Death 4 Drowning （Immigration） #2
Despite her lost virtue, eventually Mariangela was able to find a husband; we pretend virginity is everything, a woman’s only asset, but the truth is the only thing about a woman that matters is whether she can work.
None of Angela’s still-living half siblings, who are much younger, seem to know what happened to her after the war, when she vanishes from any written historical record.
(To be frank, it is not easy to bring her up as a topic of conversation; even my most forthright interlocutors have steered the subject away from her.) I wonder if Angela ever left the village where she was born, and if she did, whether the story of her origins followed her.
I wonder whether she went on to have children with too few great-grandparents.
I wonder if she struggled, or if it was all just taken in stride, the way things are and always have been.
I AM CURIOUS ABOUT a few other things, but there is no one to ask. For example:
How was Mariangela allowed to be raped? How, above all, did their parents not know what was happening? Or did they know and turn away? Did Giuseppe, the patriarch, beat his sons for their atrocity, or did he beat his daughter for giving up that one precious asset?
And then—what happened? Did they go on all living together, and for how long? Did Mariangela have to go on sharing a bed with her rapists? How did her attackers live with their shame as they watched it bear fruit?
And then—did the rapists suffer as a result of their behavior?
Or was this a youthful transgression—boys will be boys, let’s all try to put it behind us?
Does a rapist look at his infant daughter with love?
Is there a desire to protect, to care for, when the same man-boy felt no such desire to protect or care for the infant’s mother?
How, exactly, do the laws of humanity work in a situation like this?
I know that eventually Anto ended up moving to California, and Domenico left for South America, but no one is sure where. Perhaps the brothers were driven out for their bad behavior, or perhaps, as Mariangela told Assunta, they had been avoiding the draft. The siblings did not keep in touch.
This history is taboo, so no mention must be made of it, under any circumstances.
Except I know as much as I do, which goes to show you only certain secrets are for keeping. I admit I haven’t been able to quite figure out the difference between the two. Maybe that’s why I’m writing this.
THAT, IN ANY CASE, was the childhood Antonio Fortuna was leaving behind—when he married and moved to Ievoli, when he left Ievoli for war, when he left again for America. I’m not saying Antonio Fortuna wasn’t a monster. I’m just telling you where the monster came from.
AS MUCH AS HE WANTED to escape his upbringing, Antonio did not go to war by choice. He was conscripted, like most of the five million Italian men who fought.
It is hard to read about the Great War in Italy.
Hard to read because material is hard to come by—the truth was obscured by Mussolini, buried under propaganda—and also hard to read because the facts are devastating.
The price of the war was absurd: hundreds of thousands of men sent to die over a few miles of unarable snowy mountains at the Austro-Hungarian border.
The fighting was a bloodbath, the ratio of blood shed to territory gained worse even than on the Western Front for most of the war.
The soldiers advanced up mountainsides, climbing over the corpses of their own dead, and into previously unimagined technology—poisonous gases, barbed wire, machine guns, grenades—their own military police’s guns trained to their backs, forcing them forward.
This went on, day in and day out, for more than three years.
They fought in a wintry wasteland of the snowy Alps, under the constant threat of avalanches—the White Death—that killed more Italian soldiers than the Austrian shells did.
There were never enough helmets or weapons.
The water bottles were made of wood and full of mold.
The gas masks, which most soldiers didn’t have anyway, weren’t effective against chlorine or phosgene, which passed over battalions in poisonous clouds and left rows of crouching corpses clutching their stomachs and foaming at the mouth.
The Italian soldiers were so dehydrated because of the poor supply chain that their feet became too swollen for their boots, so they marched barefoot and frostbitten.
Their uniforms were so mud caked and lice ridden that they resorted to wearing women’s clothing they ransacked from abandoned villages.
They ate dead horses and rats they caught in their trenches.
They shat in the same holes they slept in because they were too afraid of snipers to go to a latrine.
They died of typhoid and cholera. They went deaf from explosions, lost their balance stumbling over broken ground and fallen comrades.
