There was a strange lilt in his voice, a forced attempt to sound casual. Leda had no idea how to answer him. “I don’t know. I don’t have the money to go back.”
“Your family might send it. Or you could earn it yourself, over time. But I should also say”—here, again, the pinch in his voice, trying too hard to sound offhand—“that if your father gives his blessing for you to stay here, well, there aren’t a lot of unmarried girls, decent ones I mean, here in this city, but there are some. Francesca and her daughters are seamstresses. They might be able to help you find work. Don’t you think, Silvana?”
Silvana nodded again.
“Grazie,” Leda said. She had said the word so many times in the past few hours that it seemed to have lost all color.
“Well, no need to decide tonight. We should leave you in peace. You must be tired.”
Leda nodded.
Arturo looked disappointed. Really, he was like a puppy, she thought. A puppy too bewildered to realize it was lost. She watched him hesitate, then stand. Silvana followed suit.
“Just promise that you’ll eat before you sleep,” he said.
“I promise.”
“Good night, then, Leda. Get some rest. Leave tomorrow to tomorrow, it’ll be there waiting.”
They left. Leda didn’t move for a long time. Then she pushed the plate to the far corner of the table, turned down the lamp, and drank the wine in two fast gulps. She heard the chime and clang of dinner being cooked in the kitchen, the voices of women and girls as they chopped, washed, stirred. She heard men’s voices as they arrived home. Shouts. Mumbles. Laughter. She was fortunate to have landed among people who treated her with such generosity. She should be grateful. But she didn’t know these people, didn’t know how far their goodwill would stretch, what it was made of. She stared at the wall. It was riddled with stains from grease or moisture. She couldn’t imagine sleeping. The rest of her night lay before her, empty, insurmountable. Dante, dead. Where was he buried? What a disgrace, she’d forgotten to ask. Loss piled up inside her, along with innumerable fears, of the night outside, the crowded city, the thoughts in her own mind. She wasn’t sure that she could face the day to come.
What if she didn’t? If she died?
She considered this possibility. It would be an escape. But how? She had no poison. No knife. She could find a knife in the kitchen but wouldn’t know where to stab.
She thought of Arturo, who had just buried his friend, now having to bury his friend’s bride as well.
She thought of her mother waiting and waiting for a letter from Argentina.
She thought of the violin in the trunk, cast adrift on a foreign continent with no one to pass down its history or give it voice.
The chatter outside her door began to subside. It was a Tuesday night, after all, there was work to be done tomorrow. Her own plans loomed amorphous, indecipherable. She could kill herself or she could look for work. She could talk to Francesca about sewing, take up a needle and show her what she could do. She could walk down the street and hear and see and smell it, try to understand this new city, this Buenos Aires. She could mail a letter to her family, as she had promised them she would do as soon as she arrived. How would she write that letter? What could she possibly say?
She should start trying.
She went to her trunk for pen, ink, and paper, and brought them back to the table. The page was ruthlessly blank. She stared at it for a long time, and when she finally began to write, her hand shook.
Dear Papà and Mamma,
Terrible news—your nephew is gone—he is not here—
No, she thought, that’s not right, he is my husband. Before he is their nephew, he is my husband. And the word gone is wrong, it’s not as if he left on some adventure. She crossed out everything she’d written, drew a line below it, and began again.
Dear Papà and Mamma,
I am sorry to tell you that my husband, Dante, my cousin, was shot in cold blood by a has passed away, I am alone and don’t know how I will
Wrong. Wrong. She crossed everything out, again, and turned over the page. Her pen hovered over it. Nothing came. Zio Mateo seemed to leer at her from the shadows. She tried to imagine him sad for the loss of his son, but could not picture it, when at Cora’s funeral, his daughter’s funeral, he’d looked on with a face so closed it could itself have been a tomb. She threw her pen to the floor and stared and stared at the blank page, whose whiteness was interrupted by the stains and bulges of crossed-out, decimated lines on the underside, a forest of words in which she could become irretrievably lost.
