The Islands of Divine Music. John Addiego

       THE ISLANDS OF Divine Music

       A ROSE IN THE NEW WORLD

       Rosari

      Some came from the bottom of the boot to find a new life when theirs was unbearable, and some whispered the word America over and over among their prayers and sought to present themselves new before God in a new world. Rosari left Southern Italy and set sail into the unknown for an additional reason: in order to escape prosecution for her prodigality.

      Her father, Lazaro Cara, was a gentle man, and some would say he was too gentle. When his wife left him he gave up the chase after a week of weeping and lugging his children from village to village in the hilly south of Italy. Rosari’s mother was a beautiful woman with wildly sad eyes, with thick black curls which played across her cheeks even when she tried to keep them bound in a scarf. She dropped the wash in Rosari’s arms one day, put on her nicest dress, and left. Friends and family lent her father a jackass and a shotgun, but he looked silly holding the firearm in his arms like a baby wrapped in bunting. He wept, and Rosari and her older sister wept, and they walked from town to town with the jackass and ate cold potatoes and handouts from strangers and milk from their nanny goat, then returned home.

      Lazaro returned to his vocation, which was cutting the hair of the merchants and land barons and gossips in Reggio Calabria. Word came that his wife had run off with a man named Gulia. Then word was she’d dumped Gulia, or there had never been a Gulia, or that a fat butcher named Benedetti in Napoli, who already had a wife and seven children, was keeping her as a mistress, or that she had been seen among gypsies singing at a saint’s-day fair near Eboli. Then a cholera epidemic hit, and the stories about his wife got swept out the doorway with the hair and were replaced by stories of death.

      The disease took the life of Rosari’s cousin Paolo and a newborn neighbor named Gino Emilio Ravetto. Lazaro had little work and less money, the village had more activity in the cemetery with its ornate crypts and sepulchres than it did in its piazza, so, two years after his wife had left them, he and Rosari and Claudia rode a freight train to Napoli, a crowded, filthy, dangerous place. Maybe they were going to beg her mother to come back from the butcher, Rosari thought, maybe they were looking for people who still cared about the condition of their hair, or maybe they were simply taking their grief to the open road as they had when her mother had left. They hopped onto the moving train and the father held his two girls and wept for miles along the steep and sooty coastline.

      Every dark eye and flowing tress in the city made Rosari’s heart jump for want of her mother. Around the corner would come a young woman holding a basket filled with mushrooms or Swiss chard, and for a moment the girl would think it was she. Through the window of the barbershop where her father snipped hair and she cleaned the floor and shined shoes she might see a woman’s profile, somebody in a black dress with a load of firewood balanced on her head, and Rosari would almost cry out, Mama! Most of the time she kept her feelings to herself, and mostly because she didn’t want her father to get started and have him cry all over the head of some rich customer, but the keening for her mother overtook her now and then in the crowded apartment above the barbershop, and the fact that Claudia soon left them didn’t help.

      Her sixteen-year-old sister was engaged to a Neapolitan stonemason within a month of their arrival. Plump, quiet, simple-minded Claudia got married and moved into her mother-in-law’s house the night of the wedding. Rosari, who had learned to read by age seven with the help of her father and the sisters at Santo Giovanni, her home church, lost herself in newspapers and books as a way to cope with the loss of her sister and the lost hope of finding their mother. She found many books to choose among in the big city, on racks in a tobacconist’s, in the houses of the merchants. The girl would run down the narrow streets, dodging carts and mules, and deliver clean linen to ladies who would lend her books about knights and damsels in distress. She was just eleven years old, a dark-skinned, scrawny girl with disheveled hair and her nose in a book, when Gratiano, a local criminal who liked a close shave and a shoe shine, studied her.

      Debonair, articulate, yet hopelessly illiterate, Gratiano sat in the chair under Lazaro’s nimble fingers and watched the girl read a book half as big as she was. She reads and writes? he asked the barber. At that time only one of every ten Neapolitans could read.

      Smart as a whip, Lazaro replied.

      If I could do that I’d learn English and go to America. And the girl thought of how she would marry this handsome man with the dark eyes and sail to America, where he would earn an honest living trading prosciutto or pelts with Indians, and she would read books in Italian and English to him and their three children.

      The next morning, as she was carrying pane rustico from the baker’s, the criminal and his friend stopped her. They were seated on the sidewalk before a bar, each man holding a demitasse. Gratiano waved her over and introduced her to the large, bald man in a blue suit. My friend doesn’t believe you can write. Would you be so kind as to demonstrate? He handed her a fountain pen, such as she’d never seen before, and she wrote the words he dictated to her on a piece of butcher paper which enveloped a pig’s leg. Both men clapped their hands and slapped their knees enthusiastically. Gratiano placed three lire on the table and said he’d like to pay her to write a letter for him, provided she could keep it secret. Rosari set down her loaves and straightaway put the criminal’s words to pen on a piece of parchment:

      Esteemed Sir, it began,

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