The Black Madonna Read online

“And what do you think about that? You’re a young girl. How old are you? Fourteen? Fifteen? I could be your father. I have a son in America, a baby. New York is a big city, nothing like here. Everyone speaks English. You won’t have your father, your friends, no one, nothing that you’re used to.”

  Magdalena’s eyes filled up with tears. “You don’t like me,” she said. “You hate me.” She covered her face with her hands and she started to cry.

  “Hate you?” he said. “That’s ridiculous. How could I hate you?”

  “You don’t want me, then. You think I’m ugly.” Magdalena Caparetti sobbed into her hands.

  “Ugly? You’re beautiful. Why wouldn’t I want you? Any man in his right mind would want you. You’re a beautiful young girl. Why are you crying like this? Please . . .” Amadeo looked over at his aunt, but Zia Guinetta’s eyes were closed. She was fingering her rosary. Her lips moved without a sound.

  Amadeo shook his head as if to clear it. “Where am I?” he said. “Sitting here in some ancient betrothal ritual trying to make sense with a teenage girl.” He stared across the table. Magdalena sat very still. She wouldn’t take her hands from her face but she had stopped crying. “You’re just a little girl and this is a terrible idea,” he said. “Believe me . . .”

  Magdalena uncovered her face and put a hand up to his lips to silence him. “Not such a little girl,” she said.

  In her chair in the dark corner near the stove, Zia Guinetta moved her fingers along the beads of her rosary and smiled to herself. “Everyone has a story, no?” she heard Magdalena say to Amadeo. “I’ll tell you mine. Then you decide.”

  Zia Guinetta nodded in the corner. She watched Amadeo watching Magdalena. She watched how he sat, leaning forward, how he listed into her words like a sinking ship. The button on Magdalena’s blouse was open, whether through carelessness or design, who could know? But Zia Guinetta could see Amadeo losing strength. She could see him falling. Magdalena’s beauty was as potent as Zia Guinetta’s magic. The combination was deadly. His food had been filled with that magic. It had made him ill and it had made him well. The scent of female power filled the kitchen.

  “My mother . . .” Magdalena began, and Amadeo listened. His eyes never left her face. “My mother was very beautiful,” Magdalena said. “She was married and already had me when a friar came to Castelfondo from Naples. She went to work in his kitchen. He had wine from France that was sealed in bottles. He had a room where sausage and cheese hung on ropes from the ceiling. He had traveled. He would tell my mother about the places he had been.”

  Magdalena stretched her arms above her head and pulled her hair into a knot. Her hair was red where the light from the open door caught the color.

  “She went to live with him,” Magdalena said. “And then she disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “They say she had a son and the friar sent her away.”

  “Where did she go?”

  Magdalena rested her elbows on the table. She opened her hands, shrugged her shoulders.

  “I’m sorry,” Amadeo said. “And your father?”

  “It would be better for him if I went away.” In the corner, Zia Guinetta sat very still.

  Amadeo opened his hands. Magdalena put her hands inside his and she held his wrists. “You see, there’s nothing for me here. All I have here is the reputation of my mother.” She tightened her grip on him. Her nails cut into the skin on the underside of his wrists. “The Madonna sent you to me,” she said, “to fulfill my destiny, don’t you see? There’s nothing else to do.”

  She stood up and came toward him. He saw points of gold in her eyes. He saw her lips part and then she spun around, away from him. His skin burned where the hem of her dress brushed his arm. He thought he would never leave this spot, never get up from this chair. He suspected he would die.

  Zia Guinetta thanked the Black Madonna from her corner by the stove. She and Carmelo and Maria and Tommaso would never worry again.

  “Whatever you want,” Amadeo said to her.

  She touched her fingers to her lips, then her heart. She smiled at him and turned away. He could see the muscles in her back where her blouse was cut low. He watched her walk through the door into the street and he didn’t move until Zia Guinetta came over and spoke in his ear.

  “Well?” she said.

  “Tell me what you need.” Amadeo ran his hands through his hair. He pressed his fingers into the bone above his eyes. “I have things to do . . . go to Matera . . . Dammit, Terragrossa’s car won’t start. How do I get there?” He slammed his fist on the table. He felt his strength coming back.

