Death 1 Burns （Cognitive Development） #3
Assunta, who was six months pregnant, walked with Antonio down the mountain to the railroad station, which was in Feroleto, the largest town in their cluster of villages.
Maria led the donkey with Antonio’s pack tied to its back.
It was not a very romantic good-bye; when the train came, Antonio kissed his wife’s cheeks, hoisted his pack, and disappeared into one of the carriages.
Assunta had learned during her young marriage that Antonio was not a romantic man, although he was certainly a sexual one.
The women stood on the platform until the train rumbled down the mountain toward far-off Catanzaro.
Assunta cried silently, open-eyed, her tears sliding off her cheeks and landing on the protrusion of her belly.
She was crying because a part of her was relieved at Antonio’s going away, at not having to cater to his insatiable alimentary and sexual appetites, which had become very trying when she was tired from the pregnancy.
She felt guilty for feeling this way. As, the priest told her at confession, she should.
THE BABY CAME ON THE AFTERNOON of January 11, 1915.
Assunta woke up with some cramping and then her water broke as she was cleaning out the fireplace.
She mopped up the mess nervously, wondering if she should waddle down the mountain to tell her mother, or if then she wouldn’t be able to climb back up via Fontana to her own house to give birth.
Her anxiety over this decision paralyzed her, but luckily Maria and Rosina dropped in for a visit of their own accord.
That’s what life in a village is like; if you haven’t seen someone all day, you go and check on them.
The older women heated water and hung mint over the bed to ward off the Evil Eye.
They gripped Assunta by the elbows and made her walk in circles.
They helped her use her chamber pot and fed her a chamomile infusion to relax her muscles and her mind.
In the late afternoon, when the contractions were starting to come closer, Ros went up to the church to fetch the nun, Suora Letizia.
The suora was very holy and knew women’s medicine, even though she had never had any children herself.
She had attended many births over her sixty-five years and had seen all kinds of things, babies born feetfirst and babies tangled in their cords and babies that turned out to be twins.
Her lilting northern accent soothed laboring mothers. Everyone felt better with her there.
Assunta was nervous and did not want to die, which was a possibility.
Maria and Ros were not nervous, though, because they had total faith in God and His will.
Assunta knew she should have had this faith, too, and as she worried about dying she also worried about worrying about dying.
But the baby was born absolutely without incident, with only as much pain and misery as every mother experiences in a healthy birth.
It was a pink, fat little girl with a patch of black hair that covered the whole top of her head.
Her eyes were light brown, like her father’s.
Antonio had left instructions for how his child was to be named: Giuseppe if it was a boy, after Antonio’s father, and Mariastella if it was a girl, after Antonio’s mother.
The child was not an hour old before her mother had shortened Mariastella to Stella.
“My little star,” Assunta said, because it was too easy to say, because the baby was too beautiful.
Maria and Ros blessed the baby and performed the cruce incantation to banish the Evil Eye. They were, as mentioned, women of total faith who trusted wholly in the saving grace of Jesus, but from a practical standpoint it never hurt to back up His good efforts with a little mountain witchcraft.
IN MAY 1915, when Assunta’s meticulously cultivated bean garden was in full purple and yellow flower, the news arrived that Italy had gone to war against Austria.
Infant Stella was four months old and splendidly fat; she had the kind of heavy-cheeked dangling baby face that sat smiling directly on her own chest. This was, needless to say, very popular with all the neighbor ladies, who came over to affectionately press those cheeks with their lips and fingers.
Stella’s mother had no way of guessing how short these golden days of baby fat would be or of the privation that was coming.
“How long does a war take?” Assunta asked her brother, Nicola, when he brought her the news.
Nicola didn’t have an answer for this. He had avoided the draft by virtue of his age—he was thirty-five, separated from Assunta by the four babies their mother had lost at birth—but Ievoli had sent seventeen ragazzi, a generation, and no family in the village was unaffected.
