The Black Madonna

by Louisa Ermelino

  Giacomo Caparetti filled it, turned the empty bottle on its side and went to get another. “She’s only fourteen,” he said over his shoulder.

  Zio Carmelo sucked in his breath. Zia Guinetta was right. She was young. He was quiet for a moment, pushing the thought out of his head. “Not so young,” he said, when Giacomo Caparetti came back to the table. “Magdalena’s a big girl. And you know, Giacomo, my wife, Guinetta, is the ear of Castelfondo. Malicious tongues are wagging.”

  Giacomo Caparetti started to cry. His tears splashed onto his hands and arms, onto the table, into his wineglass. Zio Carmelo would have offered his handkerchief if it had been clean. Instead, he patted his hand. “You’ll talk to her then? My nephew will be here in five weeks.”

  “What do I do?” Giacomo Caparetti swayed in his chair. “How will I . . . ?”

  “I’ll take care of everything,” Zio Carmelo said. “There should be a dinner . . . a few other things. This is all separate from the dowry, of course.”

  “There isn’t much,” Giacomo Caparetti said.

  “Don’t worry. What there is, there is.” Zio Carmelo poured them both more wine.

  “I can get it for you now,” Giacomo Caparetti said. He stood up.

  “No, no, you don’t have to. What’s the rush?” Zio Carmelo held up his hand. Giacomo Caparetti sat back down. “Of course, if I had it,” Zio Carmelo said, “I could get started with the arrangements right away.”

  “I’ll get it then.”

  “It’s not really necessary.”

  “Yes, yes, wait here. Drink up. I’ll be a minute.”

  Zio Carmelo poured himself more wine. He tried not to think about the size of Magdalena’s dowry as he listened to the movements in the back room. Giacomo Caparetti returned with a black sock knotted at the top and handed it to Zio Carmelo. “Like I said, there isn’t much, but that’s all of it.”

  Zio Carmelo slapped Giacomo Caparetti on the back. “You should be proud, Giacomo. How many fathers have no dowry at all put aside for their daughters?” Giacomo Caparetti wiped tears from his eyes. Zio Carmelo wondered where they all came from.

  “Thank you, Don Carmelo,” Giacomo Caparetti said, and reached for Zio Carmelo’s hand to kiss it.

  “No, no,” Zio Carmelo said. He stood up and put an arm around Giacomo Caparetti’s shoulders. “Please, Giacomo,” he said, “we’re almost family.” He kissed him on both cheeks. “You just take care of Magdalena. I’ll take care of everything else.”

  Zio Carmelo was out the door when Giacomo Caparetti called to him. “Your nephew . . .” he said, “. . . he’s handsome?”

  Zio Carmelo turned around. He threw up his hands. “How handsome does a rich man have to be?”

  Zio Carmelo took his time going home. He stopped at the piazza and waited for the coffee bar to open and the men to gather. He covered his pocket with his hand, feeling the bulge of the black sock with Magdalena Caparetti’s dowry inside. Zio Carmelo played a few games of cards. He told the men that Magdalena Caparetti would marry his nephew, who was coming to Castelfondo at the end of the month. He bought them all drinks and he invited them all to the wedding. “It will be three days of celebration,” he said, and the men all nodded their heads and picked up their cards.

  In New York, Amadeo made his arrangements to travel to Italy, to leave his business, and most important, to take care of his baby son. He talked with Teresa about taking Salvatore with him but she wouldn’t hear of it. She called him crazy. “How long can you be?” she said. “A month? Two? Why upset him? Someone else’s milk, someone else’s arms. He’s too young. And he’ll miss Nicky. They’re like brothers. Look at them.”

  Amadeo sat in her parlor on the couch under the shelf of dolls that Teresa Sabatini’s husband sent to her from all over the world and looked at Salvatore sitting on the floor with Nicky, mother’s milk glistening on his chin.

  “But won’t he miss me?”

  “Yes, yes, of course, but no matter what, you’re still only a man. You can try but you can’t know. Trust me. Look at Nicky. Isn’t his father away? Isn’t he fine? Go,” she said. “Enjoy yourself.”

  It was not what Amadeo wanted to hear. He looked around the room. He held a hand out to Salvatore, who caught hold of his fingers. “What if we all went?” he said. “A vacation . . . the four of us. You never had a vacation, have you? You work so hard, taking care of the two boys. We could all go together.”

