In the quiet of the hills, Umbertina would think of faraway America, a place as removed from her as Don Antonio’s front parlor. She knitted and thought. Hanging from her waist on a length of yarn was a crudely shaped tin heart joined to a tubular sheath that served as holder for her needles when her hands were occupied gathering wood or pushing aside the brush in her path. A border had been hammered along the outline of the heart, and three circles delineating the forms of a simplified flower, daisies perhaps, made up the design. The tin heart had been given to her by Giosuè, a charcoal maker from the next village who was young and had no prospects beyond the immediate one of being conscripted. When the time was right he would speak to her father for her; in the meantime she wore the tin heart, unaware of what love was but knowing that as all women become wives and mothers, so would she. Working to survive she understood; all the rest was of a foreign world—the world of the gentry whose men worked indoors among books and paper and whose women never used their hands except to embroider. They rode in carriages drawn by horses and looked at the poor with hostile eyes. Umbertina saw them when she drove the goats to market in Soveria Mannelli. The children of the gentry went to boarding schools or took lessons from Don Antonio, but Umbertina and those like her were untaught, for as Don Antonio said, it was not their place to be otherwise.

What Umbertina knew, she had learned through her eyes and ears and hands as she absorbed the rhythms of the life about her. She witnessed its rude forces in the rutting of the goats she herded and in the she-goats’ kidding. She read the faces and listened to the words of the women who met at the stream or the well; she saw and read the language of nature and knew its portents. What did she need with books when all the world was about her?

Each day Umbertina rose from the loft she shared with her brothers and sisters above the one room of their stone dwelling, took her piece of dark bread soaked in oil and salt, or a piece of onion or goat’s cheese wrapped in a square of dark cloth, released the goats from the pen that was a part of the room dug out from the hillside and separated from it by a partial grating, and went out through the steep narrow streets. At the edge of the village she drank from the fountain, still undisturbed by the girls and women who would come later to fetch water in jugs from it.

Nothing varied in the expectation of her days and nights except as the seasons passed. In the cold months there was a fire in the hearth of that bare room with its packed earth floor, a fire made of the twigs and branches she gathered while herding and packed on her back to bring home. And there were chestnuts to roast in the embers or to boil with wild fennel, those providential chestnuts from the surrounding woods that gave the name Castagna to her village and provided the flour for its dense gray bread.