The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna

by Juliet Grames

  Assunta had never seen anything like it. The girl wasn’t even six. Ros, who was also visiting that day, laughed herself to tears watching.

  “It’s not funny, Ros,” Violetta said. “Someone has to teach that girl respect, Assunta, or you’re going to have a real problem on your hands.”

  “Ooo, she’s a tough one!” Ros said, wiping her eyes.

  Now as Violetta stood in the alley, head cocked, hoping Stella would give her another excuse for a confrontation, Stella met her gaze and scowled back.

  Assunta tried again. “Say, please come inside, Zia.”

  “Please come inside, Zia,” four-year-old Cettina echoed, always eager to please. Stella stepped back from the doorframe to let her aunt pass.

  By the time Assunta joined her sister-in-law in the kitchen, Violetta had spread the contents of her bundle on the table. Four loaves of bread, which Violetta was cutting into quarters with Assunta’s knife.

  “Old loaves from last week,” Violetta explained. “I thought they would be good for the pigs.”

  Assunta scooped up baby Giuseppe, who was not wearing any pants at this moment. She wrapped her elbow under his cold naked bum. “That’s very kind of you, Violèt.”

  Violetta shrugged. “It’s no trouble to me. I am happy to go without for you.” Ah, there it was, the bitterness. The poor woman couldn’t even let a gift feel like a nice thing.

  “Well, thank you.” Assunta brought Giuseppe over to her sister-in-law. “Give your auntie a kiss, Giuseppe.” He complied, then smiled. “There’s a good boy.” He didn’t talk much yet, but he was already the most outgoing of her children. Assunta put him down on the floor again. “Now go put on your pants.”

  Violetta wiped the crumbs from her hands on her skirt. “You want to take some out to the pigs now?” she asked the girls. She handed them each two crusts.

  “Should we feed the pigs, Mamma?” Stella asked, her voice meaningful—I’ll only do it if you tell me, Mamma.

  Assunta tried not to laugh. What a sharp little thing she was, with her sharp little face! Like an adult, and with the wickedness of an adult. “Yes, yes, go feed them,” she said. “Then come back in and we’ll fix some lunch.”

  There was absolutely no reason to worry about her daughters as they stepped out into the wintry sunshine.

  The two girls entered the pigpen without trepidation; the pigs, as anticipated, approached for fondling. Cettina offered up her ends of bread, and they snouted it, making piggy noises. They bumped their rib cages, which would soon yield delicious pancetta, into the girls’ torsos, the roiling force of their body weight inexorable. When one had finished with Cettina’s bread, it turned to Stella, black-ringed eyes level with her collarbone. For some reason, at the wet snuffling of the pig’s nose against her wrist, Stella recoiled. In an inexplicable spasm, she clenched her hand and pulled back her right arm.

  The second pig caught on that there was bread being withheld, and it rounded on her. The two pig heads pushed into her chest as they fought for the elusive crust. Stella felt herself pushing back, the forward pressure becoming less playful and more defensive.

  “Pigs, Stella,” Cettina said. Her spit-wet hands were bunched in her skirt, her eyes wide. “The pigs.”

  Stella realized that she had only to release her bread, and the pigs would take it and leave her alone. So she let go. Or at least, her brain made the decision to let go. But her hand stayed clenched. In that initial moment of betrayal, as Stella wondered what was wrong with her body, one pig or the other pushed her to the muddy ground, where she landed on her back, her spine reverberating with the fall. The pigs began to step on her, clamor over each other in a gnawing, snorting ruckus. Stella stared in shock at her hand. It was as though—and she would remember this exact sensation for the rest of her life—another hand was wrapped around hers, squeezing, so the bread was trapped tightly within the binding of her little fingers.

  There was silence in the courtyard as Cettina, stiff with confusion, watched, as Stella fought her own hand and the pigs fought each other. It was Stella’s scream that ripped through the damp post-rain air and brought Assunta and Violetta running, a piercing, full-bodied child scream as the pigs chewed and stepped one then the other over Stella’s abdomen, which split and poured forth its contents, just like the pigs’ own abdomens were destined to be split to make and fill sausage casings.