  “Never mind,” Zia Guinetta said. “Tomorrow morning Terragrossa’s car will start. Eat something. Take your nap.”

  “But I have to go to town. I have to send a telegram to New York . . . my son.” Amadeo shook his head as if to clear it, to find his past.

  “Rest for now,” Zia Guinetta said, her hand stroking the back of his neck. “I’ll take care of everything.”

  “What happened, Zia?” he said. I feel it here . . . and here. He put a hand to his head, moved it to his belly. “Was it God or the Devil?”

  Zia Guinetta clicked her tongue. “Fate,” she said. “It’s always fate.” But under her breath, she praised her Madonna.

  The wedding was everything Zio Carmelo had promised. Amadeo turned his pockets inside out and complained about nothing except that Magdalena was hidden in her father’s house for the weeks before the ceremony.

  Zia Guinetta fed Amadeo bits of meat and raw eggs and milk from the goat and when the day of the wedding arrived, he had to admit that she had saved his life. She pinched his cheek between her thumb and forefinger. “So handsome,” she said. “Any girl would be lucky.”

  The wedding celebration lasted three days. There were fireworks after the vows, and the brass band did came from Matera. The musicians wore red uniforms with big gold buttons in two lines down the front of their coats.

  Zio Carmelo had ordered paper lanterns in different colors strung across the piazza so the party could go on through the night. Silk banners decorated the balconies. Goats were roasted on spits, and the wedding cake, filled with almonds and honey, was so high that Magdalena had to stand on a stool to cut it.

  The children got sick from all the sweets, the men got drunk from all the wine. The priest held the bride after the ceremony and kissed her for too long a time on the mouth.

  Magdalena looked like a Madonna. Everyone said so. Five seamstresses had worked for two weeks to finish her dress. They had grumbled at such short notice but Zia Guinetta had put her hand in Amadeo’s pocket and the seamstresses were sorry when the dress was finished.

  Everyone talked about the embroidery on the bodice, the train that was as long as the church aisle. There were whispers that virtue was not rewarded, that the Devil’s power was clear in the forces at work between men and women, but no one could say that it was not the most extravagant wedding Castelfondo had ever seen.

  It was such a celebration that Zia Guinetta worried that it was too grand, grander than the festival for the Black Madonna. “She might take offense, get jealous,” Zia Guinetta said. “She’s a woman, after all,” and so she dug into Amadeo’s pockets and the papier-mâché statue in the church was replaced with a plaster statue that Zia Guinetta swore cried tears on the anniversary of the wedding. Zia Guinetta would wipe the tears with a lace handkerchief that she never washed but kept in a velvet-lined wooden box under her bed. The priest and the mayor talked about sending the handkerchief to Rome but Zia Guinetta would not give it up, not even for the Pope.

  Zio Carmelo wrote all this in a letter to Amadeo and when Amadeo showed it to Magdalena she was not surprised.

  The couple left in Terragrossa’s car, which had miraculously started just as Zia Guinetta had said. The car was decorated with bits of colored cloth and ribbons and pieces of tin and mirror that caught the sun. Giacomo Caparetti would not let go of his daughter and cried until his eyelids s
welled shut and Terragrossa said if they didn’t leave soon they would miss the bus.

  On the way to Naples, Magdalena told the people on the bus that they had just been married and she gave them pieces of wedding cake that she had wrapped in an embroidered cloth. She uncorked a gallon of wine and by the time they reached the city, it seemed as though they had had another wedding.

  Magdalena held Amadeo’s arm when they walked in Naples. She had never been outside of Castelfondo, never seen a city. In the hotel, she ran the water in the bathtub until it overflowed. She flushed the toilet over and over to watch the swirl of water go down. To where? she wanted to know. She stood at the balcony and looked out at the sea for hours. Amadeo made her a bath with bubbles.

  She’s a child, he thought, but when he lay with her at night, he wondered where she had really come from and how she had come to be his. She knew things. How? he asked himself. It frightened him, and when she saw this in his face, she laid her head on his shoulder and took his hand.

