Death 3 Bludgeoning （Education）
Bludgeoning
(Education)
In general the Ievoli schoolhouse was not a very dangerous place, because the children didn’t spend much time there.
In Mussolini’s Italy, elementary education was compulsory through third grade, but it was hard to enforce this law in villages like Ievoli, where there was limited benefit to sending one’s child to school.
The school was a boxlike wood and stone edifice on the far side of the church chiazza.
It had a vaulted twelve-foot ceiling and tall windows to let in lots of light, and got very cold in the winter, so there was no school between Advent and Easter.
There was no school during the month of August for Ferragosto, the celebration of the Assumption, or in September, for the festival of the Madonna Addolorata—Our Lady of the Sorrows, Ievoli’s patron saint—and when the olive trees needed to be harvested.
When school was in session, there were two teachers, Maestra Giuseppina, who taught the boys, and Maestra Fiorella, who taught the girls.
Maestra Giuseppina, who had finished upper school in Nicastro, was married to a university graduate she had met before the Great War.
They lived in the apartment above the school, where he wrote history books while she taught the sons of Ievoli.
Maestra Fiorella was a bit of a different story.
She lived alone, for both her parents were dead.
She was only twenty-three but was already a spinster in the eyes of the village women, who felt sorry for her.
It was not an easy life, being a spinster without hope of a match, and Maestra Fiorella really had none—there were no unmarried boys of her generation left, between the Great War losses and the wave of emigration that had made white widows of so many a Ievolitana.
Besides, Fiorella wasn’t wife material. She did not know how to cook and she was a slovenly housekeeper—ladies paid calls on her during the afternoon siesta to appraise the level of grime on her walls and to sneakily wipe down her counter.
Fiorella had terrible skin, probably a product of her constant illnesses (to accommodate which the girls’ side of the school was often closed without explanation).
Although she had a patient disposition, she was not clever.
She had pursued the position of village schoolteacher because it had become evident she wasn’t going to be good for much else.
Usually the girls’ lessons consisted of the maestra’s reading aloud from her primer, omitting the words she didn’t recognize.
The passages were mind-numbing and often unintelligible, what with the missing words and the fact that the primer was written in Italian, which was very different from the Calabrese language the girls spoke at home.
There was only one broken slate for everyone to share, so after the morning reading the children who had taken the trouble to come to school that day—because, let’s be honest, it is not always convenient to come to school, especially when there is a good chance of discovering the teacher has not come, either—would take turns writing the letters of the alphabet on the slate.
Since Fiorella disliked math, the girl students never learned multiplication or geometry.
This was too bad for Stella, who was good with numbers; she probably would have caught on quickly.
Stella started going to school the Easter of 1927, when she was seven.
Assunta had wanted Stella to wait until Cettina was big enough to go with her.
The sisters sat at one desk and kneeled together on pebbles in the corner when the maestra caught them whispering to each other.
Stella was smart and enjoyed being admired and envied by the other students.
But the maestra’s lessons were boring, so sometimes she and Cettina would only pretend to go to school.
They’d dress, kiss their mother good-bye, then spend the morning picking cherries off other people’s trees, or sitting on the rocky ledge above the algae-filled cistern trying to catch the bergamot-green lizards that peeked out to sun themselves.
When they did go to school, the school day lasted from 9 A.M. until noon; sometimes they adjourned earlier.
During chestnut or strawberry season, Maestra Fiorella would have the whole class stump out to the fields and collect fallen fruit, which she’d take home for her own dinner.
The children were not supposed to tell their parents about this kind of recess, but of course people caught sight of the little girls all marching out of the chiazza together, and the parents gossiped unhappily about how Fiorella was stealing their children’s labor when she was supposed to be teaching them.
No one stepped in to stop her; it would have been too awkward a conversation.
