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CHAPTER 1
She had hazel eyes, fair skin where the sun did not reach, and a strong chin. In the village people said of Umbertina that she had character right from the womb. "She'll be the man of her family," they said.
To herself she was Tinuzza the goat girl, eldest child of the peasant Carlo Nenci and his wife, Benedetta. When she went out into the hills above Castagna with her goats and gathered chestnuts or mushrooms or wild greens, or knitted thick cream-colored stockings to wear in the winter months, that is how she thought of herself and her life: a goat girl.
At sixteen she was strong and full-figured. Her face had the high color of one who is always out in the open. Her bare feet were toughened from exposure, but her large, strong hands were soft from absorbing the oils of the unbleached yarn she knitted. A loose braid of brown hair hung down her back, its thinness at variance with the fullness of her face and body. She was a Calabrian of the mountains and walked erect, unlike the Calabrians of the plains, who were listless and thin, bent by malaria.
Her eyes with their moody amber lights suited her, as did her name with its allusion to shade and shadows and the dark reddish umber of the earth. She was of taciturn nature, reflective, sparing of her feelings, tenacious and tight-lipped. She was used to solitude, and in the hills she would ponder what she heard others say.
"Fatti non foste a viver come bruti/ma seguir virtute e conoscenza," Don Antonio, their priest, had preached to them at mass. He was a learned man and they were ignorant, so he explained. "These are the words of the great poet, Dante Alighieri, and they mean you were created by God not to live like brutes, like dumb animals, but to attain to virtue. You people of the Sila are descendants of the tribe known anciently as the Bruttii. But I tell you, you are no longer Bruttii but Christians," he thundered at them. "No longer heathens beyond God's word, but meant, in the words of the immortal Dante, to hear it and follow it. This is God's intention: that you not live as brutish animals deprived of His word, but come to His Church and follow the Church's holy prescripts for you."
Umbertina's father, a weathered and knotted man, who like the other men stayed away from the Church, had laughed sardonically when he heard of the priest's sermon. "Don Antonio is too fine for us. He should have stayed in his seminary in Cosenza. What have we to do with his fine words? Let him impress the women!" And then his laugh had turned to a scowl of bitterness. "Siamo bruti!" he said, crashing his fist down on the table and spilling wine. "It's true we are brutish — his words won't change that. We're meant to be dumb like animals. Why else would we follow the Church that tells us to feed our fat Don Antonio? But even as animals we're of less value than Don Antonio's chickens or the baron's hunting dogs."
Umbertina understood nothing of who the Bruttii were or who Dante was, but she understood her father.
Carlo Nenci was a poor man, one of the many poor men of Castagna. His home was a stone hovel and he worked one piece of the large holding belonging to the Baron Mancuso di Valerba, which meant he paid the baron in labor and produce for the privilege of turning that gentleman's idle land into profit. The baron did not work the land and did not know about the land; in return for doing nothing and knowing nothing, but for having had the good fortune to be born who he was and thus owning all the land and trees and streams within sight, the baron was given half of what was produced by Carlo Nenci and the other men of Castagna. Baron Mancuso lived in Rome — he was too great a signore to be seen in these parts — but he could be imagined, the people said: Just multiply by a hundred times the airs and orders of his agent, the fattore, and that would be the baron. The wife of the baron was obese and the baron had gout, but, went the people's bitter humor, those who worked for them were fortunate because they ate little and so stayed lean and hard. We plant wheat, they said, but never taste white bread; cultivate vines, but rarely drink wine; and raise animals, but eat no meat except the tainted flesh of those that die from sickness.
The baron never came himself to collect all the abundance of his lands — the wheat, the oil, the grapes and figs, walnuts and chestnuts, the wool and cheese and flax; the person who did the collecting was the fattore, and to kiss the hand of the fattore was to kiss the hand of the absent baron.
For some it was different. For Carlo Nenci's distant relative, Serafino the shepherd, it was different because he had left, following Domenico Saccà, the socialist, to America. Domenico, sometimes called Minguccio, was a shoemaker in the market town of Soveria Mannelli, and the first of the region to go. Hotheaded, quick to flare up, filled with ideals and the frustration of what he called the unfinished revolution, he had emigrated to America because, he said, the new Italy had betrayed Garibaldi, its parent. Domenico Saccà wasn't a laborer who had sweated under the sun or shaken with the cold only to go hungry despite his toil; he could read and write, and he knew of the New World and what to expect of it.
He was not well liked by others of education.
"Let him go to America," Don Antonio said scornfully. "That is an intelligent distance for him to put between us."
