When We Were Strangers

by Pamela Schoenewaldt

  “Even the back side is lovely,” Attilio observed. “If the road were longer, you could make a whole bouquet. You could make one in America, you know, with all the flowers you remember.” Yes, I could do that, a year’s flowers in the same bouquet, from the earliest snow crocus to the last yarrow my mother coaxed from her garden.

  Attilio sighed. “My wife used to paint bowls and sell them. She could read and write. Catarina did so much—before the fever took her mind.”

  “And now?”

  “She watches birds. She cleans copper. When I’m home, she’s glad to see me, but if I leave for a morning or a month, it’s the same for her.” His eye fell on dark roses in the dim light. “She still loves beautiful things. She’ll follow every thread of this shawl. Look there!” He pointed south and east.

  The moon was blooming over Mount Vesuvius. Stars twinkled like sparks in a night fire as we ate bread and cheese and I tried not to think of the ocean. When Attilio grew drowsy, I took the reins but held them slack, for Rosso kept a steady pace, finding smooth tracks in the moonlit path. By dawn I would see Naples, a city that was already old, Father Anselmo said, before Rome was even founded.

  A fox streaked across the road, startling Rosso. I sang him one of my mother’s songs of a shepherd girl in the summer, her face all white and fair. “In summer?” Carlo always snorted. “Shepherd girls turn brown as nuts.” I sang another song that Zia had taught me, of a girl whose lover goes off to sea and marries far away. I said my catechism, pictured the houses in Opi and all who lived in each, the names and habits of our sheep, and then it was dawn and time to wake Attilio.

  He fixed blinders on Rosso and took the reins to lead us into Naples. The city was nothing I could have imagined, a maze of narrow streets wedged between stone palaces that cut the sky to ribbons. I saw marble fountains and streets made of stone that Attilio called basalt, sleek and black as a priest’s silk vestments. Even windows towered, not like our square portals a child’s head and shoulders might fill, but tall enough that a standing man could leap from them.

  Rosanna was awake now, peeping through a wall she’d made of pots. “Irma, where are we?”

  “In Naples, where your uncle lives.”

  “All these buildings?”

  “And more,” Attilio said. We saw women with goiters hanging like melons from their necks, hunchbacks, dwarves and legless beggars on tiny carts, their hands bound in leather globes to push themselves along. Bareheaded women with red flounced skirts slipped in and out of gentlemen’s carriages. Street boys snatched fruit from carts. I saw two priests talking while a thief picked their pockets. We saw a church made of stone cut in diamond shapes, enough stone in that one church to build another in Opi. Peddlers sang out their wares. I saw balls of mozzarella bobbing in vats of milky water, boiled pig heads, onions and mountains of artichokes, barrels of olives and wine and carts piled with dimpled lemons as big as two fists.

  In a clogged piazza we stopped behind a cart from which a friar hawked palm-sized replicas of body parts. Thin silver lungs, hearts, intestines, breasts, throats, eyes and kidneys dangled from posts, flickering in the breeze. A limping woman bought a little silver leg. “She’ll give it to the church and perhaps be cured,” Attilio explained.

  “Which one cures malaria?” Rosanna asked.

  “Don’t worry,” said Attilio. “The sea air protects you here.” When she looked at him doubtfully, he stopped by a man with a pot of boiling oil. “Watch him, child,” Attilio said. When the man tossed a handful of dough into the pot, it sank and then bounced up, brown and bubbling. He deftly scooped it in a wicker ladle, shook it dry, scattered it with sugar and tossed it up to Rosanna, flipping Attilio’s coin in the air to catch it in his cap. Rosanna gave out a low, cramped “ha, ha” as she jiggled the hot ball in her hands. “Careful,” Attilio warned, but she was already nibbling.

  Men sold pasta from great pots, serving handfuls to men who threw back their heads and aimed the quivering strands at their throats. A grown man sang for coins, his voice as high as a boy’s, his cheeks as hairless as mine. Attilio glanced at Rosanna and said briefly, “cut,” making a gesture I knew from watching my father castrate rams.

  Rosanna was wolfing her dough, licking each finger. “Why?” I mouthed.

