They were transients in the land of their fathers, heading away from it, and it gave them a queer sense to be adrift between the old country and the new, belonging to neither. The journey impressed her with the feeling of place: Wherever it might be, one had to have a place in the world.
They were joined in Soveria Mannelli by two young brothers, Zeno and Bruno Saccà, cousins of Domenico the shoemaker, who were going to join him in the town where he had settled, a place called Cato in what they called the state of New York. Then there was Gino Gualtiero, a handsome young man who was leaving behind his new wife with the promise to send for her when he had work; and Cristina Muzzi, who had with her the three children born from each of her immigrant husband’s visits back to the old country and who would have been satisfied to live that way indefinitely if Giovanni Muzzi hadn’t had Domenico write a letter to Don Antonio in Castagna asking him to read this message to his wife: “Either come with the children to live with me here or you won’t see any more of me or of the money I’ve been sending you. This is the last remittance—use it for the passage money, or good-bye for good. Your husband, Giovanni.”
Umbertina, related to Giovanni Muzzi, gave a hand to the whining, crying Cristina, who had always been a poor creature in Castagna, without salt or backbone. Now Umbertina liked her even less for her continual lamenting and her thin, pinched face and the way she frightened her children by her moans and sighs of “Gesù! Gesù!”
“Are you still a girl living under your father’s roof?” Umbertina chided her, and as she spoke she knew she was chiding herself too. “Or are you the wife of your husband and mother of his children, and a woman with work to do?”
“It is a curse to leave one’s home and the place where one is known to go among strangers,” said Cristina. And in her heart Umbertina acknowledged this truth. But she only answered, “We are doing this for our children, and they will not be strangers where they grow and work.”
“Che Dio voglia!” said Cristina, her thin face made even more scrawny and pinched-looking as it contorted with weeping. Her two girls were about the age of Giacomo and Benedetto, and like Umbertina, Cristina also had an infant in her arms.
They soon left the green forests along the mountain road that twisted down to the valley where Cosenza spread at the confluence of two rivers. There they rested in a public park filled with marvelous plants Umbertina had never seen before—acacia, tall palms, eucalyptus, and cassia; she filled her leather flasks with water from the fountains, and as the family ate their coarse bread she looked at the finely dressed people who strolled through the gardens as if they had nothing else to do with their time. In the wide, paved streets horse-drawn buggies rang with the sounds of bells on harnesses and passengers sat under gay, tasseled canopies that sheltered them from the sun. The sun was strong there, in the lowland.