  THENCE CAME ASSUNTA’S SECOND RUN down the mountain to the doctor’s. This trip was so much more hopeless than the first—her daughter’s stomach had cracked up the middle like a boiled chestnut, and the pigs had done some heavy mixing of intestines and mud.

  On this tromp down the mountain—her daughter’s torso swaddled tightly in once-white kitchen linens, now a frightening vibrant red—it seemed obvious that these were Assunta’s last moments with her second Stella, and over the stupidity of a crust of bread from her noxious sister-in-law. She gasped for breath, tasting blood in the raw back of her throat, fought for balance on the steep, muddy donkey path. “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee,” she rasped into the wet winter air, over and then over again—the rest of the rosary eluded her. She was certain her daughter had been cursed.

  That afternoon and night, during the washing and stitching, and the next day while they waited to see if infection had set in, Stella lingered at a point of acute danger. The intestines—the doctor identified them for the sober Assunta, who had never butchered a mammal and wasn’t sure of the frothy substance that had come out of her daughter—had survived the trampling somehow intact. The doctor, with his now-familiar smell of chicken skin, washed the innards to remove dirt, pushed them back in with his bare fingers, and stitched up the bloody mass of tissue with a needle and thread, just as Assunta would have darned her blouse. Stella’s eyes were open, dry and staring, throughout the procedure. No one, including Stella, knew whether she was conscious or not. A number of ribs had been broken, but neither lung had been punctured, as the child was evincing no blood from her respiratory tract. The doctor credited the suppleness of the childish bone structure, which had apparently accommodated the crushing weight of the pigs instead of snapping in fatal places like the neck or spine. He explained that the real test, now, would be to see whether any poisons had already infested her cavity. If she should survive the week, it would remain to be seen whether her female nest had been ruined, whether as an adult she would be able to conceive or give birth.

  Assunta, weeping her silent tears, considered this last statement as she held her daughter’s hand in the doctor’s lying-in room. How interesting that this thought had occurred to the doctor now, at this moment, Stella’s blood still tucked into the creases in his hands. In the same breath, he had told Assunta she may not survive the week, and also if she does, she may not be able to have children. Was it an off-the-cuff medical observation? Or was it something he’d learned to address for other village mothers, because other mothers would ask? Was the doctor’s narrative just a progression of statements, or was its implication true? Was a life without children a life at all, for a woman? Assunta would never know, as she had had children since she was a child herself. Assunta ran her mind over these questions with philosophical disinterest. Nothing mattered except that the doctor’s miracle needle might somehow, somehow have stitched her Stella back into this world.

  When the bachelor doctor had left her alone with her daughter, Assunta stood over the bed and laid her hands against the sides of Stella’s abdomen, away from the stitching. Stella’s belly burned like a pot on the stove. When all the cool had gone from her palms, Assunta flipped them, the same way she had done that night in 1918 when her first Stella had fought the fever, and when Assunta had tried to suck the heat out of her daughter’s skin with her own hands.

  STELLA AWOKE TO THE HUSH of her grandmother’s voice, but she didn’t open her eyes. She felt an intense nausea and a bursting sensation in her gut. As she lay unmoving in the buttoned-up darkness, thinking about whether she ever wanted to open h
er eyes again, the room began to creep up on her, the nostalgic odor of unnumbered strangers’ body liquids and mint, sharp and sweet.

  “Mint,” Stella said, her voice raspy. “The mint.”

  The doctor, who hadn’t been sanguine about his patient’s surviving the operation, found this unnerving. Maria, however, did not.

  “Yes, little mouse, the mint,” Maria said. Her granddaughter was asking for a spell to fight the Eye. Before the doctor could see what he must not, Maria wrested his candle from his hands and used it to drive him from his own operating room.

  As Assunta worked the unfascination, she tried to stop herself from thinking about whose jealousy could have cursed her little daughter. This was the second time her Stella had been brought to death’s door by bizarre bad luck. Was the Eye fixed on her? Some affectionate-looking villager who was secretly jealous of Assunta’s beautiful, clever child? Or jealous of Assunta for having her?

