The
Evil Eye
The occult has always fascinated
me. My real world persona is so
grounded, so rational, so entirely focused on a linear view of reality that
perhaps it's only natural my down-time fantasies should revolve around all that
is unseen, unfamiliar, unconstrained by rigid precepts of science and
rationality.
Before I was born my mother, raised in
a Baptist household, lived in uneasy proximity to my father's devoutly Catholic
mother. My grandmother was christened
Giuseppina, the feminine incarnation of St. Joseph, the husband of the Virgin
Mary. She emigrated from the hills of
southern Italy, from a medieval era village where vestiges of witchcraft and
the curses of the evil eye still gave shivers to the people who struggled to
feed themselves far away from the great city of Rome and the wealthier
North. Giuseppina outlived one husband,
then another, and supported herself by running a local grocery store and
selling bathtub gin during prohibition.
Behind her back, the small group of fellow immigrants who clustered in
one neighborhood of a dreary New England mill-town called her La Popessa, the
Popess. She would have been Pope had she
been a man, they said. Or perhaps, a
local mafia don.
Growing up I knew her only as the
perpetual widow, dressed in black, mourning all her dead husbands. She doled out a percentage of her bootlegging
profit to the local monseigneur, who according to local gossip had selected the
most beautiful nun in the nearby convent as his mistress. La Popessa was Catholic to a fault, with
pictures of the Pope and images of the saints around her home. Polytheistic, almost, with the feminine
features of the saints looking down upon the small kitchen where she made jars
of tomato sauce and pizzelle cookies without a speck of sugar. They were burnt half-black, dry and
flavorless. I loved their crunch. They were almost as good as the Communion
wafers I snacked on when I rummaged through the back room of the local church,
allowed free reign through the empty space by my grandmother's stepson, who
cleaned the rooms and took care of the outside grounds of the diocese for
little or no pay.
La Popessa had arranged my father's
first marriage, when he was barely in his twenties, ready in his army uniform
to be called up for another US intervention in Asia that was and wasn't a
war. The wedding lasted almost as long
as the marriage, and my father couldn't afford the hefty price or political
pull an annulment required. So years
later, when he married my mother, a Baptist girl just out of high school, they
had to get married by a Justice of the Peace.
No flowing white gown, no incense, no solemn incantation by a priest
sworn to celibacy to ensure they would be joined together for eternity.
My grandmother was none too pleased, of
course. Not with the divorce, not with
the non-Catholic new wife. Still, when
my mother discovered she was pregnant with me, La Popessa offered to cast a
spell and tell her sex of her unborn child.
She practiced witchcraft all the time, my grandmother, in between
praying the rosary, one little bead at a time, and collecting saint cards from
the funerals she loved to attend. Most
of her magic was dark, casting the evil eye upon a snooping neighbor, or
cursing a deadbeat customer. I can give
the malook, she would say, and I can
take it away. But the occasion of my
conception called for white magic, good magic. First, she took down a tall glass from the cupboard, one reserved for company,
perhaps even for the monseigneur, not one of the jelly jars she reused as glassware. Then she filled it with some water from the sink
and placed in front of my mother. She
cracked an egg on the edge and allowed just the white to run into the liquid,
the tentacles of protein spreading out toward the base. The signs were indisputable. A granddaughter would be born, and near
Christmas, too. She pulled out a
wrinkled wad of bills, close to a hundred dollars, and promptly tried to bribe
my mother into naming me Guiseppina. My
mother turned her down flat.
Evil eye or not, I arrived a few days
late to be a Christmas baby, with the commonest of Italian names and a bland
middle initial I could use to fit in with less ethnic groups. La Popessa never forgave my mother, but she
adored me. I would spend Sundays with
her in church, listening to the service in Italian. Back home she would push plates of polenta
laded with meat sauce in front of me and slip me ten dollar bills on my
birthday.
La Popessa died when I was in college,
and we carefully saved a saint card from her funeral. It wasn't until we clipped her obituary out
from the paper that I realized I had never seen her full name written out. Guisippina Maria. In the end, La Popessa had her wish.