  Teresa laughed, low, in the back of her throat. “Where are the brains you were born with?” she said. “How could I come back here after that?” She shook her head. “God Himself couldn’t save me.”

  The day before he left, Amadeo came to see his son at the building on Spring Street, in Teresa’s apartment on the fifth floor, He brought an envelope bulging with ten-dollar bills, the address of his aunt and uncle in Castelfondo, and a letter for the lawyer on Bedford Street, Vincente Violotti, who would take care of whatever she needed while he was gone. Amadeo promised he would write often and not be gone long.

  Teresa held Salvatore in one arm and her son Nicky in the other. The boys were wearing matching white suits she had knitted by hand. She stood on the landing at the top of the stairs to watch Amadeo leave and had the two boys wave their fat fists goodbye long after the outside door to the building on Spring Street had banged shut. He had kissed her for the last time.

  The day Amadeo was scheduled to arrive in Castelfondo, Zio Carmelo went down to the café. He had hired Terragrossa, the owner of the only automobile in Castelfondo, to meet Amadeo’s bus at the crossroads. He had given a gift of money to the mayor in return for a promise to keep the peasants out of the fields and in the piazza, so it would be filled with people when Amadeo entered the town.

  At home, Zia Guinetta had the dowry safe in her cupboard, and when Zio Carmelo left, when the house was empty, she sat down to count it.

  Zio Carmelo had spent some, and kept some back. Zia Guinetta suspected this. She didn’t know that he had thought about keeping all of the money secret from her, a private cache of drinking and gambling money, with a few pennies left over for the widow who sold votive candles to light in front of the Black Madonna of Viggiano.

  Castelfondo waited for Amadeo Pavese from New York. The goats made more noise, the babies cried louder, the peasants grumbled. Zia Guinetta made up Amadeo’s bed in her daughter Maria’s wedding sheets, the tiny initials embroidered on the hem by the girl’s own hands for the day she would marry. Maria complained about the sheets, but Zia Guinetta had no good sheets of her own, not having been a proper bride with a trousseau of linens. “If things work out,” she told Maria, threatening to slap her, “you can wipe your behind with these sheets. Pay a little now, more will come later.”

  In the piazza, everyone talked about Amadeo Pavese. Everyone was curious to see the nephew from America. Tommaso tried to get attention by saying that he could answer their questions. Who knew Amadeo better than he? But today no one listened to Tommaso. They wanted to see for themselves.

  “Would the nephew come from Naples?” they asked each other. “Through Matera? Potenza? Had his ship landed at Bari? And would Terragrossa, waiting at the crossroads, know who he was?”

  They laughed at Terragrossa the next day when he sat in the café and bragged that he knew Amadeo Pavese the first second he saw him. “Who else got off at that godforsaken place?” they taunted.

  Terragrossa pushed his hand through the air. “If the Pope and his army got off the bus, I would have known Amadeo Pavese. His shoes were made of leather, not cardboard, like yours,” he said, pointing to Silvio Racioppi, “and his hair was black and smooth with pomade. Ah, I said to myself, this is an American.”

  Terragrossa had run up to carry Amadeo’s suitcase. He had insisted, pulled it from his hand. He ran to open the door of the car. He was confused when Amadeo resisted his attentions until he remembered that Americans were democrats. Terragrossa had smiled at his own intelligence.

  “A long journey?” he said.<
br />
  Amadeo nodded. He looked out at the countryside. He thought of the desert, the face of the moon. There were no trees, nothing. The town was set into the hill, bleached white, medieval. He could have been born here, he realized. He could have had another life. Part of the town had fallen into the ravine at the last earthquake, Terragrossa told him.

  “My uncle lives in town?”

  “In a palace,” Terragrossa said, “two stories.” He held up two fingers.

  “You can take me to a hotel in town.”

  “Hotel? What hotel? There’s a widow who rents rooms but you couldn’t stay there. The tax collector, the pig doctor, stays there. There’s lice in the sheets. Your uncle gave me instructions. ‘You bring him straight here,’ he told me. ‘Do you know how many years I’ve waited to see him?’ He had tears in his eyes when he said it.” Amadeo thought he saw a tear in Terragrossa’s eye and offered him his handkerchief. Terragrossa fingered the material and tucked it into his shirt pocket.

