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All he knew, really, was digging. He dug to eat, to breathe, to live and sleep. He dug because the earth was there beneath his feet, and men paid him to move it. He dug because it was a sacrament, because it was honorable and holy. As a boy in Sicily he stood beside his brothers under the sun that was like a hammer and day after day stabbed his shovel into the skin of the ancient venerable earth of their father’s orchards. As a young man in Boston and New York he burrowed like a rodent beneath streets and rivers, scouring the walls of subway tubes and aqueducts, dropping his pick, lifting his shovel, mining dirt. And now, thirty-two years old and with the deed to seventy bleak and hard-baked acres in his back pocket, he was in California. Digging.

FRIENDS! COME TO THE LAND OF FERTILITY WHERE THE
SUN SHINES THE YEAR ROUND AND THE EARTH NEVER
SUBMITS TO FROST! COME TO THE LAND THE ANGELS
BLESSED! COME TO CALIFORNIA! WRITE NOW, C/O
EUPHRATES MEAD, Box 9, Fresno, California.

Yes, the land never froze, that was true and incontrovertible. But the sun scorched it till it was like stone, till it was as hard and impenetrable as the adobe brick the Indians and Mexicans piled up to make their shabby, dusty houses. This much Baldasare discovered in the torporific summer of 1905, within days of disembarking from the train with his pick and shovel, his cardboard suitcase, and his meager supply of dried pasta, flour, and beans. He’d come all the way across the country to redeem the land that would bloom with the serrate leaves and sweetly curling tendrils of his own grapes, the grapes of the Baldasare Forestiere Vineyards.

When he got down off the train, the air hot and sweet with the scent of things growing and multiplying, he was so filled with hope it was a kind of ecstasy. There were olive trees in California, orange and lemon and lime, spreading palms, fields of grapes and cotton that had filled the rushing windows of the train with every kind of promise. No more sleet and snow for him, no more wet feet and overshoes or the grippe that took all the muscle out of your back and arms, but heat, good Sicilian heat, heat that baked you right down to the grateful marrow of your happy Sicilian bones.

The first thing he did was ask directions at the station, his English a labyrinth of looming verbs and truncated squawks that sounded strange in his ears, but was serviceable for all that, and he soon found himself walking back in the direction he’d come, following the crucified grid of the tracks. Three miles south, then up a dry wash where two fire-scarred oaks came together like a pair of clasped arms, he couldn’t miss it. At least that was what the man on the platform had told him. He was a farmer, this man, unmistakably a farmer, in faded coveralls and a straw hat, long of nose and with two blue flecks for eyes in a blasted face. “That’s where all the Guineas are,” he said, “that’s where Mead sold ’em. Seventy acres, isn’t it? That’s what I figured. Same as the rest.”

When he got there and set his cardboard suitcase in the dust, he couldn’t help but pace off the whole seventy acres with the surveyor’s map Euphrates Mead had sent in the mail held out before him like a dowsing stick. The land was pale in a hundred shades of brown and a sere gray-green, and there was Russian thistle everywhere, the decayed thorny bones of it already crushed to chaff in his tracks. It crept down the open neck of his shirt and into his socks and shoes and the waist of his trousers, an itch of the land, abrasive and unforgiving. Overhead, vultures rose on the air currents like bits of winged ash. Lizards scuttered underfoot.

That night he ate sardines from a tin, licking the oil from his fingers and dipping soda crackers in the residue that collected in the corners, and then he spread a blanket under one of his new oak trees and slept as if he’d been knocked unconscious. In the morning he walked into town and bought a wheelbarrow. He filled the wheelbarrow with provisions and two five-gallon cans that had once held olive oil and now contained water—albeit an oleaginous and tinny-tasting variant of what he knew water to be. Then he hefted the twin handles of the new wheelbarrow till he felt the familiar flex of the muscles of his lower back, and he guided it all the long way back out to the future site of the Baldasare Forestiere Vineyards.

He’d always thought big, even when he was a boy wandering his father’s orchards, the orchards that would never be his because of a simple confluence of biology and fate—his brothers had been born before him. If, God forbid, either Pietro or Domenico should die or emigrate to Argentina or Australia, there was always the other one to stand in his way. But Baldasare wasn’t discouraged—he knew he was destined for greatness. Unlike his brothers, he had the gift of seeing things as they would one day be, of seeing himself in America, right here in Fresno, his seventy acres buried in grapes, the huge oak fermenting barrels rising above the cool cellar floors, his house of four rooms and a porch set on a hill and his wife on the porch, his four sons and three daughters sprinting like colts across the yard.

