“When your brothers come out here, your mother will be able to come too and we’ll get more organised.” Then he looked at his son and exclaimed: “Gino, you’re not crying?!”
“I’m thinking about home.” Gino’s voice was desolate. Unable to look at his father, he blundered on:
“Why did you make me come here? This is hell!”
As if to prove it he wiped the sweat from his forehead, gathering a line of wet red dust on his finger in the process and momentarily dislodging the flies that stuck to his skin and his eyes.
In the days that followed, Gino shed many a tear when he was alone. His father had not managed to have him taken on straight away to work underground in the mine, but the next week he would start work alongside a younger friend of Aldo’s named Nino Pezzato, on the timberline. On this
