Elizabeth Street (3 page)

When Vittorio Macri’s boat was not moving quickly enough, it was Nunzio who figured out that the boat’s balance was off because of a misplaced center pole. And when he was only a teenager, Nunzio worked with the forger to create a better spearhead, which locked into the fish when the rope was pulled back.

Nunzio enjoyed his elevated position in the village. He was proud that his father’s friends came to him for assistance; it only made him love Scilla more. It was decided that Nunzio had a gift and should become an engineer. It meant leaving and going north to study. Felipe, the sometime village schoolmaster, warned him that he would be treated badly. He said they would call Nunzio a peasant and laugh at his clothes and dialect. But the prospect of losing status, of being mocked, all paled next to the thought of leaving Giovanna. In the end, Giovanna made the decision easy. She said that she would not marry him unless he went to school and came back an engineer.

It took Nunzio more than five years to finish his studies. Being from the Mezzogiorno, he was forced to work for less pay than his fellow students in his apprenticeship, and the professors often held Nunzio’s work to a higher standard, forcing him to repeat lessons. While these injustices kept him away from Scilla longer than planned, Nunzio reminded himself that it was a miracle he was studying at all. He would not spend his life, as every man of his family had before him, taking fish from the sea. Giovanna cursed their decision; life was intolerable without him. But her chest swelled with pride when someone asked if she had heard from “Maestro” Nunzio, a title reserved for respected professionals.

To make the time pass while Nunzio was away, Giovanna worked day and night. In the early mornings she cleaned her family’s narrow three-story house, starting from the top floor, with its terrace that overlooked both sea and village, and moving on to the second floor, which opened to the alley behind the house, and ending with the bottom floor, which faced the sea and the family’s fishing boat. After cleaning, she would go to her parents’ fish store to ready it for the day’s catch. She would return to the store in the afternoon after the midday meal to sell fish to the people of the Marina Grande and San Giorgio. When this routine left her with too much time in the evenings, she started trailing Signora Scalici, the town’s midwife.

Giovanna had long been the person to whom villagers in the Chianalea brought sick animals. When Giovanna held a hurt animal, it would calm down, and if she couldn’t help the animal, she would hold it until it died to ease the creature’s passing. She was equally as nurturing with plants. On the family’s terrace, a garden flourished in pots, and this became Giovanna’s laboratory. She devised poultices for drawing out infections and healing wounds using a variety of herbs.

So when people saw Giovanna with the midwife, they acted like they had known all along that one day Giovanna would deliver the babies of the village. While it was a natural progression, some of the women were not happy at first. They thought Giovanna had airs. They disapproved of how she took charge in the fish store and had no problem scolding men about the quality or price of their fish. And the women were puzzled and suspicious of her decision to allow Nunzio to go north without marrying her.

As each year went by, more and more of Giovanna’s time was spent helping Signora Scalici deliver Scilla’s next generation. After their initial mistrust, the mothers liked having Giovanna around. Signora Scalici was kind, but all business. Giovanna could help take the minds of birthing mothers elsewhere when the pain was unbearable and focus them when the time was right.

Early in her training, she had helped deliver her childhood friend Francesca Marasculo’s third baby. It had been a fast delivery. The women had cleaned up and left. Giovanna was to forever remain haunted by the screams of Francesca’s husband echoing off the stone houses as he ran through the Chianalea calling for help. He had woken up in a pool of Francesca’s blood, as she lay hemorrhaging and unconscious beside him. By the time the midwives reached her, Francesca was dead, her two young children clinging to her limp hands.

Francesca’s death became a scar that knit itself on Giovanna’s soul. From that time forward, after birthing a baby, Giovanna spent the night with the mother, cooking, cleaning, and keeping a watchful eye. For that, too, she had earned the respect and trust of the women of the village.

The wedding guests had returned to their pews following communion. The church was silent. Nunzio and Giovanna knelt before the altar. The priest nodded, and Nunzio squeezed Giovanna’s hand as they got up. Giovanna’s mind stopped wandering. The joyful weight of the moment nearly made her fall.

“Do you, Nunzio Pontillo, take Giovanna Costa to be your wife?” Nunzio was at sea as he looked into Giovanna’s blue eyes and said yes from their depths.

“Do you, Giovanna Costa, take Nunzio Pontillo to be your husband?” Giovanna felt complete when she said, “Yes.” Life was as it should be and how it was meant to be.

Sì. Finalmente.

Nunzio and Giovanna were born not long after the unification of Italy. As a child, Nunzio would climb on his uncle’s donkey, with a stick for a bayonet, and pretend he was Italian revolution general Giuseppe Garibaldi, riding into town to exile the foreign rulers. Giovanna would cheer and wave a red cloth. When their elders said the word “
Risorgimento
!” Giovanna and Nunzio could hear the defiance, hope, and passion in every syllable. Now, years later, it was different. It was as if the adults were saying an ex-lover’s name. There was still an attraction in their voices, but you could hear the betrayal.

