Look, it has nothing to do with me. The true love, the arrangements. The water over the head, the black cat crossing my path. This was not the old country or the new country, but it was ours like a legacy. Some people had legacies and others had stories, written in languages long forgotten. It's easy to forget them when you just sat down one day and made them up. This curse started long before I was born, but I always knew it was around. The owls reminded me and the bears made no appearances. This has nothing to do with you. This was before were infidels, when we were all just lovers. Maybe when we were younger or after we are dead. This is when we were innocents; when we are ours.
It began when my great-grandmother decided to denounce the law of the small town she lived and marry the man that she loved. The whole thing she arranged was her own change in her own pockets, she would even wear pink skirts. In Sanfratello at the beginning of the twentieth century this was something that was very much not allowed. Marriage was practicality. You married so someone's father could send over their two best goats. But it did not happen this way. As the story goes, my great-grandmother was leaving church one morning when she saw a boy with a bloody hand. She stopped to help him, typing his wounds up with a handkerchief. With blood on her pink skirt and eyes that should have never been blue, she decided that there must be more to this life than her father's farm &her mother's God. There was a feeling in her stomach-- do you know that feeling? There was a sound in his voice-- do you know that sound? She knew that some things would be worth eternal damnation.
So it went that she fell in love with Joe Lovano, on a street corner, on a Tuesday afternoon. She was fifteen years old and her mind was made up. She began to make choices that were not her to make and with this her reputation was soiled &her linens were silk. It was her own mother who bestowed the curse on her. On the wedding day.
She said to her "Gracelia, the Lord will be unforgiving to
your decision and everything that comes from this love will be damned for the rest of
time, the luck that our family has had will be gone- he is no good!" And it was true,
everyone knew that Joseph Lovano was no good, he was an awful eighteen year old
who had often been known to sleep around with women in surrounding towns, but I
can tell from the story, and I can tell from the pictures, that Grace loved him, she
had no choice you see, I think that's something that her parents, her siblings, that
town failed to understand she knew the minute she saw him that it was the beginning
of the end, but she went ahead and did it anyway.
Oh you tell me, tell me what's so bad about a black eye? Tell me why black eyes don't heal? Oh you tell me why it is not worth it to push out sixteen children or bleed to death or poison the bread? Tell me why I beg for ten more minutes in the morning when I grasp onto the hair of blond men and sob like something has gone wrong, like I can see the Gulf of Mexico and not the Brooklyn Queens Expressway? Tell me where you got stabbed baby, cause I don't see shit.
Kate says they all just want to get their dicks wet, and mom, she says I'm making it up. Dad books the plane ticket and Nick acts like he's never held my hand in an airport. My best friend who is long gone and dead understands the power of a bowl of water held over the head. My reflection knows to be weary of the evil eye. So do all the psychics on the corner-- you should stop, you should ask them. You'll bear the babies, you'll bore the babies, you'll bathe the water until it's as holy as nobody's blood.
And I know you don't believe in curses, or God. You don't believe in true love or my face. But I can feel it sometimes. And some day I'll tell you how the story ends. How the story started, before we were infidels. When I was just dressing your wounds.
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