“Aha,” Ferruccio whispered to her, “now we have come upon the village authority and gentry all in one. It’s the priest—he can look up the records for you.”

But more and more she seemed to herself an intruder in a place that was as much a ruin as the monastery below them. And what was the use of pursuing Umbertina? she asked herself. This coming to Castagna had been more to lose herself than to find Umbertina. What had she in common with the impoverished hovels of this place . . . with the isolation and backwardness? She was now a product of education. There was no return. Umbertina’s message in fact was: Leave, take a direction, go forward, do not look back. And yet she was there because no message could overcome her feelings of having to be there.

In some primal way she felt connected to the place—even as if she had been there before, had experienced the landscape. Or was it remembrance from some fourteenth-century Italian painting in the Uffizi? She felt the rightness of standing there and yet she stood there as a stranger, the homeland now as foreign a place as others she kept traveling through.

Only connect! Only connect! She thought of Forster’s Howards End. God! I’m so literary, she chastised herself; why can’t I be as simple and easily pleased as these people. But there it is again: Who sees the virtue in simplicity except the overeducated?

Ferruccio had begun a conversation with the priest, telling him who they were.

The priest, an elderly man in a grease-spotted tunic and with several days’ growth of beard on his flaccid face, nodded as his eyes went from one to the other. “It is not Rome or New York,” he said finally, “but the air is pure here and there is peace.”

“How many people enjoy this peace?” Ferruccio asked, while Tina looked at him sharply to see if he was teasing.

“Officially I was supposed to have twelve hundred souls in my care when I took up my duties. Now there are about half that number. Perhaps there are no more than five hundred. First the men go north, then the others. Yet it wasn’t always so—my own grandfather was a charcoal burner from the next village down the road, Carlopoli. He settled in Castagna and made good. It isn’t only in America that you can better yourself,” he finished, addressing himself to Tina.

Tina felt her face flushing. A toothless old woman was grinning out at them from what seemed a cellar window; an urchin had come down to the piazza and was hopping about to get their attention. “Acà, acà,” the old woman’s voice rasped at him. Other women and children were in doorways, behind windows, or standing in the narrow streets silently staring.