The Women of Saturn Read online

  “How much rougher than this will it get?” asked Mother timidly.

  “Eh, what do you expect? It’s February. Wait until we cross the Big Rock, then the dancing will begin.”

  “O Dio mio,” said Giuseppina and made the sign of the cross as if to pray for salvation.

  “Don’t blame God. Blame your dear husbands for sending you out in the ocean in the middle of winter … but if I had beautiful wives like you, I’d want you with me, too, to keep me warm in frozen Canada. But just think, in less than twelve days, you’ll be with your husbands. When you feel like throwing yourselves off the deck of this ship, just think of the joy of being in their arms.” He smiled.

  “What a chiaccherone!” Giuseppina answered. “But remember, we’re serious women here … with children.”

  “And I’m the most serious waiter on the Italian Line. At eleven, after breakfast, you all must come on deck for a safety drill. And after lunch, we will be approaching Gibraltar, and you’ll see the Big Rock.”

  “If we look at the water, we’ll get sicker. I’m staying in bed,” Giuseppina said.

  “After what I just told you? That, Signora Giuseppina, is the worst thing you can do. There’s only one way to survive the crossing: dance with the waves. When you feel a wave coming, instead of saying, ‘O Dio mio,’ and making the sign of the cross, say, ‘What a beautiful wave, let me jump on it … the higher the better.’ I tell this to all my beautiful ladies. Some believe me, but some don’t.”

  “Eh, it’s easy for you to joke. You’re used to this,” Giuseppina replied.

  “Try doing it all year long in this casino, and then you’ll see how easy it is! Believe me, Signora Giuseppina, listen to my advice, learn to dance with the waves. It’s the only way to survive! Now I have to go. Ciao, and remember to come up and see the Rock.”

  “But why did we have to get someone like him?” said Giuseppina after he left.

  “I think he just likes to joke around with everyone. It’s his character,” said Mother.

  “Si, si, that’s what you think, but that one is hungry. Who knows how long it’s been since he’s eaten?”

  Breakfast was coffee with warm milk and some sweet breads, and we all ate well. Then all the passengers met on deck. Luigi and I kept trying to guess what kind of fish we saw jumping out of the sea. Lucia chatted with Margherita, the woman from Amato. The ship’s crew members came on deck with lifejackets on their arms. Armando went straight to Lucia and Margherita, and helped them put on lifejackets. Giuseppina nodded at my mother as if to say, “See? What did I tell you?”

  The captain of the ship welcomed us, told us to pay attention to the safety instructions, and left. The attendant pointed to the small boats roped on the side of the ship and told us that they would slide off the sides and into the ocean in case of an emergency. Women and children would be the first to go down.

  “What will these little things do for us if the boat sinks?” Mother asked, removing her lifejacket.

  “They’re not called salvagenti for nothing. They’ll hold us up in the water until help comes,” said Luigi. “Unless the whales come first. Geppetto was saved by a whale.”

  “Sure, believe in Geppetto!” said Mother.

  I had visions of the Andrea Doria being gashed on its side by an iceberg, then tilting sideways before collapsing completely, like a soldier shot in the heart. Fifty-two people died in that shipwreck. And it had only happened that past July. Zio had given us all the details and shown us pictures from the newspaper. Half the rescue boats had tipped over before people could get into them. I knew that Mother must have been thinking the same thing, judging from her white, drawn-out face, while everyone else trying on the lifejackets laughed.

  As soon as the drill was over, the two older ladies went back down to the cabin, and asked us to bring them some bread for lunch. Mother was afraid that she’d feel sick quicker if she walked up and down.

  We could already see a difference in the height of the waves, and I tried to practice lifting myself up with their movements. I had never been on a boat before and had never swum in the sea. The only time I had passed by the beach in Catanzaro Lido with my family, Mother had held me so tightly that my wrist hurt.

  The two younger kids stayed with us for lunch, but didn’t eat anything. I tried playing with them, but they sucked their thumbs and cried for their grandmother. We went back down with Lucia and brought some bread and cheese for the others.

