Jason was surely as lost to her as her mother; she would never find him again, and even if they did meet again in the States, what could there be between them now? Would he understand that she had left him because she loved him and that it was because of her goddam restlessness, so different from his New England stability and his serene definition of himself, that she had to leave him, could not marry him? Would he know that? Or only the hurt of having been left? She would send him a postcard in the morning. She never did.

One night Ferruccio heard that Pasolini’s Canterbury Tales was playing in a nearby town and they went to see the film. Tina was turned off by all the bare asses, the pissing, farting, sexual heaves and thrusts the film indulged in, and Ferruccio was amused at her reaction. “It’s so noisy, so overdone, a big cluttered kermess of pranks and roistering as if all life were without any solemnity,” she said.

“Yes,” Ferruccio teased, “be sure to get in the solemnity.”

She turned away from him. Jason would have understood her. His grandfather had been the serious boy who had gone aboard the Castagna and loosened the frozen mate from the rigging.

When they left Bagamoyo, Calabria was again a hard experience. She hated her ambivalence toward Calabria but feared the harsh country and stunted people who stared at her for having had the luck to be born elsewhere. She began to think of her coming to Calabria as in the nature of those age-old raids, a despoiling foray more than a sentimental journey back to her origins. She was going to descend upon a place, take of it what she wanted, and then leave it to its perennial state, as treacherous in her own way as the Saracens.

Brullo was the word for Calabria: burnt like a crème brûlée, nude, ravaged, scorched. Worse than a lunar landscape, for that is a natural phenomenon, and what Tina saw was a land despoiled by men and showing its scars. The occasional patches of scraggly green growth hardly took hold around sun-baked farmhouses on yellowed stretches of land; no garden or orchard or patch of grain ever was in sight of those dried-out hovels. When, in the distance, a few gnarled olive trees appeared on the bare hills, it made the shadeless country all the hotter by contrast.