  “If a poor family has a boy with a good voice,” Attilio whispered, “they might give him to the church, sell him really, for a sack full of lire. The boy will be cut in hopes he’ll sing like an angel all his life, bringing glory to God. And his brothers can eat.” A shiver ran through me, like the first cold of winter. “We’re in Naples, Irma, not Opi.”

  We had come to Piazza Montesanto. Chickens swirled around our cart. Wheelbarrows, fine carriages and peddlers’ carts jostled us. In every doorway someone worked: sewing, filling mattresses, carving wood, weaving cane, painting plates, braiding rope, nursing babies or shelling beans. There were Arabs in robes, Africans as black as the basalt they walked on and travelers from blond northern places. Naples was a city of foreigners, Attilio said. Some great palaces were owned by English and most of the nobles spoke French. When Attilio asked a peddler how to get to the fishermen’s quarters, Rosanna gulped the last of her dough.

  “We could go tomorrow,” she ventured. “After we find Irma’s ship.”

  I gathered her slight body close. “Let me comb your hair, Rosanna,” I said, longing to promise that she could stay with me if the uncle didn’t want her. But how could I keep a child in America or even buy her passage there? I combed her hair, smoothed her dress and wiped the damp, thin face.

  We turned down Via Roma, a great street lined with stone palaces, each with a guard and carved doors broad enough for two carriages. Who knew there was such wealth in the world? We entered a warren of narrow dirt streets and turned south to the fishermen’s quarters, where streets dissolved into twisting lanes and boys clustered around our cart, leaping and calling: “Guide, guide, you need a guide!” Attilio picked a high-jumping boy, gave him the uncle’s name and showed a coin the boy would get if he took us straight to the house.

  The boy darted through the crowd, shouting and pushing dogs and children from our path, leaping between puddles and calling, “Come, come,” when Rosso balked. We stopped at a squat whitewashed house between two scrub pines. “Arturo the fisherman lives here,” the boy announced, seized his coin and scampered away. The house was small, but clean curtains fluttered in the window. A handsome, strong-jawed woman sat in the doorway weaving fishnet and did not look up until Attilio stood at her side. His back was to me so I could not hear what he said, but the weaving never stopped. Rosanna peeped from her den.

  At last Attilio came back to the cart. “Come,” he said. “She wants you.” I gave Attilio ten lire so the child would not go empty-handed to her new home.

  Rosanna waded slowly through the pots. “Here, take your sewing,” I said, pressing the cloth into her arms. She let me kiss her but the glittering eyes were fixed on the woman who was standing now in a swirl of fishnet. As Attilio lifted Rosanna from the cart and walked her to the house, she turned once to smile at me, a thin curve up like a crack in a clay plate, and raised a bone-thin arm to wave. Is this how Zia felt, hearing my footsteps fade as I hurried down our street and out of Opi?

  Attilio set Rosanna by the door and offered my lire to the woman, who first refused and then took them. As they spoke, her wide hand cupped Rosanna’s shoulder. The child did not pull away, nor did she look back as the woman drew her into the house.

  “Well?” I demanded as Attilio climbed back in the cart.

  “Arturo’s still at sea. Their only son drowned last month and she’s past childbearing. They’ll be happy to have Rosanna. The woman said she always wanted a daughter. So it went well, no?”

  “It did, yes.” Rosanna wasn’t my blood and I had only known her two days, Carlo would remind me. Yet already I ached for the steady breathing as she made her wild designs, her famished eyes following my hands and the warmth of her body in the littl
e time that I’d held her.

  “Well, now let’s find your ship,” said Attilio. “The port’s this way.” I wished it were further, but the packed dirt street quickly became a paved road leading to a harbor thick with shabby fishing boats, elegant pleasure boats and iron-clad ships sprouting smokestacks between high masts. They burned coal to make steam, Attilio explained, and used sails on breezy days. Beyond the ships, the Bay of Naples stretched like a bolt of blue cloth stitched to the sky, beautiful, but the water seemed hardly strong enough to bear the crafts that skimmed so carelessly across it.

  “How far is America?” I asked.

  Attilio rubbed his long nose. “Two or three weeks.”

  Three weeks floating on water! In hard winters our world turned white for weeks, but at least we were on land in a house with our own people around us.

