When Giovanna reached puberty at fourteen, they were no longer allowed to spend hours alone together. Because they were cousins and neighbors, they saw each other many times a day, but their unchaperoned adventures came to an end.
As Giovanna made her way down the aisle, she glimpsed the faces witnessing her journey to the altar. Each face held a story about her life with Nunzio. There was Paolo Caruso, who had saved her leg. Early one spring, she and Nunzio had climbed the narrow steps out of the Chianalea, raced through the plateau of San Giorgio, and picked their way through the lemon groves and then headed to the farms to trade fish for goat cheese and milk. Giovanna fell over a stone wall, cutting her long, thin leg to the bone. Paolo was the first to hear Nunzio’s cries and carried Giovanna home on his back. Nunzio trotted alongside, bravely singing Giovanna’s favorite songs while holding his shirt around her leg to stop the bleeding.
Giovanna smiled at her older cousin Pasquale. Many times, this still formidable man had served as their protector. As children on the beach, Giovanna and Nunzio would search among the water-polished stones and fragments of terra-cotta for the ancient Greek and Roman coins that frequently washed ashore, particularly after a storm. They would use these thousand-year-old coins, with bits and pieces of heroic images still visible, for a pitching game played in the narrow alleys of the Chianalea. Once, older boys had cheated them out of their prize coins during a game. All burly Pasquale had done was knock on the culprits’ doors, and the treasure was quickly returned to its rightful owners.
Zia Antoinette’s cracked face brightened when Giovanna passed. Zia Antoinette had been the first of many to catch Nunzio and Giovanna kissing. She’d whacked Nunzio so hard with her broom that Nunzio would later joke that kissing Giovanna made his head spin and culo hurt.
Giovanna passed the row holding Nunzio’s sister, Fortunata, her pregnant belly, and six children. The older boys, Orazio and Raffaele, were already fishermen. They stood tall next to their lean, muscular father, Giuseppe Arena. Fortunata’s youngest boy, Antonio, waved to Giovanna from the pew.
Giovanna was also conscious of who was missing. In her mind she placed her brother, Lorenzo, who lived in America, and Nunzio’s father, who had succumbed to cholera a decade ago, at the end of the aisle with her mother, Concetta, and Nunzio’s mother, Zia Marianna.
Tears streamed down Concetta’s and Marianna’s faces and over their delicate features. Giovanna always thought the sisters-in-law looked like matching porcelain dolls: one with dark chestnut hair like her own, the other with red hair like Nunzio’s. They were close, and even now they did not separate to sit on opposite sides of the aisle, as was customary for in-laws, but stood together holding hands.
Nunzio and Giovanna had grown up listening to their mothers talk and gossip while they wove linens and embroidered late into the night. They marveled at how quickly their mothers turned the simple string into strong and beautiful cloths. When Giovanna and Nunzio were twelve, they heard Concetta and Marianna planning to sew together two tablecloths they had made to create one large enough to cover the Christmas dinner table. On the night before their mothers were to stitch the two cloths together, Giovanna and Nunzio each took the string from their mothers’ sewing baskets, and out of sight in the moonlight reflected by the sea, they pulled the string slowly through their mouths. When Concetta and Marianna knotted the stitches that wove the two halves together, they did not know they were accomplices in Nunzio and Giovanna’s first act of commitment. And only the week before the wedding, Concetta still did not know why Giovanna was so insistent that the stained and tattered Christmas tablecloth be part of her trousseau.
Nunzio took Giovanna’s hand after she had kissed her father and he’d shuffled into the pew beside his wife and sister. The couple’s eyes locked. Nunzio said he saw the sea in Giovanna’s eyes. He often told her that when he was out fishing he imagined himself sailing on her gaze, and that like the sea, the color of her eyes changed before a storm. Nunzio could tell from the color of the water what the day’s catch would be, and he could tell from the color of Giovanna’s eyes whether she was tranquil or had dark undertows. For her part, Giovanna felt that Nunzio’s eyes were windows. When life held her captive, she could escape through those windows. She could see farther and more clearly through Nunzio’s eyes.
