A light of recognition came over his face and he broke into a broad grin.

“Tinù, Tinuzza!” he exclaimed, giving her the affectionate diminutive by which he called her as a child. And then to be sure, “Carlo’s daughter?”

She looked up at him and nodded, and in that moment he saw she wore no ring. In another moment he knew he would ask for her hand. He had come back from America to marry a woman of his village and to start a family. Now that he saw this strong girl glowing with health and womanliness he thought, Why not the daughter of my friend?

“Still with the goats,” he said, smiling. “Everything the same—the ruins, the old mule track . . . the good air.”

Serafino walked beside her as they went toward the village. Viewing the familiar scene, he felt a great relief and at the same time a sadness. It wasn’t the first time that he had returned. As a young man of eighteen or nineteen he had left Castagna to join General Garibaldi and his Redshirts after they crossed the Strait of Messina from their victories in Sicily, marching through Calabria and sweeping the Bourbons away before them. The news of the approach had crumbled the reserve of that people as nothing before. Serafino had already heard of the Garibaldini at the coast, where he took his flock. When the general himself arrived in Soveria Mannelli, Serafino sold his sheep and went off with him.

No one had ever thought of Serafino the shepherd as a soldier, much less a revolutionary. He was an easygoing, gentle man whose movements were slow. He spoke with long pauses, as if reflectively, or as if words did not come easily to him. He was used to the long silences of his stay in the mountains with his sheep; his thoughts were simple.

“Serafi, what made you go with the troops?” Domenico Saccà, the socialist, asked him when he returned.

“I thought it was time to go. They said for a few men to own all the land was not good and that we should all be free. I think that is right.”

But not everyone had his simple faith, and when the general’s victories were betrayed by the statesmen, the cynics laughed at the fools, at those who had believed that things could change. “The more it changes, the more it’s the same,” they said.

But Serafino never regretted going. Among the Redshirts he had met men from other parts of Italy whom he could hardly understand, so different was their language from his. But he listened and learned from those strangers, and got along well with them; with his blue eyes and tall stature he was more like them than like the small, dark, nervous, bitter, and sad-eyed men of Calabria. Il normanno his paesani called him, and in the words were a secret envy, an acknowledgment that he was different—that his nature was not, like theirs, intense and tormented.