Elizabeth Street (9 page)

The
Lombardia
left the Bay of Naples on the twenty-eighth of December with Giovanna and 1,301 other passengers in steerage. They would arrive in New York to a new world and a new year. But such lofty thoughts did not occupy the minds of Giovanna and her fellow passengers; instead, they concentrated on enduring the smell of vomit, urine, and excrement that hung in the stifling air and on the deafening sounds of babies’ cries and the ship’s boiler. If for even a moment the immigrants were able to block out the assault on their senses, they were left only with relentless boredom.

It was day three of the fourteen-day voyage. Giovanna thought that time had taken on the character of a long labor where every minute lasted an hour and was filled with anticipation. Conversation, the most common way to pass time, was not possible for Giovanna. Nunzio’s death had her by the throat. She would listen to people talking and even tried to join in a few times, but her vocal cords still could not vibrate. No one questioned her silence. There was so much more to worry about.

On the bunk beneath Giovanna was a young woman with her two-year-old daughter. Giovanna had been assigned the bottom bunk but had given it to the woman for fear that in one of the ship’s many keels, the child would fall to the floor. The top bunk was considered preferable anyway. You were less likely to be splashed by vomit. Nearly everyone was horribly seasick; the winter seas knocked the boat around like a toy. Giovanna’s life on the water had given her an iron stomach, much to the benefit of the woman beneath her and to those on either side. The peasants from the sea towns fared better on the ship than those from the mountains, many of whom had never even seen a twig float. When the ship rocked suddenly to the extreme, steerage echoed with the terrified screams and prayers of immigrants who were certain their real destination was the bottom of the ocean.

Occasionally, the passengers would brave the icy wind aboveboard to get air. A section of the lower deck that caught the soot from the ship’s smokestacks was reserved for steerage. There, crammed on the deck, the immigrants would suck in the fresh, salty air, ignoring the crew, who were using the same deck to slaughter livestock and wash chamber pots.

A small portion of the upper deck jutted out over the lower deck, and from here the first- and second-class passengers would gaze down on the immigrants. Sometimes, a well-dressed man or woman would throw bread or an orange, trying to get it into the hands of one of the waiting children. One day, Giovanna watched boys on the deck above shouting to children below who gathered in hopes of catching food. The first-class boys let something drop, and there was a scramble. When the child who retrieved the prize uncupped his hand revealing an apple core, the immigrant children angrily cursed, “Sporcaccioni!” throwing the offensive trash overboard. The boys above, getting the reaction they wanted, doubled over in laughter and ran.

Below in steerage, families were put in separate cubicles that resembled sties. Among the Italians, there were few families; it was difficult enough to scrape together the money for one fare, never mind for the whole brood. A blanket hung on a rope separated the men and the women, although it did not hang in the middle of the hold, for there were far more men than women. Among the women, there were two groups—those traveling alone with children, presumably to join their husbands already working in l’America, and young women whose faces bore all the promise and fear of their arranged marriages. As far as Giovanna could tell, she was the only woman traveling alone who was not in her teens or with children.

A number of the women were pregnant, but it took an experienced eye to tell because their stomachs were hidden under layers of clothing. Giovanna prayed that no one went into labor. She was surviving by going through the motions of life; delivering a child would confront her with the pain and beauty of living and breathing and with what she could not have.

The passengers already knew to call Giovanna for their aches and pains. On the first night, when she could no longer bear the sound of a child’s rattling cough and his mother’s admonishments to be silent, Giovanna rose from her bunk and walked to the buckets of saltwater that were set aside for baths. She poured water into a washbasin and headed to the ship’s boiler room. The crewman was stunned into compliance at the sight of such an imposing, mute woman motioning for him to make the water hot. While the soot-faced young man heated her water, Giovanna dug in her trunk for the poultices and herbs she was carrying and put together a salve for the child’s chest. Retrieving the hot water, she went and sat on the woman’s bunk. Because the steaming saltwater made her intentions apparent, or because Giovanna’s manner was so matter-of-fact, the woman did not protest. Giovanna rubbed an oil of eucalyptus and archangelica on the child’s chest and, taking the shawl from the mother’s shoulders, created a tent filled with saltwater steam for the sick child.