Unlocking their gaze, they turned toward the priest and faced the altar of Santa Maria di Porto Salvo. The church was humble on the outside, simple stone and stucco. But inside, the frescoes that covered every wall turned the village church into a cathedral of dramatic proportions for the fishermen. Scilla’s history surrounded the parishioners and was interrupted only by windows onto its subject; and if the light was right, the view outside became one with the paintings. The tale of the creation of the frescoes had become part of village lore. It was a story built on stories:
One hundred years ago, an itinerant painter wandered into Scilla looking for work. The church had just been built, and the whitewashed walls mocked the parishioners with their poverty. The fishermen invited the painter to a town meeting in the church, where young and old regaled the painter with tales of Scilla. As they spoke, he sketched their faces and gestures in charcoal on paper they normally used to wrap the fish.
The oldest person in the village, Nunzio’s great-great-grandfather Giacomo, told the oldest tale. “Scilla,” he began with great flourish, “was the town Scyllae from Greek myth.” He made it known to the painter that they were all good Christians, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t something to the legend—otherwise, there was no explanation for why the waters between Scilla and Sicily were so treacherous.
The painter apologized. “Signore, I am an illiterate man who only knows the stories of the Bible.”
Giacomo smiled. He had hoped the artist did not know of Scylla. He relished the opportunity to recount the chilling legend and to watch his friends’ and family’s faces as they reacted to different parts of the story.
Giacomo eased back into his chair and moved a candle closer to his face. When he described in detail the beautiful nymph Scylla, who was loved by the god Glaucus, he studied the men’s expressions. Giacomo knew they would miss the next part about Glaucus asking Circe for a love potion because their minds had not yet finished caressing Scylla’s lithe and silken body. When he told of Circe’s jealous rage, as she herself was in love with Glaucus, Giacomo saw the disapproval of the women. They sucked in their cheeks and shook their heads at such selfish emotion. The children’s eyes widened when he told of how Circe had turned Scylla into a hideous creature with twelve feet and six heads. “Scylla was cursed to remain on a solitary rock and devour sailors as they attempted to navigate the Straits of Messina,” Giacomo recounted dramatically. The children hugged their legs and drew them into their chests.
“Ever since,” Giacomo directed his closing comments to the painter, “should a sailor survive Scylla’s wrath, he would soon encounter the deadly whirlpool Cariddi, which lay in wait across the strait on the Sicilian side. This is why we say, ‘Tra una pietra ed un posto duro’—‘Between a rock and a hard place.’” Giacomo punctuated the ending by lifting his wine glass to Scylla and Cariddi. The artist captured the gesture perfectly, immortalizing Nunzio’s great-great-grandfather Giacomo as Saint Paul.
Another villager had been waiting for her moment. She had listened attentively to her father’s stories of ancient Scyllae, and when he died at sea she had become the unofficial town historian. Rocking her sleeping child in her lap, she began with great drama: “The blood of one hundred nations courses through our veins.” She pointed into the night as if the painter could see the view beyond her hand. “There,” she announced, “Sicilia. You can practically touch it. Every king and warrior believed they had to control Scyllae to control Sicilia. Scyllae was conquered so many times that the villagers lost track of who ruled the town—and were often reminded by the tip of a sword.”
After many more stories, most of which were true, the oldest fisherman, Agostino Bellantoni, clea
red his throat to gain the floor. His feet shuffled beneath him, and he hung his head humbly. “Signore Artista”—his voice was at first tentative but gained conviction as he continued—“we enjoy these old stories. But Scilla is what it has always been, a village of simple fishermen and goat herders. This may not be exciting to an artist, but Scilla is for us the sea, Scilla is the cliffs, the trees of lemons, and now, our church.”
The most beautiful painting was behind the altar. Giovanna had studied it a thousand times, but today she felt herself standing in the boat with the disciples hauling in nets full of fish. The disciples looked at her with the familiar faces of the Costa, Pontillo, and Arena families of Scilla. Saint Paul, holding high a crucifix, gave her a warm smile from underneath his intense expression. Gazing from the boat, she saw Scilla’s mythical cliffs, and beyond the cliffs was heaven.
