Death 1 Burns （Cognitive Development） #4
Assunta was quietly panicked about seeing her husband.
She wasn’t sure if she remembered what he looked like.
She sang to Stella, bouncing the little girl on one hip to quell her own nerves.
The station was crowded with women and old men, almost everyone clothed entirely in black.
While they waited for the train, Assunta walked with Stella up and down the cobblestoned chiazza, which curved around the mountain like a barbican keeping strategic eye on the valley below.
Assunta and Stella peered in the artisans’ shops.
The bambina greeted the shopkeepers politely, buon jurno, like she’d been taught, and the artisans laughed and said how smart the little girl was, benedic’, God bless.
The train arrived shortly after the bells of Santa Maria had rung ten o’clock.
It had been traveling all through the night and the night before that, a grueling slow journey from Trieste to Rome and then to Napoli, stopping in each village to unload veterans and caskets.
Finally the train had made it to Calabria, the farthest part of the peninsula from where the war had been, to deposit the last of the survivors.
The returning soldiers from Feroleto, Pianopoli, and all the smaller surrounding towns filed off the train.
Assunta searched their faces, wondering with a fresh lurch of terror which was Antonio.
They all looked like they might have been him, and yet none of them looked exactly right.
Assunta stood dumbly, but clever Rosina called out Antonio’s nickname, “Tonnon!,” and a man was striding toward them.
This Antonio looked like the older, leaner brother of the Antonio Assunta had married.
His face was taut and his silhouette reduced.
He was no longer the strapping, meaty young man who had gone to war.
But he exhibited no visible scars except, if you looked closely, the perpetually flaking patches of skin on the tops of his ears from an old frostbite.
“Antonio,” Assunta said. She tried to smile, but she hiccupped with tears.
She hadn’t remembered him as handsome but here he was, so handsome, strong though thinned, darkness sparkling in his amber eyes.
She had her man back when so many women would never see theirs again.
God forgive her for enjoying his absence.
He kissed her cheeks, left then right. He had many days’ stubble on his face. “Is this my daughter?” he said. He kissed Stella’s cheek. “Mariastella, my daughter.”
Stella turned away and buried her face in Assunta’s chest. Ros laughed and grasped Antonio’s arm so he would bend over to kiss her cheeks.
“She’s shy,” Ros told him. “But she’s very happy you’re home.
Aren’t you, Stella, my little star?” Stella peeked at her aunt Ros, but wouldn’t look at her father.
“She’s been talking about you all morning, saying, ‘I’m going to see Papa soon, where’s Papa,’ haven’t you, Stella?
” It was the kind of lie that aunts tell.
* * *
THE THREE FORTUNAS LIVED TOGETHER as a family for five days.
The day Antonio came home, they all ate lunch together in Maria’s house, all the Mascaro women and Nicola and his family.
Antonio was quiet and drank copiously through the meal, then leaned heavily on Assunta’s arm on the way back up the hillside.
As soon as they were inside their basement, Antonio locked the door and pushed Assunta onto the bed.
He lifted her skirts and entered her without even removing his trousers.
His wife, surprised, was unready and dry, and the act itself took longer than she remembered it had in the first year of their marriage, which suddenly felt like a very long time ago, a forgotten world and lifestyle.
Assunta endured in silence, her mind tortured by the thought that little Stella was watching them, that she should stop her husband, but that she couldn’t stop her husband, not when he had been gone for more than three years, when he’d waited this long, when this was her duty to him.
Assunta had become so used to her chastity that it hadn’t even crossed her mind that she would have to give herself to her husband in the same room where her daughter slept.
Would it be like this from now on? She turned her face to the wall, trying not to see Stella’s wide, inquiring eyes.
When it was over, Antonio fell so heavily asleep that Assunta struggled against the dead weight of his legs to pull off his boots. She spent the afternoon cleaning the apartment and urging Stella to play quietly. Assunta needn’t have hushed the baby; nothing would have woken her husband.
His second day home, Antonio slept. Well-wishers came over, wanting to kiss his cheeks and bless him and cry and ask questions about their boys who hadn’t come back or other boys they had heard about—Assunta thought this through and understood how terrible that kind of affection might be for Antonio.
She closed and bolted the windows and the door to discourage visitors.
Some people, of course, still knocked. She would open the top half of the door and shoo them away.
“Tomorrow,” she would whisper, “or the day after.” Meanwhile she cooked so that when her husband woke up hungry he could be served immediately.
She had no bread to offer him—no flour, still, this winter—and fretted over how to make a minestra from the withered potatoes and dried fruits in her stockpile.
Little Stella watched her somberly. She understood the gravity of the task.
His third day in Ievoli, Antonio was ready to leave again. “We are going to Nicastro,” he told his wife. He had a small but meaningful amount of money, active duty severance, and he had already decided how he wanted to spend it.
It was a Thursday, and not so cold for early December. Assunta did not see why they had to go to Nicastro right then, but now that she had a husband again it was her sacred duty as a Christian woman to do as he told her. “I will bring the baby to my mother,” she said.
“No, Mariastella must come with us,” Antonio said. That was part of the errand. “Get her dressed.”
“She can’t walk all that way,” Assunta protested. It was at least two hours on foot; Assunta herself had only been to Nicastro twice in her life. She thought of the broad palm-lined boulevards and the strange men who would be sitting in the bars lining the corso. A terrifying place for a child.
“I’ll carry her,” Antonio said.
The thing he had in mind was a family portrait.
It had become an obsession of his during the snowy days in the Alps.
Some men had brought photographs with them, and by the end of the war Antonio remembered what other men’s wives looked like, but not his own.
He had decided that when you have a family you should have something to show for them.
The Nicastro portraitist fit in a sitting for the Fortuna family even though they didn’t have an appointment, which wasn’t something Antonio had thought of.
The photographer was used to people like Antonio, bumpkins from the mountain villages who showed up at his shop with only word-of-mouth notions about what would happen there.
Between all the boys going off to war and all the emigrants sailing for the Americas, people needed tokens to remember one another by, and he had been doing a lot of business even through the privation of the last few years.
Many of the people who came to be photographed were poor and even their best clothing looked shabby, so the portraitist kept a chest of clothes, four women’s dresses in different colors and sizes, two full men’s suits, and lots of children’s outfits, since sometimes men brought their whole large family.
He didn’t charge extra for use of his costumes; he didn’t want people complaining that the photograph he’d taken looked bad, even if the reason was the appearance of the subject rather than the quality of the photo.
The portraitist showed the Fortunas how they might pose and suggested they do their best to keep the baby still; they would only have one shot.
The photograph wouldn’t be ready for a week.
Antonio could pay half the fee now and the other half when he came to pick up the photo.
Or he could pay the full cost plus an extra fee and have the photograph delivered, but the portraitist warned this might take longer, since it depended on when he had enough delivery orders to justify a trip up to the mountain villages.
Antonio chose the former; he was not one to waste money when there was another option, however inconvenient.
THE NEXT DAY, the fourth day Antonio was home in Ievoli, the Fortunas set out after lunch for Tracci to visit Antonio’s family.
Antonio had Assunta pack the present they had bought in Nicastro—a pickling jar, the famous white ceramic from the town of Squillace, painted with flowers and leaves in ochre, yellow, and green—as well as anything she might want to spend the night.
Tracci was an hour’s walk from Ievoli, and Assunta wished they could return after dinner rather than stay overnight.
But there had been trouble with brigands lately, and Assunta hardly wanted to expose her daughter to the evil night winds that carried diseases like cholera.
Only the malicious walked about after sunset, breathing the poisonous night air so that they could in turn infect others. Assunta was not malicious.