“Yes,” he said, considering the floor, “let’s see, then, what you see in this newly appearing ink. Don’t worry that you’re not given enough to write your theme. No matter how little you seemed to have been given, it will be enough.”

“You know the line from Antonioni’s film L’Avventura: ‘Do you have any other truths to tell me?’” she asked, smiling.

He looked up, smiled, and said mildly, “Start with your grandmother.”

Part One

Umbertina, 1860–1940

Chapter One

She had hazel eyes, fair skin where the sun did not reach, and a strong chin. In the village people said of Umbertina that she had character right from the womb. “She’ll be the man of her family,” they said.

To herself she was Tinuzza the goat girl, eldest child of the peasant Carlo Nenci and his wife, Benedetta. When she went out into the hills above Castagna with her goats and gathered chestnuts or mushrooms or wild greens, or knitted thick cream-colored stockings to wear in the winter months, that is how she thought of herself and her life: a goat girl.

At sixteen she was strong and full-figured. Her face had the high color of one who is always out in the open. Her bare feet were toughened from exposure, but her large, strong hands were soft from absorbing the oils of the unbleached yarn she knitted. A loose braid of brown hair hung down her back, its thinness at variance with the fullness of her face and body. She was a Calabrian of the mountains and walked erect, unlike the Calabrians of the plains, who were listless and thin, bent by malaria.

Her eyes with their moody amber lights suited her, as did her name with its allusion to shade and shadows and the dark reddish umber of the earth. She was of taciturn nature, reflective, sparing of her feelings, tenacious and tight-lipped. She was used to solitude, and in the hills she would ponder what she heard others say.

“Fatti non foste a viver come bruti/ma seguir virtute e conoscenza,” Don Antonio, their priest, had preached to them at mass. He was a learned man and they were ignorant, so he explained. “These are the words of the great poet, Dante Alighieri, and they mean you were created by God not to live like brutes, like dumb animals, but to attain to virtue. You people of the Sila are descendants of the tribe known anciently as the Bruttii. But I tell you, you are no longer Bruttii but Christians,” he thundered at them. “No longer heathens beyond God’s word, but meant, in the words of the immortal Dante, to hear it and follow it. This is God’s intention: that you not live as brutish animals deprived of His word, but come to His Church and follow the Church’s holy prescripts for you.”

Umbertina’s father, a weathered and knotted man, who like the other men stayed away from the Church, had laughed sardonically when he heard of the priest’s sermon. “Don Antonio is too fine for us. He should have stayed in his seminary in Cosenza. What have we to do with his fine words? Let him impress the women!” And then his laugh had turned to a scowl of bitterness. “Siamo bruti!” he said, crashing his fist down on the table and spilling wine. “It’s true we are brutish—his words won’t change that. We’re meant to be dumb like animals. Why else would we follow the Church that tells us to feed our fat Don Antonio? But even as animals we’re of less value than Don Antonio’s chickens or the baron’s hunting dogs.”