In the quiet of the hills, Umbertina would think of faraway America, a place as removed from her as Don Antonio's front parlor. She knitted and thought. Hanging from her waist on a length of yarn was a crudely shaped tin heart joined to a tubular sheath that served as holder for her needles when her hands were occupied gathering wood or pushing aside the brush in her path. A border had been hammered along the outline of the heart, and three circles delineating the forms of a simplified flower, daisies perhaps, made up the design. The tin heart had been given to her by Giosuè, a charcoal maker from the next village who was young and had no prospects beyond the immediate one of being conscripted. When the time was right he would speak to her father for her; in the meantime she wore the tin heart, unaware of what love was but knowing that as all women become wives and mothers, so would she. Working to survive she understood; all the rest was of a foreign world — the world of the gentry whose men worked indoors among books and paper and whose women never used their hands except to embroider. They rode in carriages drawn by horses and looked at the poor with hostile eyes. Umbertina saw them when she drove the goats to market in Soveria Mannelli. The children of the gentry went to boarding schools or took lessons from Don Antonio, but Umbertina and those like her were untaught, for as Don Antonio said, it was not their place to be otherwise.
What Umbertina knew, she had learned through her eyes and ears and hands as she absorbed the rhythms of the life about her. She witnessed its rude forces in the rutting of the goats she herded and in the she-goats' kidding. She read the faces and listened to the words of the women who met at the stream or the well; she saw and read the language of nature and knew its portents. What did she need with books when all the world was about her?
Each day Umbertina rose from the loft she shared with her brothers and sisters above the one room of their stone dwelling, took her piece of dark bread soaked in oil and salt, or a piece of onion or goat's cheese wrapped in a square of dark cloth, released the goats from the pen that was a part of the room dug out from the hillside and separated from it by a partial grating, and went out through the steep narrow streets. At the edge of the village she drank from the fountain, still undisturbed by the girls and women who would come later to fetch water in jugs from it.
Nothing varied in the expectation of her days and nights except as the seasons passed. In the cold months there was a fire in the hearth of that bare room with its packed earth floor, a fire made of the twigs and branches she gathered while herding and packed on her back to bring home. And there were chestnuts to roast in the embers or to boil with wild fennel, those providential chestnuts from the surrounding woods that gave the name Castagna to her village and provided the flour for its dense gray bread.
In all weather, summer and winter, it was good to go up in the hills and woods with the goats. She was glad to be out of the room, which was musty and dark if no fire was lit, and unadorned except for a rough table and chairs, a chest for bread, and her parents' bed with a picture of San Francesco di Paola above it and sacks of chestnuts underneath. Umbertina went barefoot until the coldest weather, her skirt hoisted up into its waistband and showing her short sturdy legs. In the hills she always headed toward the stream whose waters fed the village fountain and then made its way down into the valley, where it vanished into the torrente called Corace and flowed past the old ruins of the abbey.
She sat for hours on the bank of the rushing stream looking into the depths, putting her hands in the flow and scooping up the clear, cool liquid to splash against her face, or cupping her hands to drink the pure drops. She loved the stream's clear and rapid course downward, unfettered by obstacles. It was her companion more than the goats, who were often stupid and clumsy, and whom she taunted, calling them names and shouting after them. Or whom she watched as they mated, imagining that's what it was like to be with a man.
Sometimes she lay in the sun and dozed; sometimes she scrambled up to the highest point she could reach, from which, in the fall when the leaves had dropped, she surveyed the country around her. All she saw were hills and woods and small clusters of houses in distant villages; but she knew from what she had heard that there was a huge lake of water, l'oceano, which could only be crossed in a journey of many weeks, so immense was it, and that it took one to a new world. The New World. It sounded to her strange and solemn — more solemn than Don Antonio's threats — almost like life after death, it was so remote. She could not imagine the hugeness of that water. Yet she knew that Serafino the shepherd and Domenico Saccà the shoemaker of Soveria Mannelli and some others, too, had crossed it to the new land.
What was its newness, she wondered; did it not have trees and hills and streams? Or goats and mules? Or people who lived in huts and went out to work in the fields? Did they not eat bread? Was the other world new because the land hadn't yet trembled and moved and knocked down the buildings? Down in the valley she could see the crumbling walls of the old monastery, which, it was said, was built in remote times by men from the north called Normans. It was old even before the earthquake of hundreds of years ago had split its walls and caved in the roof, and then other earthquakes had added to its ruin. Now it was only a place where the shepherds took a willing girl. To see the abbey there in the valley meant that Castagna was an old place, not a new one — that Umbertina knew.
