The Sicilian Woman's Daughter

by Linda Lo Scuro

  She finally stops, slurps her tea, then takes a tart. I can’t get my head round how Zia can help, if not just to offer consolation.

  “Well, he’s obviously telling his wife he’s on business when he’s with you,” I say.

  Giusy looks at me, without blinking, as if I were an alien. With suspicion. It must be my accent. Zia can hardly tell cockney from toff-speak. But this young woman is intimidated by the way I speak. I try to give my words a slangy edge: “You see, he’s got the best of both worlds. His wife must know he’s cheating on her but she puts up with it like you do.”

  She looks at Zia, who says: “He big bastardo.”

  It is exactly what I meant. No one can sum up things like Zia.

  “What you want from me?” Zia asks bluntly.

  “I want him to leave his wife, and I want a baby boy.”

  “Alberto rich man. He alright. He have two women, he want lot baby. Wife no leave Alberto if he no pay. Goodbye wife is goodbye money.” Zia tells her straight. At times, people couldn’t make out what Zia is on about. But I understand her alright.

  “He said he can’t live without me. He’ll never ever leave me,” Giusy says.

  “Ah, he get that from love song.”

  “No, Zia, I mean it, I can tell. He loves me.”

  “I try help you. I give you two potion. One love potion, one baby potion.”

  “Thanks, Zia.”

  Jesus, how can grown-up women believe in that mumbo jumbo?

  “Love potion mean he no leave you. Baby potion mean you make baby boy.”

  “Does that mean he’ll leave his wife?”

  “If he pay lot money she leave. If he pay little money she stay,” Zia says, “I make sure you make boy. No worry. I get potion.”

  Zia takes the key she has tied around her wrist and unlocks the pantry door. A crucifix has been nailed above the lintel depicting Jesus dying. Giusy and I watch. The door is in the same room we are in. Zia lives in one of these big Edwardian houses with all sorts of nooks and crannies and, of course, a walk-in pantry: it is big, dark, and spooky. No windows. As black as hell. And smells like it, too. Does she have garlic in there? Or what? She pulls a string attached to the ceiling to switch on the bare light bulb dangling at the end of a wire. Zia walks down three steps. From where I am sitting, I can see diagonally into the pantry. I can’t figure out where it ends. But I get a glimpse of jars of all sizes with handwritten labels on them, mixed up with bottles of home-made wine and bottles of olive oil, pickled aubergines, peppers, and olives; home-made tomato sauce, and little boxes going down as far as I can see. Noticing, over her shoulder, that I am looking, she pulls the door to, behind her, as she goes in.

  I smile at Giusy and say, “It’ll be alright.” The same sentence I often repeated to my pupils when they came crying to me. You need to give people hope, at times. Is that what Zia is doing?

  Giusy is well turned out. Her make up is heavy and immaculate, her dark hair is long and styled. She has all sorts of gold jewellery hanging from her. A necklace with a big cross dangling down into her cleavage, which is well in view. Her bangles jingle as she reaches for her cup.

  “Life’s difficult, isn’t it?” I say.

  “Yeah, yeah,” she answers.

  “What’s your job?” I ask.

  “Hairstylist. I got a salon. It’s called Giusy’s. Alberto gave me some money to do it up. Looks nice now. Business is picking up.”

  Zia appears with two little bottles in her hand. She heads over to a drawer in her sideboard, takes out some labels and a pen. She writes ‘Alberto’ on one, and ‘boy’ on the other. “You put little in drink before go to bed. When finish potion you come back, I give you more.”

  Giusy seems quite happy, relieved even, stretches out a blue finger-nailed hand and pops the bottles into her handbag. She offers to pay Zia.

  Zia says: “You no pay, potion free.”

  Giusy says her goodbyes and leaves saying “See you next week, Zia.”

  I tell Zia that Alberto has paid to do up her salon. Zia knows that already. She tells me that his wife, Olga, also of Sicilian extraction, knows about Giusy. She’s decided to stay with Alberto, unless he pays up. She is a lady of leisure and isn’t going to give up her lifestyle. Though she does a bit of part-time work, selling cosmetics or something, to keep herself from getting bored.

  “But she can’t be happy,” I say.