  “Who are you?” he said.

  “I’m yours,” Magdalena told him. “And you’ll never be sorry.”

  So,” the women said to Teresa Sabatini on the stoop outside the building on Spring Street. “What do you hear from Italy?”

  “He’s coming back soon.”

  They all nodded. “Well, it’s about time.”

  “And he’s gotten married.”

  All of them gasped. “No,” from the first step. “It can’t be,” from the second, and then, “So soon!”

  “Wait,” Teresa said. “Stay right there,” and she went upstairs to check on Nicky and Salvatore, who were sleeping under the open window so she could hear their cry from outside on the stoop. She put a hand on their foreheads and pulled the blanket up under their chins. From behind the sugar bowl she took the yellow envelope with the telegram that had come from Italy. Downstairs, she smoothed her skirt under her and sat down on the top step. She handed over the telegram. The women passed it around.

  “It doesn’t say much.”

  “Only that he’s taken a wife.”

  “A young one, I bet.”

  “And maybe big like this,” someone said, and she leaned back and held out her arms in a circle in front of her. The others laughed.

  “Too bad,” Jumbo’s mother Antoinette said, putting the telegram back in its envelope, handing it up to Teresa, who sat on the step above her. “He would have been a good catch for you. You’ve practically raised his son.”

  “What are you talking about?” Teresa folded the envelope into a small square and stuffed it down the front of her dress. “I have a husband.”

  “Oh, that’s right. It’s hard to remember,” Antoinette said. “Who sees him?”

  “And I have my own son.”

  Antoinette smiled. “That’s right, too,” she said, bouncing Jumbo on her knee. His body shook and trembled and everyone there could see that he was the biggest baby boy.

  Amadeo took Magdalena everywhere in Naples. They went to dinner and to the theater. He bought her clothes to wear and rings for her fingers and her ears. She was a witch, he told her, and he was caught under her spell. She laughed at him deep in her throat.

  “We have to go back,” he said one morning. “My son . . . the business. I didn’t know I would be gone so long.”

  “There’s something . . . before we go,” she said.

  “What? Anything.”

  “I want to see my mother. She’s here, in Naples.”

  “Magdalena,” he said. “You don’t know that.”

  “She’s here. I have proof. Wait.” And she dug through her things to find a postcard of the Bay of Naples. The ink on the card was faded.

  “So she sent you a postcard. How long ago? She might have been passing through. She might have had a friend send it. And even if she was here, how could you find her? Do you know how big Naples is?”

  “You could find her for me. You promised me anything. You said that. I want to see my mother.” She curled herself into the curve of his arm. She made a mustache under his nose with the ends of her hair. She left a trail of kisses down the center of his body.

  “Magdalena,” he said. She covered his mouth with her hand.

  “You’ll find her. I know you will . . . for me.”

  Amadeo said he would try. She was a child, he reminded herself. She wanted her mother. When he was away from her, his head would clear and he would wonder how it had all come to be, but he could never understand. He would see her and he would forget everything that had gone before, except for Zia Guinetta’s face and the way she had held Magdalena before they left in Terragrossa’s car. How Zia Guinetta had whispered in her ear and touched the amulet from around her neck to Magdalena’s lips. Amadeo didn’t ask. The way of women. What could he know?

  He ordered a coffee in a bar near the waterfront and thought about Magdalena’s mother. A country girl with a small child arriving in Naples. A good-looking young country girl with no family and no money. He paid his check and asked the waiter the best place to find a woman in Naples. “Una casa di tolleranza,” the waiter said. “There’s plenty, but forget the houses. I get you a woman.”

  “No,” Amadeo told him. “I want a house, a good one.”

  “But this woman is beautiful, young. She comes to your hotel room, no questions. She does whatever you want.”

  “My wife is in my hotel room.”

  “Ah.” The waiter shut one eye. “I understand.”

  Amadeo made a face he hoped was sly and held out a folded bank note. “Where do I go?”

