Concettina Tempesta

Concettina Tempesta’s significance lies in the way her family history turns survival into both inheritance and silence. The narrative associates her with two childhood ordeals: a young Concettina’s escape from the eruption of Mount Etna, remembered in Domenico Tempesta’s account of his mother, and the survival of Ma, Domenico’s daughter, after a night in which her mother, Ignazia Tempesta, tried to take her with her. The distinction between these generations matters; their shared name and mirrored danger make family memory feel less like a settled record than a pattern passed down.

Identity and Family History

In the account of Domenico Tempesta’s childhood, Concettina Ciccia is his mother and the only surviving member of her family after Mount Etna’s 1865 eruption. Her parents, Alfio and Maricchia Ciccia, had owned hazelnut and almond groves, which the lava destroyed. Four days later, an eruption of the earth killed her father and three of her brothers; her mother later died by suicide. The losses left Concettina orphaned at eight.

The narrative also identifies a different Concettina as the child of Domenico Tempesta and Ignazia Tempesta. In Dominick Birdsey’s later reconstruction of his mother’s past, this girl is the eight-year-old Ma who survived a night in the snow after Ignazia tried to take her along when she went onto the ice. The text’s repeated name and repeated image of a child facing danger link the generations without making their separate experiences identical.

Childhood and the Mark of Survival

As a small child in Sicily, the first Concettina escaped the lava by climbing a cedar tree with her rag dolls. She came back down in an effort to retrieve one she had dropped and severely burned her right hand. The doll was lost, but she climbed back into the tree and remained there until it was safe to descend. The lasting scar became a visible reminder of the attempt to save something precious at personal cost. Domenico recalls the scarred hand not only as a mark from her childhood but as the hand that held, fed, and sometimes slapped him as he grew.

After her own mother’s death, Concettina was raised by an elderly widow who worked as a seamstress and lacemaker. She learned the craft and became a skilled lacemaker herself. Her childhood did not end with a straightforward return to safety: as a young woman, she experienced screaming fits and strange dreams, and believed that moths carried the voices of the dead. At times, she shut herself in her room, bolting the window and extinguishing the candles to escape what she understood as the moths’ pleas.

Motherhood, Grief, and Departure

Domenico describes his mother’s life after his father’s death as one of bereavement and diminished security. She struggled with widowhood and the family’s loss of income and status, and sometimes threatened to die by suicide as her mother had. She resumed speaking of the moths, which she said comforted her and brought news of her dead husband. Domenico forbade these conversations. His account acknowledges that he sometimes struck her, claiming this was his duty as head of the family; the blows could stop her screaming or provoke it. His narration thus records her distress while also exposing the authority and violence with which he tried to control it.

When Domenico and his brothers, Pasquale Tempesta and Vincenzo Tempesta, prepared to leave Sicily, their mother opposed their departure. She feared being left destitute. On September 11, 1901, the brothers sailed from Catania aboard the SS Napolitano. As their wagon carried them toward the harbor, Concettina raised her scarred and unscarred hands and cried out that her sons had wounded her by leaving. Domenico says he never saw her again. He also relates that she later married Nardo. Until that marriage, he says, he had continued to send her postcards and Christmas gifts; his account presents the marriage as a final break in their relationship.

The Younger Concettina and the Family Secret

In the account of Ignazia’s death, Domenico initially believes that she has drowned their daughter as well. Concettina is instead found alive in a shack, where the police locate her after hearing her whimper. Domenico holds her and recognizes her vulnerability; he says that this is when he comes to love her. The townspeople speculate about what happened, but Domenico rejects rumors of a stranger or a kidnapping. He says that the footprints in the snow showed a struggle, while the child told neither the police nor him what had occurred.

Dominick later reads the surviving evidence differently: Ma had fought to save herself, hidden in the shack, and kept her mother’s secret. She had been eight years old. Dominick’s reconstruction emphasizes both the child’s agency and the cost of her silence: she survived, returned to life with her father, and carried an episode that the family never discussed. The story’s uncertainty about what Concettina remembers does not erase the evidence of her survival; it makes the gap between what happened and what the family could say part of her history.

Narrative Significance

Across these accounts, the name Concettina gathers stories of bereavement, danger, and endurance without reducing them to a single repeated fate. The scarred hand from the Etna episode and the footprints that reveal a struggle on the ice are different kinds of traces: one stays on a body, the other preserves the outline of an event that its survivor will not recount. Domenico’s manuscript supplies one version of the family past, while Dominick’s reading recovers Ma’s survival from its silences. Together, these narratives make Concettina’s history central to the novel’s concern with how family trauma is remembered, obscured, and carried forward.