“What are you doing? It’s not summer anymore, the cold is coming in! How spiteful you’ve become, dear! Have you no heart left in your breast?”

Catena looked at her. In that olive-colored face all you could see were her eyes, with swollen, bruised lids, like two blotches.

She sat down on the doorstep, put the little one on her knees and, making him dance, began to tell him, first softly, then louder, then in that strange, shrill, ear-splitting voice:

“My treasured star, my little bee, my golden grain!

Call Papa, call him, he is far away.

My star, my noble knight….”

She gripped him tightly with her small, nervous hands, lifting him into the air, while the child struggled to free himself, crying.

Gna’ Vita was frightened and tried to take him from her, but Catena held on with an iron grip, and the poor woman could do nothing.

The neighbor women all came running, alarmed by the shouts of the women and the cries of the child. Begging her, threatening her, they tore the child from her hands, running the risk of hurting him, while Catena repeated, laughing with her eyes wide open:

“My treasure! My star! Call him, call him….”

They thought she would die from convulsions, the way her mother had. But then she regained her composure. And she never again raged the way she had that morning.

She didn’t recognize her son, she didn’t recognize her mother-in-law, but she bothered no one. She spent whole days huddled on the doorstep with her chin between her hands, never feeling the cold of the north wind. And if a neighbor approached her, she would explain, with a strange smile on that small, dark face, how she was waiting for the steamship from over there.

“You see?” she would point, “down there in the big, big sea, the steamship that smokes and whistles.”

The baskets with the grapes and prickly pears were ready.

“I’m leaving tomorrow. I’m cured now,” she added, touching her eyes with the palms of her open hands. “I’m cured. Do you see? I’m leaving tomorrow.”

Dainty Shoes

Dainty Shoes

Le scarpette

Vanni and Maredda loved one another, but they couldn’t even talk about getting married because they were so poor. Neither had fathers; Maredda was a weaver, and Vanni worked in the shop of mastro Nitto, the shoemaker. Often he would say to his mother: “No matter how much we work, we’re just like ants, we scratch and scrape and barely get by.”

“And what’s there to do about it, my son? Getting by is already something.”