Murder In Matera

by Helene Stapinski

  Capri began to fade. The water was a deep sapphire with whitecaps, the spray hitting the faces of those nearest the railing. Soon the houses on the mainland thinned out, replaced by rocky cliffs and patches of green. Eventually Vesuvio and the coast blended into one single mountainscape beyond the stern.

  The Neustria slipped past the pastel houses of Procida Island and the Palazzo d’Avalos; Ischia and its volcano, Mount Epomeo, with its silent crater up top; and small volcanic islands whose names Vita didn’t know. Nunzia counted the castles hanging near the edges of earth, so many castles, Castel dell’Ovo, Castel Sant’Elmo, and Castello Aragonese, in front of Ischia. They had been built centuries ago to scare invaders. But now they were growing smaller, like toy castles in the distance, no longer large and imposing, no longer threatening.

  The hills grew greener, the houses fewer and fewer until all Vita and her children could see was blue. Blue sea. Blue sky, a gentle blue like the color of Mary’s veil at the Chiesa Madre. Everything Vita ever knew, fading, fading, not just the landscape, but the memory of it all. The murder, the lover, the dead babies, and Rocco cradled in her arms. All of it. Fading fast.

  THE PASSENGERS RETREATED TO THEIR QUARTERS, WHICH WERE divided into three classes: women traveling alone, men traveling alone, and families. Vita was allowed to stay with Nunzia, but Leonardo was on his own since he was thirteen, already a man.

  Men made up nearly 80 percent of the immigrant population coming from Italy. Women almost never traveled alone.

  The sleeping quarters were barely lit and cramped, with as many as three hundred people to each. The six-by-two-foot berths, with two and a half feet of headroom, were packed tightly in two tiers. Each iron bed frame contained a lumpy mattress filled with either straw or seaweed, covered in coarse canvas, a life preserver for a pillow, and a small, thin blanket, which wasn’t nearly enough for the chilly September nights at sea.

  Vita and most of the other passengers went to bed fully clothed, sometimes wearing everything they’d brought, since there was no room in the berth for bags. You wore it or slept on top of it or hung your clothes like drapes from your berth, which was the wisest option since crew members came and went as they pleased, barging right through the women’s bunk areas in the morning, just when the women were dressing or undressing. Washrooms were above deck and less open to shifty porters.

  A law passed ten years earlier barred the crew from the passenger compartments, but no one really paid much attention to it, since many of the passengers couldn’t read the postings placed on the walls. When a crewman entered the women’s compartment, he would gawk at those dressing and undressing and sometimes even cop a feel. Some women fought back. But the commotion just blended into the general din of steerage.

  The Italian men played lotto and shouted at one another. One man played his violin. Children laughed. Babies cried, their mothers pushing them toward withering breasts.

  Passengers of different sexes could mingle by day, usually fighting for space above deck, trying to take in a few rays of the precious sun, the lovely sun that they had all abandoned in Southern Italy.

  They sat amid all the machinery that crowded the deck, the cables, winches, spare masts, and curving air intakes, because there were no chairs or benches. Some were lucky to scam a coveted spot on the cover of the cargo hold, spreading a shawl or jacket to claim the space as their own. A steady snowfall of cinders from the black funnel floated down onto Vita’s kerchiefed head and into her children’s eyes.

  The crew was allowed to mingle with passengers on deck, cursing and making inappropriate comments to the women, sometimes touching or fondling them. But if anyone tried to touch Vita or her daughter, she would not hesitate to punch him.

  Women wouldn’t dare venture out on deck at night, though some men, like Leonardo, did, to breathe the fresh salt air, and wonder at the phosphorescent wake, the sky salted with stars and the glowing Milky Way, that last vestige of Hera’s squirting breast milk. “Count your nights by stars, not shadows,” went the Italian saying. And Leonardo did. Though there were too many stars, really, to count.

  The sea was a vast void of nothingness by night, until the moon rose. The voyage to America was so long, some watched the moon wax through a third of its cycle, growing like the belly of a pregnant woman. Its milky light was reflected on the ink-black water. At 10 P.M. the deck was hosed down, forcing everyone down for the night.