Cora’s corpse appeared two days after she died. The spring floods had swelled the river and made it carry her downstream, to the low bowl of the valley beneath the village. By then, her face was blue and gray and bloated almost beyond recognition. Her undergarments were stuffed with black stones and a single iron crucifix almost twenty centimeters long.
She had escaped from the hut where she’d been living for six months, up the hill from the village, under strict lock and key, far from everyone except a quiet old monk from the nearby Franciscan monastery who came to tend to her. Nobody had dreamed that she would try to escape, let alone succeed. She had clearly planned ahead. When the monk arrived that afternoon with her bread and cheese, she was waiting for him with the iron crucifix in hand, the only heavy implement in her crude room, which, on previous days, the monk had seen her cradle like a baby and sing lullabies to in her babbling mad-girl’s voice, and no matter how much he’d scolded her for the blasphemy, he had not succeeded in making her stop. All of this he told Cora’s father, Zio Mateo, on the evening Cora went missing. Leda was not in the room when that conversation occurred, but she heard the whispers of it and she could imagine how Zio Mateo had looked when the monk told him about this, sneering with pity and rage the way he did when people failed to do his bidding. So you knew, then, Mateo said to the monk, that she could unfasten it from the wall.
The monk nodded, ashamed.
But you never stripped her room of it.
She had so little, the monk said. I hoped that Christ’s presence would help her soul.
Her soul? How does your head feel now, old monk? Had enough of Crazy Cora’s soul?
The monk rubbed his scalp and looked penitent. The blow had been swift and unexpected; she had struck his skull from behind as he was setting her plate on the wooden table. He had lost consciousness, and when he recovered it, the girl was gone.
Her two brothers went to look for her. They thought she might be sleeping in the forest, on a bed of leaves, murmuring words wild enough to make the dirt beneath her go insane. She had to be found. She had to be helped. She had to be punished, too, of course, but that part went unspoken. At night, Leda imagined Cora running and running through the valley and then out of it, through forest and over hills and past villages that speckled the earth with their sadly clustered lives, all the way to the foothills of Vesuvius, and Vesuvius would gather her into its black hollow core and find a way to set her free.
But it did not happen that way. It was Dante who found her, Dante who thought to look downriver, thought to trace the trajectory of the drowned. He pulled her corpse from the water, still light enough to gather into his arms despite the extra burden of wet hair and clothes and skin, let alone the stones he did not yet know about. He carried her pressed against his chest, one arm under her knees and the other at her back, as if she were a princess condemned to sleep by an evil spell, though unlike such a princess Cora hung at a stiff and awkward angle and refused to bend or drape or fold. The walk home was laborious. He did everything he could to avoid being seen by village gossips, taking a long, circuitous path through the forest, and entering their house through the back door. None of it made any difference. The news spread quickly and expanded in the telling.
This part, too, Leda could imagine with precision: Dante walking up the hill with a disfigured body in his arms. The sweat on his neck from exertion. The bruised corpse, soggy in a man
ner never felt among the living. Those last and terrible moments of touch. The need to put her down on the ground to open the back door, if nobody inside saw him coming and opened it for him. The need to report on how he found her, once inside, Dante’s voice a dull scrape against the quiet.
The full story was not told and not acknowledged in Leda’s house. Cora had not run past the crumpled body of an aging monk, with the focused gait of a murderer. She had not reached the river and filled her pockets and undergarments with stones and even heaven help her with the holy cross itself, all pressed against her nether skin for the express purpose of pinning her underwater. She had not walked into the river with a will to die.
But in the village, it was told and told—in the plaza, at the apothecary’s pungent shop, at the public washing tubs, where women gathered to scrub stained sheets without mercy. Tongues burned with the story.
That girl, what a burden she became to her family.
And look where she’s ended up.
You know how they found her? A holy cross, right in her—can you imagine?
No.
You mean—?
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen. Disgusting.
A disgrace.
But she was crazy. We have to remember she was wrong in the head.
That girl was possessed by demons.
I heard she howled like a dog when the moon was full.
I heard her eyes turned red as blood when she attacked that poor monk.
