Death 1 Burns （Cognitive Development） #2
Assunta was born in Ievoli on the feast of the Assumption of the Most Blessed Virgin, Santissima Maria, Madre di Dio, August 15, 1899—hence her name, Assunta, from the word Assunzione.
She was a devoutly religious woman, the kind who prayed extra to make up for the fact that her husband did not.
There were lots of such women in Ievoli; I suspect there still are.
Assunta was raised by her mother, Maria, to have pure, all-sustaining faith in Jesus Christ and in God’s heaven, where she would someday ascend after death if she did exactly what the priest told her to.
Assunta was no casually obedient churchgoer; she believed.
At mass, especially when she was in her early teens, in those hormonally violent years of incipient womanhood, she was often overcome with emotion when she contemplated the suffering heart of the Most Blessed Virgin and would begin to sob in her pew.
Assunta had voluminous, spectacular emotions that only grew more impressive as she got older.
Her weeping displays were one of two reasons her daughter Stella would vow never, ever to cry, and kept her vow for forty-eight years.
Now the reason Assunta married Antonio Fortuna when she was only fourteen years old—on the young side even back then—was because her father died suddenly, leaving his women in a tight spot.
No matter how hard a contadino works the padrone’s land his whole life, he owns only his labor; when he dies he most likely has nothing to leave behind for his wife.
Assunta had very little dowry, and the longer she lived with her widowed mother, the less they would both have.
It would be better if Assunta were the responsibility of another household.
But it also seemed that she was ready for marriage.
She had a matronly aspect about her, not least because of the aforementioned bosoms Stella would inherit from her.
Assunta had a nurturing presence and an assuredness of carriage.
She had a memorable face, with large dark eyes shaped like upside-down crescent moons that cupped her round cheeks.
She was a striking womanly girl. When neighbor ladies came to visit they started thinking about which of the young men in the village she might marry, or maybe a young man from Galli or Polverini or Marcantoni, where so-and-so had an eligible cousin.
In the end Assunta married a young man from Tracci, an hour’s walk south.
Antonio Fortuna was seventeen years old, a stone layer who came to Ievoli to build the new schoolhouse.
Assunta saw him often, lunching with the men under the single fat, ancient tree in the church chiazza.
Antonio followed Assunta with his lascivious eye when she came to the well to get water.
She liked the look of him, broad-shouldered and strong, a meaty young man with a crazed cap of shiny black curls, and she liked that he expressed interest in her.
She never gave him her handkerchief, however.
Assunta was shy of boys and had been successfully trained to channel that groin-tightening teenage energy into concentrating on Mother Mary’s virginity while reciting the rosary.
She was the kind of girl who liked love songs but never thought of herself when she sang them.
Assunta didn’t say anything about the handsome young stone layer to her mother, because what was there to say?
But it all came out in the way things do: one of the Ievoli stone layers mentioned to his wife that Antonio Fortuna, son of Giuseppe Fortuna from Tracci, had been giving the eye to Assunta, poor dead Franciscu Mascaro’s youngest daughter.
Then the wife went over to pay a visit to Assunta’s mother, and mentioned the boy from Tracci—and then, well.
When you talk about something enough, pretty soon it comes about.
Even though Assunta and Antonio had never spoken to each other, everyone else had spoken to each of them about the other so much it seemed like they had already decided everything without saying anything at all.
That was the whole of the courtship. It doesn’t sound like much, but it was very exciting for Assunta, who spent that winter sewing her nervous energy into her rather rushed trousseau, warming up to her mental picture of herself standing in her own kitchen surrounded by babies, enduring the premature and stomach-curdling mourning of her soon-to-be-lost virginity.
There wasn’t a long formal engagement because the young men had started to be called up for obligatory military service.
It didn’t suit anyone for the couple to wait until whenever Antonio might be allowed to come home, so Assunta and Antonio were married in February 1914, three months after first speaking to each other.
