The Black Madonna (7 page)

1936

A
madeo Pavese was married a year when his wife gave birth to twin sons. She died delivering the second, who was stillborn. Amadeo Pavese named the first baby Salvatore and made the priest christen him before he said the prayers for the dead.

The midwife spoke with Amadeo about the infant Salvatore. What did he know about babies? she asked him. Amadeo covered his face with his hands.

“The baby needs a
nutrice,
” the midwife said, “mother's milk. He needs a
bambinaia
to wrap him in strips of cloth so his legs grow straight, to swaddle him in blankets so he feels secure.” She crossed her arms in front of her chest and held herself. The priest put a hand on Amadeo's shoulder.

“But who?” Amadeo said. The priest put his hands behind his back and walked the length of the room.

“Teresa Sabatini,” the midwife said. She had thought only a moment. “She's around the corner on Spring Street. You can see into her windows from yours. Here,” and she pulled Amadeo over and pointed with a finger.

Amadeo looked up. The priest nodded. “A good choice,” he said, “a good woman. I just baptized her son. She named him Nicola.”

The midwife took Amadeo's hand.
“Povero tu,”
she said. “This terrible thing. Ah, who can understand God?” She shot a look of anger at the priest. He stepped forward and frowned, raised a hand in benediction. “A good woman, Mrs. Sabatini . . .” he said.

“Perfect,” the midwife said. “Her baby is just months old. I delivered him myself. Her husband's always away at sea. Her house is clean. She's filled with milk. I was there only yesterday.” She patted Amadeo's hand. I'll talk to her.”

“When?”

“Now, I'm going over there now.”

T
he undertaker came to the house to get the bodies. He covered the windows in the front room with a black curtain and cleared a space for the coffin. He brought two lamps and twenty folding chairs.

The coffin was polished red mahogany and the mother and child lay inside together, the baby in the white christening dress that had been brought from the village of Castelfondo in Lucania, the mother in her wedding gown, the baby in her arms.

The wake went on for six days and was talked about for years after. It was the pain of life laid out in a box for everyone to see. Everyone who looked into that coffin felt lucky, made the sign of the cross and promises to God.

Antoinette Mangiacarne went to the funeral parlor every day, and every day when she came home she would knock on Teresa Sabatini's door and tell her about the flowers and the people and the coffin where Amadeo's wife lay with her son in her arms. She called Teresa a saint for nursing the orphan.

“He's not an orphan,” Teresa told her.

“Ah, no, but without a mother is like an orphan, as unfortunate as an orphan. How is he?” she asked. “I hear he's frail.” Antoinette looked around, hoping to catch a glimpse of the infant, but Teresa had the babies tight together in the cradle in her bedroom, blankets up to their noses, away from Antoinette's eyes.

“He's beautiful,” Teresa said, “a treasure, like my Nicky. They could be brothers.”

Antoinette shook her head. “Delicate babies are sweet, easy to take care of—not like my Jumbo. She laughed. “What a handful!” And Antoinette excused herself, promising to come again.

Teresa closed the door after her before she went to the back to look at the sleeping boys. She had agreed to nurse the baby because there was no one else and the priest had promised her grace. She had more than enough milk and while she thought she had no more love or attention to give, that Nicky had taken it all, she was surprised by her own feelings when the infant clung to her. Nicky was almost five months old, already alert and moving. This one was newly born, and to him, Teresa was the world.

S
ix days is too long,” the undertaker said, worried about the Health Department. The bodies were starting to turn black. He had seen the discoloration after the third day. “There's a reason we do things,” he told Amadeo. “I'm an undertaker, not a miracle worker.” The funeral Mass had been postponed twice. The priest was getting edgy, looking for sin. “Enough is enough,” the undertaker said. “Believe me, I know. You don't want them talking that you're crazy. Grief-stricken is bad enough.”