  Or was it the jealousy of a ghost, who every year was a little further forgotten by her loved ones, while her replacement shone like a star in their hearts?

  THE DOCTOR DIDN’T DARE MOVE Stella for at least a week, lest the barely reinstalled intestines shake loose. She would have to stay in Feroleto; Assunta could sleep on the floor. He tactfully did not mention the added expense when he delivered the news.

  Antonio hadn’t sent Assunta any money in three years. While she sat by the bed, Assunta sucked her teeth and tried not to think about the cost, remembering that it was thinking about the cost that had killed her first Stella.

  THEY BUTCHERED ONE OF the doctor’s chickens and boiled it in a pot. The chicken would be added to Assunta’s bill. They tried to feed Stella the chicken broth, but when she opened her mouth to swallow the broth spilled out the sides of her face and streaked her cheeks. It was as if there were a round ball of air in her throat, repelling anything that tried to pass through it. She could speak, but her throat was scratchy. Maria gave her mint to chew and this at least called forth some saliva.

  “You were attacked by the pigs, little mouse,” Nonna Maria told Stella.

  But Stella remembered. “No, I wasn’t. They just wanted the bread. I had bread and they just wanted to eat it.”

  “Silly girl,” Maria said soothingly. “Next time you just give them the bread.”

  “There won’t be a next time!” Assunta said. She knew what she thought of pigs now.

  “I tried to give them the bread.” Stella’s words were puffs of air. “But I couldn’t give it to them.”

  “What do you mean you couldn’t give it to them?” Maria asked, petting Stella’s head, which was the only piece of her that bore petting.

  Stella was relieved that she could explain what she’d felt, that someone was going to take this fear from her. “There was a hand. Like this.” With her right hand she seized her left and squeezed so the fingers bunched together like grapes, slowly ripening before the women’s eyes as the blood swam in fruitless circles. “A hand was holding me.”

  “Whose hand?” Maria asked. “Concettina’s?”

  “No, Cettina was over there.” Stella gestured to her left. How freely her arms moved, without any pain! The rest of her was a burning belly. “It was an invisible hand.”

  Maria and Assunta were quiet, because this sounded awfully supernatural to them. Eventually, Maria thought to take out her rosary, and the two women started a soft chant of the Hail Marys. Cettina sat on the floor and stared up at her sister, who lay quietly on the bed and stared back. They didn’t have to say anything to each other, nor did they have anything to say. Stella had been the one who was trampled, but Cettina had had to watch it.

  When the suffering child was finally asleep, Assunta admitted, “I don’t think it’s the Eye, Ma.”

  Maria did not respond to this. Sitting on the bed with her palm on her granddaughter’s forehead, she frowned with half of her mouth.

  ON THE SIXTH DAY, the doctor allowed Assunta to take her daughter home. It seemed she had escaped infection. After the doctor reswaddled Stella’s midriff and torso, Assunta handed him a packet of lire—his fee, the cost of the surgery, five nights’ lodging, the price of one chicken, the entire bill paid in full, no installment plan needed. The once-beloved pigs had been sold to Zu Salvatore, who ran the store in the centro, and in whose basement their haunches were currently suspended. Between the cost of their food for the year and this set of medical bills, the pigs had almost paid for themselves.

  AS THE THICK CRUST of a scar formed over the wound that split her abdomen, Stella was bed-bound for many weeks—very trying for a child of six. During this time her godmother Za Ros entertained her by teaching her various womanly handicrafts. She taught her to embroider handkerchiefs and to crochet increasingly elaborate decorative lace. Stella, naturally competitive, focused her bored energy on mastering these tricks, then basked in the adults’ admiration. Everyone told her how clever she was.

  On an unseasonably warm day in February, after four arduous weeks of only being allowed to leave the bed to use the chamber pot, Stella convinced her mother that she felt well enough to go outside. Assunta clutched her daughter’s arm as they walked the forty steps to the church chiazza—that was as far as Assunta would let Stella go. They stood on the plateau and looked down over the mountain together, silently appreciating the panorama. Weak March sunlight cut through the veil of gray clouds and splashed the olive valley below them, a yellow puddle of springtime between the mountains.