ON THE OTHER HAND, Maestra Giuseppina, who taught the boys, was a devout fascist. Every morning when she stepped into the classroom at five of nine it was expected that the little ragazzi were already assembled in a row in their matching uniforms to perform the official salute to her and to the picture of Mussolini on the wall. But at least the boys learned to read.
THERE WERE SO MANY THINGS a girl needed to learn at home, anyway—cooking, horticulture, the tending of baby siblings, cleaning.
There was endless needlework—linen to be spun, clothing to be stitched or mended.
A girl needed to prepare her trousseau, all those bedsheets and kitchen linens and underwear she’d need for her marriage, and she started working on that grand project when she was nine or ten.
That was the age, too, at which she would start taking part in the village’s cottage silkworm industry, which would occupy her twenty-four hours a day for the month of July.
But for a little girl, the most important education of all was spiritual, so that she might grow up to be a good Christian wife and mother.
Stella and Cettina had started catechism classes after Easter of 1928, when Stella was eight, a little on the old side, and Cettina was six, a little on the young side.
Catechism classes met on Saturday afternoons in the vestry by the church. In 1928 the teacher was Signora Giovannina, who owned the peach grove, and who felt the great weight of the responsibility of all of these children’s immortal souls if she couldn’t knock the fear of God into them.
Stella was good at catechism. She memorized the incantations and Bible verses as easily as she remembered folk songs.
Cettina was not so good. She struggled to remember things from week to week.
When Stella tried to whisper her sister prompts, Signora Giovannina yelled at Cettina, which made Cettina freeze up and abandon any thought that might have been in her head.
This was a tricky moment; Stella hated watching her little sister suffer, but if Stella tried to help it would only get Cettina in more trouble.
Stella always thought of what her mother had told her—that she had to look out for Cettina, that Cettina was just little, not smart like Stella.
It was hard to tell as they grew up if Cettina actually wasn’t smart, or if it was just that she could never quite catch up with her older sister, even though she was always expected to follow by her side.
They were old enough now that their adult characters had emerged out of their baby fat.
Stella already realized what kinds of things the women in the village said about her, and what kinds of things they said about her sister.
They said Cettina was a good girl, an obedient girl, a hard worker, a bit of a brute because she had no common sense.
Stella, meanwhile, was pretty and sharp—quick, clever, and hardheaded, capotost’, the most stubborn and willful little girl anyone had ever seen.
She was proud to be called all those things.
Stella wanted to be tough. She had survived, against all odds, two near-death experiences.
She liked to think of herself as harder, stronger than anyone else around her.
They said Cettina was the better sister, but secretly they all were more interested in Stella. Stella was nine years old, but she had already realized that. And as much as she loved her sister, she did not mind it one little bit.
STELLA MADE HER FIRST COMMUNION the Easter of 1929.
But Cettina was not ready to make Communion.
She would need a second year of catechism, at least. This was very upsetting to Cettina, who felt left out.
She loathed catechism and now would have to go without her sister, who was henceforth exempt.
Making Communion, however, was not optional; Cettina’s place in God’s kingdom depended on it.
She would have to figure it out on her own.
Cettina cried the whole day she learned about Stella’s upcoming Communion. She was still crying when she and Stella got into bed.
“You’ll be all right, little bug,” Stella told her, fanning her legs in the cold blankets to warm them up with body heat. “You still have Marietta and Vicenzina to keep you company.”
Cettina snuffled into the pillow. Stella imagined it was covered in snot.
“I wanted to wear a white dress,” her little sister said when she was ready to talk. “I wanted to carry a . . . what do they call it? With the flowers?”
“A bouquet,” Stella answered.
“I wanted to carry a bouquet and walk into the church with you and make Communion.”
“You’ll make Communion with the other girls your age, next year. If I don’t go this year I’ll be too old. The biggest one.”
Cettina was sobbing again. “What if I never make Communion because I’m too stupid?”
“Eh!” Stella said, a reprimand. She’d learned this noise from her mother. “Enough. Everyone makes Communion, and you’re smarter than lots of those other kids.”