Her heart was telling her that. In fact, the letter from Palermo brought strange and unexpected news.

The postman read it to her, and after, she held it for a long time in her hands, poor and ignorant hands, burnished and weathered from labor and age, looking at the few black and twisted lines as though she could understand their meaning.

“There’s no end to the bad news,” she said sadly to her husband that evening. “That son of ours, beautiful as a banner in the breeze, is leaving, and his wife is coming back.”

So much for planting and the farm! Now she would be tied down, no longer able to follow her husband, who needed help, up in Baronia. What could you get done up there with a young mother and an infant?

• • •

Catena returned in the evening by coach. Drawn and unkempt, with ashen lips and glazed eyes, she appeared sick, as though she had a fever. She set the child on the bed and sank down on the wood bench disconsolate, her arms on her knees. Mamma Vita took the crying baby to try to calm him, and holding him again so close to her breast, she felt a great tenderness, as though with that sweet creature a part of Mariano had come back to her.

“What happened, Catena?” she asked.

Her daughter-in-law did not reply.

“What about the others, Catena?”

Her daughter-in-law kept silent. The baby cried louder because he was hungry.

“Give him to me,” she said brusquely.

“No, your milk is no good now. Do you think I don’t understand you?”

The slow, trembling voice of the old woman penetrated her heart, and Catena began to weep and speak confusedly, gradually calming down as she poured out her emotions.

It had been a day from hell. There were twenty-five of them, including that horrible stepsister of hers. And everyone was in the streets, the big city streets, dazed by the noise, blinded by the dust, and tired, so tired, that they could’ve thrown themselves down to sleep on the ground, and all of them there together, frightened, like souls in Purgatory, as if they had no homes of their own back in the village; dodging carriages with or without horses that would have run over a Christian just like that, sent back by the steamship, sent back by the doctor who was supposed to examine them. Finally, he’d checked them, one by one. She’d been the last and had gone with confidence after all the others had been accepted.

“And then … you know?” she shouted, “after the shame of having to be examined by that strange doctor, to have to hear that there’s something wrong with your eyes! Me! My eyes that have always been the envy of everyone!”

She spoke without finishing words, in halting phrases broken by sobs that wracked her chest.