Such a Pretty Girl. Nadina LaSpina

      When I was four or five I wanted to be ugly, and got very angry when people said I was pretty.

      “I’m ugly, brutta, say that I’m ugly.”

      But no one listened to me.

      “Che bella bambina, what a pretty little girl,” they all said. And inevitably, they added, “Che peccato! What a shame!”

      There was such sorrow in their voices, such an anguished look on their faces… I didn’t want my being pretty to make people sad. Better to be ugly, I thought.

      I especially didn’t want my being pretty to make my mother sad. As soon as she heard those words, even if she had been laughing a minute before, my mother’s eyes filled with tears and her face turned into a mask of agony. At those times, my mother looked just like the Addolorata.

      The Addolorata, the “sorrowful woman,” was the name of a statue in the church across the street from where we lived, in the little town of Riposto, in Sicily. It was a statue of Mary holding the dead Christ, a Sicilian version of Michelangelo’s Pietà. The mother dressed in gold-embroidered purple silk, grief carved deeply into her painted face, on her lap her dead son, red-stained slender limbs draped in lifeless abandonment.

      People seemed as mournful when they looked at my mother holding me as they were when looking at the Addolorata holding her dead son. Sometimes I thought my mother and the Addolorata were one and the same. They even had the same name: Maria.

      I have early memories of being on my mother’s lap as she sat outside with the town women while my father was at work. We sat in the afternoon sun in the winter months, and in the summer we sat in the shade.

      My mother told the women the story of when I was born. The midwife, mammana in Sicilian, was impressed that such a slight woman as my mother could give birth to such a big baby as me. She left my mother bleeding on the bed, with my grandmother tending to her for a few minutes, and rushed with me in her arms to the bakery around the corner to weigh me on the bread scale. Not even washed yet, crying loudly because my lungs were so vigorous, wrapped only in a sheet, for it was very warm on the afternoon of May 16, 1948. Over four kilos I weighed, almost nine pounds.

      And I was growing so healthy and strong, my mother told the women, already talking, at sixteen months, and walking on my own, and I was never sick, never a fever until… until that fateful night when Crudele Poliomielite, Cruel Poliomyelitis, invaded our happy home and stole me from my family.

      I imagined Crudele Poliomielite as an ugly monster with a weird name, who actually appeared out of the darkness to grab me and steal me away. But how could I’ve been stolen when I was still there in my mother’s arms? Could it be what got stolen was the healthy baby she’d given birth to? And what was left was a changeling, me? It took a while before I understood she was talking about my getting sick. Only then could I get over the secret fear that I might not be my parents’ real daughter.

      My father’s name was Giovanni. He was always at work. He built houses—that was his mestiere, his trade. He was a master builder, mastru. Young men worked for him and he taught them how to mix cement and build walls with bricks.

      Even when he was home, my father worked, fixing anything that needed fixing, covering up cracks with plaster, changing the color of the walls to make our house more beautiful.

      I adored my father. To me, he was the smartest, strongest, most handsome man in the world. I loved it when my father picked me up and carried me in his work clothes all smeared with cement. My mother complained about my getting dirty. But I liked it. And as my father held me, I felt the muscles in his chest and arms.

      “Muscles as hard as his heart is soft,” my mother said.

      I liked the way my father smelled—of cement, sweat, and cigarette smoke. I wrapped my arms tightly around his neck and clung to him. My father kissed me and called me gioia, joy.

      Sometimes my father carried me on his shoulders. I laughed and grabbed on to his head to keep my balance.

      “I’m falling, Papà!”

      My father laughed, too, and, his strong arms raised, wrapped his hands around my waist. His hands were so big, they almost entirely encircled me.

      “Non aver paura, gioia! Don’t be afraid!”

      But I wasn’t afraid. I felt I was on top of the world. He moved his shoulders up and down in a rhythmic motion, mimicking the galloping of a horse.

      “Where does my princess want to go? Your wish is my command!”

      I laughed and laughed.

      Whenever my mother told the town women the story of my getting polio, they looked up from their knitting and sewing and murmured “Che peccato!” I leaned against my mother’s chest, hiding my face in the folds of her lace-trimmed blouse, and smelled the lavender she rubbed on herself when she washed.

      Wasn’t her story proof that my mother was blameless? She had made me big and healthy and strong. What happened to me was not her fault. But those words, “Che peccato,” were not just an expression of regret and sympathy; they carried the connotation of guilt. Peccato means “sin” in Italian.

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