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I wondered when I went from being someone he’d design a custom pig statue for to a person he could barely look in the eye.
it was Aunt Rosie who kept the family legends alive. She told and retold the coming-to-America story of our great-grandfather Giovanni, Gio to his friends. The first American of the family, the one who worked himself to the bone in Sicily’s sulfur mines and then bravely came to the new country to labor in a toilet factory in Queens. He slept in the attic of a funeral home in Astoria owned by other Sicilians for more than ten years.
I’m sending you to Sicily. You and I should have made the trip there together a long time ago. Now don’t go feeling sorry and blaming yourself. I’m not mad at you. Life got in the way…but we’re not gonna let death hold us back. You’re going to take my ashes to Caltabellessa. I want you to know the town where I was born.
No one with half a mind would admit to being the witch’s kin even though every woman in town depended on her healing powers for something or other. Men never visited the witch. She only ever tended to the women and then only in secrecy.
The state required children to attend school for just four years. At fifteen, I was the only girl left in our class,
It was said that la strega could deliver a baby without pain to the mother, an insult to God since the Bible insisted women deserved pain in childbearing in penance for the sins of the first woman.
We swallowed our breath and held it tight in our chests as we passed the cave where the dragon had lived hundreds of years before, the terrible reptile who ate the bad children, or so our parents and grandparents had told us. Everyone knew you had to hold your breath or you’d bring bad luck on your entire family. “Do you want to stop at the dragon’s ear?” Cettina asked. When Saint Pellegrino eventually slayed the dragon many hundreds of years ago, the beast had turned to dust, all of him crumbling except for his giant ear. The ear turned into rock, becoming one of the outer walls of the cave
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I’d never seen anything so spectacularly perfect as the sapphire sea emerging from the edge of the soft pine forest. Pristine white sand stretched for miles.
Eraclea Minoa
“I am Pippo.” It was pronounced Peep-poh. He drilled down hard on the last syllable like it was a surprise, a puppet jumping out of a jack-in-the-box.
The picture had come to represent what can happen when, for once in your life, you thought you actually deserved all the nice things that were happening to you. In the end I had wanted too much. I wanted success and love, a career and a child, a marriage and freedom. I’d wanted it all and I’d ended up with nothing.
“You will have to see for yourself. It is an ancient village, your Caltabellessa, settled by the first people of the island, the Sicani, in one thousand BC.”
But the Romans eventually sacked it and then so did the Byzantines and the Arabs and eventually the Normans came.
“We would like to have many more, but we do not get so many on this side of the island. We get the more adventurous ones, also those looking for their ancestors, but most of the tourists visit Taormina on the eastern shore. The cruise ships stop there and give the visitors eight hours of Sicily before heading off to Greece or Amalfi.
The stories he told were no longer sweet and funny. “It’s too hot for clothes in the mines anymore. Even a thin shirt feels like flames on your skin. We work naked most days since the air is on fire,” he whispered. His once smooth olive skin was burnt and warped on the backs of his thighs, the bottoms of his feet.
Sulfur mine
My papa had changed too, but his feelings for me were different from Mamma’s. Before the baby came, he had been proud of who I might turn out to be. Now he looked through me, not unlike the way he looked through my mother and her sisters. I was no longer special to him.
Maestro Falleti had explained that ever since the Risorgimento, when Sicily was forced to become a part of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861, the rich leaders in the northern cities on the mainland had been bleeding our island dry. “Sucking the life from our blood and our soil,” he told us. “They take our sulfur, our good grain and our grapes, our fish and our meat, and they give us the lowest possible prices for it because we are all one kingdom now. But what do we get from them in return? Nothing. Sicily may have no choice but to be a part of Italy. But our people will never be of Italy. We are
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Every couple of meters she stooped to pet one of the stray cats that had formed a kind of parade behind us. “The cats keep the souls of the dead,” she remarked to me with a deadpan glare. “Be kind to them.”
I absolutely had to visit the cursed village ten miles to the north. A priest recently performed an exorcism by helicopter to save all ten thousand souls who lived there from their utter depravity.
The island of Sicily is “God’s kitchen,” she insisted, but I should only eat in the restaurants that write their menus on the chalkboard on the wall each day. A printed menu meant they were buying frozen food from the supermarket
“The national forest, nearly the entire thing. The Cosa Nostra burned down all of the trees in the Madonie Mountains so the government would pay them to replant them.”
By the second carafe of house wine Giusy revealed that sometimes she steals little things from guest rooms, never anything valuable, just items that would be annoying for their owner when they went missing: earring backs, a tube of concealer, once a diaphragm. She sort of blushed when she said it but she also looked proud of herself. “Why are you telling me this? I’m a guest, aren’t I? Now I know what happened if my birth control goes missing.”
Since becoming a mother, I barely had time to remember all the things I once wanted, all the lives I hoped to lead, but sometimes the desire all flooded back and I felt a small death.
“She will try to make him well,” Cettina whispered, choking on her next words. “But the baby came after Melina’s last breath. The baby was born to a corpse. That means he is cursed.” She only breathed the last words but every woman in the room heard her and they nodded their heads in agreement. There was no way this baby would live. And if for some reason he did, they all believed he was destined to become a monster.
“He is not cursed. He is a miracle.” But I didn’t think that was true either, because when you stop believing in curses you also stop believing in miracles.
“Gio will be going to la Mérica to find work.” The words were not a shock. This had always been a possibility. So many of the men had already left. It was almost like a war had conscripted them to another life. Gio’s brother had already gone to la Mérica. He worked in a factory in a big city there. I couldn’t remember the name of the city or what they made.
“If this really happened. And it’s a horrible, horrible thing if it did, but if it did it happened nearly a hundred years ago. What good is it to dredge it all up now? My aunt, God rest her incredible soul, is dead and I’m not here to solve a mystery.” “But I think you are.”