“Grazie, mille grazie, signora,” mumbled the mother, kissing the hands of Giovanna, who then left as wordlessly as she had come.

“Signora,” an arm tugged on her skirt. Giovanna got up and reached for her bag of herbs. “No, no, signora, I want to talk to you. I know you can hear; I see how you listen. Why don’t you talk, signora?”

Giovanna looked down at a girl of perhaps eleven with cascading dark hair who steadfastly gazed up at her. Her first instinct was to shoo the girl away, but something in the girl’s quizzical expression and forthrightness softened Giovanna. She came down from her bunk and sat on the floor with the girl.

Realizing that Giovanna wasn’t going to answer her question, or any questions, the girl decided to do all the talking.

“We’re going to l’America,” she said proudly.

Giovanna nodded and pointed to her chest indicating, “Me too.”

“You see, my father died. Now it’s just my mother, my little sister, and me. My grandparents said they couldn’t take care of us, and in our village there are no men left for my mother to marry—they all went to l’America. My grandparents wrote to my father’s sister and asked her to take us in. They work on a big farm and pick red berries in water. I’m going to do that, too!”

Giovanna noticed that the girl had not stopped scratching her head. Retrieving a small comb from her bag, she motioned for the girl to sit with her back to her.

“Mamma may even find a husband, and I’m going to make enough money to buy new shoes for the entire family!”

Giovanna combed small sections of the girl’s hair and used her nails to catch and crush lice and pick their nits off each strand.

“My aunt, she went to l’America when she was fifteen to get married. I don’t want to get married. Boys are disgusting. Don’t you think so?”

She stopped talking long enough to turn and look at the smile on Giovanna’s face. Hours passed this way with the girl recounting her life story and her grand plans for l’America while Giovanna methodically deloused her head.

At some point Giovanna tuned the girl out, wondering what Nunzio’s voyage had been like. He had written little about his time on the ship, only saying that his plan was to work hard enough so that if Giovanna were to ever visit l’America she would travel with a second-class ticket. She wondered if Nunzio had met a young boy and if they’d built boats out of nutshells. Had he slept on the top or bottom bunk? Did his ship smell as sickeningly awful as this one? She imagined that boredom drove Nunzio to join in one of the many games of
briscola
or
scopa,
even though he didn’t like playing cards. It was one of their few differences—Giovanna loved card games.

The shuffling of bodies and the clanging of tin plates signaling a meal snapped both Giovanna and the girl out of their own worlds. They rose and each got her plate, which had been issued by the shipping company, and stood in line. The evening meal was no different from the previous evening’s meal or the noon meal for that matter. When each passenger reached the head of the line, a crewman ladled broth with unidentified floating objects into their shallow bowls and handed them a piece of stale bread. Giovanna was grateful for her stash of salami, mustasole cookies, and wine. She rationed herself, dreading the prospect of running out and having nothing but the greasy broth.

It was too cold to take their evening meal above on deck, although a few souls did brave the night winds rather than eat in the stench of the steerage quarters. At mealtime, even the most private passengers became sometime conversationalists. Giovanna found that she noticed and heard so much more since she had ceased to speak and vowed that if her voice returned, she would remember this lesson. The primary mealtime topic was news and gossip relating to their voyage and new life in l’America.

“You must all be prepared for when we arrive at the dock in l’America,” pronounced Luigi, who had been designated the authority on America.

“
If
we get into l’America,” shot back a man whose dress and demeanor indicated he was from the mountains. “My brother-in-law, he got to America and it was all filled up. They made him go home.”

“
Stupido
! That’s impossible. They send you home, but only if you have a disease of the eyes,” countered Luigi. “They lift your eyelid, and if they see the disease—bam—you are back on the boat.”

