Young men and women seldom met. On Sunday and holy days there was mass in the village church, where Don Antonio preached life’s hard duties and the obedience required of the villagers, while the men looked over the girls and the girls kept their gaze on their beads. Once a year on the feast day of the village saint, San Rocco, they all saw each other at the procession. Sometimes they passed on the dirt road in the valley, or in the village, but they did not stop to talk. Umbertina’s and Giosuè paths had crossed several times in the hills, she with her goats and he with a gang of charcoal makers. But they said only the “Good-day” that custom allowed. They had never spoken, but she was aware of his attention. And things could be learned of potential suitors from listening to the women talk around the fountain or at the stream while doing the wash. Even the poor Cristina Muzzi, near her own age and married to a relative of Umbertina’s, liked to boast of her knowledge of man though she put it, as always, in a complaining way. “Ai,” she said, rubbing her belly, swollen with child, “you see what a man can do! First he looks at you, like the charcoal burner looks at Tinuzza, and then you end up bursting like a too-ripe melon.” But Cristina said it proudly; she was not beautiful or clever, but a man had wanted her and she wore the sign of being taken and this was her rank over the virgins. It made Umbertina wonder about the pleasure a man could give if such a miserable creature as Cristina even reflected it. It explained the warm feeling of pleasure and confusion she felt at meeting Giosuè’s eyes. Or why she saw his features in her mind after he went on. Or why she imagined how it would be to lie with him. He had beautiful thick wavy black hair that she wanted to touch, he had eyes that looked deeply at her, and lips that were full.

At the stream Umbertina turned her eyes away until he came up to her and said, “I was waiting to see you. At the market there was no chance.”

He held something out toward her. It was the tin heart. “I have made it for you,” he said.

Silently she shook her head.

But he smiled and said, “I am Giosuè. From Carlopoli. This is for you.” He was a thin young man with large dark eyes and there was something in his slightness that touched her. He didn’t have the swagger of the other young men of the village.

Umbertina looked at him and then at the tin heart, which he still held out to her. He was young but his face already had a pinched, anxious look. He was also proud. “I have made it for you,” he repeated. “You are Tinuzza who takes the goats into the hills.”