  Lucia and I decided to go back on deck and join Luigi to see the Rock of Gibraltar. As soon as we left the cabin, Mother called me back in. She said in a soft voice, “Stay close to Lucia,” as though I was supposed to look after the older girl.

  The deck was full of people, and the sky, hazy, threatening rain. It was hard to tell where the waves finished and the clouds began. Luigi was the first to notice the shape that looked like a huge whale in the distance. “The Rock,” he yelled.

  The Rock, in size and shape like a mountain, seemed like a shadow that appeared and disappeared in the mist. Armando showed up behind us, and suggested that we go up to the first-class deck, because the view from there would be clearer. We followed him up happily, as both Luigi and I had wanted to see what first class looked like. Besides being higher, the view, as far as I was concerned, was the same—except that there were fewer people around us.

  As we got closer to shore, black-skinned men in small boats rowed toward us. They were Moroccans, Armando said. They sold colourful scarves with pictures of the Rock of Gibraltar and other souvenirs. They pushed up a small basket on a long stick with the purchased item, after people had put their money in. They made a couple of sales, mostly to the men.

  Looking toward the Rock, I was overcome with the same feeling of fear as the day before when I had stood next to the ship. I turned my head and watched the people’s faces in first class. They stared in awe at the sight and I forced myself to look again.

  After a while, I became accustomed to the shape of the Rock of Gibraltar before me. The small boats returned to shore and the people on deck slowly dispersed. Armando stayed with us and started a conversation with Lucia. Luigi had made friends with a couple of boys who took turns playing his harmonica.

  “I’m going to check out the lounge in first class,” he told me excitedly before he sped off with them.

  I sat on a bench with the book I had brought with me. All through the train ride, Lucia had hardly said anything, immersed in her own sorrow. I figured that she was very sad to be travelling alone without her family, and I wondered if she still thought about Totu, the boyfriend she had left behind. She never once mentioned his name—yet they had been sweethearts for as long as I could remember. Now, I noticed how animated she looked, listening to Armando. She still didn’t speak much. She mostly laughed at Armando’s jokes or nodded at him. I heard him say, “But tell me, you never answered my question yesterday.”

  “What question?”

  “How long have you been married?”

  Lucia mumbled that it had only been a few months.

  “Then why didn’t your husband wait for you?”

  Lucia just shrugged and looked into the water.

  It took Armando a couple of instants to blurt out, “I think I understand! You must be one of those proxy brides. Then I was right yesterday. I’m never wrong about these things. You’ve never met your husband and you’re still a signorina.”

  Lucia nodded.

  He answered. “I’ve seen it before—many times. You’re not the first one. But you’re by far the prettiest. Your husband has won the lottery. He will be a very happy man when he sees you.”

  She remained silent; he changed the subject. “Look at that piece of rock. It looks close, yet we can’t see it clearly. I’ve seen it I don’t know how many times in the last five years, but whether the weather is clear or hazy, it always looks the same to me. I’ve never be
en able to see its colour or to see if anything grows on it. I ask myself, ma, what purpose does it have? Is it a mountain? Do people live on it, or is it just this mass of rock stuck in the water?”

  He paused for a few instants and then continued. “A couple of times, on clearer days than today, it looked as though I would be able to see more of it. But just when I think it’s becoming clearer, the ship starts backing off and the Rock becomes a blur again. It’s as if the captain does it on purpose to tease me. Who knows? Maybe one of these days, I’ll get on a boat with the Moroccans and I’ll get to see it up close.”

  Realizing he was carrying on a conversation with himself, he turned toward Lucia and said, “Open your mouth.”

  Lucia seemed puzzled, but opened her mouth anyway. “I just wanted to see if you have a tongue. You Calabrese are the quietest women I have ever met. Ebbé, I better go down to the dining room and get things ready for dinner. Come back here tomorrow morning, between ten and eleven, and maybe we’ll have a chat—now that I know you have a tongue. If you shut yourself up in that room, this boat will seem like a tomb. You passed the Rock. We’re now in open water. Gibraltar was once considered the edge of the world. Si salva chi può.”

