“And then, the pig says”—Vittorio was prone to commentary—“our Italia must be protected by an Italian army. Our good men from l’alta Italia are serving, and so must the lazy dogs of the south whose families whine that they can’t leave their farms.”
“That stupid son of a whore!” Luigi DiFranco, a goat herder, shouted, jumping on his chair. It wobbled on the uneven cobblestones beneath. “If my son goes in their goddamn army, who will take care of the goats and make the cheese to pay their taxes!!??”
Every man shouted at once.
“Who will fix the nets?”
“Dogs! They are pigs! Sporcaccioni!”
“How come they tax my mule but not their rich friends’ cows? I’m not stupid!”
“Will their sons plow my land?”
The men were so loud that Vittorio’s brother lit a firecracker to stun them into silence.
Cesare, one of the oldest men in the village, was the first to speak. “Who is this Italia and why does she need an army? Is she a Roman queen?”
After a moment there was laughter, but Vittorio was getting impatient; he wanted to continue reading. “Cesare, do you know nothing? Italia is the country we live in. The north, the south, Sicilia, we are all this country of Italia.”
“Cesare’s right!” The firecracker had done little to change Luigi’s mood. “Who is this Italia? I’m Calabrese. I can’t afford to be an Italian. They taxed my goat, they taxed my mule, and now they want to take my son. Italian my ass!”
“It’s the price we pay for a united Italy. Do you want to be conquered every time the winds blow?” Vittorio felt he had to defend unification.
“No, but I want to eat!” shouted Luigi.
“I hear the northerners aren’t running to join their army,” another man shouted. “A ship captain in Naples told me the northerners are leaving in droves for South America.”
It was like another firework had exploded. Voices overlapped. Hands and arms were not enough for gesticulation. They jumped up and down and acted out emotions. Someone fell off a wobbly chair. From afar, the group looked like it was engaged in a bizarre ritual dance.
“Leave their homes? When do they come back?”
“If there are no northerners in the north, let’s move!”
“Have you ever seen a Piemontese row a boat?”
The men talked until Luigi’s one-eyed demented rooster crowed midnight, and Giovanna and Nunzio stayed under the bougainvillea bush until their mothers pulled them out by their ears. Giovanna couldn’t remember if that was the first time she heard talk of people going to other lands, but from that moment on it was a constant topic.
It was unthinkable to leave your home. It was a concept, like Italy, that was too difficult to fathom. Didn’t her papa teach them that while the rulers always changed, the Calabresi remained? If no war or event in Italy’s history had forced them from their home, how could unification?
Lorenzo, Giovanna’s older brother, played with the little bit of food on his plate. The air was thick at the dining table. Concetta knew her son well. She knew he was trying to say something, and she was doing her best to stop him from saying it. Every time he started to speak or even sigh, she picked up a plate or shifted in her chair to break his concentration. Domenico peered at his son expectantly from under his eyebrows, afraid to meet his gaze.
In the past three years, Giovanna had watched her proud brother move from anger to frustration to defeat. There was a slump in his once-square shoulders, and his lean body now just looked skinny. Giovanna felt that she and her brother had aged. It wasn’t simply because he was a man of twenty-two and she a woman of twenty, but because life had become more and more difficult with each year.
When they had buried the last of the dead from the cholera epidemic, including Nunzio’s father, they thought that the worst times were over. But cholera turned out to be an overture to a tragic opera where events spiraled out of control and the audience was left trying to keep track of the villains.
The other villains were not as dramatic or forthright as cholera; they were more insidious and masked. Since the government started taxing goats, the mountain peasants had to reduce their herds. Soon there wasn’t enough milk and cheese to trade, and they had to reduce the herds further. For a while they ate a lot of goat meat. Now there was no milk, no cheese, and no goats. Then they taxed the mules, so farmers had to plow the lands themselves. One year the crops would be eaten by parasites, and the next they would die of drought. When there wasn’t enough food from the farms and people were forced to grow what they could in their yards, they taxed the gardens. Only the padroni, the large landowners, who were mainly foreigners or northerners, had farms and animals anymore. The goat herders and the farmers were reduced to serfdom on the manors of the padroni.
When the people rebelled with sticks, the northern police mowed them down with guns. The only option for many men was to become a brigand. First the sons and then sometimes the fathers left for the mountains to make their living robbing rich landowners and travelers who traversed the region’s few roads. In the dead of night, the men would scramble down cliff paths to leave money or food with their families, never staying more than minutes. When they stopped coming in the dead of night, their families knew that the police had killed them.
Lorenzo planned on marrying Pasqualina, Vittorio’s daughter, but he was waiting for things to get better. Pasqualina got tired of waiting. When Luigi DiFranco’s son, who was living in America, wrote Pasqualina’s family with a proposal of marriage and the money for passage, she accepted. After Pasqualina left, Lorenzo considered brigantaggio, but he knew that he would not be a good brigand. He came from a family with property; the best brigands were of pure peasant stock. It was their way to rise up in the world, to gain respect, and to reap the justice that the law failed to give them. And it was their fate for their severed heads to be displayed as an example for other justice seekers.