One of the changes since unification was that sometimes Giovanna and Nunzio went to school. School was the rented room of a teacher sent from the north. The
professore
never lasted long, but when there was a professore in town, Giovanna’s and Nunzio’s parents insisted that they go. The town was supposed to build a school with money from the north, but the school was never built, and the money disappeared. Despite fleeing teachers and nonexistent classrooms, somehow Giovanna and Nunzio learned to read and write, and this alone distinguished them from most of the other children. But the majority of their education came from proverbs, legends, and conversation they overheard in the town square—the
chiazza
.

The chiazza was Scilla’s heartbeat. It was on the third level in Scilla and overlooked the castle, the neighborhood of the Chianalea, and the beach. Its western end jutted out over the sea. Adjacent to the square were rows of pino marino trees and flowering bushes; in June the air was scented with honeysuckle. In good weather, which was nearly every day, people would gather there in the evenings, and on Sundays. Children were scooted away to play so that the adults could have a glass of wine and gossip. Giovanna and Nunzio had a spot under a bougainvillea bush where they could listen undetected while they shelled and sucked on pistachios.

They loved when the talk turned from the village to the news of the world. Town gossip was boring. Generally it was a topic the men all agreed upon, and it made for uneventful conversation. “The fish are running good,” and they would all nod and grumble in agreement, “Sì
,
the fish are running good.” But when the subject was the politics of Italy, that was an entirely different matter. Arguments and curses flew fast and furious, fists were raised in dramatic thrusts, and unlikely alliances were both made and broken.

When Giovanna and Nunzio heard that a northern newspaper had made its way into town, it didn’t matter how many chores they had, they would make sure they were under the bougainvillea bush with an extra stash of pistachios and a flask of wine. On these nights, Vittorio, one of the few
contadini
in the village who could read, would scrub his hands and muscular forearms with lemons to rid them of the fish smell and put on his best shirt. He would stride to the chiazza and sit in the prime spot that had been reserved for him. Within minutes, scores of men would gather around Vittorio with the women on the perimeter pretending to be absorbed in their sewing.

Vittorio would read aloud from what was usually a Roman newspaper, although sometimes a paper made it all the way from Milano. Their local newspaper was published in Reggio and written in their dialect, but it didn’t have the same incendiary content of the northern papers. The northern papers were written in Italian, which was only vaguely similar to the dialect spoken in Scilla. Also, the paper was invariably three months old, and along the way pages had been torn out to blow a nose or to wrap the day’s catch. So Vittorio would struggle to read what was left of the words that most closely resembled his own language.

“And then, the pig says”—Vittorio was prone to commentary—“our Italia must be protected by an Italian army. Our good men from l’alta Italia are serving, and so must the lazy dogs of the south whose families whine that they can’t leave their farms.”

“That stupid son of a whore!” Luigi DiFranco, a goat herder, shouted, jumping on his chair. It wobbled on the uneven cobblestones beneath. “If my son goes in their goddamn army, who will take care of the goats and make the cheese to pay their taxes!!??”

Every man shouted at once.

“Who will fix the nets?”

“Dogs! They are pigs!
Sporcaccioni!
”

“How come they tax my mule but not their rich friends’ cows? I’m not stupid!”

“Will their sons plow my land?”

The men were so loud that Vittorio’s brother lit a firecracker to stun them into silence.

Cesare, one of the oldest men in the village, was the first to speak. “Who is this Italia and why does she need an army? Is she a Roman queen?”

After a moment there was laughter, but Vittorio was getting impatient; he wanted to continue reading. “Cesare, do you know nothing? Italia is the country we live in. The north, the south, Sicilia, we are all this country of Italia.”

“Cesare’s right!” The firecracker had done little to change Luigi’s mood. “Who is this Italia? I’m
Calabrese
. I can’t afford to be an Italian. They taxed my goat, they taxed my mule, and now they want to take my son. Italian my ass!”

“It’s the price we pay for a united Italy. Do you want to be conquered every time the winds blow?” Vittorio felt he had to defend unification.

“No, but I want to eat!” shouted Luigi.

“I hear the northerners aren’t running to join their army,” another man shouted. “A ship captain in Naples told me the northerners are leaving in droves for South America.”

It was like another firework had exploded. Voices overlapped. Hands and arms were not enough for gesticulation. They jumped up and down and acted out emotions. Someone fell off a wobbly chair. From afar, the group looked like it was engaged in a bizarre ritual dance.

“Leave their homes? When do they come back?”

“If there are no northerners in the north, let’s move!”

“Have you ever seen a
Piemontese
row a boat?”

