My mother is not my mother, though she did, in accordance with a prearranged contract, pick me out from a divot in the vast charcoal of Malandata, a town unknown to any but the witches who live out their lives, there under the volcanic sky. It is an unusual town in that it exists in the constant shadow of Etna to its east and Carpacciolo’s Spanish castle to its west. No fruit or vegetables will grow there, so the witches must concoct their own food or make the hour-long car trip to Grenaldo when their magic isn’t in season. But the shadow town has the perfect weather for their chosen endeavor.
The deposit of charcoal on which Malandata was built—and by built I mean the witches’ shacks, because no normal people live there, and no other buildings exist there and no animals either except for the cats—that deposit of charcoal was coughed up by the earth itself and broke the barren ground sometime between 1900 and 1910. Opinions differ on this, but since there are so few people who actually know or talk about Malandata, and fewer who have traveled there and remember, we must rely on the orally communicated accounts, which are predictably unreliable. But according to these accounts, the emergent bed of charcoal, which was at its start the size of a small suitcase, has re-erupted every year since, growing in diameter each time just a barely perceptible amount, but such that now it should be—what?—a square kilometer, at least.
Each year, almost always on the same day—there is some variation; it has to do with the phases of the moon—the charcoal puffs itself out of the earth some more, and it also takes on a glowing, glistening cast as some of its embers wriggle out from under the rest. By the witches’ manipulations of whatever natural or divine force is at work there beneath the earth, some of these craggly blocks can be split to reveal a sleeping, perfect, coal-black child.
It was with these witches that my mother had personally contracted my birth, an event that I also remember despite my supposed nonexistence at the time, which awareness, though I am not in contact with any of the other children conceived in charcoal, I presume to be a consequence of our unusual origins.
My mother was an old, salty twenty-two at the time, already wrinkled and red from the ferocity of the sun and seven months pregnant with her fifth potential child when she sought the services of the Malandati. Every child she had carried to this point in her life she had either miscarried by the fourth month or had been born dead, and though she wasn’t actively seeking to become pregnant, she was frustrated and humiliated by the failure of her womb and sought a back-up plan to keep her from returning home to Puzza from the hospital in Catania empty-handed.
My mother’s first meeting with the Malandati was conducted at Ugenio’s Ristorante in Grenaldo, where the witches went for such meetings and also for the minestrone, famous then and still because it’s made with family recipe extra-virgin olive oil, cold-tempered with grapeseed.
They sat down, my reddened mother with her prematurely withered fingers, and the three Malandati, each one dressed in varying colors of the same shapely woman’s suit that was fashionable at the time: Greta wore eggshell, if I recall correctly; Pasqualina wore a pale turquoise that complemented the vivid pink of her lips; and Silvana, whose shoulders squared a bit larger than the other two, wore the black suit with red lipstick that cooled her perfect skin to almost white. They were stunning in this guise of theirs, which they used to command respect and increase their profit margins. Have you heard the saying? Everything costs more when you buy it from a beautiful woman, but it’s worth every penny. And here they were, the Malandati, negotiating with my mother for the price of my birth. They sat and adjusted their skirts, initiated the coded conversation required for such a transaction. From what I remember, it went something like this:
Greta: Thank you so much for inviting us, Signorina Puzza.
Grazia: Please, call me Grazia. But it was you who invited me.
Greta: Only if you believe what your mother tells you is true. But who has time to listen to a mother?
Grazia: Mothers are like the earth. They are always holding you up, but someday they will demand that you return the favor. Ugenio’s has a specialty?
Silvana: Only if you’re willing to pay for it.
Grazia: I’m willing to pay. Except―
This is where my mother strayed from the coded conversation, which she had received as a script in the mail after she had answered the similarly coded advertisement on the back of the Santo Paolo Cathedral Easter booklet, a stack of which she had been using as toilet paper before she noticed the ad—on the last copy—what serendipity! The ad appeared to be a plea for charitable donations for the godless orphans of the Vietnam War. But every fifth letter, my mother saw, had a barely perceptible tilt and together they spelled: A MiStic chiLd for yoU. NAMe yoUr own PrIce. MalAndata.
