to be the way I was, ciunca, crippled?
Or was it my fate to be a cripple? Fate, destiny. Destino. That word was used incessantly in Riposto. Everything happened because of destiny. Everyone had his or her destiny. All Sicilians knew they could not escape their destinies.
“Che destino!” the women muttered after my mother finished telling her story, trying with that word to exonerate her and comfort her. “Che croce! What a cross you have to bear,” they said, quickly moving their right hand down from their head to their chest and then from shoulder to shoulder, making the sign of the cross.
I understood I was the cross, though I didn’t quite understand how or why. Was it that my mother had to carry me, since I couldn’t walk, like Christ carried the cross in the pictures around the church? Was I such a burden for her? Was I growing that heavy?
My mother rarely complained. She was resigned to her destiny. She knew she had to atone for the sin of having a crippled daughter. She accepted her suffering like a good Sicilian woman. After all, in Sicily all women suffered. They believed a woman’s destiny was to suffer, to atone for the sin of being a woman.
Sometimes, as I sat on my mother’s lap, the women talked about their sufferings: the curse of menstruation, the toil and the ravages to the body of pregnancy and childbirth, the exhaustion of raising children, the rigors of poverty… And many of them suffered their husbands—their brutishness, maybe even their beatings.
My father never beat my mother. He always hugged and kissed her. And he worked hard all the time so we could have all we needed. But because of me, my mother’s suffering was greater than that of all the other women. Carrying the cross of a crippled child, my mother was the epitome of suffering womanhood. She was indeed the living Addolorata.
I was glad when my mother finally took leave of the women and got up from the rush-seat wooden chair someone had brought out for her. Since she had to carry me, my mother couldn’t bring her own chair out of our house. I hoped none of the women would decide to hug me. But usually at least one of them did.
“Pietà!” the woman whispered, almost to herself, taking me from my mother’s arms to hold me tight against her ample bosom.
“Che peccato, che destino, che croce,” all the women continued to murmur as my mother walked away with me in her arms.
We went past the pensionati, retired men, middle-aged or older, who didn’t have to work and sat smoking cigarettes and cigars, far enough from the women so they couldn’t be heard, as they talked of important matters like the Mafia, the weather, and the government. They didn’t comment, those men, but just looked at my mother and me as we passed by, and clucked their tongues and shook their heads.
Then my mother carried me into our house, through the first room and the second room—that’s how our rooms were named—all the way to the kitchen, where my grandmother was cooking.
“What are you making today, Nanna?”
We all lived in that house, which always smelled of tomato sauce, my maternal grandparents, my parents, and I.
The house was on a street named Via Libertà. Liberty, freedom. How I wanted to be out on that street! But usually, my mother sat me behind the glass panels of our front door, and I looked out at Via Libertà, watched people go by, watched the neighborhood children play.
Until I was three, maybe even four, my mother pushed me in my baby carriage. Almost every day, all through the warm months, she took me to the beach. She’d been told by the doctor in Catania, the nearest big city, that she should bury me in the sand and let me get very hot, then put me in the water to shock my nervous system and cure me of polio. Or maybe the advice came from the wise old women, who knew how to mix potions and were called witches.
I loved the sea but didn’t like being buried in the sand. Other children, playing nearby, kicked sand into my eyes. Sometimes, I had to beg my mother to take me into the water, because I got so hot that I thought I’d shrivel and turn to ashes like the coals we burned in the middle of winter in the conca, a large iron basin or cauldron.
Finally my mother realized the hot sand treatments were useless. By then, I’d grown too big for the cradlelike baby carriage. I felt embarrassed when the other children pointed their fingers at me and laughed. But though I was glad to be rid of the carriage, I missed our trips to the beach. Now that there was no alternative to being carried, I didn’t get out as much or go as far.
My mother usually didn’t carry me any farther than down the block—to join the women knitting and sewing. But she carried me to our sundrenched courtyard, where I sat with the geraniums in the pots; and sometimes up the steps to our roof terrace, from which we could see the sea. Every day she carried me around our house and to the bathroom whenever I had to go.
“I have to make pipi, Mamma.”
As I got bigger, at times she moaned, “Oh please, not again. My back is killing me. Can’t you hold it?”
If my grandmother heard her, she reproached her: “Don’t yell at the poor little girl, povira picciridda!” though my mother was not yelling. My grandmother couldn’t carry me, for she wasn’t strong enough. She was a very slight woman, always dressed in black, with her hair tightly pulled back in a knot.
My grandfather was tall and handsome, with well-groomed white hair and a mustache, and he did carry me. If I asked sweetly, he carried me outside on Via Libertà, if only up and down the block. My grandfather was not pensionato. He didn’t sit with the men to talk about the government. He despised their idleness. Though he was even older than my grandmother, he sold fruit from a cart he pushed around the town’s streets. What he didn’t sell, he brought home for us to eat. Because I loved cherries, when they were in season, he made sure he saved some for me before selling them all.
I wished my father didn’t have to work, so he could carry me more often. He was so strong, he carried me up Corso Italia, which everybody called “u stratuni,” the big street, all the way to the next town, Giarre, where my other grandmother and my aunt lived—my father’s mother and sister. My paternal grandfather had died during the war, so I never knew him.
My other grandmother was short and chubby, with a round face that was always smiling. My aunt was even slimmer than my mother, wore an apron, and baked cakes and cookies. My favorite cookies were called piparelle and were crunchy and a bit spicy.
“If you eat too much, your father won’t be able to carry you back home; you’ll get too heavy,” my aunt said.
“I can never be too heavy for my papà!” I laughed.
Though he was a kind and gentle man, my father got angry at times. But his anger was not directed toward any of us. He got angry at what he called ingiustizia. He hated those guilty of injustice, the politicians and the mafiosi, who he said were one and the same, the fascists and the idle rich. Sometimes he headed down to the town square, yelling for people to follow him, to protest against injustice. My father also hated ignorance. Whenever he heard anyone saying “Che peccato, che croce” while he was carrying me, he muttered, “Ignoranti!”
Rather than accepting destiny, my father always spoke of fighting injustice.
While I ate cookies, he sat with his mother and his sister, talking fast and smoking. When my grandmother called my being ciunca God’s will, volontà divina, my father said it was ingiustizia divina.