  The waiter took the bill and put it in his pocket. He smiled. “I know some places, not that I’ve been there. Eh, what would I be doing in a place like that? I’m a waiter. Life’s not easy but you have to thank God. I always tell my children . . .”

  Amadeo stood up. “Are the houses near here?”

  “Yes, yes, very near,” the waiter said, and he took the pad from his pocket and drew the directions to an area on the outskirts of the city.

  Amadeo stood on the street across from the brothels. Outside the houses there were colored lights to show that they were open for business.

  He went into the first one. There was a young girl on the couch in the front room. Her hair was in pigtails with yellow ribbons tied on the ends.

  “I want to speak to the signora,” he said. She smiled when she heard his accent and he saw she was missing a tooth. She was as young as Magdalena.

  He thought about Magdalena then, about sending her back to her father. He could give her money and put her on the bus to Castelfondo. He had thought about this when he was sitting in the coffee bar near the waterfront. He always thought about this when he was away from her. What would happen to her in New York? She was so young. What was he doing anyway?

  The girl in the pigtails had gotten up and was knocking on a door. She looked at him seductively as she waited, her hip against the door so that when it opened she almost fell inside. The woman who opened the door shouted at her and the young girl raised her hands to cover her head as if the woman would hit her.

  “Signora,” Amadeo said, and his voice and his accent made the woman stop and look up. She was bony, and, Amadeo thought, very ugly, with a long nose and the mottled, yellowish skin of an opium smoker. He gave her a gracious smile.

  She sent the girl away, up the stairs, and she came over to him. “So early, signore,” she said.

  “The light was on.”

  “Yes, from last night. Saturday. “We are always busy on Saturday.” She yawned. He saw long stained teeth.

  “Should I come back?”

  “No, no. Sit.” And she led him to the red couch where the young girl had been lying when he came in. Amadeo sat down. He knocked off the embroidered doily that covered the armrest with his elbow. The fabric underneath was stained and worn. The woman picked up the doily and pinned it back in place. “The girls make them when it’s slow,” she said. “Sweet, don’t you think?”

  Amadeo nod
ded. She did not seem so ugly now. She put a hand on his knee and moved closer to him and he remembered why he was here. “Signora,” he said. “I’m looking for a woman.”

  “You’ve come to the right place,” she said. “Just tell me what you want, how you want it.”

  Amadeo leaned closer. “The woman I want came to Naples ten years ago. She had a baby with her, a boy, I think. She came from the mountains, from Lucania.”

  The woman sat back. “Uffa,” she said. “Naples is a big city. Girls are always coming here. They all have babies. They all come from the mountains. Ten years is a long time. Do you know anything else? The name of the village? You have a picture?”

  “Castelfondo,” he said. “Near Viggiano in Lucania. She was beautiful, strange eyes, anyone would remember them, bright, as though a lamp were held behind them.”

  “Lucania,” the woman said. “I know Lucania.” She smiled with one side of her mouth. “So who is this? Your wife? Your sister?”

  “No.”

  “Who then?”

  “Does that matter?”

  “You want me to help you, you have to help me. Everything is important. Who are you? Why do you want to find her? Maybe you’re up to no good. How do I know?” She paused, traced an eyebrow with a delicate finger. “So, now, tell me. What is this woman to you?”

  “I’ve just married a young girl whose mother ran off to Naples years ago and she wants to find her. She wants to see her again before we leave for New York.”

  “Fortunata . . . this girl is lucky. Do you know how many cafoni come here and promise to take my girls off to America? Then the girls cry when they’re left. You’re an American. You could have any girl in this place.”

  “I don’t want a girl, signora. I want to find my wife’s mother. That’s all.”

  “Of course, I understand. Didn’t I have a mother? What is a girl without a mother? But who’s to say that this mother wants to see her daughter? Or that she’s still in Naples? That she’s even alive? Not to discourage you, but things go on here. You wouldn’t believe the things God allows. . . .” And here she kissed the medal of the Madonna that hung around her neck. “I pray to her every day to keep my girls safe.” She held out the medal for Amadeo to see. It was the image of the Black Madonna. The woman tucked the medal back into the front of her dress.