It was a mixed blessing. In Pavia, Giancarlo got his first real taste of life outside Castelalto, and he found that it suited him. And musically, he thrived at the university. With no other release for it, Giancarlo poured his passion for Antonella into the music he wrote, and his work impressed his professors very favorably. Creatively, it was the most productive time of his life. Emotionally, however, he was a wreck. Every moment he was away from Castelalto, he missed Antonella terribly, and he would torment himself as he lay awake at night, wondering what she was doing with Giorgio. And so Giancarlo found himself returning home every weekend he could, hoping simply to see her, however briefly, and exchange a few words. Antonella, who herself was busy studying to become an art teacher, always seemed pleased to see him, but their encounters were fleeting. Every time he watched her go off with Giorgio, it only served to make him more miserable.

A year passed this way, and then another.

His second year in Pavia completed, Giancarlo came home for the summer, full of indecision. An opportunity to spend a semester abroad that coming autumn, studying in America, had been presented to him, and Giancarlo had accepted. Part of him was eager to go, for it was the opportunity of a lifetime. Another part of him, though, could not bear the thought of it. He knew without asking that his father was going to object, but that was not what concerned him. It was the idea of being thousands of miles away from Antonella for an entire three months that distressed him most. He was not sure if he could go through with it.

By this time, Giorgio had been working regularly and earned enough to buy his own car. On the weekends, when he wasn’t playing soccer for a local amateur team, he liked to dress up and take Antonella out for a ride to show her off. Giancarlo, meantime, got around town on a rickety old bicycle and worked odd jobs, saving like a miser for his trip to America. He felt like a pauper compared to his more steadily employed brother, but he was happy to be home and once again have the chance to spend time with Antonella, who was not working at all that summer.The two took up once more their ritual of meeting on the piazza in the afternoon, and against all reason, Giancarlo began to hope, for he sensed in her a change toward him.

One day, early in the summer, Giancarlo found Antonella on the piazza with her sketch pad on her lap. At seeing him, she beckoned for him to come sit.

“I need practice drawing faces,” she told him. “Sit for a while, and let me draw yours.”

Giancarlo could refuse her nothing, and so he sat down, and looked away nervously toward the mountains.