  Vita was already inside, and sat with her youngest snuggled up against her, keeping her warm between her chest and her armpit, singing songs or telling her stories to pass the long hours. She told her all about Francesco and the murder, though Nunzia had heard this story dozens of times and could practically recite it. The stolen pears, the young man with the gun, the fight, the prison sentence. Vita sang to Nunzia. She sang a version of the song, “Canto di Carcerato,” that she had learned years ago after the murder and would cry herself to sleep with on those long nights when Francesco first went away.

  See what in town they all are saying of me

  And see if my affair is growing quiet

  For then, if God so willing as I am praying

  My longing eye for freedom soon will spy it.

  Vita would sing her daughter “Ninna Nanna” to put her to sleep on the rocking ship. And when she was sure Nunzia was asleep, when no one else in the world was watching, Vita would finally cry, those pent-up tears spilling out finally, tears for her three dead babies and for Grieco and for her long-lost love, Francesco.

  WHEN THE SUN ROSE, BEFORE MOST OF THE OTHER PASSENGERS were awake, Vita would set Nunzia free, let her run around on deck so that she could stretch her young legs. Little children, even girls, were like young goats or sheep. They needed space to roam and grow.

  When they first boarded the ship, Vita and her children were each handed a metal fork, a spoon, a cup, and one tin dish for all their meals, which they had to store in their berth somewhere and had to somehow clean in the scarce fresh water on board. Water here was nearly as rare as back home in Basilicata, and because of the new layout, much harder to find. It seemed ridiculous, with those miles and miles of rolling waves out there. No towels were provided. Passengers used clothing or their blankets to dry their dishes.

  The wooden floors below deck were never washed on the voyage, only occasionally swept. No sick bags or buckets or trash cans for waste. Fruit pits, fish bones, nail clippings, eggshells, apple cores, wrappers, cigarette butts, orange peels, and other garbage sat for hours or sometimes days.

  Vomit stayed on the floorboards for hours, soaking into the wood, the stench remaining the entire trip. Which led to more vomiting. A few conscientious crew members sprinkled a bit of sand on top.

  When it rained, everyone stayed inside their berths, which were wet from the rainwater coming through the hatchways and leaking from the ceilings. With the roiling, rolling sea, seasickness was widespread, and without proper ventilation, those suffering didn’t stand a chance to recover.

  Only on the day the voyage ended were the toilets and washroom floors finally cleaned with disinfectant to pass inspection. But not before then.

  The only good places to throw up were overboard and into the washbasins in the washroom. But those basins were also used to bathe, wash your dirty dishes and utensils, do your laundry, and shampoo your head, if you could stand it in that dirty, nasty basin. There weren’t enough basins for so many people, only ten basins per washroom.

  Simple wooden benches were placed in the passageway between sleeping compartments to serve as a dining room. Passengers lined up in a single file in front of four stewards handing out rations. Breakfast at 7 A.M. was easiest, since it was only coffee and a few hard biscuits, keeping with Italian tradition. The other meals, served at noon and at 6 P.M., were slightly more elaborate.

  When the bell rang, stewards ladled out the soup, limp vegetables, leathery, smelly meat, or pasta—often pasta, or what the steamship company liked to call pasta. Any fruit was of the poorest quality,
the bruised, sad remnants from the bottom of the barrel, literally. Children and infants were served condensed milk.

  The food was so bad that some of these people—these starving people who had gleaned in empty fields for wild roots and herbs—wound up throwing more than half their meal overboard. Most lived on coffee and bread, which was stale and sometimes moldy, but at least not rancid.

  Some of the smarter passengers, with time and money to plan ahead, had brought their own rations—fruit, some fresh bread, scamorza, or homemade soppressata—the likes of which no Italian on board would see again for a very long time. Maybe a lifetime.

  A bar served fruit for three cents apiece, candy, and drinks, though hardly anyone had any money for that.