  “Nobody happy all time,” Zia says, “but she happy when she spend his money.”

  I ask Zia how she knows all this.

  “I give Olga potion. She visit me. She no ask potion for boy. She want money potion. She wife, she no need keep husband happy. Good if he happy. Good if he not happy.”

  We laugh.

  “Well, at least you give the potions away for free,” I say.

  “If work, they bring present, if no work, they no ask for more.”

  “What do you put in those bottles?”

  “Part cod-liver oil, part olive oil, part vinegar. If it taste bad, they think it work.”

  “Yes, but you gave her two bottles.”

  “In other one, I add salt.”

  “Tomorrow you go speak to big bastardo Alberto. We help Giusy. Women help women. My Tony he have woman when he live. You go speak to Alberto, you young. He listen to you,” Zia says.

  “I can’t just go and tell him what to do. It’s none of my business.”

  “It you business. He need help, Giusy need help, Olga need help. You go. You ask what he want do with life. You know, like you naughty children at school. You sort out.”

  We let the subject drop. Zia holds up the mint-green bed sock and says, “This second bed sock. The first one too long. I give to you husband. He have big feet.”

  That’s all we need to give our love life a coup de grâce.

  “You want white or green pompom?”

  “Erm, white, please?” If they are going to look ridiculous, we might as well go the whole hog.

  “You good taste. When I finish, I make bed sock for you. I have pink wool.”

  Zia’s stream of consciousness leads her from big feet to my wedding.

  “I no come to you wedding.”

  “Yes, I know, Zia. You were invited, but it was unfortunate you were in Sicily.”

  “But you no tell me in time. You tell me day before I leave with Susi.”

  “It was all sudden.”

  “But you no pregnant?”

  “No, I wasn’t pregnant, but I thought I was,” I lie. “Then after we were married I had my period.”

  “Minghia! So you futtiri before you marry? Pope not happy.” She is shocked and stops knitting.

  And she didn’t know about my university days. With neither religion nor family as shackles, I was free to do whatever I wanted. It was great.

  “Well, yes. But just once. We got carried away. It was a mistake.”

  “If only one time, God forgive you mistake,” she generously concludes, and starts knitting once more.

  We are still sipping tea, when the door bell rings again. It is Angelina and Provvi again. I knew Angelina as a child. My mother was a friend of her mother’s. I don’t know what kind of friendship they had because they always seemed to be squabbling. We met at weddings, christenings, or at house gatherings. It was at a christening party that my mother and Angelina’s mother grabbed each other by the hair in the ladies’ toilets.

  Angelina and I weren’t especially friendly. She and her two girl cousins, little barrels, short and fat like her. All three were constantly singing Elvis songs, and sometimes took their transistor out into the street and danced to his music there. I remember passers-by joining in. Angelina had definitely lost that happy-go-lucky stance now. I had never had it. I was a wreck. Frightened. Always carefully treading on eggshells. I couldn’t be happy like them. They saw me as a misery guts, for sure. Don’t think I was much fun at the time. Too busy getting whipped; it made me morose. I felt Angelina didn’t like me, and that stayed with me.
She consciously avoids me when she walks into Zia’s living room. Or maybe she is simply absorbed in her thoughts. We’ve never fallen out, or anything like that.

  Provvi is in a state. She wears sunglasses. One side of her face is swollen, her cheek is somewhere between reddish and purplish. Her lip has, what looks like, a cut in it. Of course, I realise, there and then, that her husband must be the cause of this. Zia says: “What happen? He big bastardo.” Provvi takes her sunglasses off. It looks awfully painful. She pulls her sleeves up to show us the aubergine-like bruises on her arms. “What’s worse is that he insults me and shouts in front of the kids. Says I make him do it because I don’t do what he says. Says he’ll break my spirit, ruin my face, break my nose, break my teeth... That I’ll need plastic surgery by the time he finishes with me...”

  On hearing that, I think that she has just put into words what my mother tried to do to me: break my spirit. Knock the fun-loving girl out of me. And she succeeded. She made me melancholic. Downcast. It was only when I went to university that my real personality surfaced. Vivacious and always up for a laugh. Though resentment and anger have never left me. Even as an adult I can’t get my mother’s violence towards me out of my system. It makes me particularly sensitive to the plight of mistreated women and children. I had always sided with them and wanted to help. That’s the way I channel my anger. If my mother were alive today, I would revenge what she did to me. The other abuser was Peppina, and I haven’t given up on the idea of getting my own back for all the suffering she caused me.

