Chapter 21
They married quickly and soon became Luccio and Zaneta Mazza, a young Italian family with a baby in tow.
She came early, Zaneta still recovering from malaria in her half-starved and weakened state.
They celebrated their daughter Mira’s first birthday the same week Italian airwaves carried news of Mussolini’s execution and, two days later, Hitler’s suicide.
Photos of the work camps had already begun surfacing, and Zaneta sank into a distant and dark pool, where breath seemed casually optional.
She hardly noticed when Luccio came home from throwing his nets to find the curtains drawn and the baby wailing, her frightened eyes wide on her little, tearstained face.
It wasn’t the baby’s fault, of course, but Zaneta, though she knew it was unreasonable, even cruel, heard the baby’s cries as confirmation that the weight of her sorrow made her incapable of mothering.
It seemed pointless to even try when she felt so empty.
How could she provide or nurture anything from her endless well of nothing?
Sometimes the thought of caregiving made her so ill she’d pull the baby from her breast as she nursed, unable to bear even the touch of her small, needy fingers.
Luccio, the voice of reason, learned to take over when the clouds of Zaneta’s moods gathered.
He paced the floor with Mira over his shoulder, shushing and bouncing her until she quieted.
He took her for walks by the sea to get her out of the house, out of her mother’s earshot, and Zaneta winced, seeing them from the window as they sang, splashed on the shore, and spotted the birds dipping and gliding above the water.
She wanted to be good—to be a good mother, do good in the world.
She did love Mira in her way, protected her and taught her words and songs, but whenever a ray of that light trickled into her heart, it would just as suddenly snuff out, driven back by the shadow memories of that dark time hiding in the ruins.
If she happened to let a moment of happiness in, or find her lips curving in a smile at the sight of Luccio and Mira together, her broken heart whispered her disloyalty to the memory of her family.
In this way, her love for Mira was fractured, never quite solid and sure, the fissure too deep to heal.
In time, Zaneta told Luccio about the soldier, as much as he needed to know.
He’d guessed, actually, remembering the one he’d witnessed selling her woven byssus creations for profit at the port.
What she didn’t say, among other things: I poisoned him and left him in a well to rot.
Not because she feared Luccio’s response—had he been there, he would’ve done the same, or worse, on her behalf—but because of her terrifying lack of remorse.
It was the same dead absence of feeling that sometimes crashed upon her like a wave when she watched Mira play or eat.
Survival was one thing, but what kind of person responded that way to a baby?
Zaneta cowered from the inky shadows that wavered inside of her.
No water woman should harbor such things. She was a disgrace to her line.
“No one needs to know about the deserter or that you had anything to do with him,” Luccio assured her. “And we have Mira to live for now, and each other.”
“I’ll know,” Zaneta had replied. “How can she be here while they’re not?”
“She’s a baby,” he pointed out, as if she hadn’t pushed the child out of her own body. “Hope that life goes on. Wouldn’t your mother be grateful for that?”
Zaneta snapped, “She’s not here. It’s not so simple. Not for me. I’m trying.”
Slowly, their community restored itself.
The homes of the weaver families remained empty.
Zaneta and Luccio, after a long while, hesitantly entered them one by one.
Zaneta had decided, as part of carrying on their tradition, that she would gather what byssus and tools she could from them.
It would honor them to put it to use. They also collected photos and other items and kept them in a small trunk, a labeled collection of history that would preserve their memory and work.
Zaneta, on Luccio’s arm at first, ventured back into town to the post office and the market.
She held her head high, defiant and brusque, so different from the shy girl she’d been.
When someone met her gaze, they would inevitably be the one to look away, and Zaneta felt some satisfaction in seeing their shame, even if it went unspoken and unacknowledged.
They couldn’t deny what had happened here.
Yes, they’d all lost family members in the war, but some of them had been eliminated outright.
For a solid year, the town seemed a shell of itself, the once vibrant and lively port making a careful and tentative return to the way it once was.
People were weary. More than a few families struggled after the war, having lost their main wage earners.
But gradually the cafés opened and people ventured out to visit one another with cautious smiles and offers of condolences—“Mi dispiace. Mi dispiace”—until Zaneta was sick of hearing the phrase, sick of saying it.
It didn’t fix anything, didn’t call any water women back to the island, had there been any left. Zaneta was the only one.
Since the war’s official end, it seemed the lists were endless.
Lists of casualties, name after name on the dreaded rosters printed in the papers or posted near the port: soldiers, civilians, prisoners, wounded.
Separate lists came out tallying those liberated from the so-called work camps and seeking family members, so many lost or displaced.
Zaneta’s trembling finger ran down the lists as often as they appeared, searching for the Renda name, stockpiling grains of hope each time she failed to find it.
Those grains vanished the day Luccio came home clutching a page he’d torn from the paper.
Zaneta took one look at his face, gone pale, and snatched it from his hand.
Johann Renda, Allegra Renda, Marta Renda.
The names of her parents and sister leaped off the paper.
Three more statistics from the war, but Zaneta’s entire life.
She had proof now, certainty she would never see them again.
Except for Dahlia. Her remaining sister’s name was missing, and Zaneta clung to that fact like a jealous miser, vaulting it in her heart.
Slowly, slowly, Sant’Antioco recovered. The colorful fishing boats came back, taking their rightful places where the ugly gray naval vessels had previously crowded the docks.
The empty bakery case filled once more as rations lifted and staples like sugar and salt became available again.
Signor Sanna, the dry goods shop owner, beckoned to Zaneta when she passed in the street on one of her visits to town.
She stepped inside the familiar store, its shelves still sparse. “Signora Mazza,” he said. “Once these windows had a display of the island’s byssus.”
Zaneta looked at him pointedly. “Yes, I know.”
He had the grace to cast his eyes to the floor and squirm uncomfortably. “The Germans had never seen anything like them. I should have thought to take down the display when the soldiers started to arrive, but they’d always hung there, a testament to our island.” He was stammering. “I didn’t think.”
Zaneta sighed. No one ever did. “I had heard they were buying byssus weavings in the port,” she said.
Let him wonder how she could’ve heard that, where she might have been all this time.
She didn’t have a numbered tattoo on her arm, but she’d suffered in her own way.
“I was sorry to hear it.” She wouldn’t let him off the hook so easily.
He spread his hands. “What could we do? With a gun in your face, you handed them what they asked for.”
“Mmm.” They certainly did. She placed her hands on the counter to steady herself.
“Could you,” he began. “I mean to say, would you, Signora, honor us again with something to hang in the window?” He met her eyes, and this time he didn’t look away.
Zaneta thought of her mother then. She would have gladly agreed. It was about the byssus, not them. “I would.” She nodded. “I may have some things already at home I can bring in next week. It might show people that perhaps the war didn’t take everything.”
As part of the war recovery, the island hosted hundreds of workers who claimed to be on a mission to get rid of the rampant malaria.
It was the worst region in all of Italy, they said.
Since the Germans had flooded so many inland areas to hamper Allied soldiers, it seemed everyone they knew had battled malaria in the past year.
It rattled Zaneta’s nerves when they repeatedly knocked on their door and came in to dust every inch of their home, dousing them each in clouds of the marvel they called DDT.
It had halted the typhus epidemic in Naples, they said, a lifesaving miracle.
Lifesaving, Zaneta scoffed. Suddenly they’re concerned about lives?