Death 4 Drowning （Immigration）
Drowning
(Immigration)
I have a lot more to say there, but that’s for later. For now I want to tell you one strange little story.
Why had she let her family make that mistake for all those years? And what, after the Accident, made her finally put her foot down and correct it?
I visited Auntie Tina after I returned from Calabria and asked her if she had any recollection of when or why her sister Stella’s birthday was changed.
“It was always January twelve,” she told me. The fact that the birth registry mistake matched crazy Stella’s new birthday, she said, was just a coincidence.
But it wasn’t a coincidence. Tina misremembered. Which can happen, when a person lives with a revised history for so long it erases its antecedent.
Stella, crazy Stella, knew the truth, when no one else took her seriously. What other truths were locked in her head? What else were we misremembering?
HERE, AFTER MUCH RESEARCH, I am able to present to you the explanation of why Stella Fortuna’s birthday was changed, and why she kept it a secret for so long—forty-nine years—that even her sister forgot it.
It is also the story of the fourth time Stella Fortuna nearly died, when she almost drowned during her attempt to emigrate to the United States.
The fourth death is the most controversial, because it is the most ambiguous—the danger was only recognized long after it had passed. It may not be completely truthful to list it among the almost-deaths. It’s the best legend, though, and sometimes a good legend is truer than the truth.
* * *
ANTONIO FORTUNA IS A RATHER inscrutable villain. After years of ignoring his family, why was he interfering with their lives now and forcing them to join him in America?
Antonio had his reasons, obscure though they may seem.
Some of them might even have been altruistic.
Nowadays, all we remember about Antonio Fortuna—rightfully or wrongfully—are the nasty things he said and did.
But the whole picture is more complicated than its fragments, which are so simple and ugly in isolation.
To be honest, there are sections of Antonio’s life I can’t tell you anything about; he was a forceful man but not a prolix one, and many of his secrets were buried with his bones.
Not all of his secrets, though. I know some.
TRACCI, AS YOU KNOW, was a hamlet south of Ievoli.
There is a mountain-hugging road that connects all the villages like beads on a necklace.
If you follow the road from Ievoli about half an hour past Polverini, you’ll get to the crumbling campanile of Tracci’s chapel, which is barely as big as a two-horse stable.
Tracci no longer exists; the houses that are still standing are empty and its last inhabitants have moved away, but at the turn of the twentieth century it was home to fifty people or so.
There was once a time when Tracci drew pilgrims because of its Madonna statuette, which had been known to accomplish minor miracles—she famously protected a priest who was transporting her when he was beset by wolves.
Now she lives, somewhat slimy with glistening moss, in a cave cut in the mountainside.
A rusted iron gate protects her little grotto, and some locals must still visit her, because there are offerings of plastic flowers nestled among the rocks at her feet.
In 1896, Antonio’s father, Giuseppe Fortuna, was eighteen years old and engaged to be married to a Tracci girl named Angela Gaetano.
That September, two months before his wedding, Giuseppe went to stay with his maternal uncle Luigi Callipo in Pianopoli to help with the olive harvest. There were four Callipo first cousins; Mariastella, the oldest, was a year older than Giuseppe.
Mariastella never told a soul what had happened between her and her cousin Giuseppe, whether she had been weak of will or whether Giuseppe had taken advantage of her, but eight months after he went home to Ievoli and married his fiancée, Angela, Mariastella gave birth to Antonio.
There was nothing that could be done; the baby’s father was already married before God to a good Christian woman.
Mariastella’s father made his wretched daughter, still sore and torn from her labor, carry her mewling infant up the mountain to Tracci to confront the exploiting cousin.
Luigi Callipo demanded Giuseppe take the baby off his hands, but Giuseppe’s pregnant wife, Angela, whose marital happiness was destroyed forever that day, refused.
She became so crazed with rage or betrayal that she couldn’t stop hyperventilating and everyone was afraid she would go into early labor.