What could it be to Tinuzza the goat girl that in antiquity her land was called Magna Graecia; that its city Sybaris had given the world its concept of luxury; that Plato had visited the flourishing center of Locri to learn from the masters there; that in what is now Reggio a woman poet called Nossis had sung in celebrated verses of her loves; that Hannibal had sulked in defeat in Crotone before evacuating Italy; and that Spartacus the gladiator had hid out in the Sila from the might of Rome? Rome to her was only the place where the baron, the pope, and now a king lived, all equally indifferent to the fact of her existence.
She looked about her and saw what was familiar: Over to the west where the sun sank at night was where Giosuè lived in Carlopoli, a village like Castagna perched on an elevated clearing overlooking the valley. Twelve kilometers away was the town of Soveria Mannelli. At the marketplace she saw men in the uniform of Italy, a country she knew no more of than of America. But she heard her father and other men talk, and they would shake their heads and complain about what this new country, Italy, was doing to them. She had been born the year it all happened, in 1860, when the great Garibaldi had crossed over from Sicily, and right there, at Soveria Mannelli, routed the Bourbon troops of the king of Naples in the name of the king of Italy.
It was a new thing to be Italian and the men said it brought new troubles: Taxes had come on salt and even flour milling, so the poor could no longer afford their daily bread, and many of the younger ones had gone up into the mountains, even as far as Aspromonte, to live as bandits rather than be conscripted into the armies of the new nation. There were shepherds, too, like Serafino, who had lost out when some of the old estates that had allowed pasturage on communal lands were broken up and the new money that bought them closed them off.
Don Antonio, who had chickens in his yard and ate white bread and had no worries over taxes on crops, said that it was God's will and that they were all subjects of a king who came from the far north, from Piedmont.
Of the baron's existence, Umbertina was quite sure even though she had never seen him; she grazed the goats upon his hills and gathered wood and nuts from his forests; he existed every time his fattore came riding through the village to collect payments and levies, raising a cloud of dust and scattering the chickens and pigs. She knew he and his fat wife existed, for they had to be fed those prodigious amounts of food and wine that her father and the others worked out of the land and turned over to the fattore. Umbertina had heard of the baron since her earliest childhood. But the king?
Yet she did not have to see him to know that he, too, existed and had to be fed. He had men who came and gathered taxes in his name while the price of food got higher. "Ladro governo," her father muttered about everything, even about the weather or crop failures in his fields. The thieving government that took everything and gave back nothing — not a road or a school or a sewer — was to blame for their misfortunes. It was the ladro governo that took bread from the mouths of the poor instead of giving out the lands Garibaldi promised when he told the peasants their day had finally come. The ladro governo taxed the poor man's working mule but not the rich man's carriage horse. The ladro governo had sent Garibaldi into exile and made land distribution available only to those rich enough to buy great quantities.
"It was better when it was worse," the people of Castagna and the other villages said.
And they suffered as well from nature's heavy hand: from earthquakes, landslides, floods, and droughts against which their prayers and processions rarely prevailed. Umbertina remembered in her tenth year when the earth shook and the tremor had ruined crops and widened the cracks of the poor hovels in the village, knocking the worst into rubble and loosening more stones in the old abbey. Don Antonio called it God's retribution for the sacrilege done against His Church by those who in thought or deed had helped Rome be taken from the pope. Whatever it was, it worked a sense of helplessness in the people: It would always be thus — their land worn out, rent with shocks and tremors; a faraway government in Rome celebrating a victory that was meaningless for Calabria; and with it all, a priest, like all priests, who preached God's wrath and never His mercy. Were they never to have hope? The only "Italy" that would mean anything to them would be not this old land with a new king, but whatever place would give a man bread for his family. They would leave.
Already the shepherds of the Sila, who in winter took their flocks to the coast, had come back and told of what they had heard and seen. The men from the north who were putting down rail for the train line said that many were leaving; the fishermen told of taking people up to Naples in their fishing boats so they could sail from there to America.
It was then that Serafino the shepherd left for America. He was the first from Castagna, and he was bound to go, Umbertina's father said. He had no family. He would be taken in the conscription. And for what? To defend a country that had taken away his pastures and given him taxes instead? Besides, his life had always been difficult up in the mountains with his sheep. He lived alone, nourishing himself from the cheese he made by boiling the sheeps' milk in a great iron kettle and fermenting it with the wild herbs he found. He carved wooden spoons and pipes and made reed flutes to pass the time, but it was a lonely life for a man; if he were to marry, his family would remain below in the village and he would see them only at the change of seasons when he brought his flock down.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Umbertina"
by .
Copyright © 1979 Helen Barolini.
Excerpted by permission of Feminist Press.
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