The men talked until Luigi’s one-eyed demented rooster crowed midnight, and Giovanna and Nunzio stayed under the bougainvillea bush until their mothers pulled them out by their ears. Giovanna couldn’t remember if that was the first time she heard talk of people going to other lands, but from that moment on it was a constant topic.

It was unthinkable to leave your home. It was a concept, like Italy, that was too difficult to fathom. Didn’t her papa teach them that while the rulers always changed, the Calabresi remained? If no war or event in Italy’s history had forced them from their home, how could unification?

Lorenzo, Giovanna’s older brother, played with the little bit of food on his plate. The air was thick at the dining table. Concetta knew her son well. She knew he was trying to say something, and she was doing her best to stop him from saying it. Every time he started to speak or even sigh, she picked up a plate or shifted in her chair to break his concentration. Domenico peered at his son expectantly from under his eyebrows, afraid to meet his gaze.

In the past three years, Giovanna had watched her proud brother move from anger to frustration to defeat. There was a slump in his once-square shoulders, and his lean body now just looked skinny. Giovanna felt that she and her brother had aged. It wasn’t simply because he was a man of twenty-two and she a woman of twenty, but because life had become more and more difficult with each year.

When they had buried the last of the dead from the cholera epidemic, including Nunzio’s father, they thought that the worst times were over. But cholera turned out to be an overture to a tragic opera where events spiraled out of control and the audience was left trying to keep track of the villains.

The other villains were not as dramatic or forthright as cholera; they were more insidious and masked. Since the government started taxing goats, the mountain peasants had to reduce their herds. Soon there wasn’t enough milk and cheese to trade, and they had to reduce the herds further. For a while they ate a lot of goat meat. Now there was no milk, no cheese, and no goats. Then they taxed the mules, so farmers had to plow the lands themselves. One year the crops would be eaten by parasites, and the next they would die of drought. When there wasn’t enough food from the farms and people were forced to grow what they could in their yards, they taxed the gardens. Only the
padroni,
the large landowners, who were mainly foreigners or northerners, had farms and animals anymore. The goat herders and the farmers were reduced to serfdom on the manors of the padroni.

When the people rebelled with sticks, the northern police mowed them down with guns. The only option for many men was to become a brigand. First the sons and then sometimes the fathers left for the mountains to make their living robbing rich landowners and travelers who traversed the region’s few roads. In the dead of night, the men would scramble down cliff paths to leave money or food with their families, never staying more than minutes. When they stopped coming in the dead of night, their families knew that the police had killed them.

Lorenzo planned on marrying Pasqualina, Vittorio’s daughter, but he was waiting for things to get better. Pasqualina got tired of waiting. When Luigi DiFranco’s son, who was living in America, wrote Pasqualina’s family with a proposal of marriage and the money for passage, she accepted. After Pasqualina left, Lorenzo considered
brigantaggio
, but he knew that he would not be a good brigand. He came from a family with property; the best brigands were of pure peasant stock. It was their way to rise up in the world, to gain respect, and to reap the justice that the law failed to give them. And it was their fate for their severed heads to be displayed as an example for other justice seekers.

Lorenzo wanted his turn at life—to become a man like his father, with a house and a business. The Mezzogiorno had turned him into a contadino without power or a future.

“I’m going to America.” There. He said it.

Concetta sucked in air and began to clear the dishes as if a word had not been spoken.

Lorenzo looked at his father. “I’ll send money. I can’t help you here.”

His father walked out the door in silence and sat on the dock. Lorenzo rose to hug his mother, who sobbed at his touch. She didn’t want her son to see her this way, so she waved him out of the house. He heard Giovanna comforting his mother as he walked to his father and sat down beside him. Domenico didn’t look up and continued staring into the water that reflected his weather-beaten but still handsome face. In a soft voice and with tears etching his skin, Domenico said,

Domenico pulled at the ropes holding the trunk to test their tightness. Lorenzo checked his pocket many times for the address of Luigi DiFranco. It had been arranged that he would first go to Luigi’s home until he found his own place to sleep in New York. The piece of paper seemed so fragile. What if he lost it? He had already memorized the address, Mulberry Street, 141, but he did not trust his memory. He copied it again and put it in his shoe. The immigrants who returned described a city of black smoke and soot. He had waking nightmares of wandering around trying to see obscured numbers and not being able to ask directions.

Domenico put his hand on Lorenzo’s shoulder and said, “
Andiamo
.” Concetta and Giovanna were inside the house. Having said their goodbyes, Concetta did not want to see her son walk off. She was in her rocking chair, the one where she had nursed Lorenzo, winding her rosary through her knotted fingers. Giovanna sat beside her, resting her hand on her mother’s leg. When Concetta heard the mule’s hooves scrape on the cobblestones, she rocked faster and faster until Giovanna had to grab the arms of the chair to keep it from falling over. As the frantic rocking stopped, her mother let escape a wail from deep inside her chest that Giovanna knew was echoing off the cliffs of Scilla.