They charged toward their deaths in total confusion.
There were gruesome incidents of friendly fire.
They answered to a general who was ignorant, egomaniacal, stubborn, and indecisive, all at once, an idiot man with unchecked authority who placed no value on his soldiers’ lives.
The general’s name was Luigi Cadorna, and I only write it down here because I believe his monstrosity should be more widely known.
For those who might make the argument that Cadorna was incompetent, not evil, I will offer my opinion that it is the moral responsibility of the incompetent to identify their own weaknesses and not accept positions of power.
What makes the truth even more wretched is that they died for nothing at all.
Whatever promises had been made to Italy for entering the war were null in the grimacing face of peace.
At the end of four years of bloodshed, 1.
5 million Italians had been killed, an additional seven hundred thousand soldiers disabled by injuries.
There is, as with all wars, the missing statistic of how many women were raped because they lived in the contested territory.
Another half a million Italian civilians died of the Spanish flu the soldiers brought home from war hospitals, the highest influenza mortality rate of any nation.
The casualties extended beyond the years of the war, extend even to today.
It took Italy fifty years to pay off its war debts.
The country’s economy was destroyed, and industrialization shifted irrevocably to the north, which was the kiss of death for any meaningful development of Italy’s south.
It is the reason that, today, Calabria still sends its youth to work in faraway cities, where they settle and don’t come back.
SOMEHOW, ANTONIO FORTUNA SURVIVED THE WAR.
He was drafted with the very first class at age seventeen, and he lived to bring his body home, uninterrupted by bullets or shrapnel.
He survived the November 1915 offensive on San Michele, where half the Catanzaro brigade was slaughtered.
He survived his brigade’s assault on the Asiago Plateau, a disaster in which the Italian soldiers were trapped in muddy sinkholes and barbed wire, where the Catanzaro 141 lost three-quarters of its men and where the soldiers not mowed down by gunfire had to spend the freezing night playing dead among the corpses until they could escape at dawn.
They say war is a crucible, where men are forged. I would venture that a monster is forged in a crucible as easily as a man is. Some men go to war and find God; others lose God forever. Antonio was one of the latter.
But he survived.
Maybe his daughter Stella’s ability to survive death was inherited. She never liked her father, but maybe she owed him that much.
WHEN ANTONIO FORTUNA CAME HOME after four years in the army, Ievoli was too small for him.
He sailed to the United States for the first time in February 1920, following in the footsteps of four million other Italian immigrants.
Most of them came from the south—Sicily, Campania, Puglia, and Basilicata as well as Calabria—where Italian unification had hurt the most, where war and taxes had squeezed the already impoverished contadini dry.
The south was emptied of adult men; in Calabria, 30 percent of households had no capo, no male head.
Italian men emigrated because they wanted to work, to make better lives for themselves than the poverty and exploitation they had left, although there was plenty of poverty and exploitation in l’America, too.
Italian laborers—almost always men, often illiterate and with no recourse to aid or advice—crossed the ocean in steerage to be herded onto trains bound for coal mines in West Virginia or for jobs laying railroad track in the forests of Pennsylvania.
They left unpaved, unplumbed, deforested, and malarial villages; they left starvation, cholera, entrenched feudalism, an inescapable class system.
They left their families, in hopes of reuniting with them under better auspices.
They brought their love of food and orderly gardens, their languages and their prejudices, their mysterious triple god and their myriad saints, their rites and their songs and their pageants.
They brought their worship of their mothers; they brought their mothers.
In many cases they intended to go back, which made our Italian ancestors unusual among would-be American immigrants, but in many cases they never did go back, which made us the same as everyone else.
ANTONIO WAS ON THE LATE SIDE for American admittance—if he’d been just a few years later, after 1924, when the U.S.
government passed the National Origins Act and ethnic quotas were instituted, Antonio would most likely have had to pick some other destination, perhaps Canada, Argentina, Australia, or France, where many Calabresi would end up.