He longed to see her, but Magliano Toscano was many kilometers away, and now was the season of the grape harvest.
Each morning before daybreak, the whole family piled into the donkey cart and drove off to their vineyard. Up and down the rows they snipped the purple bunches, dew-drenched in the morning, shiny warm in the glare of noon. They filled basket after basket to roundness, and emptied them into big tubs. It was Giorgio who lugged them, two at a time, to the wine shed, dumping the grapes, stems and all, into a huge vat. Then at dusk after the animals had been fed, he clambered up the wall of the vat, grasped the pole across the open top, swung himself inside, and with his bare feet pushed down the slippery seeds and skins that had risen to the surface.
One evening when the family, dusty and weary, was returning home by starlight, Giorgio spoke shyly to his mother. "Some day I would go to Magliano to see the filly of Sans Souci ... if only I had the time."
"Maybe on Sunday after the mass," the mother suggested.
"I will go!" he cried, and the weariness of the long day suddenly melted.
But Giorgio did not go. On the next Sunday he was chosen watchkeeper of the church. And now the Sundays stretched out longer than all the other days. He had to scrub the floor inside the church and sweep the earth outside. He had to dust the altars. He had to arrange the benches and chairs. He had to play the bells, calling the people from houses and barns. He had to help serve mass. And when the services were over, he remained on watch. Alone in the deep hush, he listened to the wind moaning in the cypress trees, reminding him that each tree in the churchyard stood for a soldier dead. He tried to close his ears to the dismal sound, but the trees kept on whispering, and the mourning doves added their plaintive lament.
There was reward, however, in being watchkeeper. It meant that the people of Monticello considered him more man than boy. His voice was changing, too, and now when he sang in the choir it cracked, sliding far off key.
"Tsk, tsk!" the father remarked one Sunday. "Our Giorgio is getting a voice most strange. More howl than human. Sometimes," he laughed, "I look up quick to see, is he growing flap ears like basset hound, or great furred ones, like Pippa? Because he knows how animals think, must he sing like them, too?"
The family was seated around the table eating their Sunday supper of fritto misto, a mixed fry of little fish from the River Orcia.