There was a white hearse on the seventh day, like a wedding coach, and the neighborhood held its collective breath when they saw it parked outside the church. A teddy bear of blue flowers and a wreath of white orchids covered the top of the coffin and after the priest said the prayers at the grave and the people had all gone home, Amadeo Pavese stayed with the gravediggers until the coffin was deep in the ground and covered with dirt. Every Sunday he went back. On Christmas he brought a fir tree strung with lights, and at Easter, a basket of colored eggs and a yellow stuffed bunny.

A
fter the funeral Amadeo came home to the empty house and sat at the table to write a letter to his Uncle Carmelo and his Aunt Guinetta in Castelfondo telling them about the death of his wife and child. He sent the letter along with the money he sent every month the way his father had done. Amadeo Pavese never forgot the family in Castelfondo. When his business did well, he sent more money, and in return he received photographs of the carved and varnished door of the house in Castelfondo, the indoor toilet with the porcelain seat, Zia Guinetta in front of the house, her hand on the brass doorknob. Pictures arrived of the daughter, Maria, in her Communion dress, and of Mammone, the most important mother, in a hat of silk flowers.

Amadeo had once brought over Zio Carmelo's son Tommaso to work in the business when he was first starting, but Tommaso had gone back home two months later, appearing in Castelfondo with a cardboard suitcase full of new clothes, ten words of English, two of which were “For chrissakes,” and the attitude of a man who has seen the world. He never worked again. The sort of work available in Castelfondo, he explained to his father, was beneath him. How could he possibly go into the fields after having been to America?

Having been to America became his career. Having been to America had made him a man of stature. Tommaso loved America and he loved his cousin Amadeo, whose money his father sent him to collect at the post office every month on the fifth. The only thing better than being a rich man, Tommaso told the men in the café, was to be a rich man's relative.

Zio Carmelo sent long and detailed letters from Castelfondo, addressing Amadeo as
figlio mio.
When Amadeo was married, he sent an elaborate gift from a shop in Matera.

When Amadeo was married was the first time Zia Guinetta worried. “After all,” she said, “Amadeo will have a family of his own now. Suppose he forgets us?” But Zio Carmelo waved his hand at her.

“The girl is from Lucania. She knows about family, how one helps the other,” he said, and for sure, month after month, the money was there at the post office when Tommaso went to pick it up.

“I told you there was nothing to worry about,” Zio Carmelo said one evening while Zia Guinetta massaged his feet, but when the news of the deaths of Amadeo's wife and son arrived, Zio Carmelo suffered a bout of indigestion. He blamed the garlic his wife crushed on his bread in the mornings, the tomatoes she used for her sauce. He blamed her, but in fact, it was fear. He felt a pain in his heart for his nephew, but the pain in his stomach was for all of them in Castelfondo: Guinetta, Maria, Tommaso, Mammone. They were stuck away in the mountains of Lucania. Who would remember them if Amadeo Pavese forgot?

W
hen Amadeo lost his wife and his infant son, he closed his heart. There were women who passed by the stoop of his house purposely to talk to him, women who came to his store and lingered too long, but he had no interest. The only woman he saw was Teresa Sabatini, because she took care of his son. If Zia Guinetta had known this, if she could have seen across the ocean to New York, she would have slept better, but instead she worried. There was not a lot to think about in the village of Castelfondo.

T
he eclipse . . . I knew when the year began with an eclipse of the sun that 1936 would be unlucky.” Everyone knew this, but Zia Guinetta knew it more than most, because she was a witch. She had learned the arts from her mother on Christmas Eve, the only day of the year when the powers can be transferred. It was said that she had captured Zio Carmelo with more than her physical charms. She had made him love her and marry her despite his mother, who had scratched her face until she drew blood when she heard about their courtship.

Zia Guinetta had been the housekeeper of a local priest who took her in when she was orphaned as a young girl. She had cooked his food and cleaned his house and aborted his babies, until the day she saw Zio Carmelo coming home from the fields. She was there every day after that, waiting for him where the path turned and led up to the village.