ON THE DAY THEY WERE MARRIED, a rare snow came down from the Sila mountains.
As Assunta climbed up the hill to the church for the ceremony, her sister Rosina used one of the table runners Assunta had embroidered for her trousseau to protect the bride’s black dress.
Hailstones collected like salt in the baskets of mustazzoli cookies the flower girl, Assunta’s nine-year-old sister-in-law Mariangela, handed out to the mass-goers.
The couple’s wedding night was spent in their new home, a basement apartment of a stone house terraced into the mountainside on the third alley off via Fontana.
The basement apartment faced the olive valley, and wooden boards had been jammed into the hillside to form a steep stair leading down from the street.
Antonio had arranged to rent the basement from the owner, a widow named Marianina Fazio, for terms that included Assunta’s help with the cleaning and the garden.
The apartment was difficult to fumigate because there was no chimney, only the wide windows, which, when thrown open, looked out directly onto the widow’s hens and two spotted goats.
The newlyweds’ first night in the basement apartment, the wet air was thick with the smell of chicken feathers.
The exposed stone walls were damp to the touch, and Assunta lay awake for a long time, picking at the mortar with her fingernail and thinking about the strangeness of being so close to a snoring man, the strangeness of the night shadows in the unfamiliar corners, the strangeness of what hurt.
In the middle of the night, there was a screaming outside their window, a human but inhuman shriek that woke Antonio and Assunta from their awkward first shared sleep. Antonio pulled on his trousers and scrambled to light the lamp.
The awful scream sounded again before they had reached the door.
It took Assunta precious heartbeats to understand what she saw through the gauze of falling snow: standing over the still-heaving carcass of one of the widow’s white goats, two gray, long-faced wolves.
They must have come down from the Sila forest because of the snow—they were driven to these parts only when they were starving.
Their mouths were red and their eyes small and black in their pointed faces.
A gelatinous white fog filled the courtyard between them like a cloudy aspic and snowflakes caught in the wolves’ ruffs as the four of them stood looking at one another.
Antonio, man of the house, was frozen in fear or perhaps disorientation.
Assunta, who was, rightly or wrongly, not afraid of wolves, grabbed the iron fire poker from the floor, ducked under Antonio’s arm, and ran outside barefoot.
“Go away!” she cried, lunging at the closest beast, who crouched and growled but gave ground before she did.
“Away!” It was just as well she didn’t stand by, because for the rest of their fifty-five-year marriage her husband would almost never be around to drive the wolves away.
Luckily for the newlyweds, the screams of the dying goat had woken the neighbors, and men rushed to the Fortunas’ aid with their own shovels and axes.
By the time they had driven the wolves off, plenty of witnesses could tell the story: Assunta in her matrimonial nightgown and Antonio bare-chested in the snow, fighting off the wedding-night wolves.
There might be other beasts about, so while Gino Fragale from two houses down helped Antonio gut and skin the goat carcass for the dismayed widow Marianina, Assunta brought the chickens inside and shut them in her kitchen.
Then she tried to scrub away as much of the goat’s blood as she could with only snow and her broom; she didn’t want the scent luring the wolves back.
Assunta and Antonio spent the rest of their wedding night listening to the flustered chickens scratching at the stone floor.
EIGHT MONTHS AFTER THE FORTUNAS MARRIED, Antonio left to join the army regiment in Catanzaro.
An army enrollment officer had come through Ievoli in the summer to make sure all the eligible men had been registered for the draft.
The young nation of Italy was building an army to reassume its rightful place as a world power—you remember, that rightful place it had relinquished sixteen hundred years earlier, back when those Visigoths sacked the great imperial city of Rome.
Not that Assunta had any notion of Roman history or the cataclysm that was already tearing Europe apart.
When he left for the army, Antonio didn’t promise to send his wife letters. He could read and write but didn’t like to; Assunta could not read or write at all. She assumed he would come back to her if he lived, but only il Signore, God the Father, knew how long he’d be gone.