  Zia is fuming and shouts “Big, big bastardo. We show him. We make Giulio pay.”

  Giulio, Provvi’s husband, lashes out at Provvi for no valid reason. Provvi says he picks on things like dinner isn’t ready, or because he trips over the children’s toys, which he says Provvi hasn’t put away because she’s untidy. “Anything is reason enough to beat me.”

  Angelina listens, looking down at her shoes, and mutters insults, curses, and threats directed at Giulio. Angelina says she’s spoken to Giulio’s mother to see if she’d intervene in Provvi’s favour. Giulio’s mother sent Angelina packing. She defended her son saying that Provvi was useless in the home and made her son angry. He wasn’t a bad man, he needed to be treated in the right way, and Provvi couldn’t do it.

  “She needs to be strong and take some brave decisions like I did with my husband. It’s the only way,” Angelina says, as she keeps nodding, “the only way,” she repeats in a soaring sour tone. Then Angelina turns around and addresses her daughter: “When he threw you down the stairs and broke your leg, you could have landed on your head instead and been dead by now. Think of your children.”

  I gasp. Jesus. This man is a beast. It has to stop. Provvi can’t go on living like this. But, what were they thinking of doing? Of course, he had to be made to see sense. That’s the reason why Angelina and Provvi have come to see Zia. To get help. To sort it out. Zia gets up, goes over to the sideboard, takes a Bible out of the drawer. “You swear on Bible you no speak about what we say today. This secret. Only me and you three know. You put hand on Bible, you swear you no say a thing.”

  “Zia, look, it’s no use me swearing on the Bible, you know I’m not religious.” Angelina and Provvi look at me as if I’m the devil incarnate.

  “She no believe,” Zia says to them. “She strange, she not normal woman like me and you.” Zia looks me up and down and says: “Eternal God have mercy for you. I pray for you. You mother no like what she see from heaven. You promise.”

  “Yes, I promise I won’t say anything about this,” I say.

  Angelina and Provvi swear on the Bible according to Zia’s wishes. “You forget you ever come to my house,” Zia says to the two women. Now looking at Provvi, Zia says: “You take Giulio to Sicilia You find reason. When arrive in The Village, Peppina, my sister, she give him education he deserve. She look after him. I come to Sicilia, I help if I no ill. I stay with Peppina.”

  Aunt Peppina lives alone now. My grandmother died in 1975. I remember because it was a year before my own mother’s death. My grandmother had never left the village in her life. Not even to have her children; her three daughters: Zia, my mother, and Peppina were born at home, in that order.

  Angelina and Provvi discuss how they can persuade Giulio to go to The Village to get some education. Zia suggests inventing a seriously ill relative, a family celebration... anything that gets him there.

  Zia asks: “Provvi you agree we take Giulio to Sicilia?”

  “What will you do?” asks Provvi.

  “Depend on him. We talk to him. If he no stop, we teach lesson. We take care. You no worry.”

  Tears come to Provvi’s eyes. She knows Zia will stop at nothing. And she also knows that Giulio is obstinate. Angelina sighs. She is getting irritated at Provvi’s lack of resolve. “Look, do you want to carry on like this, or what?”

  “You silly girl,” Zia says to Provvi. “If social service people know he hit you in front of children, they put you and children in state refuge. You want that? If you husband no go to jail, he come to kill you. Think about. Come back Monday, quiet day. We talk again.”

  We all go down the corridor towards Zia’s front door. Angelina and Provvi leave. I am about to follow them. Zia shouts out to me: “Maria, I forget, I forget the lasagne!” She hurries to the kitchen, and comes back out with a big rectangular baking tin wrapped in aluminium foil.

  “For you, dinner.”

  In the meantime, another woman has arrived at Zia’s door. Still in turmoil, I take the lasagne, say thank you, and leave.