She almost killed him.
I heard she tore her own clothes off like a common whore.
Oh, we all saw that.
You remember, don’t you, poor Sister Teresa—?
Oh sweet María yes.
She’s never been the same since, you know.
What she put the nuns through. All of them.
Pffft, that girl, she brought evil spirits down on us.
It’s because of her that the woods are haunted.
I still won’t walk out there alone.
Nor I.
Nor I.
Bless the nuns, they did their best.
Oh yes, the way they—
—cleared the woods.
Yes.
Of that girl’s evil.
For the good of all.
And the girl’s mother: how she must have suffered all these years to think her own womb could make such a creature.
No greater horror for a woman.
But her fault after all. What kind of mother breeds a girl like that?
And now, the worst sin. The taking of your own life.
To think that a Mazzoni daughter will be buried outside of church grounds—the shame of it!
But, despite the gossip, Cora was not buried outside church grounds. Zio Mateo made a gift to the church, and the priests quickly agreed with him; yes, yes, you’re absolutely right, it was a terrible accident, she fell into the river and how scared she must have been, poor girl, a tragedy, and thank you for your generosity, Don Mateo.
She was buried in a spare ceremony that nobody attended beyond the immediate family. Leda felt the spurn of it and longed to spit in the face of every gossip-woman in the village who did not come. The air was restless that day, full of wind and bluster; four roses abandoned the coffin’s surface for a hapless flight between the spindly cemetery trees. The Mazzoni family tomb lay ready, its marble slab pulled aside to reveal the insatiable open mouth of the ground. A small cluster of relatives, all dressed in black, wept dutifully as the priest muttered his prayers. The women clung to their hats and their black veils fluttered restlessly. Leda stared at the coffin and tried to understand how the radiance that had once been her cousin could be enclosed in that box of wood. Not possible. Though that life-joy had long been gone. She remembered Cora two years ago, before the madness, when she was still the girl who shone too brightly and leapt off too-high rocks. That was the Cora she wanted back. That Cora was not in the coffin. She had vanished without dying, an ending worse than death.
Cora’s mother wept in silence, face veiled, shoulders shaking. Dante stood beside her but did not move to offer comfort. He looked as though he were struggling to keep his face from breaking into many little pieces. In her mind’s eye Leda saw him walking up the hill, carrying his dead sister. And then, without warning, he looked up at Leda and their eyes locked. He knows, she thought with sudden horror. He knows why Cora went mad. He saw, perhaps not everything, but enough. And he hates himself for knowing, for failing. It is that way for me also, she thought at him. Dante took in her gaze and then looked away, at the far boundary of the cemetery, where centuries-old headstones stood impassive in the lucid wind.
That night, Leda lay in bed and tried to speak to her dead cousin. She started slowly. Cora. Cora are you there? My soul-cousin, my almost-sister, where are you? Are you cold? Are you hungry or does that end after you die? I have not forgotten you, cara, carissima. I wish you hadn’t gone and I am shouting for you to come back but I also know that there is no place for you here—can you hear me?—for two years now there has been no place for you in Alazzano, and now, as of tonight, there is no place for me. I am going to fly away from here as soon as I find a way, and whatever trace of you is still here in this world is coming with me, Cora, I promise you this; stay with me in spirit and I’ll take you out of here, together we’ll find a small corner of the possible to call home. I should have done it long ago, should have listened when you asked me to run away, forgive me, Cora, please forgive, I didn’t understand, but you did, back then, you already understood everything, understood far too much, because of him. He turned our village into hell. He tore the veils of night and dirtied the soft insides of days and I am speaking of your father: because when you went crazy he was not surprised and when you went up to the hut on the hill I was forbidden to come see you, we were all forbidden and we all obeyed him, what traitors we all are, cowering at his every word, he was the only one allowed to visit you—the only one—your own father, Cora, your own father—and everybody pretending it is not that, not that, unbelieving, unseeing, afraid—
She howled these thoughts into the night in utmost silence.
The night responded with a barricade of stars.
