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spoken, then lowered them again to stare down towards her bare feet, without uttering a word.
    Most of the girls turned away, all chattering at once, like magpies making merry over rich pickings, but two or three of them turned towards her and said, ‘Why have you left your mother on her own, then?’
    ‘To find myself a job.’
    ‘Where do you come from?’
    ‘From Viagrande, but I’m staying at Ravanusa.’
    The steward’s goddaughter, who was due to marry the third son of Massaro Jacopo at Easter, who wore a fine gold cross round her neck, and who thought she was very clever, said as she turned her back on her, ‘That’s not far! If the news is bad, they can send it by pigeon.’
    Nedda shot her retreating figure a glance similar to the one that the dog curled up by the fire had been shooting at the clogs threatening its tail.
    ‘No!’ she exclaimed, as though replying to herself. ‘Zio Giovanni would come and tell me!’
    ‘Zio Giovanni? Who’s he?’
    ‘Zio Giovanni of Ravanusa. Everyone calls him that.’
    ‘You should have got Zio Giovanni to lend you something instead of leaving your mother alone,’ said another girl.
    ‘Zio Giovanni isn’t rich, and we already owe him ten
lire!
What about the doctor’s bill? And the medicines? And the bread we have to eat every day? Oh, it’s easy for you to talk,’ Nedda added, shaking her head and allowing for the first time a more sorrowful tone to creep into her coarse, almost savage voice, ‘but as you stand in the doorway and watch the sun go down, knowing there’s no bread in thecupboard, no oil in the lamp and no job to go to next day, it leaves a bitter taste in your mouth when you have a poor old woman lying ill in bed!’
    She fell silent, but continued to shake her head without looking at anyone, her eyes dry and expressionless except for a hint of benumbed sorrow such as eyes more accustomed to tears would be incapable of betraying.
    ‘Your soup plates, girls!’ shouted the steward’s wife, raising the lid from the pot with an air of triumph.
    They all crowded round the fire, where the steward’s wife was ladling out the beans with the parsimony of long experience. Nedda, her soup bowl under her arm, was last to come forward, and when she finally found a place, the flames lit up her whole person.
    She was dark-skinned and poorly dressed, with that air of coarseness and timidity brought on by poverty and loneliness. She might have been beautiful, if toil and hardship had not profoundly altered not only whatever delicate womanly features she had possessed but also the very shape of her body. Her hair was black, thick, unkempt, and tied up with string, her teeth were white as ivory, and there was something attractive about her coarse features that became more evident whenever she smiled. She had big black eyes, moistened with tints of blue, that would have aroused the envy of a queen for that wretched girl curled up on the lowest rung of the human ladder, had they not been overlain by the shadow of timidity that comes with poverty, or rendered so lacklustre through her unchanging air of sorrowful resignation. Her limbs, whether because they had suffered so much beneath enormous burdens, or because they had been forcibly wrenched into shape through painful exertions, had lost their natural form, but without becoming sturdy. She worked as a builder’s labourer whenever she was not clearing rocks from ground being broken up for ploughing, or carrying other people’s heavy goods into town, or attending to one of the many demanding tasks that in those parts are considered too demeaning for any man to perform. As for the jobs women normally undertake in farming areas, harvesting the grapes and the corn and gathering the olives, they were like holidays to her, a time for merrymaking, a genuine pastime rather than hard work, though on the other hand they broughtin less than half the amount she could earn – thirteen
soldi! –
as a builder’s labourer