Luigi demanded money in restitution for his daughter’s lost honor, but Giuseppe didn’t have any money, and neither did his father.
Mariastella’s honor was the Callipos’ problem, not the Fortunas’.
For the next ten years, Mariastella lived in her father’s house, an unmarriageable ruined woman whose presence was a reminder of her abomination.
Not every family would have been so cold; some would have raised their daughter’s bastard child in loving embraces and hoped for the passage of time to erase the shame.
But the Callipos were strict about female virtue, and Mariastella was never allowed to forget her sin.
There’s not much else I can tell you about the first decade of Antonio’s life, except that it was not a happy one.
Angela, Giuseppe’s wife, died giving birth to her fifth child in 1909.
She was twenty-six years old and such a shrunken, cowed woman that her memory was entirely lost by the time of her children’s children, who grew up calling Mariastella Callipo Nonna.
For when Angela died, Giuseppe took his fallen cousin as his second wife, rescuing her from an otherwise unredeemable life of ignominy.
He needed a woman to care for his four young children and Mariastella was the right choice—a chance to make peace with God over past indiscretions, to heal a family wound.
Even in 1909, Tracci was already in decline. The Fortuna house Mariastella and her son moved into was old and shabby. The well was a mile away, so it was difficult to keep the house clean or do laundry. But at least Antonio was now a legitimate son with a last name.
Antonio was thrown together with four half siblings.
Mariastella would drop another two babies before she became too plagued by prolapse and uterine infections to be a desirable sexual partner to her husband.
She would in fact die of a urinary tract infection in 1950, at age seventy-three.
No one recognized the signs of blood poisoning, even when she walked around in the chiazza wrapped only in her blanket and the skin God gave her. Everyone just thought she was crazy.
That was forty years on, though. In the meantime Mariastella had children to raise, food to grow and cook, water to fetch, laundry to wash in the cold stream.
She was not destroyed by her circumstance, as Angela had been.
But she was a very hard woman, hard as the cast-iron pan she used to discipline her children and stepchildren.
I KNOW IT BECOMES DIFFICULT to follow our Calabrese family stories because of all the repeat names.
Our family trees are taxonomically mind-boggling, Linnaean nightmares with roots not quite numerous enough to support their trunks, where an unwholesome bloodline can be muddled by overlapping names.
In the Fortuna family, you don’t have to go far back to find tangled roots—they are right here, in the generation of Antonio’s siblings.
Giuseppe Fortuna and his family lived, as you already know, in a one-room house with one square bed.
The children were made in that old square bed, and then they had to sleep in it.
Of course it became too much, but it became too much incrementally, a little at a time, each of the children growing one pound bigger, and then one pound more, a swelling symphony of fat baby limbs and sharpening toddler elbows.
It is hard to isolate the breaking point, the day things went too far.
It is especially hard when you have no spare money for more furniture, or anywhere to put it.
Sometimes the best solution is to just think to yourself, Sure, it’s getting bad, we’ll have to do something about that, and go back to the cycle of the plow and exhaustion and sleep.
Did you wonder why Antonio Fortuna, the restless, the playboy, had gotten himself married to Assunta Mascaro when he was only seventeen years old?
Now you know why. Marriage was his easiest solution for escaping that dingy, grotesque house and the communal bed.
Not everyone else was able to escape it.
This is the core fallacy of the famous southern Italian sexual jealousy, the poetic inspiration for the world-renowned machismo, the revenge knifings and the disciplinary patriarchy.
There was no need to be jealous of a spouse or inamorata.
There was no bed for them to be unfaithful on, no moment of the day not full of back-hunching blister-rupturing physical labor.
The place a woman was most likely to have the job done to her was at home.
In the summer of 1918, Antonio’s half sister Mariangela gave birth to a baby girl, whom she named Angela. The mother was thirteen years old; the father was one of her two brothers who were still living at home, either Anto or Domenico. It was impossible to say which for sure.