The light-force which emanates from the star—constituted through the marriage of contemplation with activity, and which is the antithesis of the thesis that “there is nothing new under the sun”—is hope. It proclaims to the world: “What has been is that which prepares what will be, and what has been done is that which prepares what will be done; there is only that which is new under the sun. Each day is a unique event and revelation which will never be repeated.”
My dear Barbara,
It’s as if I were writing to you from the future: I’ve just left our earthquake-ravaged land and am in Cosenza, where there was also an earthquake, but three years ago. That is, I am in the situation you will be in three years from now, or: nothing will change.
I walk along the street and it seems to me that I am still there with you. One has only to look at what happened here to understand that the time it takes for reconstruction will be very different from what you’re told. Many stores have not reopened. Some towns, like Aiello, live with the terror of a rib of rock that might come free again and crush them. Those who have lost family and home have nothing, no compensation or anything else, despite the fact that there was a lot of talk at the time and a competition to see who could be more generous with the Calabrian sisters and brothers. Does it remind you of something? But I don’t want to put you in a bad mood. The human spirit doesn’t change, but God will be merciful with you, I know it, I feel it, it can only be thus.
I’m well, I have a decent room in the convent, the sisters call me “the earthquake victim” and spoil me a little too much. And yet I miss our days, I even miss the encampment, our understanding one another beyond words.
Give me your news. How is it in the village of the queen? Is Jutta well, are people kind to you? Do you have enough to eat? Has the nausea stopped? The baby is growing? When it’s possible I’ll come and see you, I promise.
I think of you with all my affection, give Jutta a kiss for me, too.
Yours ever,
Rosalba
Calling the cabin assigned to Jutta and me in the Regina Elena village home was excessive, but Rosalba’s letters were breaths of fresh air, and, compared to the way we camped after the disaster, the new lodgings appeared more than comfortable. The reality, however, was different.
Although the saga of rebirth insisted on a row of small modern-style houses, which we were asked to pose in front of for the official photographs, the structures were unstable and precarious, full of drafts and loved by ants and mice. At night we were afraid: the doors swung back and forth in the wind gusts, and the sensation of being tolerated by the community did not correspond to a concrete sense of protection; the day’s appearances were belied by the night’s desperation. Two cabins down from ours a man waited for darkness to get drunk on mysterious reserves of alcohol, and we heard him beating his wife, banging fists and sticks against the walls. One morning I tried to talk to the woman, but received in response a snarl and an invitation to mind my own business. Jutta, approaching her at Mass, had told her that we could make space in our cabin for her and her child; the answer had arrived in a dialect so thick and loud that there was no doubt it was a curse. We no longer mingled: The atmosphere among the cabins was one of unassailable distrust. All of us held tight to the little we had, and a violent husband wasn’t the worst that could happen.
In the morning we got up early, went to claim our ration of food, muttered about where the aid money had ended up, and grumbled about when the promised houses would be ready, in the other villages as well as in ours; they were being constructed with money from foreigners, and so Messina, once the glorious commander, was named like a group of colonies: the Swiss village, the American village, and then mine, the village of the inevitable sovereign Elena, also a colony.
“Don’t you want to leave here?” I asked Jutta on one of those afternoons of sun without a season, typical of our land. “Don’t you want to get your house back?”
After months, the excuse of waiting to find out if the friend and the maid were miraculously alive no longer held up. Construction had begun in the ruins of what had fallen, and if there were dead people under the new foundations, too bad: the city would be reborn on the corpses.
“I don’t think you’ve understood. I don’t have a house.”
I put aside the book by Matilde Serao, which I was rereading.
“I have money, yes, in a bank, and that’s why I’m here. It’s not much, but we can live on it until we find work.”
“And the house where you lived with your husband?”
“When the baby was born dead, the marriage died, too. We no longer slept together. I knew he had a lover, but I didn’t know who she was, or that they’d had two daughters. I discovered it when I opened the will. That was why he’d stopped repeating that not having children was the greatest misfortune of his life—because he had them. He didn’t marry that other woman out of respect for me, but he left the house to the daughters, to apologize for not having been present. To me he wrote a letter in which he wished me the best, but I would have to manage on my own.
“That’s horrible!”
“Men. They can’t make up their minds, they’re afraid of doing harm and do worse. They live on the edge, and when they die they leave a mess.”
“So you came to Sicily to put all that behind you.”
“And also because, once, I was happy here.”
We were made of flesh, bones, and nerves. We were made of ourselves and nothing else, kept alive by a creature with different blood that was nourished on mine and swelled my belly; every morning I woke up bigger and gained greater respect and credibility. I got used to introducing myself as the widow Cosentino, I settled inside that name fully, determined to take advantage of the possibilities and use it as a passport.
