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.
My grandmother crossed herself. “Bestemmia, blasphemy!”
After I turned five, my mother carried me every morning across the street to the convent in back of the Church of the Addolorata, where the nuns ran their elementary school. At the door, she handed me over to a nun, who carried me into the classroom and put me in my seat, right in the front row.
At first, the nuns were scary in their long black habits, but I got used to them. They smelled of incense and flowers. In the afternoon, they carried me around the convent. I was passed from one nun’s arms to another’s. They carried me into the church, bending one knee and telling me to cross myself as they passed the altar with the tall crucifix; to the vestry, where baby Jesus, a beautiful doll, slept in a basket covered in lace; and out to the garden, where the palm trees were so high that, no matter how far back I tilted my head, I couldn’t see the tops, and the sparrows flew in circles and sang.
I loved those little birds that always sounded so happy. They woke me up every morning with their singing.
Sister Teresina, the youngest and my favorite, even carried me into the huge kitchen, where they had the biggest pots and pans I’d ever seen. Sister Prisca, the oldest, stirred the minestrone in a blackened iron pot with a giant wooden spoon.
But sometimes, while they carried me, some of the nuns started holding me tighter and tighter against their chests, kissed my head, and whispered, “Pietà, pietà!” That scared me. I felt I was suffocating. Out of fear, I’d start weeping. Thinking they were comforting me, the nuns held me even tighter and rocked me like a baby—which I hated.
Every Sunday, my mother carried me into the church. My father never went with us. Before Mass started, she knelt with me in her arms in front of the Addolorata and lit a candle. I couldn’t stand to look at the Addolorata’s face, which was the same as my mother’s, so beautiful but so sad. I kissed my mother, trying to make her smile, but she never smiled in church. I wrapped my arm around her neck, bent my head down, pressing my forehead against her shoulder, and kept my eyes shut. But though I couldn’t see anything, I was painfully aware of the gaze of the whole congregation.
The nuns did their best to instill in me a sense of guilt and shame, and to teach me to embrace my own destiny of suffering.
“Offer your suffering to the Lord!” they always said to me. I couldn’t understand. What would the Lord possibly want