  Attilio worked his cart through the crowds to a patch of shade by a water pump. “You stay here with Rosso and the cart. I’ll find you a good ship.” He was gone two hours by the church bells. To pass the time I brushed Rosso, cleaned out the cart and put my documents in order. I watched passing waves of merchants, porters, fishermen, fishmongers, and gaudy women calling to sailors.

  At last Attilio returned. “The Servia is bound for New York in a few days. The stevedores say she’s sound and there’s a lodging house where you’ll stay while they finish repairs.”

  “Repairs?”

  “All ships need repairs. Look,” he waved his hand at the port where nearly every ship swarmed with sailors, cleaning, pounding and hanging off ropes like long-legged bats. “But you must get your ticket now to be sure of your place.”

  “Yes.” I couldn’t move.

  Attilio smoothed Rosso’s flank. “You have to see the ship’s doctor first.”

  “Why? I’m not sick.”

  “I know, but one of the ships last season carried a family with typhus. It swept through steerage and a week out of Naples reached the crew. They were shorthanded across the Atlantic.” Attilio spoke quickly, stroking Rosso’s neck. “So the Servia’s captain is having the steerage scrubbed and he hired a doctor to check the passengers. You see, he’s prudent. You’ll be safe.”

  “Did many die in steerage?”

  Attilio shrugged. I saw wrapped bodies swallowed in waves. “They could have been weak already,” he said, suddenly as cool and brisk as a stranger stopped for directions. What did I expect? He was just my passage to Naples and I was just a shawl maker for his imbecile wife.

  Salt air burned my throat. “How much is the ticket?”

  “Twenty lire, a good price. And don’t worry about typhus, Irma,” he said earnestly, the old Attilio again.

  “We never had it in Opi,” I admitted.

  “So there’s nothing to worry about.” Attilio studied the cart. “The pots are in order and Rosso’s brushed. Irma, you didn’t have to do this.”

  “It was nothing.” I would have gladly cleaned the cart again to put off the wrench of leaving. I nearly begged him not to leave, to take me with him back to Opi or even on his travels, endlessly winding through Italy, but not leaving, not cast off and alone. I tried to speak and Attilio too opened his mouth, but then his brusque busyness returned. He helped me into the cart, loosened and then tightened Rosso’s harness and silently eased us through the crowd to the ragged ticket line, where travelers bunched together, shepherding trunks, crates or simple bags like mine.

  “There’s the shawl,” I said, pointing to it folded on his seat, the roses framed on top.

  Attilio touched each flower gently. “It’s beautiful. Catarina will be so pleased.” He grasped my arm. “Irma, remember, don’t pay more than twenty lire for the ticket.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Remember to buy enough food for the passage, things that keep. You have money?”

  “Yes.”

  “And tell the officers that Carlo will meet you. Say he sent you to come marry his friend. If they ask. They might not.”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t worry about the doctor. You’re healthy, you’ll be fine. In America you’ll sew for rich women just like your Zia said.”

  “Are you putting that cart on a ship or not?” a man behind us snapped. “If not, get out of the way.”

  I jumped down with my bag. A sea breeze puffed across us. “Thank you, Attilio,” I whispered. My eyes burned. Attilio kissed his hand and gently pressed it to my cheek. “God keep you, Irma, and take you safe to America.”

  “Out of the way, peddler!” someone shouted.

  Attilio sat up and clicked Rosso’s reins. A water cart pushed behind him, then a fisherman hauling nets and a cart piled high with wine barrels.

  “Get in line, signorina, if you want the Servia,” said a woman with a child gripping her skirt. The woman’s almond eyes studied me, searching the crowd. “Was that your father?” I shook my head. “Husband? Brother?”

  “He’s a—peddler who gave me a ride to Naples.”

  “Oh. Well anyway, look after your bags. This port is full of thieves.”

  I pulled my bags behind hers, watching the gray-blue patch of Attilio’s shirt disappear in the crowd.

  “Mamma, why is the lady crying?” the child whispered.

  “Leave her alone, Gabriella.”

  Chapter Three

  On the Servia

  The ticket line snaked languidly across the piazza, bunching and stretching over basalt paving hot under our feet.

  “My name is Teresa,” the woman announced.

  “Mine is Irma,” I said. Why give a family name if nobody knows your family? Travelers called to each other up and down the line, words skimming overhead.

