Rosari left Southern Italy and set sail into the unknown for an additional reason: in order to escape prosecution for her prodigality. Her father, Lazaro Cara, was a gentle man, and some would say he was too gentle. When his wife left him he gave up the chase after a week of weeping and lugging his children from village to village in the hilly south of Italy. Rosari’s mother was a beautiful woman with wildly sad eyes, with thick black curls which played across her cheeks even when she tried to keep them bound in a scarf. She dropped the wash in Rosari’s arms one day, put on her nicest dress, and left. Friends and family lent her father a jackass and a shotgun, but he looked silly holding the firearm in his arms like a baby wrapped in bunting. He wept, and Rosari and her older sister wept, and they walked from town to town with the jackass and ate cold potatoes and handouts from strangers and milk from their nanny goat, then returned home. Lazaro returned to his vocation, which was cutting the hair of the merchants and land barons and gossips in Reggio Calabria.