  She smiled and nodded. He turned and seemed to have noticed me for the first time. “You, Calabrisella, don’t listen to the old ladies. Their heads are filled with nonsense … but it’s not their fault. You two, now, must learn to think for yourselves.” Then he stared at the book I was holding on my chest. “Ammazza, you’re reading that book at your age?”

  I hadn’t read much yet, but I tried again after he left, while Lucia stood leaning against the railing, looking toward the Rock. I skipped the first few pages, which were full of descriptions of the countryside around Lake Como. I decided to use the reading method that Signor Gavano had taught me in third grade. I read the first sentence of each paragraph. If it sounded interesting, I read the rest; if not, I went on to the next one.

  The first character to draw my attention was Don Abbondio, the parish priest of the area, taking a stroll in the countryside and reading his breviary. The priest trembles at the sight of two bravi— henchmen for the most powerful landlord of the area, Don Rodrigo. They stop him and ask, “You’re intending to marry Renzo Tramaglino and Lucia Mondella tomorrow?”

  “We’re just servants of the public,” Don Abbondio answers in a quavering voice.

  “There’s not going to be any marriage, not tomorrow or any other day,” says the bravo.

  Just then Lucia shook me by the shoulder and said we should go down. As I moved to follow her, I noticed a man with thick black hair leaning on the railing and staring at both of us. I had watched him earlier as he bought something from the Moroccans.

  “Why are you staring at me like that?” Lucia said. I thought she was talking to the man, but she looked at me. I was confused for a few instants.

  “Don’t say anything about the waiter talking to us,” Lucia said. I had already figured that out by myself. If she noticed the man listening to us, she didn’t show it, but my eyes met his as we left and his intense stare scared me. His dark, coarse hair stuck out on his head, and grew low on his forehead, making him look like a menacing bird, or like one of the bravi shadowing Don Abbondio.

  At supper, the dining room was full. Margherita shared our table. I looked around for the man-bird but he wasn’t in the dining room. We had pasta and meat again but nobody touched the meat except Luigi, who ate everything on his plate and then mopped it clean with a piece of bread. The elderly Neapolitan waiter made us laugh. “You saved me from having to wash this plate,” he told Luigi, then advised us to follow his example and eat as much as possible in the first three days, to build up a reserve for the rest of the trip, when we wouldn’t want to look at food. At the end of the meal, Armando came by our table with a napkin full of bread rolls, cheese, and fruit.

  Mother said, “He’s very thoughtful.”

  To which Giuseppina replied, “A little too thoughtful, if you ask me.”

  “What are you laughing at?” my mother asked me. I hadn’t realized I was laughing to myself—not because of what Giuseppina had said, but at poor Don Abbondio in the book. When the groom visits him, insisting he perform the wedding as planned, the priest panics and falls sick. I laughed remembering the author’s comment: “…Don Abbondio did not have to search around for this expedient, as it came up of its own accord.”

  6. DAY FOUR

  MOTHER AND GIUSEPPINA FORCED THEMSELVES to walk up once during the day for lunch and some fresh air, then went straight back to bed. The two little girls never left their grandmother’s side, their thumbs always in their mouths. On our fourth day on the boat, Margherita had sought out Lucia, but Lucia brushed her off quickly. She wanted to go to the first-class deck, but didn’t feel right, she told me, bringing others along. Luigi spent time playing ping-pong and cards with his friends in first class, carrying his harmonica everywhere he went. Sometimes people would congregate to listen to him play on deck, and he revelled in their applause. I was stuck to Lucia, who met Armando regularly at ten. I wished that they would meet to talk in the lounge so that I could sit comfortably on a sofa and read my book, but they spoke standing up, leaning against the railings as if meeting there by accident.

