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RETURN TO BELLA TERRA (The Italian Chronicles-Book 3)

By MaryAnn Diorio

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Brooklyn, New York, January 5, 1905

“Dear Maria, you must come quickly! Mama is dying!”
Maria Landro Tonetta’s heart lurched. She grabbed the edge of the kitchen table as she read the telegram from her younger sister Cristina. It was dated two days before. What if Mama had already died?
With trembling hand and tear-filled eyes, Maria continued reading. “Mama wants very much to see you again before she dies. Can you come right away?”
Of course she could. Not only could she, but she must. Her heart raced. She would book passage on the next ship that sailed to Sicily, provided there was still room. Ships sailed from New York to Palermo approximately every two weeks, and manifests filled up quickly.
Outside the balcony door window, the only window in the tiny tenement house flat, a steady snow fell thick and fast. January had begun with a fury.
And so had Maria’s day.
Her throat tightened. Would she ever see Mama again?
Guilt washed over her. When she’d left Sicily eight years earlier, she’d promised Mama she would come back for a visit. A promise never kept. Not for lack of desire, but for lack of money.
A lump formed in Maria’s throat.
No one had told her and Luca that life in America would be difficult. Discouraging. At times, deeply depressing. The claims of streets of gold had proven false. Instead, they’d discovered streets of tin. The claims of beautiful homes had turned into crowded, roach-infested tenement houses that often bred violence as well as disease.
And the claims of well-paying jobs had turned into long hours of hard labor that barely allowed them to make ends meet.
Worst of all, no one had warned them of the deeply felt hatred and prejudice against Italians, particularly Italians from Sicily. No one had warned them of the condescending ethnic slurs, the continual threats on their lives, the horrendous assaults, and the vicious discrimination in the workplace, particularly against Italian women. No one had warned them of a brutal life that, so often, had made her want to return to Sicily and to Bella Terra, the beautiful hillside farm where she’d grown up.
And the home in which Mama now lay dying.
Hot tears spilled from Maria’s eyes onto the telegram, blurring the words. She must leave immediately. It would take over two weeks, if not longer, to cross the Atlantic Ocean back to Sicily, especially in winter. She had no time to spare.
But what to do first? Her husband Luca would not be home from his job on the railroad for one more day. He’d been forced to take the position laying rail for a new stretch of the Pennsylvania Railroad shortly after his release from prison. Should she wait for him to return before booking passage on the next ship? If she did, she would run the risk of an arrival delay of an additional two weeks.
And what if Luca wanted to go with her? She shook her head and sighed. That was out of the question. Their finances barely permitted one round-trip ticket let alone two. Besides, who would care for Anna and Valeria? She could ask Enza Addevico, her good friend and neighbor who lived in the apartment down the hall, but leaving her children with Enza for an extended period of time would be a terrible imposition, not to mention that Maria would miss them terribly.
But miss them she must. She took a deep breath. No. She would have to go to Sicily alone. There was no other way. Her greatest regret was that Mama would not see her grandchildren one last time before she died.
The thought of traveling across the Atlantic Ocean alone filled Maria with dread. The voyage from Sicily to America eight years earlier had been a nightmare. But at least she’d traveled with her husband and children. Traveling alone would mean she’d have no protection.
Except Mine.