  “There’s things you should know,” he told Amadeo.

  “Tell me.”

  Terragrossa lowered his voice and covered his mouth with his hand. “This place is filled with streghe and you should be careful. They poison the bread and the sausage and the wine. They put things in the food, terrible things from their bodies, and they take over your soul. There was a man, Cosimo Carbone, who threw himself off this cliff, right here,” and Terragrossa pulled the car off the road and stopped it at the edge of the cliff so that Amadeo could see where it had happened. He shook his head and looked back over his shoulder at Amadeo. “They’ll go wild for a man like you.”

  He turned the car up the road that led to the village and drove into the center of town. A bright red banner with BEN TORNATI written in gold letters was strung across the piazza. The mayor had commissioned the banner for the soldiers returning triumphant from the war in Abyssinia, even though there had been only one volunteer from Castelfondo. The mayor had been glad to rent the banner to Zio Carmelo for the day. He had added a small fee for hanging it across the piazza. The red-and-gold banner hung in contrast to the black ones that flapped above every doorway. They marked death, and were left there until the wind and the weather tore them down.

  Four musicians waited in the square, not from Matera as Zio Carmelo had promised, but peasants from the village. They played goatskin bagpipes and the children covered their ears. Zio Carmelo got mad when anyone asked about the brass band. “At the wedding,” he told them, annoyed. “You people always want everything right away.”

  When Amadeo got out of the car, the bagpipes played “God Bless America.” Zio Carmelo came up to embrace him. “Look,” he said. “The whole town is here to welcome you. They should be sleeping. They should be in the fields.” Amadeo stood in the noon sun; he tipped his hat and thanked them all. He smiled and they smiled back except for some of the peasants who were disgruntled at missing a day of work for nothing, as far as they could see. Zio Carmelo had promised a spectacle. To save face, Zio Carmelo had to buy drinks in the café for the men and sweets for the women and children.

  So the men drank and the women and children sucked on candies and the bagpipes played “God Bless America” over and over. Amadeo was made to sit in a chair under a makeshift canopy and the mayor made a vague speech of welcome in which he mentioned the glory of Rome and Zio Carmelo brought the residents one by one to meet Amadeo. The most important people of the town came first, the mayor, the doctor, the head of the carabinieri. They shook Amadeo’s hand and kissed his cheeks. Amadeo would not let anyone kiss his hand although the peasants tried. The young girls hid behind their mothers, who offered Amadeo bits of sausage and bread and cakes on small plates. Terragrossa bulged his eyes at Amadeo from behind the women’s backs and pointed to the food and sawed his hand across his throat in warning.

  Magdalena Caparetti was there, leaning against a wall. Her father had brought her. He had not told her about the betrothal, but only that the rich and handsome nephew of Carmelo Laurenzano was coming from America and there would be a celebration in the piazza. She was very glad to end the year of mourning for her brother. She had brushed her hair into a long braid and put on the necklace her mother had left for her. “He’s fat,” she told her father when she saw Amadeo.

  Giacomo Caparetti pinched her arm. “Of course he’s fat. In America, everyone’s fat. They have plenty to eat, not like here, where everybody starves.” Her father thought to introduce her but he didn’t know how, so he went over to Zio Carmelo and pulled at his sleeve. Zio Carmelo turned angrily until he saw who it was. “Giacomo . . . Paesano . . .” He embraced him. “What do you think?” he said. “A fine man, eh?”

  Giacomo Caparetti nodded. “Should I bring Magdalena to meet him?”

  “Of course, why not?”

  “I haven’t told her anything.”

  “So what? There’s always time. Patience gets you through this life. Fate decides the rest. Bring her here. Guinetta will introduce her.”

  Zia Guinetta took Magdalena by the hand and brought her to meet Amadeo, who was sitting under the makeshift canopy drinking the local wine. He smiled at her and shook her hand, and she went back to stand against the wall.

  “Beautiful, no?” Zia Guinetta put her face down to Amadeo’s ear.

  Amadeo laughed. He had been traveling for days and days. His head was light from the wine. His stomach felt strange from the food. “Zia,” he said, “she must be twelve years old.”

