And on this day, too, Elena had come to comb her hair in the sun right in front of her house. When Gemello arrived playing his flute and humming, Grace bit her lip and began shouting at Vastianedda, staring with half-crazed, hysterical eyes at Elena’s beautiful chestnut hair shining in the sun. That hair shimmered, filling the entire street with light.

But Gemello wasn’t cheating on her with la Mottese, no. Who would ever have suspected gna’ Basila, that good wife? She, the one who always put on such a pious face when Grace complained and who always raised her eyes to the heavens, scandalized that anyone could love such a bum; it was she who was filling his pockets with money. She was the reason why Gemello had gone weeks and weeks without hunting.

And when one evening Vastianedda came to tell her that she had seen Gemello go into gna’ Basila’s house, Grace went straight away to hide behind the entryway, never feeling the piercing cold, waiting for Gemello to come out. It was very late when the neighbors heard the cries of the child, who was screaming:

“Mamma! Mamma!”

• • •

Early that morning the woman headed out to Buscardo to wash with a black eye and a slow step. Vastianedda followed with a bundle on her head, looking up at her mother to make sure she didn’t see her nibbling on a crust of bread. But Grace wasn’t even aware of her presence.

She spent the entire day at Buscardo washing mechanically, bent over the stream’s shore out in the open. At times she thought, and at times she felt herself becoming sleepy and lifeless, like when your eyes are half closed in a cart bumping along the cobblestones on the main street. She stayed there awhile, her hands stiff with cold in water that was clouded by soapsuds. Little by little the water cleared, and the bubbles slowly disappeared, carried downstream by the current that was always the same, always the same. And if she were to expose gna’ Basila … Gemello would just beat her again, worse than ever, and don Liborio, the happy husband of that evil woman, would give her the rest. Who would help her, so alone in the world, so alone and poor and ugly?

She looked at her emaciated arms and her red dress. She saw herself and felt as she never had before, small and stooped in the midst of the vast countryside on the shore of the stream that always ran its same course. And what if Gemello didn’t come back? If he had left her forever?

America 1911

America 1911

La Mèrica