When We Were Strangers (2 page)

“What’s Cleveland?”

“A big city in America full of jobs.”

“Suppose you get sick? Do you understand, Carlo, dying alone? No one to have a mass said for you or light a candle for your soul.” The baker’s cat had caught a pigeon and was eating it by the well. “You’ll die like a beast. Like that,” I said, pointing.

Carlo took our water bucket, set it down and gripped my shoulders. “Irma, believe me, it’s better than working here like a beast. Better than living in one stone room with
him
. He’s worse every year since Mamma died.” Carlo stepped closer. “You can’t stay here when I’m gone. Come with me.”

“To work on a ship? No. And who’ll care for Zia?”

“When I’m in Cleveland, I’ll send for you, you’ll get a job and then we can both send her money.”

“I can’t leave, Carlo, you know that.”

He sighed and took his rucksack from a hollow in the chestnut tree. So it was not soon that he was going—or the next morning, which would have been hard enough—but right away, that afternoon. I gripped the linen shirt I’d made him. Carlo held my hands. “Listen, Irma, I’ll write to you.”

“You don’t know how.”

“I’ll find a scribe. I’ll write from Tripoli and then from America.” He kissed me and touched my face. “God keep you, Irma. I have to go. They’re meeting me at noon on the Naples road.”

“Then
addio
,” I whispered, go with God, and then more loudly, “Addio
.
”

“Addio, Irma. Take care of yourself. I’ll write.” Then Carlo walked quickly down the narrow street we grandly called Via Italia. Not ten paces and his feet disappeared as the road dipped down. With each pace, more of his legs dropped from sight, then his back, straight shoulders and finally the peak of his red woolen cap. Soon our domed rock hid him. When I saw him again, he was a speck on the road to Pescasseroli.

Carlo never wrote. My father asked everywhere, but nobody had ever heard of an uncle with merchant ships to Tripoli. “Perhaps he met a traveler with an uncle,” I suggested.

My father spat. “And believed a
traveler
?”

With Carlo gone, there was no more fighting in the house, but now silence filled the room, pressing on us everywhere like the smell of wet sheep. That summer the baker died and his widow Assunta took over the bakery. After three months of mourning, both her daughters married. My father drank himself sick at the wedding feast. Still, two good things happened that season. The ewes gave such rich milk that our cheese fetched well at market. And just before Christmas, Father Anselmo hired me to make an embroidered altar cloth for the church. He even brought us beeswax candles so we had light to work in the evening and Zia Carmela could see enough to knit thick sweaters we sold to farmers. But our silent evenings were longer now. We never spoke of Carlo and no one in Opi ever mentioned him again, as if he’d never lived.

The winter passed slowly. On days too cold for outside work, my father fed the sheep and then sat by the fire watching me sew. Sometimes he said, “Sing Rosa’s song about the moon.” When he called me Rosa once, Zia Carmela snapped: “She’s
Irma.
Don’t go soft in the head, old man.” Aside from these sudden sparks, the click of our needles and the crackle of fire, there was only the swish of my sweeping, the knock of our wooden bowls as I rinsed them, the crunch of raw onions at meals and the thud of the fresh loaves I brought from the bakery each week and set on the table. The end of each week brought new sounds: dry crusts rattling in our bread box.

When Father Anselmo came to inspect my work, he said he’d heard that Alfredo’s three cousins would join him soon in America. Two families from the next valley were going as well. Giovanni, the shoemaker’s son, had sent enough money from a place called Chicago to build a new house for his parents and buy back their fields. He said he’d be home in a year to court the landlord’s widow.

“She wouldn’t refuse him now,” Zia muttered.

“Perhaps Carlo will write from Cleveland,” I said. My father’s jaw twitched but he said nothing. We sat in silence as the fire spat.

Father Anselmo watched me, my head bowed over the altar cloth. “Irma needs a husband.” He sighed. “But there’re hardly any young men left even in Pescasseroli with so many going to America. Did you hear? The mayor’s daughter is marrying Old Tommaso.” I gripped my needle. So what I heard at the well was true: no decent man wanted Anna now that her belly was swelling. If clubfooted Old Tommaso took her, the mayor would forgive his debts. Poor Anna, who was so beautiful that she might have had a doctor’s son.