  NINE

  Wednesday 23rd August – evening

  On my way back home, my brain is spinning with what has been said this afternoon, especially Giulio’s violence towards Provvi and about Giulio being tricked into going to Sicily. I suppose he deserves everything coming to him. In all honesty, if that had been me in Provvi’s place, Giulio would have been counting worms for quite a while. I would have to go back on Monday afternoon, to find out how things have progressed. Zia, who is so endearing and funny when she speaks English, Zia who gives women hope, has a dangerous sinister side. You do not want to have her as your enemy.

  And what about her sister, Peppina, in Sicily? Zia said Peppina would ‘look after Giulio.’ She would make him see sense. No hesitation there. Peppina had had a few vicious outbursts towards me when my family stayed at grandmother’s house, during holidays in Sicily. The garden behind the house was beautiful. Right at the bottom of the garden, before the drop down a slope, was a row of tall cactus-like Indian rubber fig plants. Just outside the kitchen door stood a large cement sink, where we washed clothes by hand. A little further along there was a hen house with lots of chickens clucking around in the sun. And a lamb. So sweet. I spent time with it everyday. Fed it grass. On the other end of the scale from the innocent lamb was Aunt Peppina, the demon.

  Once, when I was looking at myself in the mirror, about to go out with some young relatives of ours, she crept up from behind startling me when, from the corner of my eye, I glimpsed her reflection in the mirror. In Sicilian, she snarled: “Cu pensi di essiri?” meaning: “Who do you think you are?” Adding that I wasn’t as beautiful as my mother had been when she was young. Compared to her, I was dirt. I became terribly afraid of Peppina and tried not to be alone with her.

  One late afternoon I was quietly playing solitaire in the living-room-cum-Peppina’s bedroom next to the kitchen. A shrill shrieking sound pierced through the kitchen door. I’d never heard such a desperate cry for help. It was clear something barbarous was happening in there. “Tenilo strittu,” Peppina was shouting to my mother, meaning: “hold it tight.” As I put my head round the door, I saw the most stomach-churning sight that has stayed with me to this day. There was a big sheet of polythene covering the middle of the floor, on it was this poor helpless creature writhing in pain, blood all over the place, some had spurted onto the women themselves. Peppina was trying to cut the lamb’s throat and making a hash of it,
while my mother held it down. I screamed “Stop it,” over and over, then ran out to the bottom of the garden, where I howled my disgust to the barren parched land below. And vomited over the edge of the fence.

  During that holiday, my mother tried to bully me into staying in Sicily with Peppina and my grandmother, rather than going back to England with her and my father. My mother had no scruples in trying to get rid of me. I was twelve. I was horrified. I wanted to go back home to Auntie Marge, my friends, my school, and to Miss Davies, my teacher. I didn’t want to stay amongst those weird women dressed in black, a few were slightly bearded and some had discoloured and missing teeth. My mother was just as vicious as Peppina. She got me up against a wall and slapped me in the face again and again. “I don’t care if you kill me,” I yelled to my mother, “I’m not staying here.” I was desperate, howled and screamed till I was hoarse and couldn’t yell any more, pulled hair out of my head, slapped my own face until it was bright red. All worth it. In the end, she caved in. I came back to England with, what were supposed to be, my mother, and my father.

  Back home in London, though, my mother made my life hell, even more than she had done before. The novelty was that she tied a length, about a yard long, of clothes line to her pinafore. That way, she’d have it at hand when she was overcome with the urge to whip me. I was very careful not to provoke her. Being terrified of her, I tried to keep out of her way. Whichever room she was in, I’d try to be in another one. When I bumped into her my heart pounded with fear.

  She was in the kitchen one day. I thought I ought to make an effort, ask her if she’d like any help, and smiled at her. She grabbed hold of the clothes line (the sort that had wire running through the middle) swished it high above her head. I turned round to run away, but it came down on my back. She ran after me whipping me, and growling “I’ll kill you,” until I managed to get to the bathroom and lock myself in. I tried to look at my wounds in the mirror, red stripes criss-crossing my back. I applied cold water to my wounds, thankful that at least they wouldn’t be visible to others. Her reason for whipping me was that I was taking the piss when I smiled at her, she said. My opinion was different, of course, I think she simply wanted to whip me. She had no pity. None at all. I bellowed: “I hate you,” from behind the door.