn’t bad to look at, tall and slim, strong, the way he liked women, and her skin . . . it was beautiful, smooth and clear. He was sure that if he could touch it, it would feel soft and velvety, like the skin of his baby son, whose neck he nuzzled when Teresa put him in his arms.

  He found himself watching her. Every Sunday he was aware of something else about her. When she caressed Salvatore, he noticed her hands. When she took off her coat, he saw the straightness of her shoulders. He began to hope she would reveal herself, but Teresa was stoic. She listened when he talked about his business, his son, about what he hoped for the future. She was smart, he decided. She didn’t gossip. She was clean. She was good to his son.

  They were in the garden, after lunch, the Sunday before Easter. Teresa was stirring sugar into his coffee and he stopped her hand. “It’s almost a year,” he said. Teresa looked up. Another woman, he thought, would have looked down. “Salvatore loves you,” he continued.

  Teresa made a sound with her tongue. “I’m the only woman he knows.”

  “And you’re the only woman I know,” Amadeo said. He was careful, tentative. She took the spoon from the coffee. He let go of her hand.

  “I’m married,” she told him. “There’s enough talk as there is.”

  “Your husband’s never here. He’s like a ghost.”

  “I have to think about my son and you have to do the same.”

  “I always think about my son, and I think about you, and your son. Be honest, Teresa. We’re a family, all of us. A family that fate put together.”

  It was hot in the garden, unusually hot for the Sunday before Easter. Teresa had put the babies down to nap after their lunch. She had taken off her hat. Amadeo could see that the heavy knot of hair at the nape of her neck was coming loose, about to unwind. He could see the rounded ends of her hairpins. Her hair was close to falling, he knew, past her shoulders, down her back.

  Teresa opened the top button of the dark wool dress she had sewn to wear on Sundays. She fanned herself with her linen napkin. “It’s so hot out here, even under the grapevines.”

  “Let’s go inside,” Amadeo said, “where it’s cool and dark.”

  The black armband was still around Amadeo’s sleeve when he wrote to Zio Carmelo that he was thinking of coming to Castelfondo for a visit.

  It’s months and months now that I don’t sleep,” Zio Carmelo said to his wife that day the telegram arrived. Zia Guinetta poured coffee into his bowl. She had put the telegram under his spoon.

  Zio Carmelo crossed himself before he touched the yellow envelope. “It could be something terrible,” he said. “This could be our end.” Zia Guinetta turned away to stir her pot of beans. She smiled but he couldn’t see.

  Zio Carmelo wiped his face with his handkerchief. He
gathered up the crumbs on the table and threw them on the floor for the rooster. He got up and walked outside to pee against the tree. When he came back in, he opened the telegram. Zia Guinetta had not moved.

  “I told you. I knew it,” Zio Carmelo shouted at her back. “You never listen. You worry for nothing.”

  “What?” she said, never turning.

  “Look at this. Amadeo is coming to Castelfondo at the end of the month.” Zio Carmelo kissed the yellow paper. He went over to Zia Guinetta and kissed away the drops of sweat that had formed on her upper lip as she bent over the steaming pot.

  Zia Guinetta wiped her hands on her apron. “There are important things to do,” she said. “The bride . . . Don’t forget about the bride.”

  “Of course not. What am I? Stupid? But you have to tell me, who? Which girl? Who would make the best wife for Amadeo? Think hard. I’ll do the rest. She has to be beautiful, young, clever, grateful, docile . . .”

  “A docile girl won’t leave just like that for America with a strange man. And Americans don’t like docile women.”

  “How do you know what American men like?”

  “Tommaso. Tommaso knows everything about America.”

  “Guinetta? Our Maria . . . What about our Maria?”

  “Pig. Your own daughter to your sister’s son? Are you crazy? Pig,” Zia Guinetta said again and she didn’t speak to him that whole day.

  Now when Zio Carmelo walked through the town, when he sat at the coffee bar in the piazza until noon, he looked carefully at his compatriots, remembering their sisters and daughters and granddaughters, conjuring up their faces, their figures. One of them, he thought, would be the right girl for Amadeo.

