Death 1 Burns （Cognitive Development） #7
Assunta didn’t know what to do. She crawled into bed with Stella, pulling off her dress so that she could press her daughter’s hot flesh to her own, hoping she could draw the fever into herself instead.
Stella lay against her, fiery with baby heat, for a little while, but then moaned and pushed herself away.
Assunta cried, stuffing back her hyperventilation so as not to upset the baby or aggravate her husband’s pique.
Her tears sounded loud to her as they dropped onto the mattress, hissing as they were absorbed into the linen fibers of the bedsheet.
The same thoughts ran again and again through her terror: the brigands, the rain, the long dark road to Feroleto, the fact that Antonio thought of himself as a parent although he had never lived with his daughter, so his faith in his own authority was false.
Should she have fought him harder? She felt that every word she had said had been poorly chosen, every decision she had allowed to be made had been wrong, but she couldn’t think of what she could have said or done instead.
Assunta remembered watching the soft orange of dawn appear in the cracks of the windows, so she must not have fallen asleep until after day had broken.
But fallen asleep she had—how?—deeply asleep, after two nights of sleepless exhaustion and panic.
When Antonio shook her awake, the bells of the church were ringing the loud call to mass.
It must be almost ten o’clock; she would have missed the rosary recitation.
Before she had even opened her eyes her hand stretched, per habit, out toward Stella and met the cold flesh of her daughter’s arm.
Assunta jolted upright, wide awake and livid with fear. Antonio was gripping her shoulder—his fingers bruised her.
“Assunta. The baby is dead.”
THIS IS NOT THE STELLA FORTUNA who would survive seven (or eight) deaths. This was the first Stella, her older sister and namesake. This was the Stella who died.
* * *
THERE IS A THEORY—a controversial one, depending on your religious sensibilities—about why the second Stella nearly died so many times in her life.
Some people wonder if she was haunted by the ghost of her dead sister, the first baby whom she replaced in body and in name.
It isn’t a very Catholic thing to believe in ghosts, and those of purest faith would never consider the idea—or so Assunta told herself, and prayed harder.
The second Stella would live out the first’s aborted narrative and play out all of the ugly scenarios her sister demurred by dying so tragically young.
It is easier to remember the first Stella as the perfect little girl she was than to imagine the real person she never had a chance to be, a real person like the second Stella.
A woman who grows to adulthood is often a damaged thing; the first Stella might have grown up to be beaten by her husband, or might have been caught stepping out on him; she might have turned out to be unchristian or unattractive, petulant or flatulent, embittered or stupid; she might have died early of something else, anyway.
Lived-life stories end in decrepitude, resentments, and squandered opportunities; in crumbling faculties, unrecoupable disappointments, in loneliness.
This—the ugliness of reality—is the gap in the story of the two Stellas, the first, who died at age three and a half, and the second, who wouldn’t die at all.
* * *
THE BABY’S FUNERAL WAS HELD on Monday afternoon.
The entire village came to the mass. Every pew was full and the foyer was packed with those who had arrived too late to find seats.
Everyone loved Assunta, and their hearts were broken for her, as well as for her young husband who had only just returned from the hardships of war to this fresh grief.
Afterward Assunta remembered nothing of the service, only that when the church doors were thrown open and the mourners spilled out, filling the chiazza to its iron balconies, the sun was beginning its wintry descent into the Tyrrhenian Sea.
A black and gray storm was moving in over the mountains and a spatter of cold rain followed the mourners on the slow procession down to the cemetery, but to the west the sky was clear, and the water in the marina was a vibrant aquamarine.
The pallbearers were Assunta’s brother, Nicola, who had been little Stella’s godfather, and Father Giacomo himself, whose priestly robe trailed through the muddied dust. Normally there would have been six pallbearers, but Stella’s little casket was so small only two were required.
The casket was tied around the middle with a rope so that if one of the pallbearers were to trip on the steep path the body wouldn’t go flying out.
Assunta walked behind the casket, her mother and sister gripping her arms. Maria and Rosina were both sobbing, but for once Assunta was not.
She held off her grief by the force of her will because she knew that when it finally came she would die.
A hundred mourners followed the coffin all the way to the aboveground cemetery, a walled city of marble mausoleums that stood like miniature houses on uniform narrow streets.
Family members were stacked in pairs, a nameplate announcing their respective dates.
There had never been a Fortuna buried in Ievoli before, and so little Stella’s remains would slide into the first shelf of an empty death house, where she would wait for her family to follow.
Assunta and Antonio stood in front of the stone portico and received the mourners.
There were many wet faces, but they pressed hands and kissed cheeks quickly so that the next in line could step through.
No one wanted to be out after dark, lest they encounter the same ill air that had killed the baby.
TWO DAYS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, in the midafternoon, there was a knock on the door.
Assunta answered in her bare feet and the dress she had been wearing for four days.
On the other side of the door, with his fine leather boots standing in the mud of the widow Marianina’s chicken yard, was a man Assunta knew, but she couldn’t remember how.
“Good afternoon, signora,” the man said, which was no help to her in placing him. He had a leather satchel that struck her as particular.
“Ciao,” she replied. She labored to concentrate in her stupor.
“You never came,” the man said. “I was in the area—I had to come to Marcantoni for a delivery—so I thought I would stop by to save you the journey.”
She couldn’t pretend anymore; she didn’t have the energy. “Never came where?”
“To pick up the photograph you ordered, what do you think?”
Ah yes, now she recognized him—the Nicastro portraitist. “We don’t need the photo anymore” was the first thing she thought to say.
The portraitist’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. She had made him angry. “There is the matter of the other half of the fee,” he said. “Your husband only paid half up front. The other half was to be paid on receipt.”
“Signore,” Assunta said. She could have been exhorting the portraitist or God himself. “We have just spent the last of our money burying our daughter. That’s the little girl in the picture you made for us. Capito?” She wanted nothing more than to end this conversation and get back in bed.
The portraitist was both a human being with a heart and also a businessman who saw when there was nothing more to be gained.
“I’m so sorry, signora,” he said. “Listen, I will make you a present of the photo as my condolence to you. Forget the other half of the fee.” He was pulling a brown paper packet out of his satchel.
“No, it is nothing. You should have this photo of your daughter to remember her by.” He handed her the packet, tipped his hat, and left.
SOMEWHERE, I THINK, a copy of the portrait might still exist, if the second Stella didn’t destroy it during the purge. It’s ingrained in my memory, although I admit it’s been many years since I’ve seen it.
In the portrait, nineteen-year-old Assunta casts the impression of a much older woman, with her full bosom and weathered face.
She wears a long-sleeved black dress and the kind of hangdog expression one sees in so many photos of her immigrant contemporaries.
She’d felt nervous during the sitting, disoriented by the photographer’s instructions.
Antonio, meanwhile, is a vaudeville patriarch with his square-buttoned vest and handlebar mustache.
The first Stella, the lost bambina, is strung between them like a rosary, her Christ-like pigeon toes propped over a small standing table.
The photo is an eerie one: the first Stella’s face in the black-and-gray is melancholy and unbabyish, with deep shadows under her dark, unfocused eyes.
She has the look of one who has passed through the vale of frivolous youth and is relieved she will not have to tire herself with it again.
Assunta and Antonio never again took formal portraits of their young children.
It was expensive, for one thing, but more importantly they had learned their lesson: not to commemorate something that hadn’t yet committed itself to the flesh.
Assunta couldn’t escape the idea that, by taking the first Stella’s picture, by which they would remember her, she and Antonio had doomed their daughter to die.