  The man-bird hovered around the first-class deck, very silent at first and then greeting us as we passed by him. He spoke in a Calabrian dialect. I had become so engrossed in the story of Lucia and Renzo that all I wanted was a place to sit and read. I was captivated when I read about “a necklace of garnets alternating with filigree gold beads” that Lucia wore over “a fine bodice of flowered brocade, with the cuffs open and laced with gaily-coloured ribbons.” Getting dressed on her wedding day, the Lucia of the book reminded me very much of a young pacchiana in her wedding costume. Both my mother and grandmother owned a garnet necklace choker. I found other similarities in the book.

  This story took place in Lombardy at the same time that Mulirena was being founded by people from the north. Signor Gavano had given us a history lesson on the village and the Spaniards who ruled the Kingdom of Naples at the time. The name Mulirena stood for “best sand,” much desired by the village founders for making stones. When I read about a “Most Illustrious and Most Excellent Don Carlo D’Aragon,” I wondered if it was the same Prince Carlo after which Piazza Don Carlo, where I had lived, had been named.

  Don Rodrigo of the book and his strongman, Il Griso, were also Spanish. Maybe the landlords who had controlled the lives of the poor in Lombardy, like Lucia and her mother, were the same that sent teams of peasants down the Appenines looking for sand, and then had them cultivate olives and chestnuts for them. The landlords had all probably lived in the Castel Nuovo and the Royal Palace we had just seen in Naples.

  Except for the parts that reminded me of Mulirena, I skipped most of the long historical and descriptive passages, as I was only interested in the story, which I imagined happening in Mulirena and in the countryside around it. It could have happened to my own mother. In our village, before the war, Don Stefano and his gang used to go into people’s houses at night and force castor oil down the throats of men who refused to get a membership card for the Fascist party—something that Don Rodrigo’s bravi would be capable of doing. Don Abbondio I imagined as part Don Raffaele, the priest, but also Ntonarello, the town’s drunk and buffoon, who sang on his way home every night.

  When a plan by Renzo to bamboozle and force the priest into performing the wedding ceremony against his will backfires, the couple and Agnese have no choice but to flee, for fear of Don Rodrigo and his men.

  Lucia seeks safety in a convent. She has never left her village, and when she gets on a boat on the banks of the Adda River in the middle of the night, she looks around her at the familiar landscape she is forced to leave and weeps quietly:

  Farewell home, where sitting among her secret thoughts, she had learned to pick out fro
m all others the sound of a footstep awaiting with a mysterious awe.… Farewell, church … where the secret longing of her heart was to be solemnly blessed, and love ordained and called holy: farewell!

  The two little girls kept us awake most of the night with their sniffling and crying. They were sick with fever, and Giuseppina tried singing them to sleep, then cajoling them. Then, she started talking to God out loud. “Dear God, do me this grace, don’t let anything happen to them on this boat. If you want them, please take them after I’ve brought them to their mother.”

  After the girls finally fell asleep, I dozed for a while but woke up again in the middle of the night, feeling nauseous. I had started having one of my recurring nightmares—being alone in the forest and running for dear life, afraid of a howling wolf—but the nausea woke me up and it took me a few instants to realize where I was. As children, we had been lulled to sleep by a lullabye about a wolf eating a sheep, but it had only been in the last months before leaving the village that the nightmares had started. I heard the other beds in the dark cabin creaking from the rocking of the waves. I could hear Mother tossing in her bed, the old woman coughing and making strange sounds, as if she was trying to spit. I couldn’t believe that only four days earlier, I had been with my friends and family in Mulirena. Here I was in this hard bed that bobbed up and down like a wooden raft, sleeping in the same room with people I had just met, as if they were supposed to be part of my family. At about this time in Mulirena, we would have been awakened by the old drunkard, Ntonarello, who walked home late every night from the osteria, and who rattled his cane on the cobblestones, and sang over and over the refrain from a song he had made up: “Ntonarello nu more mai; Ntonarello nu more mai.”

  “Ntonarello will never die,” he sang every night, and because I had heard his song so often, I believed it to be true. How I wished that I could still be sleeping on the lumpy, corn-husk mattress I had shared with my mother that was all hollowed out to the shape of our bodies, and had held us snugly, like a cocoon.