Giovanna was a devout Catholic. Nunzio occasionally accompanied her to church, but she knew Nunzio treated his faith merely like an important tradition. She had decided his scientific mind wouldn’t allow him devotion, but she forgave him because she loved the way his mind worked. She marveled at how he would use numbers to solve problems and how he could look at a building, a boat, or anything in three dimensions and know intuitively how it was built.
Nunzio was fixing fishing boats by the time he was eight. When he was twelve he was improving on them. From May through August, the fishermen of Scilla caught the best pescespada—swordfish—in the entire world. They had built a special boat and developed a unique system for spearing the elusive giants. A pole jutted fifteen feet into the air from the center of the boat. A man acting as lookout balanced at the top of this pole, his feet perched on two small blocks. Beneath him, four standing men rowed the boat, and a sixth man stood at the prow, spear and rope at the ready to launch into the speeding pescespada.
When Vittorio Macri’s boat was not moving quickly enough, it was Nunzio who figured out that the boat’s balance was off because of a misplaced center pole. And when he was only a teenager, Nunzio worked with the forger to create a better spearhead, which locked into the fish when the rope was pulled back.
Nunzio enjoyed his elevated position in the village. He was proud that his father’s friends came to him for assistance; it only made him love Scilla more. It was decided that Nunzio had a gift and should become an engineer. It meant leaving and going north to study. Felipe, the sometime village schoolmaster, warned him that he would be treated badly. He said they would call Nunzio a peasant and laugh at his clothes and dialect. But the prospect of losing status, of being mocked, all paled next to the thought of leaving Giovanna. In the end, Giovanna made the decision easy. She said that she would not marry him unless he went to school and came back an engineer.
It took Nunzio more than five years to finish his studies. Being from the Mezzogiorno, he was forced to work for less pay than his fellow students in his apprenticeship, and the professors often held Nunzio’s work to a higher standard, forcing him to repeat lessons. While these injustices kept him away from Scilla longer than planned, Nunzio reminded himself that it was a miracle he was studying at all. He would not spend his life, as every man of his family had before him, taking fish from the sea. Giovanna cursed their decision; life was intolerable without him. But her chest swelled with pride when someone asked if she had heard from “Maestro” Nunzio, a title reserved for respected professionals.
To make the time pass while Nunzio was away, Giovanna worked day and night. In the early mornings she cleaned her family’s narrow three-story house, starting from the top floor, with its terrace that overlooked both sea and village, and moving on to the second floor, which opened to the alley behind the house, and ending with the bottom floor, which faced the sea and the family’s fishing boat. After cleaning, she would go to her parents’ fish store to ready it for the day’s catch. She would return to the store in the afternoon after the midday meal to sell fish to the people of the Marina Grande and San Giorgio. When this routine left her with too much time in the evenings, she started trailing Signora Scalici, the town’s midwife.
Giovanna had long been the person to whom villagers in the Chianalea brought sick animals. When Giovanna held a hurt animal, it would calm down, and if she couldn’t help the animal, she would hold it until it died to ease the creature’s passing. She was equally as nurturing with plants. On the family’s terrace, a garden flourished in pots, and this became Giovanna’s laboratory. She devised poultices for drawing out infections and healing wounds using a variety of herbs.
So when people saw Giovanna with the midwife, they acted like they had known all along that one day Giovanna would deliver the babies of the village. While it was a natural progression, some of the women were not happy at first. They thought Giovanna had airs. They disapproved of how she took charge in the fish store and had no problem scolding men about the quality or price of their fish. And the women were puzzled and suspicious of her decision to allow Nunzio to go north without marrying her.
As each year went by, more and more of Giovanna’s time was spent helping Signora Scalici deliver Scilla’s next generation. After their initial mistrust, the mothers liked having Giovanna around. Signora Scalici was kind, but all business. Giovanna could help take the minds of birthing mothers elsewhere when the pain was unbearable and focus them when the time was right.
Early in her training, she had helped deliver her childhood friend Francesca Marasculo’s third baby. It had been a fast delivery. The women had cleaned up and left. Giovanna was to forever remain haunted by the screams of Francesca’s husband echoing off the stone houses as he ran through the Chianalea calling for help. He had woken up in a pool of Francesca’s blood, as she lay hemorrhaging and unconscious beside him. By the time the midwives reached her, Francesca was dead, her two young children clinging to her limp hands.
