Tina and Ferruccio slipped away in the shadows while everyone else was intent on the singing.

41. Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-one

“What do you say, shall we head for the sea or go straight to Castagna?” Ferruccio asked as they left the coastal town where they had spent the night in the creaky bed of a third-class hotel. They were heading inland toward the autostrada.

“Oh, I don’t know . . . it’s so hot and primitive here, I’d like to get to the sea . . . and yet I came to see Castagna,” she said, fingering the tin heart tied to her shoulder bag. She slouched alongside him in the speeding red Maserati, emphasizing her irritation by pulling hard at her long hair and tying it back with a scarf, though strands continued to escape and cling to her face.

Castagna was going to be a hard nut to crack: That was the prevailing pun between them as they drove the forsaken mountain road of inland Calabria toward Morano.

“Ah, yes, Castagna, where your ancestors started from on their way to America. A ‘chestnut,’ in English, is some old stale joke, isn’t it?” Ferruccio kept looking sideways at Tina’s long tanned legs as she thrust them up under the dashboard. He was laughing, pleased with himself that he could use English so well.

“The joke’s on me,” Tina said with a shrug, her eyes fixed ahead of her on the barren landscape that stretched brown and endless in the scorching heat. All morning the disconsolate country through which they drove, the sight of the parched riverbeds so preposterously styled torrente, and the occasional grubby, fly-filled caffès at which they stopped in dusty little villages had oppressed her.

“Oh, come on,” he was bantering, “you’re in Calabria, and that’s what you want, isn’t it—to see the place your people came from?”

I wish I knew what I wanted, Tina answered silently. She wasn’t like Weezy, who, in her madness, had some crazy method; nor like Jason, who had no great purposes and was content not to; nor even like Ferruccio, who knew exactly what he was about. Tina had discovered that Ferruccio’s seemingly spontaneous whim of the night before was not that at all—he intended to go south into Calabria all along to look up an antique dealer named Luluzzo in Morano.

“You were coming to Calabria anyway,” she said accusingly. The mood of the party and the escapade was fading in the bright glare of the day and the harsh sight of the barren inland mountains.

“Let’s say Morano is the antipasto and Castagna will be the main course,” he said smoothly. “Luluzzo has the best buys in all of Italy because no one would think of coming down here to get them. Whenever I’m in the South I always stop to pick up things for my place.”