My mother said, “Except,” and the waiter set down a plate of crusty bread at the table, “except that I won’t pay if I am promised soup and get a bowl of broth instead.” This, she knew, was a direct contradiction of the Malandati standard contract that included a clause waiving responsibility if a child did not emerge from the numbered hunk of charcoal assigned to my mother. She assessed—correctly—that the witches had a bit of a racket going and that they routinely overestimated the number of charcoal hunks that would produce babies in order to maximize their profits. But my mother, too, was a budding businesswoman practicing revenge and had no intention of being taken by these shrewd, and strangely beautiful, witches. Physical form is so unpredictable.
The script having been broken, the witches didn’t know what to say. They certainly wanted to continue the transaction, as the price of the child would complete this season’s crop and allow them to take a week’s holiday in the Sulphur Islands before the births, but they had not been confronted like this before—most women seeking children were distressed and grateful for whatever pittance of hope was tossed at them. So they remained silent as my mother continued.
“I will sign your contract, but I want a guarantee. And if no child emerges from my cracked piece of charcoal, I want one of the others. There will be many, and I don’t care which one or who it belongs to. I want one, and I will have one.”
The witches conversed silently in that way that is particular to Sicilian witches: they looked one another in the eye and talked with their eyebrows. They argued over what terms they would be flexible on, and at what price. Silvana, though larger than the other two in aura, thought compromise would be all right in this case, while Pasqualina’s eyebrows betrayed the staunchness with which she was unwilling to change the rules. It was Greta, in the end, whose suggestion of a ten percent increase in price in exchange for a guarantee, and her reminder to the other women that such an increase would allow them each an extra mud bath on the islands, who won over Pasqualina’s stubbornness and allowed Silvana to retain her shape as their serene leader when she replied to my mother,
“Very well. You have a guarantee at the cost of an additional ten percent over contract rate. We’ll think of it as insurance.”
My mother agreed, and they had a lovely meal of soup and fried sardines that culminated in signatures in triplicate and the exchange of money: 20,000 lire, which at the time was quite a bit of money: just over one hundred dollars.
I dwell on the details of this meeting for two reasons: first to show that my birth was a negotiation—literally, a contract negotiation, but which represented a negotiation with the cycles of the earth and the lengths to which the Malandati were, and were not, willing to go to make some cash. The second reason is that my mother began to experience a rejuvenation upon her return to Puzza which was not explicable by the events of the meeting, but which I believe to have been correlated.
When she returned to Puzza, my mother’s shoulders leaned backed a bit further than usual, the muscles loosened of their typical rigidity, and the skin of her leather brown arms began to flake. Upon seeing her, Nonna, my grandmother, remarked that her eyes seemed not to squint so fiercely, but my mother barked at her that the old woman should mind her business and leave her in peace—she had a terrible headache and was going straight to bed.
But when she lay down, her belly an orb below the blanket, she began to sweat and called to her for cool towels for her forehead.
“Mammina, I’m sorry I yelled at you. I think I was feeling sick,” she said as her cheekbones burned red from the pulsing heat beneath them.
“It’s all right, a-mamma,” Nonna said, trying to hide her shock and concern at my mother’s sweet and unnatural tone. “You will be fine, and I will take care of you. I’ll get lemon water to cool your mouth—”
“No! Stay with me here, Mamma, don’t leave me—” she cried, literally: wretched little tears that streaked her face and revealed clean white lines of skin as though they penetrated a dirty layer of epidermis that my mother had not known was there.
And so Nonna stayed with my mother as she slept, and thus was a witness in the transformation that occurred over the course of the nine hours of restless sleep, which, before revealing the renewed youth of my mother, agitated the child in her belly so that it kicked and swam to her right side, then lodged itself against my mother’s spine so that she looked like her pelvis was levitating from the bed.
When the red around her eyes flaked off, it revealed a smooth and soft skin underneath, puffy with newness. When Nonna wiped her hot arms and neck with a towel wet with bay leaf water, a claylike substance sloughed off and clean flesh shone through. It was clear like glass to hear Nonna tell the story, but I remember it more as translucent, the red and blue of her veins gleaming like an instruction on the wonder of the human body. And it was like this until she woke, and exhausted, let Nonna bathe her with cool water and alcohol to dispense with the debris of her former body and sweat away with new luster the remaining tinge of fever that had sent her to bed.
My mother, of course, acknowledged no change, because beauty to her was a worthless measure. But everyone else noticed: the women who came to her for spells and revenge were less frightened of her; the men who bought her mineral water offered her rides in their cars as she walked on swollen feet and her belly continued to grow; the churchgoing women of Puzza who expressed a disgust they seemed not to have previously had at her unmarried pregnant state, as though a stunning woman ready to bear a bastard were more of an insult to them than some toothless whore with whom they could not possibly relate.