I read about an unnamed witness who discovered the female victim approximately half a mile from town. A hand-drawn map had an actual X marking the spot. According to the witness, the woman’s body was tied by the neck to a stake outside the entrance to a small cave. Come una capra ha portato al massacro. Like a goat led to slaughter.
Yes. I couldn’t make my mouth form the word, but I was able to nod. Saying it out loud felt like a sin. Yes, I want to learn everything.
may seem like a long time ago, but time means nothing here.” Giusy exhaled with intention. “People in our town still talk about Serafina.” “They talk about a woman who was killed a hundred years ago? Why?”
“But it still makes no sense to me why a generations-old grudge against my relative has anything to do with the sale of land right now.” “Welcome to Sicily. Holding and maintaining grudges is our national pastime. It’s our golf.”
One day we’d grabbed a bottle of Wite-Out and another of red nail polish and wrote song lyrics and the dirtiest words we could think of on the sides of our shoes. Mine read, Motherfucker ass clown. Most of the letters were faded now so ass clown was the only thing still legible.
Carmela Planeta’s husband went away to work in coal mines in a place called Alabama. At first, he sent money but then six months passed with nothing. Carmela asked Marco to find some way to contact the Italian consulate. It took many more months for Marco to discover that Carmela’s husband had at first fallen ill and been unable to work, and then, when he was healed, he took to drink and never went back to the mines. Carmela was essentially a widow without a dead husband, a purgatory of sorts. “I wish he’d died in the mine,” she said. We all understood her words even though we thought she
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He nodded, pleased to be given a task. I had learned this about men. As headstrong as they could be, they also liked to be told what to do as long as it didn’t question their own intelligence. Men needed to feel useful in a situation they could not control.
“It is a special chocolate. All the way from Modica on the southeastern part of the island. They make it differently there than anywhere else in the world. They do not use cocoa butter, or so I have been told, I am no expert in the making of chocolate. But they say it is an ancient recipe passed down by Spaniards who lived in eastern Sicily hundreds of years ago. It was taught to them by the native people in Mexico.
“The Sicilians and Calabrians used to control much of the cocaine and heroin coming in from Europe. Now the syndicates from the Balkans and old Soviet countries are taking over. They’re smart about things like technology and cryptocurrency and they’re more organized.”
“We’re all a little obsessed with the Cosa Nostra. The Brits have their royals. You Americans have your reality television stars and the Aniston to gossip about. We have the Mafia. Don’t even get me started on what I know about their wives.”
We strolled past whitewashed cliffs with small squares cut out of them, almost like windows. “What are those?” I pointed to them. “Tombs,” Giusy said. “Sican necropoli. The Sicani were the first people here. Our first people. They dug funeral cells into the rocks to suspend the dead above the earth, keeping their bodies in the void between here and the other place.”
Only a handful of working-aged men remained, mostly those tied to organized crime. They had plenty of money coming in from protection rackets and blackmail despite the poverty in the rest of the country and no reason to leave unless they were summoned to Palermo for their work.
“Sicily was Greece and Greece was Sicily and all the good stories come from here and have been bastardized around the globe. You know the story of Persephone, yes? A maiden who lived in the fertile fields close to Enna in the center of the island,”
Regardless of whether the husband came back, or the wife joined him in America, the women who had gotten to learn and work were forced to become wives and mothers again and nothing else.
“Men are easy to manipulate. You just have to know when to play the Madonna, when to play the whore, and when to play the broken bird.
he wrote long letters to the husbands who went to America reminding them to send money home to support their families.
Carmelo, had taken another wife in New York City. The guileless coward told her nothing of this. Carmelo’s letters home, always accompanied by a portion of his wages, had been as officious and polite as ever. But then three days ago Paola, our beloved baker, my savior that day on the farm, was abruptly informed by his mother that her husband had replaced her.
Luca somehow managed to get better-looking overnight. It was almost unfair how attractive he was, an assault on us average-looking people the world over.
find another town... these people are probably your second cousins
“Marsala comes from the Arabic, Marsa Ali. During the Arab conquest of Sicily the Muslim rulers landed close to here and renamed many villages, including Marsala. Also fun trivia for an American, the name for the village of Corleone was taken from the great Arab military man Kurliyun.
He once told me that he had gotten to see the entire world and that there were many places that were beautiful and broken, many people who were beautiful and broken. But that his home was the only place where he could be both of those things.”
My sense of control disappeared when I reached the aisle with the fig preserves and pistachio cream. I should have grabbed my own basket. By the time I ran into Luca rounding the corner I was cradling an armful of food like it was a lumpy baby and he let out a laugh reminiscent of a delighted five-year-old riding a merry-go-round for the very first time. He’d upgraded from basket to cart, which was now filled with cheeses, cured meats, two loaves of pane nero di Castelvetrano, and small containers of delicious things like olives and anchovies.
The moment we took off our shoes we were approached by a trio of toned young men wearing bright yellow Speedos. They offered us chairs, umbrellas, and a drinks menu. The sand was carpeted in the tiniest perfect pink shells that made a pleasant crack beneath my toes. “My god, this is the exact opposite of the Jersey Shore,” I mumbled
“Where did you work?” I expected him to tell me Palermo, or maybe Rome, Florence, possibly as far away as Milan. “Brooklyn,” he said, clocking, and obviously enjoying, my surprise. “I went to New York when I was twenty. We have family there. Everyone here has family there and I moved in with some cousins in Bensonhurst
“And all my uncles and my cousins in America thought they were tough guys even though they were not in organized crime as far as I could tell. They still talked and walked and bluffed like they were. They were plumbers. All of them. And my uncle made people call him by a ridiculous name, Frankie Meow Meow.