  Vita and her children learned to scramble for their food, as bad as it was, and as quickly as possible, since once it was gone, it was gone, just like back at home in Basilicata, with that big plate in the middle of the table. You had to be fast, or else you went hungry. You also had to hightail it to the washroom, to get a spot at the single warm spigot, to get your dishes clean. Leonardo simply licked his clean, then placed it under his pillow, his life preserver.

  Chapter 39

  COME HERE

  VITA WAS ANNOYED. SHE CALLED THE GIRL AND SHE DIDN’T answer. “Nunzia,” she bellowed, like she would in Bernalda just before dinner or at the start of the hot hour, when it was time for all children to come inside.

  Nunzia had been playing on deck, but Vita lost sight of her.

  “Nunzia!”

  She took a deep breath and yelled again, “Nunzia!” She searched the deck, calling, calling her daughter’s name. She searched below deck. Calling, calling.

  But after ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, which then turned into a half hour, the panic started to rise like high tide inside Vita’s chest. “Nunzia!” she screamed, with more urgency, her throat becoming soar. “Nunzia, vena qua.”

  Vita again searched the upper deck, back down to steerage, in and around their berth, and back up again, pushing people out of the way as she called, “Nunzia, Nunzia!”

  Vita tore at her clothes and her hair as she frantically searched, then wrapped her arms around her chest, rocking back and forth and feeling the imprint of Nunzia there between her chest and her armpit, where she had been, safe, only a few hours before. Vita would get lost herself, between decks, with her bad sense of direction, searching, searching for her daughter. She looked over into the waves, wanting, but not wanting at the same time, to find her daughter there, floating away from the ship. Could she have survived a fall? But she was not there.

  Vita wrung her small, pretty hands, her dark eyes brimming over. Have you seen my daughter? Have you seen my Nunzia? The terror rising, rising in her chest.

  Young Leonardo heard his mother’s shouts and came running. He searched and searched for his little sister, too, running between decks, looking in the same crawl spaces, three, four, five times, the ship growing ever closer to its destination, him running his hand frantically through his thick black hair. Eventually crying, shouting through his tears, “Nunzia! Nunzia! Where are you?”

  When I find her, he thought, she’ll get the beating of her life. How could you worry Mama like that? How could you worry me? He imagined chastising her when he finally found her. If he finally found her. But he knew he would hug her first. He was a good big brother, an adoring big brother, a protective big brother. How could he have let this happen?

  Vita grew more and more worried, and then hysterical, slipping into one of those immobile states, the trauma too much. Then the ship-wide search, halfheartedly done by the weary crew, as the Neustria pulled into New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty not a welcoming face, but a sign that Vita would have to leave the ship finally without Nunzia beside her. Without her only daughter. Without her small hand in hers.

  There’s thirteen-year-old Leonardo crying, too, but lifting his mother up off the floorboards of the deck and dragging her away, onto the gangplank. But her resisting, screaming Nunzia’s name, swearing it was all her fault, payback for what she had done back in Pisticci. Payback for her sins. For taking up with another man while her husband was in prison. It was her penance. The price she would pay. Another child, lost. Gone like Domenico and poor Rocco and the first Nunzia. The score etched on Vita’s heart was no longer three dead and three living. There was only a 50 percent chance of survival before the age of five in Basilicata. Vita had thought she had beaten the odds with seven-year-old Nunzia. But now she was gone, too.

  Vita’s shrieks died down to sobs and eventually to moans and then silent heaving as Leonardo carried her from the Neustria.

  Leonardo would whisper through his own tears. Quiet, Mama. You still have me. And Valente. Valente is waiting.

  And so she would stop. Vita would stop screaming her daughter’s name, a name not found on the passenger arrival list for 1892, a name completely forgotten by her family for the next century, until it was found again deep in the archives of the dusty province of Matera at the instep of Italy’s boot.

