’Ntoni arrived, with his cap over one ear, and a shirt covered with stars; and his mother couldn’t get enough of him, as the whole family and all his friends followed him home from the station; in a moment the house was full of people, just as it had been at the funeral of poor Bastianazzo, whom nobody thought of now.
Some things nobody remembers but old people, so much so that La Locca was always sitting before the Malavoglia house, against the wall, waiting for her Menico, and turning her head this way and that at every step that she heard passing up or down the alley.
VI.
Ntoni got back on a Sunday, and went from door to door saluting his friends and acquaintances, the centre of an admiring crowd of boys, while the girls came to the windows to look at him; the only one that was not there was Mammy Tudda’s Sara.
“She has gone to Ognino with her husband,” Santuzza told him. “She has married Menico Trinca, a widower with six children, but as rich as a hog. She married him before his first wife had been dead a month. God forgive us all!”
“A widower is like a soldier,” added La Zuppidda; “a soldier’s love is soon cold; at tap of drum, adieu, my lady!”
Cousin Venera, who went to the station to see if Mammy Tudda’s Sara would come to say good-bye to Padron ’Ntoni’s ’Ntoni, because she had seen them talking to each other over the vineyard wall, hoped to put ’Ntoni out of countenance by this piece of news. But time had changed him too—“Out of sight, out of mind”—‘Ntoni now wore his cap over his ear.
“I don’t like those flirts who make love to two or three people at a time,” said the Mangiacairubbe, pulling the ends of her kerchief tighter under her chin, and looking as innocent as a Madonna. “If I were to love anybody, I’d stick to that one, and would change, no, not for Victor Emmanuel himself, or Garibaldi, even.”