Lorenzo wanted his turn at life—to become a man like his father, with a house and a business. The Mezzogiorno had turned him into a contadino without power or a future.
“I’m going to America.” There. He said it.
Concetta sucked in air and began to clear the dishes as if a word had not been spoken.
Lorenzo looked at his father. “I’ll send money. I can’t help you here.”
His father walked out the door in silence and sat on the dock. Lorenzo rose to hug his mother, who sobbed at his touch. She didn’t want her son to see her this way, so she waved him out of the house. He heard Giovanna comforting his mother as he walked to his father and sat down beside him. Domenico didn’t look up and continued staring into the water that reflected his weather-beaten but still handsome face. In a soft voice and with tears etching his skin, Domenico said,
“Dami centu lire
E mi ni vaiu a l’America
Maladitu l’America
E chi la spiminata”
Give me a hundred lire
And I’m off to America
Goddamn America
And the man who thought it up
Domenico pulled at the ropes holding the trunk to test their tightness. Lorenzo checked his pocket many times for the address of Luigi DiFranco. It had been arranged that he would first go to Luigi’s home until he found his own place to sleep in New York. The piece of paper seemed so fragile. What if he lost it? He had already memorized the address, Mulberry Street, 141, but he did not trust his memory. He copied it again and put it in his shoe. The immigrants who returned described a city of black smoke and soot. He had waking nightmares of wandering around trying to see obscured numbers and not being able to ask directions.
Domenico put his hand on Lorenzo’s shoulder and said, “Andiamo.” Concetta and Giovanna were inside the house. Having said their goodbyes, Concetta did not want to see her son walk off. She was in her rocking chair, the one where she had nursed Lorenzo, winding her rosary through her knotted fingers. Giovanna sat beside her, resting her hand on h
er mother’s leg. When Concetta heard the mule’s hooves scrape on the cobblestones, she rocked faster and faster until Giovanna had to grab the arms of the chair to keep it from falling over. As the frantic rocking stopped, her mother let escape a wail from deep inside her chest that Giovanna knew was echoing off the cliffs of Scilla.
THREE
Maria Perrino groaned. Her mother absentmindedly patted her head and continued her diatribe. “L’America’s worse than a cheap whore, a mala femmina, who lures away our men.”
Giovanna and Signora Scalici tuned her out as they prepared the room for the birth. Giovanna had heard Maria’s mother give this speech before. Maria’s father was one of the first to go to America. Initially, he had sent the family a letter with money each month; now it was once a year at best. After Lorenzo emigrated, the Costas’ fish store had become one of the primary places for women who had already lost their husbands and sons to America to come and commiserate with one another. In their minds, the Statue of Liberty was not lifting her lamp, but her skirts. She was l’America’s Scylla, a beauty beckoning from a rock in the water. And she was going to devour them.
Not getting a reaction, Maria’s mother asked Giovanna a question. “Have you heard from Maestro Nunzio in Rome?”
Giovanna nodded. “Last week,” she said, and continued scrubbing her hands while Signora Scalici tended to the young woman. Giovanna no longer apprenticed; she delivered the firstborns and Signora Scalici delivered the children of women she had already helped birth. Today was different. Signora Scalici had asked her to come knowing it was going to be a difficult delivery.
“And what of Lorenzo? Has he married that girl he met in New York?” The mother interrogated Giovanna while she dried her hands.
“Next month they’ll marry.”
“Lorenzo Costa marrying a girl from Puglia.” The woman clucked her tongue. “L’America is diluting Calabrese blood.”
Giovanna wished the Signora would shut up and pay more attention to her laboring daughter.
“The head’s to heaven,” whispered Signora Scalici to Giovanna. “I’ve tried to turn the baby for weeks. We’ll have to deliver it breech.”
The mother fluttered around the room commanding her daughter, “You need to push more. Be strong.”
“Signora,” directed Signora Scalici, “we need more belladonna. Can you get it?”
“Sì, sì, of course.” Maria’s mother swept out on her mission, heading to the farmacia. The request for belladonna would be the pharmacist’s cue to keep the meddling mother occupied and out of the way for as long as possible.
The young woman calmed when her mother left. “Maria,” Signora Scalici spoke directly in her ear, “we must do this together. Lean on Giovanna and follow her directions.”
Giovanna braced her body against Maria’s back and held her beneath the arms. At the next contraction, Giovanna instructed, “A long push, make it long and slow.” Maria’s sweat-drenched hair was matted, and the veins in her neck and face looked as though they might break through her skin.
After a long hour of pushing, the baby’s culo emerged as Signora Scalici looped the cord around her finger to protect it from tangling. With Giovanna applying pressure to Maria’s lower pelvis, Signora Scalici reached in and unfolded the baby’s legs, drawing them out.
“Ah, as I thought, Maria, you have a girl.” Turning to Giovanna, she said, “We must quickly birth the head.”
Maria was exhausted. “Can’t we let her rest through the next contraction?” muttered Giovanna. Giovanna was still young and occasionally her empathy got the best of her.