  “No, no, much older. It’s the mountain air. Women here always seem young. Look at me,” she said, and she moved her hands down her body suggestively.

  As it got dark, everyone started drifting home. Amadeo was asleep in his chair and Zio Carmelo had to shake him awake. He and Zia Guinetta walked up the street to their house with Amadeo between them. They paused in front of the door, to give Amadeo time to appreciate the varnish and the brass doorknob that he had seen only in photographs.

  Inside, the first thing they showed him, before they even showed him his bed, was the toilet bowl with the porcelain seat. They wanted him to understand, to know that they were a family he could be proud of.

  “But Zio,” Amadeo said. “There’s no water. How can you use it?”

  Zio Carmelo stood in the doorway with his arms folded across his chest. “What does that matter?” he said. “It’s the only one like it in the province. It’s famous.”

  Amadeo agreed it was magnificent.

  In the mornings, Zia Guinetta made Amadeo a bowl of coffee and milk with an egg beaten into it. She put the jam on his bread herself. She cooked pasta for his lunch and turned down the bed for his afternoon nap. They had given him the back room and set up their cots in the kitchen. Amadeo had protested but Zia Guinetta wouldn’t listen. They preferred sleeping in the kitchen, she said.

  “Ha,” Zio Carmelo said to her. “At least now that he’s here we eat decent. No bread and oil . . . not with him here. We eat pasta . . . with meat in the sauce.”

  “Shhh.” She put a finger to her lips and pointed to the back room where Amadeo slept. “You want to look like a peasant in front of your nephew? Go cut holes in the elbows of your sweater then. Just the kind of man he will trust to find him a bride, a cafone who eats bread and oil.”

  “But if we can eat like this now, why don’t we always eat like this?”

  “Because we have to be careful. I save for bad times . . . the next earthquake . . . the next war. Who knows? If it was up to you, we’d have nothing.”

  Zio Carmelo put a hand under her dress. She turned and hit him with the wooden spoon. He pulled her into his lap and bit the tip of her ear. Tommaso called from outside and Zia Guinetta pulled away.

  Zia Guinetta doted on Tommaso. He was, after all, her only son, and if he spent his days in the piazza telling stories, she didn’t mind, but was proud that people listened to him. And they did. Someone was always willing to buy him an espresso or a grappa to have him tell his stories of New York. Everyone who could had alrea
dy left this place, for Rome, for Naples, for New York. Those fated to stay were glad to listen to Tommaso. He told them that the streets were paved with gold, but there was nothing like the simple life of Castelfondo. Hadn’t he returned? And they would nod, all too happy to believe that they were the lucky ones.

  Once in a while Tommaso was hired to go into another village or to Matera to attend a funeral and present himself as the rich nephew of the deceased who had made a fortune in America. Tommaso would wear the suit he had bought in New York and carry the cardboard suitcase. Terragrossa would drive him to his destination and Tommaso would pay him when he returned.

  Zio Carmelo folded his hands in his lap and thought about slipping out to see the widow while the others slept. Zio Carmelo put a kilo of dried pasta, rigatoni, the widow’s favorite, into his sack and made his plan.

  In the afternoon, when he and Zia Guinetta lay side by side in their underclothes and he heard her snores, he pulled on his shirt and pants, picked up his sack, and left the house. Even the flies were asleep. He made his way out of the town, past the shuttered houses, to follow the path to the fields and the stone shed where the widow lived. It was a place the peasants had built to keep their tools in but it had been abandoned when part of a wall fell down. The widow had fixed the wall and moved in. When the tax collector came by once a year, she would take down the wall and hide in the fields. Everyone else left her alone.

  Zio Carmelo came to the stone shed and opened the door. He called out her name. “Mafalda,” he said into the darkness, the taste of it sweet in his mouth. It was cool inside and she straddled him across the big bed she had gotten with the money he had given her. “We’re not animals after all,” Zio Carmelo had said to her, pressing the money into her hand after he had taken her on the dirt floor, in the hay. He gave her money for linen for the bed and set up a goatskin to catch the rainwater so she could wash, but she never washed, and she only slept in the bed when he came to her. After a while, he forgot about her washing, and the smell of her, the memory of the smell of her, made his heart bang in his chest.