The nausea didn’t go away, and in the morning Jutta massaged my back with a lotion for joint pain. More than once I was frightened by seeing blood in my feces, but my friend calmed me: It’s normal, she repeated, tilting her head to one side. The priest sent a doctor to examine me, a lean man with a gloomy, mean expression and breath that smelled of death. He reproached me for the poverty of my diet, then looked at Jutta fiercely and ordered her to make me eat meat at least three meals a week: You want to kill this child? he thundered. And also: He’ll be born among women, without substantial food how can he become a male?
With an entire week’s shopping money, we bought some very good, very tender fillet. I asked Jutta to cook it thoroughly, but after I swallowed a few forced mouthfuls my stomach couldn’t keep it down, and the fillet brought up with it the lunch of a few hours before.
We never again spoke that doctor’s name, although we told the priest that the pregnancy was proceeding wonderfully thanks to his advice. I threw up secretly, in the house, muffling the sound for fear someone would hear me.
In fact, there wasn’t much money, and we had to find work. Jutta was no longer interested in biology; she said she would take the opportunity to change her life. At the parish church two women from the village were teaching a course in dressmaking to those who didn’t have a job; we both went to the first lesson, but I wasn’t good at it, I cut myself, pricked myself, and, because of my belly, struggled to stay in my chair. Jutta gave me a withering look. I knew what she thought, and I agreed: crossing my legs under me as I was doing would twist the fetus and the child would be born deformed.
I went reluctantly to the second meeting, wondering what I was doing there. Jutta, on the other hand, was completely absorbed, and didn’t even notice when, after barely half an hour, I sneaked out to breathe a little freedom.
“You don’t want to work?”
The priest’s voice surprised me.
“You need to learn a trade. You can’t remain idle.”
“I don’t like sewing.”
“What do you like?”
“Reading,” I answered impulsively, “but it’s not a trade.”
“And you know how to write, no?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never written. Not yet . . .” I answered in confusion.
“You filled out the documents and signed them in front of me the morning I gave you the house.”
Writing didn’t mean only creating pages of literature, in fact mainly it meant making marks on a page, not being illiterate. I struggled to disconnect the two meanings of the word, but he was right.
“Yes, yes, of course.”
“Come with me.”
The only time I’d been alone with a man was on the torpedo boat, but I couldn’t say no to the village priest, the person who had given me a house, whom I lied to every day by answering when he called me Signora Cosentino. I followed him to a cabin where no one lived yet; before entering I breathed hard and touched my stomach. Don’t worry, said the voice of my baby from somewhere in my body: I believed it and stopped worrying.
“Here we can have up to forty children. Now, we won’t find forty certainly, at most fifteen or twenty will come, the ones who aren’t hiding. Some have never been to school. Some others will know many things, not from studying. Once they’ve seen an earthquake, children know everything.”
Twenty desks stared at us, empty. Where did they come from? For a long time now I hadn’t gone out into the city; so the schools had been abandoned, to be reconstructed in new places?
“Only the teacher is missing. You’ve studied, you’ve been to school, Signora Cosentino?”
I had been taught at home, but I nodded.
“I know you like books. It’s clear, and you just confirmed it. Your friend seems to know about science, even though for now she’s taken with sewing.”
“I’ve never brought up a child . . . I don’t know anything about children.”
“You’ll have to learn.”
“I didn’t like that doctor you sent me.”
“What did he do to you?” The priest was alarmed.
“He treated me badly. I know what to do, I don’t need someone to come and scold me.”
“I’m sorry. I thought he could be helpful. But of course women have been making children since the dawn of time, the Virgin Maria teaches that you can make them by yourself, you don’t need us,” he smiled. I smiled in return. “Even if that doesn’t please my colleagues. You know what the truth is? For your condition we need a woman doctor, one who’s studied medicine: I know someone in Catania, but here it’s more difficult. It was already difficult to find a man. The doctors have fled Messina. As long as there were the wounded of the emergency it was one thing, but now there’s neither money nor glory.”
“Find me a midwife, that will be useful.”
“And you’ll come and teach the children?”
I didn’t know what to say. In my family the women had never worked, my great-grandmother the seamstress wasn’t paid in money: to have a trade was unseemly, her passion was tolerated as a pastime. I thought of her, ’a maestra: at that precise moment Jutta was learning her art; I, instead, would steal her nickname. Together we would honor her memory, fulfilling it by turns.
“When do you want me to start?”
“Tomorrow morning at eight the children will be here, I’ll take care of paper and ink, also books. Tell me if you need anything, but anyway I’ll be here. I’ll pay you with money from the benevolent fund.”
“I might not be good at teaching.”
“You have a child in your womb, you’re getting along by yourself, and I trust your smile. I don’t need anything else.”
Outside Cabin 19, the sun was brighter than it had been in all the springs of my life.