  “Greek,” said Teresa pointing. “And Albanian over there. Those two women are from Serbia.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I live—lived near the port in Bari. Merchants came to trade from everywhere. Weren’t there foreigners in your town?”

  “Not often.” Once a drunken Swiss mercenary wandered up to Opi, slept awhile in our piazza and then left in heavy fog. Days later, shepherds found him in a crevasse, half-eaten by wolves.

  “My father’s working in America,” Gabriella announced. “He’ll have his own store soon. Isn’t that right, Mamma?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he’s waiting for us, waiting for us, waiting every day,” chirped Gabriella, nudging a pebble around a paving block. From the way Teresa plucked at her faded skirt, I suspected that not all husbands waited. In the next days, I learned my suspicions were true. Some men were bewitched by American shopgirls with soft hands, bright hair and no dust of the old country. Some women found nobody waiting in New York. One Sicilian retrieved his wife at the port, hauled her like baggage to a rented room, stayed long enough to get her with child and then slipped west on a train.

  Yet wives stood in lines like this. “I had to leave Bari,” Teresa told me. “Everyone knew I was married. They whispered if I spoke one word to another man. Gabriella was growing up half orphan. Enzo had taken my dowry money to America so Papà sold a field to buy our passage. I wrote Enzo that we’re coming and he telegraphed back, but he’s been gone five years. Perhaps he’s changed.” She glanced at her daughter. “Stand up straight, Gabriella. Don’t kick rocks like a country girl.”

  Men behind us boasted of the fortunes they would make in America and how they’d return to Calabria, buy the land their fathers had toiled for day wages, buy vineyards, pay their sisters’ dowries and spend their long afternoons like gentlemen in the fine cafés where once they were not welcome. A large family finished its dealings and the line lurched forward. When sea breezes caught a creaking sign that said TICKETS TO AMERICA, talk fell away as if the same thought ran through us all: leaving was real enough, but what of our airy dreams? Suppose we who were poor and whose fathers and grandfathers were poor did not become rich in America? Then where could we go?

  “Cheer up!” barked a young man with a small pack and a wine jug. “It’s not like yo
u’re sheep to slaughter. We’re here for adventure, me and my fine companion.” He lofted his jug in the air and waves of talk lapped up and down the line again.

  “How are you paying?” a thin man asked another who looked like a blacksmith, with his thick shoulders and burn-scarred hands.

  “Italian lire. And you?”

  “Bavarian marks,” the thin man answered proudly.

  “Make sure they don’t cheat you.”

  “You think I’m a fool?”

  I learned that I would need to change my French gold for lire and check the exchange rate on lists they were obliged to show me. I felt a whiff of pride. Who in Opi had ever used an exchange list?

  As we waited, hawkers worked the line. “Sail the Regina. No wormy potatoes. Good meat, plenty of washrooms and fresh water. Four lire less than the Servia and the captain’s sober.”

  “Mountjoy, fresh launched in England, steady as an oak table,” cried another. “The crew’s steady too. Not like some.”

  “Take the Silver Star,” urged a limping boy thin as a rat tail who galloped by our line. “Big engines. You’ll be in America sooner. Hot meals twice a day. Two parlors in steerage.”

  Prickling doubt shot through me. Was Attilio bribed to pick the Servia? No, surely I knew him that well. But what did he know of ships? He could have been lied to. The hawkers served the captains, but one ship might truly be better than others. And which was better, a shorter voyage, a stronger ship, or a sober captain? My mind lurched like a drunkard’s. “Teresa, should we ask about the other ships?”

  “Ask who? We’re just cargo, whatever they say.”

  “But aren’t we safer on the Mountjoy if it’s new or the Silver Star if it’s faster?”

  “Signorina,” snapped the thin man, “in a storm we’re all in God’s hands. You’re in the Servia line now.” This was true. For any other ship, I’d have to wait longer in the beating sun. At least here I knew Teresa.

  I shuffled forward, pushing my bag until I reached the head of the line, or one of the two snakeheads, for Teresa was waved to one thin clerk and I was sent to a huge man whose eyes glinted from the damp moon of his face. “Well?” he demanded, snapping at a boy who darted forward with a cloth the man used to dry the ruffled folds of his neck and chin. “What are you staring at, girl? Never saw a handkerchief before? Show me your documents.”