As my mother glowed her way through the last two months of her pregnancy, she paid visits to the Malandati on the pretext of expanding her business base to nearby towns—certainly there were women without cars in need of revenge. On the day of my birth, my mother arrived in Malandata feeling a jagged twinge in her right kidney that threatened to pull her down to the ground as she stood in front of Silvana’s door.
“It’s not you,” Silvana said from the other side of the screen door. “It’s the coal. It’s shifting.” She stepped out in her bare feet and a tube top that did nothing to lift her empty breasts above the height of her waist, and her thighs erupted from her polyester jogging shorts as though two jaundiced children clung to them for safety or sustenance. She smoked a cigarette with her thin, pinched lips and betrayed none of the beauty that my mother had witnessed at their first meeting; in fact, she recognized her only by looking beneath the surface of things, a talent which powerful women like my revengist mother and the Malandati cultivate.
So it happened that my mother arrived in Malandata just as the coals began shifting, three days ahead of the date the witches had predicted, and they had to scramble to get their potions together and purify themselves—honestly, I don’t know what they had to do to prepare, because at this point, my essence was beginning to formulate itself in coal cluster number 101 and I was too busy with my own birth to notice. It was really an indescribable experience, but let me try to explain it to you:
Porousness, followed by an accumulation of ions that draw the pieces of you into place like a magnet; an expansion of self like an earful, a roomful, an arenaful of voices until a clam shell seals shut over you and with relief, you notice that breathing exists and each lungful of air is a playmate and a nurturer; awareness, like a philosophy, hums you a sweet tune, and you know that from this moment forward, you can only get stupider, and then stupider, until you eventually die.
It’s at this point that I begin to see my mother and Silvana again, and now Greta and Pasqualina too, who are using an ax and a crowbar to break open the numbered blocks of coal. They stand unsteady in their tall leather boots that are black from the coals, as are the yellow rubber gloves that they wear up to their elbows. As Silvana rears the ax overhead and strikes block number 58, a pocket of sulphurous steam comes loose from beneath it and sprays Pasqualina in the neck.
“Pezz’i strunzu—” she screams, and stumbles backward on the hot coals.
“All right, fine,” Silvana says with another strike, “Stop your complaining. You can take over Greta’s job now.”
“Avaia, Silvana!” Greta says, but Silvana has already handed perfectly black baby number 58 to Pasqualina, who takes it back to the closest shack, now tipped southward at what seems a precarious angle, and labels the wiggling infant by scratching the numbers 5-8 into the bottom of its feet, where the black peels away to reveal a chocolatey brown and a paler olive where creases are already beginning to form.
My mother, all the while, has been asked to wait in Greta’s hut, which is the farthest from the center of the coals and presumably the safest from accidental suction into the earth. But she cannot help herself and she must walk, because the baby inside her is wrenching itself from side to side, and the stress on her pancreas is such that she removes her shoes and walks on the hot coals to distract herself with a different pain as the infant wrestles with her organs, presumably trying to find its way out of that body, though who can ever know what a wordless infant truly desires?
She walks across the coals basking in the blistering heat, a glow like fire rising through her body to her face, so that when the witches look up and see her approaching, they avert their eyes from the piercing light, and hear only the steam, crackling like applause between my mother’s legs as her water breaks, and when she reaches them, she says in a voice that starts from deep in her thighs, “One hundred and one,” and they skip the 46 clusters in between and approach me, already blistering from my block, my shoulders and my fists tiny beautiful jackhammers against the inner cool of the coal, so it takes just a tap of the ax to release me, screaming happily into the beginning of my stupidity, a shiny black bundle handed to my mother just as a strangled imperfect child drops from her body and lies like a cold blue stone on the shifting ground. One of the witches—in the surprise of my birth, I don’t remember which one—places the dead child in my coal egg and closes it, and with her black boot, presses it down into the pit. My mother is dizzy and delirious and the witches carry her and me back to Greta’s hut. I think I hear a shudder from that egg as we move away, but though I cry to alert my mother, I have no language yet, and she merely kisses me, her lips turning black, and turns her head to vomit on infant block number 89.
Lena Bertone's fiction has been published recently in Matchbook, Wigleaf, Monkeybicycle, Gigantic, Corium, and other magazines. A companion piece to "Malandata" appears in the Winter 2012 issue of Eleven Eleven.