Dawn was close, less than an hour away. Her first dawn in Buenos Aires. She still sat in her chair, fully dressed, the room’s darkness wrapped around her like a cape. She heard the first stirrings of feet shuffling across the patio to fetch water, she thought, or perhaps to empty chamber pots. Where did the jugs get filled, the pots emptied? So much geography she had yet to learn.
The night’s vigil had given her mind a terrible clarity, the bright sharpness of a knife. The facts unfurled in front of her without grace or mercy. Dante was dead. She was a widow, countless kilometers from home. Home itself had not been home in a long time. She had not asked to become a widow, she had had no choice. But, she thought, if this is my fate, let me not surrender, let me learn to stand inside of this new skin.
She lit the lamp and let her eyes adjust to the light. Then she picked up the pen and began again.
Dear Mamma and Papà,
Dante has died. I am sorry to have to give you this news. It was an accident at work, before I arrived, and it all happened quickly, there was no pain. I have a room of my own and good people around me, Napoletanos and Northerners also. They are very kind.
There is no money to return right now and even if there were, I don’t think I want to return but today I am going to look for work. I don’t want to go back to Italy.
I don’t know whether I want to go back.
Please don’t tell me to go b
There is no need to worry. I will write again soon.
She stopped and stared at her own handwriting for a long time. She stared into the flame of the kerosene lamp. Then she wrote:
There is no such thing as going back. I can’t see the way forward. I can’t see my own face.
The words scared her. She couldn’t imagine what they meant.
She struck them through and scribbled over them until they had been swallowed by black ink. Then she took out a new page and copied the words that were not crossed out into a fresh letter, folded it, and placed it in an envelope she’d brought from Alazzano. Like a pigeon it would fly back with her message. She, not a pigeon, would remain.
She knew she should sleep but every muscle in her body felt tense. Outside her building lay the maze of the city, the maze of the impending day. Dawn light came in, slowly, slowly, accompanied by the rasping sounds of a city that at no moment of day or night ever went completely quiet, and in that fresh weak light she tried to listen to this city full of wheeling destinies she had not yet begun to imagine. The city could kill her, or it could remake her: the distant chafe and hum of Buenos Aires on the edge of dawn just might be the sound of her life starting.
TRE
The Good People of New Babel
It took weeks to grow accustomed to the noise. The clatter and roar never abated, not even at night, not for an instant. She didn’t know how to hear herself inside so much sound. Perhaps silence had existed in this city once, long ago, before the immigrants had poured in with their thousands of jostling voices and hands itching for work, routing any last traces of quiet. In the conventillos—which earned their name, she’d learned, from their cramped spare nature, like the convents that house nuns and monks—there was always the clang of water tubs, the drag of crates across scuffed tiles, the bristling duet of a man fighting with his wife, the shout or squeal or hungry moan of children, mothers’ reproaches and lullabies and threats, the stampede of boys just back from hawking newspapers on trams, the tired laughter of men having a smoke at the day’s end, the gossip of women as they put laundry on the line, the chorus of a family bickering over dinner, scolding the older kids for taking too much bread. On the street, the din thickened with the constant beat of horse hoofs drawing carriages, vendors with handcarts shouting their wares—fresh bread as good as your mother’s! shoes! a pan that will drive your wife wild!—the cracks of whips and groans of wheels, women gossiping through windows with neighbors on their way to the market with their baskets, a respite from the strict sphere of home. And each of those homes, she knew, was as raucous inside as her own conventillo, whole families in each room, bachelors sleeping limb to limb, snores penetrating the thin walls. In her village, she could walk all the way to the bakery and hear nothing but wind in the olive trees; on nights when the moon was dark, everything slept in Alazzano, even the dirt. Alazzano also never smelled like this, like sixty-three people sharing two broken toilets into whose pits they poured the contents of their chamber pots in a relentless stream. Nor had she known hunger in Alazzano. Here, although she was lucky to eat every day, more than once in fact, some child or another always hung in her doorway staring at her plate, and she couldn’t help giving morsels away.
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