The Lord’s gentle reminder triggered a twinge of guilt. “Of course, Lord. Please forgive me.” She whispered the confession under her breath and received His forgiveness.
She folded the telegram and placed it in her apron pocket. If only a thought could transport her to Mama’s side! How Maria missed her! How she regretted not once visiting her since leaving Sicily!
Her heart clenched. God, please keep Mama alive until I get there.
The door of their flat creaked open. “Ciao, Mama!” Twelve-year-old Valeria walked in, followed by ten-year-old Anna, their book bags hanging from their shoulders. They dropped them to the floor and ran to embrace Maria.
Anna, always the perceptive one, gazed at Maria’s face. “Mama, you’ve been crying!”
Maria had hoped to keep the bad news from her children, at least until she’d discussed it with Luca. “I received a telegram from Aunt Cristina. She said that Nonna is very sick.”
Valeria pulled up a chair and sat down next to Maria. “What’s happening, Mama?”
Should she tell the children of her plans? “I must go back to Sicily for a little while. To be with Nonna. I want to see her before she dies.” The words caught in Maria’s throat.
Anna took Maria’s hand. “Oh, Mama. I will go with you.”
“And I will, too.” Valeria brushed away a tear from Maria’s face.
“I wish you could, dear ones. But there isn’t enough money to pay for your tickets. Even paying for mine will be a sacrifice.”
“Can we work on the ship to pay our passage?”
“I don’t think that is permitted. Besides, I wouldn’t want you working in that kind of environment.”
Valeria stroked Maria’s hand. “Maybe Nico can go with you.”
At Valeria’s suggestion, Maria’s heart filled with hope. Having Nico’s company would be the next best thing to having Luca go with her. Borne of the greatest tragedy of her life, her son had become her focal point. On him she’d pinned every hope, every dream, every consolation for her immense suffering. Although Nico had been the product of a rape, she’d vowed to show him he was a person of great worth in God’s eyes, a man with a destiny. Not the illegitimate outcast her Sicilian village of Pisano had viciously declared him to be.
She cringed at the memory.
Often, Luca would half-teasingly tell her that Nico had become a god to her. An icon of worship in human form. She’d shuddered at the thought but could not deny there was some truth to what Luca said. Over the years, she’d found herself intervening more and more in Nico’s life, almost as if she owned him. Luca had accused her of possessiveness. A possessiveness spawned in the years shortly after Nico’s birth, years during which she’d been alone with her son, sequestered on Bella Terra for fear of their being harmed by the villagers.
This precious son, whose nineteenth birthday was only a few days away, had become a grown man with a steady job in the garment industry. A responsible young adult whose life was separate from hers, as much as Maria struggled to accept that truth.
She considered Valeria’s suggestion with measured breath. Dare she ask Nico to buy a ticket to accompany her? He’d been saving most of his earnings toward the purchase of a house for the day when he would marry. A distant goal, but one he hoped to achieve one day. She could not ask him to jeopardize his dream.
Unless she offered to pay him back every penny.
“And don’t worry, Mama. We will take good care of Papa while you’re gone.”
“I’m sure you will.” The thought of leaving Luca and the girls behind wrenched her heart. She’d never been away from them before for more than a day. To be separated from them for several weeks would be unbearable.
“I know how to cook pasta e fagioli,” Valeria offered.
“And I know how to set the table,” Anna chimed in.
Maria laughed in spite of herself. “I am so blessed to have the two most wonderful daughters in the whole world.” She hugged them close.
“And we’re blessed to have the best Mama in the whole world.”
A longing tugged at Maria’s heart. That’s exactly how she felt about her own mama.
A mama she might never see again.

