SUCH A PRETTY GIRL
PART I
Che Peccato: What a Shame
1
RIPOSTO
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. What sin could my mother have committed to deserve such punishment? And if not my mother’s, then whose sin was it that caused me 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