Francesca’s death became a scar that knit itself on Giovanna’s soul. From that time forward, after birthing a baby, Giovanna spent the night with the mother, cooking, cleaning, and keeping a watchful eye. For that, too, she had earned the respect and trust of the women of the village.
The wedding guests had returned to their pews following communion. The church was silent. Nunzio and Giovanna knelt before the altar. The priest nodded, and Nunzio squeezed Giovanna’s hand as they got up. Giovanna’s mind stopped wandering. The joyful weight of the moment nearly made her fall.
“Do you, Nunzio Pontillo, take Giovanna Costa to be your wife?” Nunzio was at sea as he looked into Giovanna’s blue eyes and said yes from their depths.
“Do you, Giovanna Costa, take Nunzio Pontillo to be your husband?” Giovanna felt complete when she said, “Yes.” Life was as it should be and how it was meant to be.
Sì. Finalmente.
TWO
Nunzio and Giovanna were born not long after the unification of Italy. As a child, Nunzio would climb on his uncle’s donkey, with a stick for a bayonet, and pretend he was Italian revolution general Giuseppe Garibaldi, riding into town to exile the foreign rulers. Giovanna would cheer and wave a red cloth. When their elders said the word “Risorgimento!” Giovanna and Nunzio could hear the defiance, hope, and passion in every syllable. Now, years later, it was different. It was as if the adults were saying an ex-lover’s name. There was still an attraction in their voices, but you could hear the betrayal.
One of the changes since unification was that sometimes Giovanna and Nunzio went to school. School was the rented room of a teacher sent from the north. The professore never lasted long, but when there was a professore in town, Giovanna’s and Nunzio’s parents insisted that they go. The town was supposed to build a school with money from the north, but the school was never built, and the money disappeared. Despite fleeing teachers and nonexistent classrooms, somehow Giovanna and Nunzio learned to read and write, and this alone distinguished them from most of the other children. But the majority of their education came from proverbs, legends, and conversation they overheard in the town square—the chiazza.
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The chiazza was Scilla’s heartbeat. It was on the third level in Scilla and overlooked the castle, the neighborhood of the Chianalea, and the beach. Its western end jutted out over the sea. Adjacent to the square were rows of pino marino trees and flowering bushes; in June the air was scented with honeysuckle. In good weather, which was nearly every day, people would gather there in the evenings, and on Sundays. Children were scooted away to play so that the adults could have a glass of wine and gossip. Giovanna and Nunzio had a spot under a bougainvillea bush where they could listen undetected while they shelled and sucked on pistachios.
They loved when the talk turned from the village to the news of the world. Town gossip was boring. Generally it was a topic the men all agreed upon, and it made for uneventful conversation. “The fish are running good,” and they would all nod and grumble in agreement, “Sì, the fish are running good.” But when the subject was the politics of Italy, that was an entirely different matter. Arguments and curses flew fast and furious, fists were raised in dramatic thrusts, and unlikely alliances were both made and broken.
When Giovanna and Nunzio heard that a northern newspaper had made its way into town, it didn’t matter how many chores they had, they would make sure they were under the bougainvillea bush with an extra stash of pistachios and a flask of wine. On these nights, Vittorio, one of the few contadini in the village who could read, would scrub his hands and muscular forearms with lemons to rid them of the fish smell and put on his best shirt. He would stride to the chiazza and sit in the prime spot that had been reserved for him. Within minutes, scores of men would gather around Vittorio with the women on the perimeter pretending to be absorbed in their sewing.
Vittorio would read aloud from what was usually a Roman newspaper, although sometimes a paper made it all the way from Milano. Their local newspaper was published in Reggio and written in their dialect, but it didn’t have the same incendiary content of the northern papers. The northern papers were written in Italian, which was only vaguely similar to the dialect spoken in Scilla. Also, the paper was invariably three months old, and along the way pages had been torn out to blow a nose or to wrap the day’s catch. So Vittorio would struggle to read what was left of the words that most closely resembled his own language.
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