IT WAS NOT ONLY ACCEPTABLE IN SOUTHERN ITALY TO KILL A wife who cheated; it was expected. Professor Tataranno told me the night of prima notte was one thing, but to carry on a full-blown love affair was quite another. And when Francesco got out of prison, he would likely kill Vita, or at least beat her badly. It was also acceptable for him to kill the man who was sleeping with her. Unless, of course, he was the landowner.
Grieco.
When I thought about it, it all made sense, really. I told Tataranno that people had always mistaken me for Greek. When I was a kid, my mother would pick me up for lunch from school and take me to a diner across the street. It was a Greek diner and the people in there loved me. They told my mother they wanted to adopt me because I looked like them and because I loved their chicken orzo soup.
In college, my best friend, Nick, introduced me to his Greek family in the Bronx and they immediately took a liking to me, more so than Nick’s other friends. His aunts would braid my long, thick hair and his mother taught me the right way to pronounce spanakopita and taramasalata. They told me I seemed like a Greek, like one of the family. “Are you sure you’re not Greek?” they asked me, squinting.
They were the first ones to mention the Italian/Greek saying to me, “Same face, same race.” In Greek it was “Mia fatsa, mia ratsa.” And in Italian, “Una faccia, una razza.” Their food, culture, and faces were so similar that they considered themselves brethren.
Now I wondered if I really was related to Nick’s family. By Greek blood.
I was Grieco. I could feel it in my bones.
That afternoon I also reminded Professor Tataranno how Vita would later die, hit in the head with a sock full of rocks in Jersey City. His eyes narrowed. “You know that it’s a very typical weapon in Basilicata. The shepherds often use a sock full of rocks to scare away predators. And the brigands, well, it was their first weapon of choice.”
I told him killing someone with a sock full of rocks was not typical in America.
“Maybe,” he said, “maybe Francesco did make his way to America finally and took his revenge.”
That had never occurred to me before. And it seemed kind of drastic, for him to wait all those years and travel there to kill his philandering wife.
“Or maybe he hired someone in Jersey City to kill her,” he said.
That seemed more plausible, since the area where Vita lived in Jersey City had a large community of Bernaldans. I thought of Francesco, stewing year after year, getting angrier and angrier that she had left with those bastard sons of hers, and working his way into a vengeful fury and hiring a friend in America to knock her off. Was it possible there were two Vena murders?
I VISITED THE ARCHIVES IN MATERA ONE MORE TIME, TO SEE IF I could find any other murders or any other children born to Vita. I went alone this time. Imma was busy reading through the tangled calligraphy of the criminal file and Giuseppe was enjoying a visit from his niece and nephew, the children of his late sister Sabrina.
He didn’t see them very often but they were here for several days with their father, Sabrina’s widower, staying in Giuseppe’s farmhouse. They ate big meals and told family stories. Giuseppe’s wife, Emanuela, made pasta coi fagiolini, spaghetti with long green beans that were now in season, a family favorite.
I wondered if the children looked like Sabrina and if it brought Giuseppe any comfort to see them. Or maybe it made him feel worse. I didn’t have the heart to ask him. When I spoke to him on the phone, he used words that described how happy he was that they were visiting, but there seemed an underlying anxiety to those words. Giuseppe was always positive and cheerful, but today his voice sounded strained and full of sorrow, a way I had never heard it before.
By now the staff at the Matera archives knew me well, and brought my files quickly. They even stood by to see what new information I discovered.
Within minutes, flipping through the dusty book of birth certificates, I found another child of Vita. This time, a daughter.
Her name was Nunzia. Born 1883, this time in Bernalda on Via Eraclea—the Italian name for Hercules. The same street where Coppola’s ancestors had lived.
A daughter! It’s a girl, I nearly shouted into the archive room. Her name was a holy one, which referred to the Annunciation, when the angel came to Mary to tell her she was going to give birth. And give birth she would.
This time to a little baby girl.
Someone I had grown to know and love—Vita—had given birth to a new baby girl. Her final, wonderful surprise. The last reveal in a series of reveals.
Vita, I felt, or the spirit of Vita, had tried to stop me from coming here and finding the story of her husband, Francesco. But I had persevered and she was revealing all to me now. You want it. Here it is, I heard her whisper to me.
In Italian, naturally.
Eccolo.
No one in my family had ever mentioned a daughter. I wondered if Nunzia looked like Vita, like me or the other girls in my family. As with the previous three sons, Francesco Vena was listed on the birth certificate only as Vita’s husband, not the father, and was “away from the city.” In prison. Still. As late as 1883.
A daughter. How about that? Vita had a daughter. Born in March, just like me. But why, I wondered, had no one ever mentioned her? And then it hit me.
Nunzia probably hadn’t lived for very long.
I reluctantly requested the book of death certificates. And there, that very same year, only two months later, is Nunzia. Another dead baby. I thought of the crib in my Pisticci apartment and dreaded going back there alone.
I wondered if Vita’s milk had dried up. Maybe she had tried to feed the baby tainted goat’s milk or crushed-up solid food. Or maybe the baby simply caught one of the many diseases circulating through the neighborhood. Maybe Vita had given her a dose of poppies to calm her screaming and had given her too much. There were a hundred ways for a newborn to die in Basilicata in the 1880s.
I scrambled back to the birth certificates and continued to search, in the hopes there would be another child. And sure enough, two years later, in 1885, another daughter was born, in February. Vita was thirty-three, the same age that her mother was when she had had her.
This second daughter of Vita was also named Nunzia, born on the same street—Eraclea. Vita’s husband, Francesco, is again not present for the birth, being “far from the town.”
I searched and searched but couldn’t find a death certificate for this new Nunzia.
But there was one more surprise, the last one folded inside, waiting for me in that book of the dead. As I searched for Nunzia, I came across an unexpected death certificate. There, on the afternoon before I left Basilicata for the last time.
“Oh my God,” I gasped, shaking my head. The clerk looked up from her daze and tilted her head as if to say, “What? What did you find now?”
“My great-great-grandfather, Francesco. His death certificate,” I mumbled, still shaking my head. She smiled and went back to staring straight ahead. I’m sure she heard this kind of discovery every day. Of course I couldn’t go into the whole explanation of how he wasn’t really my great-great-grandfather, the story of the murder, which we had discovered in this very room, Contrada Avella, the courthouse, the prison sentence, Vita’s life as a concubine, the dead babies. It was all too much.
I looked closer at the certificate and saw that he had died in 1887 at eight minutes past eight o’clock on the morning of November 28 in Bernalda. He was forty-three years old, fairly old for back then.
One of the witnesses to Francesco’s death was a man named Filippo Grieco. Was this our Grieco? Our man? Age thirty-four? Could it be? I traced my finger over his name. Filippo Grieco. In slants and curlicues. Maybe he was my great-great-grandfather. Could he have been there, at his rival’s deathbed?
No cause of death was listed. I wondered if heartbreak really could cause someone to die. Or maybe Grieco killed him. Or maybe he died in a card game. Maybe Vita killed him. Or maybe one of the brothers of Antonio Camardo had taken revenge, vendetta.
One thing was certain. This death certificate proved that Francesco did not kill Vita or have her killed in Jersey City.
I was finally ready to leave the dead in peace.