The Fortunate Pilgrim - Mario Puzo [4]
Only the poor can understand the shame of poverty, greater than the shame of the greatest sinner. For the sinner, vanquished by his own other self, is in one sense the victor. But the poor are truly vanquished: by their world, by their padrones, by fortune and by time. They are beggars always in need of charity. To the poor who have been poor for centuries, the nobility of honest toil is a legend. Their virtues lead them to humiliation and shame.
But Lucia Santa was helpless, though her sulky, adolescent rage endured. Then a letter from America; a boy from the neighboring farm, her companion when they were both little children, wrote and asked her to join him in a new land. It was all done correctly through both fathers. Lucia Santa tried to remember the boy’s face.
And so one sunny Italian day Lucia Santa and two other village maidens were escorted to the town hall and then to the church by their weeping parents, aunts, and sisters. The three girls went on board ship, brides by proxy, sailing from Naples to New York, by law Americans.
IN A DREAM Lucia Santa entered a land of stone and steel, bedded that same night with a stranger who was her legal husband, bore that stranger two children, and was pregnant with the third when he carelessly let himself be killed in one of those accidents that were part of the building of the new continent. She accepted all this without self-pity. She lamented, true, but that was not the same thing; she only begged fate for mercy.
So then, a pregnant widow, still young, with no one to turn to, she never succumbed to terror, despair. She had an enormous strength, not unusual in women, to bear adversity. But she was not a stone. Fate did not make her bitter; that was left to friends and neighbors—these very neighbors who so intimately shared the summer night.
Ahh, the young wives, the young mothers, all the other young Italian women in a strange land. What cronies they were. How they ran to each other’s apartments, up and down the stairs, into the adjoining tenements. “Cara Lucia Santa, taste this special dish”—a platter of new sausage, Easter pie with wheat germ and clotted cheese and a crust glazed with eggs, or plump ravioli for a family saint’s day, with a special meat and tomato sauce. What flutters, what compliments and cups of coffee and confidences and promises to be godmother to the yet-to-be-born infant. But after the tragedy, after the initial pity and condolences, the true face of the world showed itself to Lucia Santa.
Greetings were cold, doors were shut, prospective godmothers disappeared. Who wished to be friendly with a young, full-blooded widow? Husbands were weak, there would be calls for assistance. In the tenements life was close; a young woman without a man was dangerous. She could draw off money and goods as the leech draws blood. They were not malicious, they showed only the prudence of the poor, so easy to mock when there is no understanding of the fear which is its root.
One friend stood fast, Zia Louche, an old, childless widow, who came to help, stood godmother when the fatherless Vincenzo was born and bought her godson a beautiful gold watch when he was confirmed so that Lucia Santa could hold up her head! for such a magnificent present was a mark of respect and faith. But Zia Louche was the only one, and when mourning time had passed Lucia Santa saw the world with new and wiser eyes.
Time healed the wounds and now they were all friends again. Perhaps—who knows?—the young widow had been too harsh in her judgment, for these same neighbors, true, in their own self-interest, helped her find a second husband who would feed and clothe her children. There was a marriage in church. These same neighbors gave her a glorious wedding-night feast. But Lucia Santa never let the world deceive her again.
AND SO ON this heavy summer night, with her first batch of children grown and safe, her second batch of children no longer infants except for Lena, and with some money in the post office; now, after twenty years