“Clear the nose and mouth when you see them,” instructed Signora Scalici, ignoring Giovanna’s question. “Forza, Maria. We will soon see your child’s head.” Signora Scalici draped the baby’s body over her forearm and reached into Maria, putting her fingers into the baby’s mouth. The fingers of her other hand cradled the back of the baby’s neck.
“Push, Maria,” gently coaxed Giovanna. Maria no longer looked human; it was as if all the blood had drained from her face, into her eyes. The strain of pushing had broken all the blood vessels.
Signora Scalici lifted the lower half of the baby’s body upward. Maria pushed, the midwife pulled, and the nose and eyes emerged. Giovanna quickly wiped them.
“This is it, Maria, but a slow push this time.” Giovanna realized the cruelty of her words. This baby was only centimeters from being born, and the mother had to take it slow. But Maria listened, and in one slow, long push, the rest of her little girl’s head emerged.
“Brava, Maria!” exhorted Signora Scalici. Maria fell back on the pillows, panting and moaning.
Giovanna cleared the baby’s passages and laid her on her mother’s chest. All three women felt such relief that laughter accompanied their tears.
“Maria, they say that with a girl born backwards, the birth is the easiest part. She will be strong and stubborn. Look at Giovanna! When I delivered her, I was first introduced to her culo!”
They were soon quiet. Giovanna looked at Maria cradling her daughter. The baby was black and blue, Maria was covered in blood, and yet they looked beautiful. A peace descended in the room as the baby suckled for the first time. Giovanna’s thoughts turned to Nunzio. With his return imminent, she could not attend a birth without thinking of their children. Her faith in the future was strengthened as she imagined cradling Nunzio’s child. They would finally be inextricably bound and live forever in their generations.
Through scores of births, Giovanna would imagine birthing her own children, so when nearly a year had passed since marrying Nunzio and she had not become pregnant, Giovanna’s disappointment became all-consuming.
Nunzio and Giovanna sat on the edge of the cliff above the village and looked out at the moon-drenched sea. It was a night so clear and bright that it was timeless. This moment, too, was timeless. They were married adults in their late twenties, but two decades before, they had often sat in the exact same spot talking of their future while they devoured fresh cheese and bread that they had traded fish for. There was no longer cheese and bread, but they still dreamt.
While Nunzio wove fantastic plans that included wealth and status, Giovanna prayed that her self-diagnosis was wrong. She hadn’t menstruated in three months; she believed that this wasn’t because she was pregnant but because she was starving.
“You know, Giovanna, one day we will sit here and I will call you Doctor,” declared Nunzio.
This comment was so outrageous that it interrupted Giovanna’s thoughts, and she laughed.
“No, Giovanna, I mean it. When things change, I will work in the north for a few years while you go to school. We will come back to Scilla as a doctor and an engineer with our five little children.”
She almost laughed again, but she saw that Nunzio’s eyes had hardened, which meant he was serious, so she kept quiet. She loved planning the future with Nunzio, but this dream was impossible. She would be happy if their plans simply included no separations, food, and children.
“Giovanna, you will make the most wonderful doctor. When I was in school, I read about women who had done many things, and I even met a woman doctor. That’s when I thought my Giovanna could be a dottore. Why not?”
It was impossible for Giovanna to say anything, so she simply gazed at the sky. Were life not currently a contest for survival, it would have been unthinkable to hear a husband encouraging his wife to become a doctor. But in times of turmoil, tradition became a detail.
After their wedding, Nunzio was forced to travel to find work. He spent time in Reggio helping to build ships and went as far as Naples to oversee the construction of a dock. At first Nunzio and Giovanna considered moving to a city with more work, but it soon became clear that there wasn’t any city in the south with enough work to keep Nunzio employed more than a few days a month. In the north there were public works projects, but after five years in Rome he knew that, engineer or not, in the north he was still considered a southern peasant.
Within a few months there wasn’t even work in other cities. Nunzio would fish, but there was little to trade for the fish, and no one had the money to buy it in the store. To make matters worse, the sea’s bounty had diminished, and often they would return with barely a basket of fish to sell. Occasionally, the glantuomini—the gentry—walked into the fish store. Their felt hats set them apart from the villagers wearing worn wool caps. Giovanna cringed when they entered. Even though there would soon be coins in the coffers, she hated the manner in which she had to greet them, “Vosia, sa benadica”—“bless me, your honor.” She refused to kiss their hands as the others did. The gentry were in full control of the local government and the police. They made the laws, enforced the laws, and exempted themselves from them. Giovanna often heard the men in town end a story with, “Chi ha denaro ed amicizia va nel culo della giustizia”—“he who has money and friends fucks justice in the ass.”
Giovanna and Nunzio’s families survived on fish and the food and sundries that were given to Giovanna in exchange for delivering babies. But it was the money sent by Lorenzo from l’America that allowed them to keep their house and pay the taxes.
Giovanna knew they were better off than most. A year ago, she started to notice curious dents in the walls of houses she visited. The mystery was solved when she entered a home to check on a mother who had delivered a few days before and saw her scraping plaster from the wall and adding it to the little bit of flour on the table.
Elizabeth Street Page 3