* * * *

Nico Tonetta trudged home from work as another major snowstorm pummeled Brooklyn. Already, nearly a foot of snow had fallen, and another four inches were forecast before morning. Traffic was at a standstill, with only horse-driven snowplows crawling the streets in an attempt to make them passable. Draped in heavy woolen blankets, the poor horses seemed as cold as he was.
A bitter wind whipped Nico’s face, causing tears to well up in his eyes. Shivering in his thin coat, he shoved his gloveless hands more deeply into his pockets and set his gaze toward the tenement house where, at almost nineteen, he still lived with Mama, Papa, and his younger sisters, Valeria and Anna. His sisters loved the cold. Perhaps they’d left Sicily at a young enough age so as not to remember its warm, balmy climate.
He sighed. In his eight years in Brooklyn, he still hadn’t grown accustomed to the cold winters.
Would he ever?
But it wasn’t only the cold winter weather that made him feel like a misfit. Whenever he ventured out of his Italian neighborhood—which he did as rarely as possible—he faced jeers, slurs, and discrimination just for being Italian. Once, he’d even been beaten for daring to walk through a well-established, wealthy neighborhood on his way to the train that took him to the Manhattan clothing factory where he worked. Thank God, the police had broken up the unruly gang of preppy schoolboys before they could inflict permanent physical damage on him. Nico flinched at the memory.
As for emotional damage, no policeman could have prevented that. His muscles still tensed at the thought of the demeaning incident. Ever since, he’d taken a different route to and from the train station.
He rounded the corner that led to the street in front of his run-down tenement house. Most of the pushcart peddlers who normally greeted his return from the clothing factory every evening had already left for the day. Only one lingered, offering his fare of hot calzoni to any straggler brave enough to weather the elements.
Nico stopped. The poor old man seemed in need of encouragement. “One hot calzone, please.”
The man smiled weakly. “I must warn you they are no longer hot. My heater ran out of fuel.”
“No matter.” Nico smiled. “I’ll take it anyway. I am more hungry than cold.”
The man wrapped a calzone in brown paper and handed it to Nico. “God bless you, my son.”
Nico handed him a few coins. “Keep the change. And God bless you, too.”
A tear trickled down the old man’s cheek as he pocketed the coins. His lips quivered. “Grazie.”
Nico’s heart sank. So many Italian immigrants had come to America with hope in their hearts. Nearly half had returned to Italy disillusioned. Many of those who’d remained had discovered that any gold-paved streets they’d hoped to find would be streets they’d have to pave with their own blood, sweat, and tears.
Yet, they chose to persevere anyway, ever hopeful that things would one day change.
But would they? And what about him? Now an adult, could he make it on his own in a country the majority of whose people hated and distrusted Italians? Who looked on them as inferior beings best relegated to the pig pen?
Who allowed prejudice and pride to over-rule human decency?
Truth be told, the odds were against him. The land of milk and honey Papa and Mama had imagined had turned out to be a land of sour milk and vinegar. Returning to Sicily was looking better and better.
The wind picked up as Nico approached his tenement house. The dilapidated building had aged even more in the years since his family had lived there. An eerie silence pervaded the street that normally resounded with the voices of mothers calling for their children to come in to dinner, of newspaper delivery boys hacking the day’s news, and of middle-aged street musicians playing their accordions and harmonicas in the hope of earning a few pennies. The snowstorm had turned the usually noisy street into a scene of silence. Except for the lamps burning in the apartment windows, there was no sign of human life. A stray dog, covered with snow, whimpered on the street corner. Nico broke off a piece of the calzone and tossed it to the dog. The poor animal had barely enough strength to totter toward it and grab it between his shivering jaws.
Lifting the collar of his worn coat around his bare ears, Nico pushed solidly into the gusting wind. Only a few more yards to go before he would reach the main entrance to the tenement house. The storm had grown to nearly blizzard proportions. He looked back toward the old peddler. To Nico’s relief, the man had left for home.
Thick, heavy flakes fell from the sky like shooting stars, piling atop one another as they reached the ground. Oh, for the warm sunshine of southern Sicily! His mind drifted back to the beautiful land of his birth. Although he was only eleven when he’d left, he still could picture the gently rolling hills of Bella Terra, his mother’s family farm, with its lemon orchards, its lush vineyards, and its purple-blue mountains, majestic against the golden-orange horizon. How he missed the fragrance of the orange groves and the wild rabbits scurrying through the fields! And Pippo, the Lagotto Romagnolo puppy his grandmother had given him on his eleventh birthday—shortly before his departure for America. What had become of the dog? Was he still alive? Did Pippo miss him?
A surge of longing filled Nico’s soul. He missed Sicily. He missed Bella Terra. He missed his grandmother. She’d been like a second mother to him.
And, strangely enough, he missed Don Franco Malbone. The man who’d been his first teacher at the village school. his parish priest, and the man at whose side he’d worked in the fields. The man who, as foreman of Bella Terra, had brought the two-hundred-year-old family farm back from the brink of bankruptcy.
The man who had wronged his mother.
Mama said she’d forgiven him years ago. For what, Nico didn’t know. Beyond stating that Don Franco had greatly wronged her, Mama had told Nico nothing. As proof of her forgiveness, she’d even hired Franco to work on the family farm.
Nico’s throat hitched. The same unutterable thought bombarded his mind yet again, as it had been doing many months of late. A frightening thought. An unbearable thought. A thought that shook him to the very roots of his being and that his mirror kept confirming every morning.
He resembled Don Franco. The same black, wavy hair. The same dark, penetrating eyes.
The same Roman nose and strong, square chin.
Not only that, but he had the short, solid build of the man, not the slender look of Mama’s small frame. Only the shape of his eyes resembled Mama’s.
Nico shuddered at the thought he wanted to expel more than anything else. Could he himself have anything to do with the offense for which Mama had forgiven Don Franco?
A chill shook his veins.
Could Don Franco be his biological father?

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