  He said nothing to anyone until the day he crossed paths with Giacomo Caparetti and remembered that he had a beautiful daughter. She had been hidden in the house since her brother’s funeral, but the year was almost up. Magdalena Caparetti had smooth white skin, Zio Carmelo remembered, and strange wonderful eyes, bright, as though a lamp were held behind them.

  “Magdalena Caparetti,” Zio Carmelo told his wife that night, wiping up the oil on his plate with a crust of bread.

  “Ah . . . a beautiful girl,” Zia Guinetta said. “Those eyes . . . but she’s very young.”

  “So? He needs a young wife. The one he had was his age and look what happened, she dies, just like that.” Zio Carmelo snapped his fingers.

  Zia Guinetta shook her head “I don’t know . . . the blood . . . her mother.”

  “Her mother?”

  “Uffa, don’t you remember nothing? Marietta Caparetti . . . that goat of a friar from Naples?”

  “Porco Dio, I remember.” Zio Carmelo smacked his forehead with his hand. “So what happened to her?”

  Zia Guinetta shrugged. “Who knows? She’s gone.”

  “And the daughter, like the mother? What do you say?”

  Zia Guinetta shrugged again. And then she smiled. “Spirit is a good thing in a woman,” Zia Guinetta said. She put her hand against the front of Zio Carmelo’s pants and whispered in his ear. He remembered how she would take him into the countryside late at night and the things they would do, things that he could never say to anyone, that the men in the café would not believe could be done, except in the pictures on the back of the playing cards that Rienzo Portare had brought back from Rome. There had not been blood on Zia Guinetta’s wedding sheets.

  “Talk to the father tomorrow,” Zia Guinetta said.

  “And Amadeo? What if he doesn’t want a wife?”

  “It’s not important what he wants. He needs a wife. He needs a mother for his son. Why not a girl from here? He’ll be grateful to us forever.”

  Zio Carmelo nodded. “He needs us now,” he said. “My poor nephew, my sister Filomena’s only son, God rest her soul.” Zia Guinetta patted her husband’s shoulder. Things would work out. There were ways.

  My nephew is coming from America,” Zio Carmelo announced in the café. He passed the telegram around and each man looked at it as though he could read and made a face to show he was impressed.

  “A wealthy man, my nephew, my sister Filomena’s only son, God give her peace. A businessman . . . He has a big business, very big. Every year it gets bigger.” Zio Carmelo ordered an anisette with a coffee bean and sat down at one of the tables near the door. “When my nephew comes, there’ll be a big feast, a real celebration. Everyone’s invited.”

  This announcement sparked some interest and a few men clapped their hands together. “Bravo, Carmelo,” they said.

  “Fireworks,” Zio Carmelo said. “Streamers everywhere . . . the band from Matera. Giovanni,” he called out to the bar owner. “A drink for my friends.”

  Zio Carmelo went to see Giacomo Caparetti in the afternoon. The village was shuttered against the heat. By the time Zio Carmelo reached Giacomo Caparetti’s house, his shoes and clothes were covered with dust. He knocked but no one answered. He could hear snores from behind the closed door.

  Zio Carmelo had chosen this time to give the meeting great weight and also to catch Giacomo Caparetti by surprise. Through the crack in the door, Zio Carmelo could see him lying on his bed, his pants over a chair. He knocked again, louder, put his face to the crack, and called out to him in a loud whisper.

  “What? Who’s there?” Giacomo Caparetti said. He sat up in his bed and looked around.

  “Open the door . . . Giacomo. It’s me, Carmelo Laurenzano.” Zio Carmelo pounded on the door with his fist. He stepped back when he heard shuffling inside. “Paesano . . .” he said when the door opened. He stretched out his arms.

  Giacomo Caparetti invited Zio Carmelo in and offered him a chair at the table. He took out a bottle of wine and two flyspecked glasses. Standing across from Zio Carmelo, he poured the wine and touched his glass to Zio Carmelo’s. “Salute,” he said and drank. Before he sat down, he poured another. The stubble of his beard was gray.