“Don’t worry,” said my father gruffly, “Irma’s fine.” Just then, I realized that since Carlo left, there had been no more talk of a husband for me. Could I
not
marry? Perhaps if the altar cloth was fine enough, Father Anselmo might recommend me to other priests in other towns. I pricked myself to keep from dreaming. What if my father died? I couldn’t sew and also keep sheep, and no single woman I knew, even in Pescasseroli, lived by her needle alone. But if I didn’t marry soon, who would want me when I was old and still wearing my mother’s clothes?

“Keep sewing,” said Zia. “We’ll think of something.”

I tried to imagine Carlo in America, but it was like searching out a sheep in a snowstorm. I could not picture my brother in a foreign land. Yet the word “America” tossed in my mind until it lost all sense and seemed merely strange, like the fruits that Father Anselmo said people ate far away: pineapple, coconuts and bananas.

The winter crept on silently, my needle flying. At least we had light, but now candle flames glittered in my father’s eyes. When Carlo was with us, they both stared at the fire and smoked all evening. Now my father’s gaze fixed on me as I moved around the little room, dragging at my skirts like wet ferns in a forest. Carlo’s voice came drumming back: “You can’t stay here when I’m gone.”

One night after dinner, my father lurched from his seat, as I lit the beeswax candles. He grabbed my wrist and snapped, “Rosa, get me Carlo’s wool shears.”

“She’s not Rosa, old man, and it’s not shearing time,” Zia snapped.

“Get them,” my father repeated.

I went to our shelf. Carlo had been so proud of his shears, never trusting the journeyman knife sharpener, but honing them carefully and keeping them wrapped in soft wool. Carlo will come back—I had comforted myself all winter—if only for his shears. But I gave my father the woolen package and never saw the shears again. I heard he traded them at the tavern for half their worth in credit.

One evening early in Lent, I had finished a piece of the altar cloth and was pressing it on our board while Zia Carmela dozed in her chair. My father came in from the tavern and stepped behind me. With a grunt, he pulled the warm cloth from the board and wrapped it around my shoulders. His rough hands grazed my breasts, then cupped them. “No!” I shouted. “Stop!” but stone walls swallowed my voice. He grabbed my dress. When I pulled back, the sleeve ripped like lightning sheering mountain air.

“Come here, Rosa,” my father whispered hoarsely. “Show yourself off like a rich merchant’s wife.” I gripped a chair, burning with shame.

Zia Carmela, groping, found the altar cloth and snatched it from my shoulders. “Ernesto! Go back in the tavern, you filthy goat. Leave Irma alone.”

“Why can’t I see her in lace? She’s pretty.”

“Stop it! The Lord’s watching you,” she shrieked.

“Let Him watch!” My father hit the board so hard the iron fell, ringing on the stone hearth. Lunging, he yanked the altar cloth from Zia’s lap and wrapped it around me again, pushing into my breasts. He pulled me to our mirror hanging by the fire. “Look!” he commanded. “See? You’re pretty now!” My face in the cracked glass was white as frost on stone.

“She’s ugly, Ernesto! Leave her alone!” Zia shouted, hitting my father with her walking stick. I twisted away and the altar cloth fell at my feet. Kicking it aside and dodging my father’s grasping hands, I shoved open our heavy plank door and stumbled into the street. Cold air burned my throat.

Through the door I heard coughing, wood splintering and my father crying out, “What do you want from me, Carmela? You think I’m not a man?”

“Irma!” Zia wailed, but I didn’t stop.

I was running now, wood-soled shoes clattering on the stone streets: “Ugly, ugly,” and then: “You think I’m not a man?” My chest ached, my breasts burned. I stumbled to the stone bench outside the bakery, panting. For a blessed minute I felt only the slow easing of my chest and the gathering cold. Then words came spinning out like knives:
Bread
,
how do I earn my bread? Ugly
,
how can I marry? Man
,
you think I’m not a man?

