Yes, there as always, at the bottom of it all was her mother; her beloved, foolish, dead-and-gone mother, whom she was emulating all along. Was this her own version of her mother’s driving over the mountains to find love and finding, instead, death in an overturned car? Was it an attempt at self-punishment for not being able to stick to Jason as her mother had not stuck to her father? Tina wanted to think there was good reason for what she had done—saving Jason from herself, or something like that—but how could she believe it was anything more than the banality of sex and too much to drink? She recalled vividly Ferruccio’s making love to her as the bed creaked and groaned with his thrusts. And her inflamed response.

She closed her eyes, pressed her two fists hard against the sockets as if to wipe out sight and memory, and then flung out her arms with a deep sigh.

“I can’t bear this,” she said. “Let’s go to the sea.”

He grinned, reached over, and caressed the inside of her thigh. “Pleasure before duty, eh!

“It’s rather a good thing I have you with me. The women of the southern coasts are not noted for their looks, and you, at least, are passable.”

She gave him a quizzical look in reply—curious, because of the literal streak in her, about his statements. “Why is that? What’s wrong with southern women?”

“The best types are in the mountains. The coastal people have been too mixed and hybridized over the ages by the sea marauders—Turks and Saracens—who invaded these coasts and impregnated the women. About the only thing these women have are large, dark cow-eyes. But that’s not for me. I prefer squinty light-green eyes like yours.”

“My great-grandmother came from the mountains. I want to go to where she came from—to see the people and know what they’re like. I want to see if I recognize me in them.”

“A kind of postponed identity crisis, perhaps,” he said glibly. “I can tell you who your people are without your ever having to set foot in Castagna. They’re mountain people—brooding, suspicious, reserved, reticent. Just like you, you see. They’re the descendants of the old Bruttii tribes of antiquity, the ones about whom Horace made the pun ‘Bruttii from their brutish manners.’”

“The Romans were prejudiced.”

“No prejudice—the mountain people deserved that witticism. They were the only tribes of Magna Graecia who didn’t mix with the colonizing Greeks. They kept to themselves in the mountains, uncontaminated by civilization, or later, malaria.”

This pleased Tina. She was glad that Umbertina and Serafino, those unknown Calabrian progenitors of hers, were from the ancient Brutii. But where were the forests of Bruttium?