Out of the mountains, they took the direction that led to the sea, and signs began appearing in the plains announcing the Bonifica di Sibari, the Reclamation of Sybaris. It had a wry sound. “Two thousand years late,” she said, and Ferruccio nodded. “Everything’s too late down here: Garibaldi was too late, Fiat was too late, the twentieth century is too late.”

They got to a place Ferruccio knew about called Bagamoyo, which was clean, he said, and well organized because it was run by a German who had stayed behind during the last war. It was a small resort on a gorgeous stretch of sand fronted by the Ionian Sea and backed by a strand of pines and willows, the first gathering of trees she had seen all day. They were told they were fortunate to find a room there, the place having been completely filled until just yesterday when a family left.

Ferruccio grinned and said, “The greatest blessing in life is not to be rich or wise, but to be fortunate.” He was irrepressibly confident and high-spirited. Did he ever worry, get dejected, lose hope, Tina wondered, as she and Jason did?

Everything, as far as Tina could see, went well with him, and his incurable optimism seemed not so much a sign of shallowness as of an active receptiveness to being lucky. She began to relax; she was thankful to be there with him, for all the harshness of Calabria glanced off him and made no mark. She and Jason, alone in the desolate land, would have been overcome with conscience, pity, self-hate, and all the other signs of a compassion that gives nothing useful to those it’s directed at.

At the sea it was different. She liked being there with Ferruccio. He knew how to deal with people, how to command the foods and wines of the region that never appeared on the menus, how to listen to the sounds of the sea and get the best part of the sun, how to get stories out of the shy local people, and how to become one with the time and place he was in.

It may have been the approximately fifteen years’ difference in their ages, or his one hundred percent italianità compared to her being the confused product of an American mother and Italian father so that she was neither one thing nor the other; but no two sides battled in Ferruccio Simongini—he was all of a piece in his self-centered approach to life.

“A fine sociologist and socialist,” she teased him. “Admit: You are only interested in yourself and your immediate pleasures.”

“Of course, when I am here with you on vacation. What else? Would you expect me to do other than pay attention to our well-being after my having abducted you?”

“You are a futurist, tell me the future,” she continued.