  Chapter 40

  SEE NAPLES AND DIE

  IHAD TRAVELED ALL OVER THE WORLD IN MY HALF CENTURY ON earth and had seen quite a few sights: Hong Kong’s harbor with its roar of construction and thousands of man-made lights, the pyramids perched on the edge of the desert as the evening call to prayer was shouted from Cairo’s minarets, the view of blue Diamond Head from Waikiki at dusk, Venice by night as an orchestra played in Piazza San Marco. I had watched the sun rise over the red rooftops in Vienna, climbed a castle to get a good view of the bullfight below in a small village in Spain, visited the Eiffel Tower with my two children, drank Mekhong whiskey at night on the beach in Ko Chang, Thailand, with my husband, danced on the frozen Bering Sea, and had driven clear across my own beautiful country, through its prairies, badlands, and mountains. I witnessed the wonder of New York City pretty much every day of my adult life; I walked most of its streets and had seen it from a blimp and a helicopter and from countless planes, trains, and cars. On this last trip, almost home, I would take a ride on the back of a friend’s motorcycle through Rome. All thanks to Vita, who had come to America and had given me—and my family—the chance at a charmed life.

  But all those things I had seen and done, they all paled in comparison to the Bay of Naples, the place where my great-great-grandmother had started over, for all of us.

  That’s how beautiful Naples was to me at sunset—its violet waters tranquil, Capri whispering, the thousands of tiny houses aflame with orange light, and Vesuvio calmly looking down on it all like a patient mother. See Naples and die, the saying went. But I would see Naples and live. And so would Vita.

  I had written thousands of stories in my lifetime, as a newspaper reporter, magazine writer, and author. But none of those stories compared to Vita’s life story. The miseria, the dead babies, the living babies, the murder, the trip to and then from Naples. She hadn’t written about others’ adventures, but had lived her own, which gave way to ours. She and all those millions of immigrants—your family included—who had come to make their lives and the lives of their children better.

  The mothers, the grandmothers, the great-grandmothers, and the great-greats were the unsung champions who had cooked and cleaned and washed mountains of laundry and fed and taught and nursed us back to health decade after decade, pushing each generation forward, not out of self-interest or personal gratification, but out of love.

  They were the true heroes. Not victims, but victors. Forget Odysseus and Hercules and the rest. Forget Zeus and Hera and the other gods and goddesses.

  Vita had changed her destiny and ours. And I wondered suddenly if it mattered who my great-great-grandfather was and whether there had ever been a warrior gene in my family. Vita had helped make our lives what they would become, by sheer force of will.

  IMMA AND I SPENT TWO DAYS SEARCHING NAPLES’ ARCHIVES FOR newspapers from the time of the murder. But we had no luck. I decided, finally, that our research was done.
It was time to have some fun.

  We ate a wonderful dinner at a place in the Latin Quarter called Hosteria Toledo. I didn’t feel guilty, like I usually would have, thinking of Vita’s hard life. I knew if she had been here she would have toasted me with some primitivo wine and told me to enjoy every damn bite.

  A family of four flew past us on a moped as we ate, mother, father, infant, and toddler, none of them wearing helmets. People had told me to avoid Naples, that I would hate it. But I loved it. The excitement of it, the charge in the air, the feeling of life swirling all around you and threatening to eat you alive. Maybe it was the wine. Or maybe it was me, Vita’s spirit rising in me. I really adored it here. Though I guarded my wallet carefully.

  The next morning we visited the veiled Christ, a delicate sculpture that seemed to be made of cloth, which was just down the street from our pensione. We ate pizza that was so good it was worth waiting ninety minutes in a cramped crowd, nearly getting run down by motorcycles. And drank pink Campari Spritzes as we sat outside in the neighborhood.

  As we walked the narrow, crowded streets, we looked into the open living rooms of Naples’s citizens, freely displaying the details of their lives like the characters in some dramatic play. More than once, I saw a mother and her teenage daughter, clearly pregnant, screaming and flailing arms and making obscene hand gestures at one another, all right in front of us, the gray-haired grandmother joining in with a curse every now and then.

  We saw rats. And miles of laundry. And piles and piles of garbage. We watched women go by dressed in short-short black netted skirts barely covering their thongs, their breasts spilling out of their skintight tank tops, their heels spiked, their hair elaborately teased, and their makeup bold and garish over unnatural orange salon tans.