Another man, having finished his meager meal, took out his mandolin and was playing softly. This prompted another announcement from “Mayor Luigi.”

“Tomorrow is the night of the New Year. We must have a
festa
!”

Just then, as if to counter the suggestion, the ship rolled over a huge wave, and people and baggage went sliding and falling to one side of the boat. When the screams stopped, the prayers started. Someone yelled, “God is punishing us for leaving!” Giovanna, exhausted from the hopelessness, went to her bunk looking for solace in scripture.

The next day on deck, Giovanna studied the crew, who were working furiously. Crates of fruits and vegetables were being stacked and candelabras polished in record time. She guessed they were preparing for a party.

Nunzio once described a fabulous party that his professore hosted for the New Year in a villa in Rome. The professore had offered Nunzio a few extra lire to help, and Nunzio was thrilled to be holding the silver trays and sparkling glasses until he realized that his fellow students were also present, only they were guests. But even in his humiliation, he had remembered almost every detail and told Giovanna of inlaid marble floors on which the women’s heels made wonderful clicking sounds, and of an entire orchestra all dressed finer than any southern bridegroom.

Giovanna tried to envision tonight’s party and the ship’s grand staircases and sparkling chandeliers that she would never see, even though they were no more than one hundred feet from where she sat. She imagined the first-class passengers moving among the splendor, the women draped in fine fabrics accented by jewels. The party continued to swirl in her thoughts, and Giovanna decided the guests would laugh with delight if the ship suddenly careened, secure in their knowledge that they were safe, as opposed to the steerage passengers, who would scream and shake with fear. The cold, wet air got to her, and Giovanna climbed down the many metal stairs that brought her back to her reality.

Shortly after the evening meal, the music in steerage began. Within an hour it became a cacophony of sound. The orchestra above deck was drowned out by the rhythms of Sicilian dances, Calabrian folk songs, and Neapolitan love songs emanating from each steerage compartment. People from one town or region tended to travel in the same compartment, so were the setting different, it would have been an impressive revue of southern Italian music.

Giovanna watched the festivities from her bunk. She was becoming accustomed to her role as an observer of life. Successful at blocking out all thoughts of what the new year and new country would bring, she was less successful in stopping the what-ifs. What would it have been like to greet Nunzio on the dock? Would 1903 have been the year they had a child? Giovanna’s fingers went to her temples to stop her thoughts from causing her so much pain. Rolling onto her stomach, she squinted at the revelers, trying to concentrate on the here and now.

A crewman walked into their compartment holding a tray and shouting in bad Italian, “The captain sent this for the kids. Happy New Year.” He set the tray, holding a large cake, on a trunk in the center of the compartment. The “3” of “1903” had been cut out, and a bit of the decoration had slid off, but it remained three glorious layers high and covered in pink frosting. The children squealed with delight and pressed forward, trying to get as close to this marvel as possible.

The authority on l’America, Luigi, took control and shouted for everyone to stand back. Taking a knife from his pocket, he cut the cake into squares and placed them into the upraised, cupped hands of the children clamoring around him. When all the children had been served, a small section of the cake remained. The unspoken question became who among the adults would get to enjoy this luxury. After much debate and no consensus, it was somehow decided that everyone would take a crumb, which turned the eating of the cake into something akin to communion.

Giovanna had fallen asleep during the great cake debate and was awoken with a tug.

“Signora, signora, it is the New Year!”

Giovanna squinted down at her young friend and patted her head in greeting.

“Signora, I ate the most wonderful thing. On the top and sides was a cream the color of the roses in the father’s churchyard, and inside, it was soft, like bread, but sweet like biscotti. I closed my eyes when I ate it, and I could see the most beautiful things. It was sunny and clean, and my sister and I had on white dresses and hair ribbons the color of the cream. In my stomach, the
torta
filled me up and sang songs. And do you know what the best part was, signora? Luigi’s son said that in l’America, they have this cake for breakfast and supper! I am going to love l’America, signora!”