She would let her hair loose when she saw the top of his hat. She offered him sausages she had made, bread she had baked, cakes filled with almonds, jam made of figs. In each of these, she put bits of her skin and hair and monthly blood until he became so obsessed with her that he couldn't eat or sleep. His mother consulted doctors from as far away as Potenza, but no one could help.

Zia Guinetta came to Zio Carmelo's door but his mother pushed her out into the street. She tore the buttons off Zia Guinetta's dress. Zia Guinetta stood there and shrugged her shoulders. “He'll eat from my hand,” she told Zio Carmelo's mother, “or he'll die. His insides will dry up like fruit left in the sun.”

Zio Carmelo's mother slapped Zia Guinetta's face and pulled the gold hoop from her ear, but Zia Guinetta didn't move. “Without me, he'll die,” she said. “There's nothing you can do.” Zio Carmelo's mother sat down on the stoop of her house, covered her face with her hands, and cried until she lost her eyesight, while Zia Guinetta went inside and fed Zio Carmelo bits of sausage and bread and almond cake from her fingers. She covered his tongue with her jam made of figs. Zio Carmelo's mother died before they married and the newlyweds took over her house. An orphan from the village of Tolve came to live with the priest.

S
uppose,” Zia Guinetta told her husband, while he pulled apart yesterday's bread to soak in his coffee, “Amadeo takes a second wife, an American, who says to him,” and here Zia Guinetta changed her voice, making it high and shrill, “ ‘Why should you send all this money to family in Italy? Who are they after all?' What would happen then?” She shuddered. “I tell you, Carmelo, what would happen. You would have to go back into the fields on Don Carlito's estate, if he would have you, and why should he? You're not a young man anymore.”

Zio Carmelo coughed until his chest hurt. He gasped for breath. “I know, I know. It would be terrible,” he told Zia Guinetta. He, Carmelo Laurenzano, a man who had always held his head high, would be forced to sit in the piazza, staring across at the café, longing for a glass of anisette with a black coffee bean at the bottom that he could no longer afford. His back would be bent. And this would be only the beginning of his troubles. His daughter was coming close to marriageable age. With the family's prospects reduced, what kind of husband could she get? A simpleton, an old man with twisted legs? Zio Carmelo held his head in his hands. “Think, Guinetta,” he said.

“I have been thinking,” she said, coming around behind him, kneading his shoulders with her hands. “Write Amadeo a letter. Invite him here. Tell him to leave his troubles and come to Castelfondo.” Zia Guinetta put her face close to Zio Carmelo's. She stroked his cheek with the back of her hand. “Maybe a pretty girl will catch his eye. He needs a wife, no? A mother for his son? What better thing could we do for him? He'd be bound to us then, tied to Castelfondo.”

Zio Carmelo turned in his chair. He took her face in his hands and kissed her forehead. He called her his treasure. She brought him pen and paper and sat down next to him, pulling her chair close to his.

Zio Carmelo wrote a letter to his nephew expressing his sorrow, his devotion, his love, and his invitation to Castelfondo. He read aloud to Zia Guinetta as he wrote. He had been to school and wrote documents and letters for the whole village. Zia Guinetta had never been to school and depended on her husband for these things. She leaned over him, her hand on his arm as he wrote.

F
iglio carissimo,”
Zio Carmelo wrote, and here Zia Guinetta took the pen and marked X's for the kisses she wanted to send to Amadeo. Zio Carmelo told her they went at the end, but she insisted he leave them where she put them. Her eyes narrowed and she bit her lip in approval when he wrote:
“All of Castelfondo shares your sorrow.”
Zio Carmelo blotted the ink with the green blotter he had bought from the postmaster, waved his arm over the paper, and went on:
“Castelfondo grieves for the loss of your wife and infant son and wishes you would come back to the embraces of your family and countrymen.”

Zia Guinetta made Zio Carmelo give her the envelope to seal and she put a pinch of red powder between the pages before she licked the glue with her tongue and closed the letter inside. Zia Guinetta couldn't read or write but she knew about important things.