Everyone in Opi knew of the woodcutter’s daughter who had lived with her father and lame mother. When the girl’s belly bulged and then flattened, people whispered that a babe had been smothered in birthing sheets and buried in secret, for it was an abomination. Why else was the girl found hanging from their roof beam, the weeping mother trying helplessly to pull her down and the father blind drunk, stumbling through the forest?

Cold closed around me tighter than my cloak. Where could I go? If I knocked on any door, people would know my voice and take me in, welcoming yet curious, for no decent woman walked outside at night. But what would I say, what would they think and how would they look at me tomorrow? What would become of us all after I ruined my family’s name, and how could I face Zia if my own words tore bread from our mouths?

I started back, dragging my fear like chains. I thought of my great-grandfather freezing in an enemy land. Before that Russian pitchfork nailed him to his death, he must have dreamed of home. Where else can one go for comfort? In the empty streets, wooden shutters rattled in the wind. Sounds leaked out: children crying, singing from some few houses, from others came moans and grunts of pleasure. I knew what happened at night and why young couples met in the thick bushes or dark streets, even in shadows behind the church. No, I vowed, not for me, never.

Cold tore through my thin wool dress. If frostbite chewed my fingers, how could I sew? Outside our house I pressed my ear to the door. My father was snoring. I slipped into the house and then into the bed I shared with Zia. “Come close, Irma, you’re so cold,” she whispered, holding me like a child and stroking the ugly from my body.

My father rose long before dawn, pulled on his cloak and ate his bread standing, his face turned away from us. When he had left the house and his steps faded into wind, Zia pulled me out of bed. “He needs a wife,” she announced.

“Like old Tommaso? A girl half his age?”

“No, not a girl, a woman. Assunta the baker’s widow is lonely. She and Ernesto used to go walking together, but then the baker spoke for her and Ernesto took up with your mother.” Nobody had ever told me this, not once in the long evenings. “Irma, you go buy some bread. I have to see Father Anselmo.” When I tried to protest that this was not our bread-buying day, she pressed a coin in my hand and pushed me firmly out the door.

I went to the bakery. “Good morning, Signora Assunta,” I said, watching her sweep out crumbs for the birds that flocked our door each morning. “I’ll have one of your loaves with a light crust, please. My father says that with your fresh bread and his cheese, a prince himself could be content.” The Lord forgive this lie, my father never spoke of princes.

“Ernesto said so? Here’s a nice one, Irma, warm from the oven. Give your father my regards.”

“Thank you, Signora. I will.” Go on, I told myself. More. “He was saying just last night what a good man your husband was, how hard it must have been to lose him.”

“Yes, Matteo was good to us, God rest his soul.” We crossed ourselves.

“And your daughters are gone too, Signora Assunta. Your house must feel so empty.” I gripped the loaf. “Ours too, since my mother died.” We crossed ourselves again. Assunta was not a bad woman, not grasping or sharp. She fed cripples and beggars with day-old bread, not stale crusts like the baker in Pescasseroli. She would be good for my father and good to Zia perhaps, but would she want another woman in her house? I pulled Carlo’s cloak around the loaf and held it to my chest. Customers were crowding in, calling impatiently for their loaves. I dropped my copper coin in the money box and slipped out the door.

“Signora Assunta sends her regards,” I told my father at dinner. “She said she’s lonely now with her daughters gone.”

“And that’s my affair?” my father snapped, but he chewed his bread more slowly. A week passed in silence. He still went to the tavern, but on Sunday afternoon he combed his hair, washed his face and hands, put on leather shoes and a good shirt and did not come home until evening. Our coins dwindled but at least we had peace.

Father Anselmo came to our house to ask for an embroidered medallion on the cloth that would show altar boys where to set the communion chalice. I worked hard to make the circle perfect for this holy purpose. Then I started the border of leafy vines. As the days crept past, a catechism looped through my mind.

Marry in Opi?
No, for there are no men to wed.

Marry in Pescasseroli?
Who? Even if there was a man to wed me, for all my life I’d hear women whisper: “Opi mountain slut.”