  Stella’s ancestors had stopped here on this plateau three hundred years earlier to build the village of Ievoli because of this incredible view. From the chiazza where these ancestors erected their church, one could see all the way to the Tyrrhenian Sea to the right and the Ionian Sea to the left. The volcanic island of Stromboli smoldered perpetually at the edge of the lichen-green bay, and Stella and Assunta watched together as it emerged from the hazy horizon when the sun began to sink behind it.

  This was Stella’s world, this mountain hers to live on despite everything that tried to kill her. Her belly aching, Stella slipped her hand back into her mother’s and they walked home for supper. But she would come back to watch the sun set again tomorrow.

  Death 3

  Bludgeoning

  (Education)

  THE THIRD ALMOST-DEATH OF STELLA FORTUNA coincided with the end of her formal education. It was August 16, 1929. Stella was nine and a half years old.

  In general the Ievoli schoolhouse was not a very dangerous place, because the children didn’t spend much time there. In Mussolini’s Italy, elementary education was compulsory through third grade, but it was hard to enforce this law in villages like Ievoli, where there was limited benefit to sending one’s child to school.

  The school was a boxlike wood and stone edifice on the far side of the church chiazza. It had a vaulted twelve-foot ceiling and tall windows to let in lots of light, and got very cold in the winter, so there was no school between Advent and Easter. There was no school during the month of August for Ferragosto, the celebration of the Assumption, or in September, for the festival of the Madonna Addolorata—Our Lady of the Sorrows, Ievoli’s patron saint—and when the olive trees needed to be harvested.

  When school was in session, there were two teachers, Maestra Giuseppina, who taught the boys, and Maestra Fiorella, who taught the girls. Maestra Giuseppina, who had finished upper school in Nicastro, was married to a university graduate she had met before the Great War. They lived in the apartment above the school, where he wrote history books while she taught the sons of Ievoli.

  Maestra Fiorella was a bit of a different story. She lived alone, for both her parents were dead. She was only twenty-three but was already a spinster in the eyes of the village women, who felt sorry for her. It was not an easy life, being a spinster without hope of a match, and Maestra Fiorella really had none—there were no unmarried boys of her generation left, between the Great War losses and the wave of emigration that had made white widows of so many a Ievolitana. Besides
, Fiorella wasn’t wife material. She did not know how to cook and she was a slovenly housekeeper—ladies paid calls on her during the afternoon siesta to appraise the level of grime on her walls and to sneakily wipe down her counter. Fiorella had terrible skin, probably a product of her constant illnesses (to accommodate which the girls’ side of the school was often closed without explanation). Although she had a patient disposition, she was not clever. She had pursued the position of village schoolteacher because it had become evident she wasn’t going to be good for much else.

  Usually the girls’ lessons consisted of the maestra’s reading aloud from her primer, omitting the words she didn’t recognize. The passages were mind-numbing and often unintelligible, what with the missing words and the fact that the primer was written in Italian, which was very different from the Calabrese language the girls spoke at home. There was only one broken slate for everyone to share, so after the morning reading the children who had taken the trouble to come to school that day—because, let’s be honest, it is not always convenient to come to school, especially when there is a good chance of discovering the teacher has not come, either—would take turns writing the letters of the alphabet on the slate. Since Fiorella disliked math, the girl students never learned multiplication or geometry. This was too bad for Stella, who was good with numbers; she probably would have caught on quickly.

  Stella started going to school the Easter of 1927, when she was seven. Assunta had wanted Stella to wait until Cettina was big enough to go with her. The sisters sat at one desk and kneeled together on pebbles in the corner when the maestra caught them whispering to each other. Stella was smart and enjoyed being admired and envied by the other students. But the maestra’s lessons were boring, so sometimes she and Cettina would only pretend to go to school. They’d dress, kiss their mother good-bye, then spend the morning picking cherries off other people’s trees, or sitting on the rocky ledge above the algae-filled cistern trying to catch the bergamot-green lizards that peeked out to sun themselves.