“You’re too rich to be a beggar and too poor to eat.”
Again? The storyteller is annoyed before she even begins, and somehow that makes her more dangerous. The children want one story, the one about how she met their father. She claims to have hundreds, but children know exactly where to press, so back they go to the barn in the mountains of the Sierra Marina. A tired man plays while soldiers search nearby for food. She says she crept quietly. He calls her a witch for knowing his thoughts. She answers like someone who has watched men closely and not been overly impressed. Their flirting has a blade in it. He warns her about soldiers. She calls him tempting prey. Neither of them sounds fully convinced by the role they are playing. Then Alphonse arrives, and the story gets sadder. He is a boy afraid that God has stopped looking at farmers, grandfathers, and ordinary work. Boredom feels like damnation to him. When King Ferdinand finds another king's cruelty useful and soldiers move through the village, Alphonse decides war must be where God's eyes have gone. He tells his mother he will die. Her tired eyes fill with light, and for a breath he thinks she is an angel. Then she is only his mother, crying before he leaves. The listener inside the story pushes back. Sadness, she says, is unnecessary; anyone who wants it can look at their own life. Nice try. The woman sees through the traveler too, catching the golden trumpets and army habits that make him neither farmer nor plain soldier. By the end, love is the thing on trial. Federigo has already served his falcon as food when Mother Giovanna asks for that same bird to save her son. What lands on the table is feathers, talons, and beak. The son dies anyway. So what is pure love down here: holy, foolish, or both?