In June, the same day little Stella sat up all by herself without any help from her exuberant mother, Assunta received a letter from Antonio, which Nicola read out for her. Antonio’s division was being sent north, to the Austrian border. The letter was at least a month old.
DURING THE WAR, there were two years of famine.
The winter of 1916–17 was the harshest on record, with documented snowfall of eight meters in the Isonzo River valley, where the boys were fighting.
Spring simply never broke, and winter extended into 1918, when some of the contested peaks in the Alps thawed for the first time and revealed brigades of corpses that had been buried in snowdrifts for eighteen months.
At home in Ievoli, the abortive growing season yielded only half the usual wheat; after the war tariff was collected, Assunta cried.
She wished she could believe this wheat being taken away from her would somehow make its way to Antonio on the Austrian front, but as the taxman’s donkey pulled his cart down the road toward Pianopoli, she couldn’t suppress the notion that he was just another mountain brigand, extorting with a wax-sealed order from the king instead of a rifle.
Assunta’s orto struggled in the unseasonably cold summer; potatoes were small and tomatoes refused to ripen and wrinkled on the vine.
As summer withered into fall, there was almost nothing to eat.
There were stories of housewives scraping the powdery stucco off their walls to replace the flour they didn’t have.
But Assunta’s walls weren’t stuccoed, and they weren’t her walls, anyway.
In her seventeen years Assunta had never known this kind of hunger.
She had no money, no father or husband to provide for her, and no way to earn money herself; she could not control the weather or make the garden fruit.
She felt as helpless as a child, but now she had a child.
Every day seemed like it must be the worst it could get, but then sometimes it got even worse.
Little Stella had grown into a bashful, gentle-tempered toddler who rarely cried.
She took without complaint the strange and increasingly desperate things Assunta fed her: mashed fava beans one day, then a minestra cooked from their leftover pods the next.
Onions fried in olive oil but no bread to eat them on.
Broths made from pine bark or bitter mountain herbs.
Unripe oranges she stole from the gullies off the side of the road to Tracci and which she stewed until the rinds were soft enough to swallow.
Assunta boiled the last of her supply of chestnuts from the fall harvest, drinking off the thinly flavored water and feeding the nuts to little Stella only when they had turned to mush.
On many days Assunta did without, relishing the growling in her stomach as proof that there was no sacrifice she had not made on the bambina’s behalf.
Assunta did her best. She got by; her baby grew.
When Stella got too big for her infant dress, there was no cloth to make her a bigger one.
Instead Assunta stitched together old kitchen linens, and Stella learned to walk in a dress that had once wiped the table.
Around them, the whole village grew thinner.
The farm animals dwindled and disappeared, even the ones that wouldn’t normally be eaten—the donkeys, for example; Calabresi love their donkeys more than they love their wives, as the old song goes.
Even Maria’s old ciucciu did not survive the war.
I’m not sure what happened to her—I can’t imagine Maria or sentimental Ros killing and cooking her, but I’ve also never gone hungry.
The dark years passed, and Ievoli prayed. One by one, the new widows and grieving mothers replaced their red pacchiana skirts with black mourning ones.
THE WAR AGAINST AUSTRIA ENDED on November 3, 1918.
A messenger on horseback rode to all the parishes along the road from Nicastro with the news.
At sundown the bells rang in the campanile of each church so the countryside echoed with the thanks of the living and the prayers for the dead.
Ievoli had lost eleven young men—a terrible price for a tiny hamlet to absorb.
One family, Angelo and Franceschina who lived off the road to Pianopoli, lost all three of their sons as well as two nephews, one on his side, one on hers.
Assunta and Ros took little Stella to Feroleto to meet the train that was carrying home the soldiers.
Assunta wasn’t sure what time it would arrive and was afraid of being late, so the women headed out at dawn.
There was no donkey to help with Antonio’s bag this time.
Stella walked half the journey on her own stubby legs and let Assunta carry her for the remainder.