  “Let me get right to it, Giacomo. You’re wondering why I’m here, am I right? Why I’ve interrupted your sleep. What could be so important, you’re asking yourself.” Zio Carmelo took out his handkerchief and wiped his face. “This heat,” he said. “Every year the same.”

  Giacomo Caparetti shrugged his shoulders and drank his wine. He watched Zio Carmelo closely.

  “Your daughter . . .”

  Giacomo Caparetti squinted. His eyes were small and shiny from sleep and suspicion. “Magdalena?” he said.

  “Yes, your beautiful Magdalena, your beautiful daughter, lovely like her mother.”

  Giacomo Caparetti stood up. His wine spilled. “Not like her mother, never. Mother, what kind of mother? Puttana . . .”

  “Wait . . . Wait . . . Giacomo . . . God forgive me if I meant anything.” Zio Carmelo crossed himself.

  “What is it? What do you want?”

  Zio Carmelo sighed loudly. He picked up the wine bottle. “May I? . . .” he said, and poured himself some wine. He righted Giacomo Caparetti’s glass and filled that, too. He mopped up the spilled wine with his handkerchief. “Listen, Giacomo, my nephew is coming from America, my very fine, very rich nephew. He lost his wife. He has an infant son. I’m here to propose a match . . . my nephew . . . your Magdalena.”

  Giacomo Caparetti put both hands on the edge of the table and leaned over. “Who knows from your nephew?” he shouted at Zio Carmelo. “My Magdalena’s beautiful. She can have anyone, anything. A husband from Matera . . . Potenza . . . maybe Naples . . . a prince from Avellino! What does she want with your nephew?”

  “Please, Giacomo, sit down.” Zio Carmelo put a hand on Giacomo Caparetti’s arm but he pulled away. Zio Carmelo stood up and pushed back his chair. “If you don’t sit, Giacomo, then I stand.”

  Giacomo Caparetti sat down slowly, his eyes on Zio Carmelo. He took the stub of an old cigar from his pocket and lit it. He still looked angry.

  “Don’t I know your Magdalena can have anyone?” Zio Carmelo told him. “Why do you think I’m here? Why do you think of all the girls in Castelf
ondo, I want Magdalena for my nephew? The women in the village follow me like wolves since they heard about my nephew. I can’t say the things they offer me for an introduction. Your heart would stop. You would never close your eyes at night. If I was a different kind of man . . . but no, I tell them. I won’t be bribed. My mind is made up. The only woman for my nephew is Magdalena Caparetti.”

  Giacomo Caparetti was silent. Zio Carmelo took a breath. He leaned over, put a hand on Giacomo Caparetti’s arm. “Magdalena is beautiful,” he said to him, “but for a woman, beauty is a sword with two edges. It can lead to trouble.” Zio Carmelo sat back in his chair. “Men desire her. Women envy her. You know, my friend, what can happen.” And here Zio Carmelo bowed his head, lowered his eyes. “The rose has thorns,” he said, looking up artfully from under his half-closed lids, hoping that Giacomo Caparetti was thinking of his missing wife.

  Giacomo Caparetti’s eyes were wet. He wiped his face with the back of his hand. “My daughter’s a good girl,” he said.

  “I know that, Giacomo. Would I want her for my nephew if I didn’t know that? Think about it. Magdalena would go to America. And for you, Giacomo, a dream come true. She’ll come back to you dressed in silk, diamonds around her neck the size of the Madonna’s tears . . . a father’s dream. I would give this . . .” Zio Carmelo held out his right arm. He sliced it below the elbow with his hand, then he poured them both another glass of wine.

  “But the dowry . . . ?”

  “Pffft . . . small . . . almost nothing . . . a token. You can give it directly to me and save any embarrassment.”

  “She’s all I have,” he said.

  “I know. Don’t I know? Don’t I have a daughter? But she’ll have a good life. And she’ll take care of you. You can forget worrying. My nephew sends money every month. He’s a good boy.”

  “But he’s a stranger, an American . . . ”

  “Giacomo, I can’t believe what I’m hearing. A stranger? He’s my blood. My poor sister Filomena’s only son. You remember Filomena? Ah, God should give her peace.” Zio Carmelo drained his glass.