To Umbertina, in her fatigue, it sounded like God’s curse, a curse of dissatisfaction and restlessness. It was a matter of indifference to her how great Nuova York was. If it was a great city, why didn’t it have a park with plants and a fountain so that weary people like them could rest and drink as they had done in Cosenza. Here when bells rang in the street, it was not canopied horse-carriages that passed, but the ragpickers’ carts. Her eyes were dulled with so much seeing, and all her senses hammered by the constant din.

Serafino, who had seen it all before, was unmoved, resigned.

“We won’t stay here,” she said to him. “We will get to the country.”

The padrone heard her and laughed with the contempt of the learned for the ignorant. “Did you come to America to remain peasants, to work in the fields?” he asked. “Here there’s money. Here there’s work.”

“I want to start,” Serafino said.

“Get yourself a pick and shovel and you can work tomorrow. I’m taking a gang up for the subway.”

They came to Bleecker Street, and at the end of the block where the street terminated in the Bowery they could see the girders and rails of the Elevated. The house they entered was one of the older ones, a narrow, three-story wooden structure of old New York, once the private home of some well-to-do merchant and his family. The broad brownstone steps were worn; the once-graceful columns alongside the front door were rotted, and the lunette above it the only sign of a once-fine residence. The house was now partitioned off and forty people were squeezed into its spaces. The only space not rented out as lodgings was the first-floor saloon, which opened onto the side alley. The roar and rush of the elevated train shook the house as they were entering and filled Umbertina’s head, frightening the baby in her arms.

The hall they walked into was stained with the marks of a thousand grimy hands that had passed that way; the stairs were decaying. Under the stairwell a dirty, tattered curtain closed off a sleeping-space that was home to the cobbler who at that moment occupied the hall with his bench and tools and looked up briefly as they passed.

As they went up the stairway the heavy smells of cooking enveloped them, and an undefinable stench that they would soon recognize as that of human bodies, unwashed, closely packed in un-aired spaces; it got darker and the air closer and they could hear clearly the sounds of tenement life: babies wailing, men cursing, women screaming out windows.

“You have a room to yourselves,” the padrone was telling them. “It’s at the top–you won’t have people above you.” He opened the door to an attic room under the roof, stifling hot, with a dormer window that let in what little light and air could filter between the taller buildings all around them. The room had a bed, a table, a wood-burning stove with a pipe that went out through the wall, and some battered old pans that hung from a wall whose papering was peeling off in shreds.