He didn’t even stop to eat, that first day. Sweating till his eyes burned with the sting of salt, his hands molded to the shape of the wheelbarrow’s polished handles, he made three more trips into town and back—twelve miles in all, and half of them pushing the overladen wheelbarrow. People saw him there as they went about their business in carriages and farm wagons, a sun-seared little man in slept-in clothes following the tread of a single sagging tire along the shoulder of the broad dirt road. Even if he’d looked up, they probably wouldn’t have nodded a greeting, but he never took his eyes off the unwavering line the tire cut in the dirt.

By the end of the week a one-room shanty stood beneath the oak, a place not much bigger than the bed he constructed of planks. It was a shelter, that was all, a space that separated him from the animals that reminded him he was a man and not a beast. Men are upright, his father had told him when he was a boy, and they have dominion over the beasts. Men live in houses, don’t they? And where do the beasts live, mio figlio? In the ground, no? In a hole.

It was some day of the following week when Baldasare began digging (he didn’t have a calendar and he didn’t know Sunday from Monday, and even if he did, where was the church and the priest to guide him?). He wanted the well to be right in front of the shack beneath the tree where his house would one day stand, but he knew enough about water to know that it wouldn’t be as easy as that. He spent a whole morning searching the immediate area, tracing dry watercourses, observing the way the hill of his shack and the one beside it abutted each other like the buttocks of a robust and fecund woman, until finally, right there, right in the cleft of the fundament, he pitched his shovel into the soil.

Two feet down he hit the hardpan. It didn’t disconcert him, not at all—he never dreamed it would extend over all of the seventy acres—and he attacked the rocky substrate with his pick until he was through it. As he dug deeper, he squared up the sides of his excavation with mortared rock and devised a pulley system to haul the buckets of superfluous earth clear of the hole. By the close of the second day, he needed a ladder. A week later, at thirty-two feet, he hit water, a pure sweet seep of it that got his shoes wet and climbed up the bottom rungs of his homemade ladder to a depth of four feet. And even as he set up the hand pump and exulted over the flow of shimmering sun-struck water, he was contriving his irrigation system, his pipes, conduits, and channels, a water tank, a reservoir. Yes. And then, with trembling hands, he dug into the earth in the place where the first long row of canes would take root, and his new life, his life of disillusionment, began.

Three months later, when his savings began to dwindle down to nothing, Baldasare became a laboring man all over again. He plowed another man’s fields, planted another man’s trees, dug irrigation channels and set grape canes for one stranger after another. And on his own property, after those first few weeks of feverish activity, all he’d managed, after working the soil continuously and amending it with every scrap of leaf-mold and bolus of chicken manure he could scrounge, was a vegetable garden so puny and circumscribed a housewife would have been ashamed of it. He’d dreamed of independence—from his father and brothers, from the hard-nosed Yankee construction bosses of Boston and Manhattan Island—and what had he gotten but wage slavery all over again?

He was depressed. Gloomy. Brooding and morose. It wasn’t so much Mr. Euphrates Mead who’d betrayed him, but the earth, the earth itself. Plying his shovel, sweating in a long row of sweating men, he thought of suicide in all its gaudy and elaborate guises, his eyes closed forever on his worthless land and his worthless life. And then one rainy afternoon, sitting at the counter in Siagris’ Drugstore with a cup of coffee and a hamburger sandwich, he had a vision that changed all that. The vision was concrete, as palpable as flesh, and it moved with the grace and fluidity of a living woman, a woman he could almost reach out and … “Can I get you anything else?” she asked.

He was so surprised he answered her in Italian. Olive eyes, hair piled up on her head like a confection, skin you could eat with a spoon—and hadn’t it been old Siagris, the hairy Greek, who’d fried his hamburger and set it down on the counter before him? Or was he dreaming?

She was giving him a look, a crease between her eyebrows, hands on hips. “What did you say?”

“I mean”—fumbling after his English—“no, no, thank you … but who, I mean … ?”

She was serene—a very model of serenity—though the other customers, men in suits, two boys and their mother lingering over their ice cream, were all watching her and quietly listening for her answer. “I’m Ariadne,” she said. “Ariadne Siagris.” She looked over her shoulder to the black-eyed man standing at the grill. “That’s my uncle.”

Baldasare was charmed—and a bit dazed too. She was beautiful—or at least to his starved eyes she was—and he wanted to say something witty to her, something flirtatious, something that would let her know that he wasn’t just another sorrowful Italian laborer with no more means or expectations than the price of the next hamburger sandwich, but a man of substance, a landowner, future proprietor of the Baldasare Forestiere Vineyards. But he couldn’t think of anything, his mind impacted, his tongue gone dead in the sleeve of his mouth. Then he felt his jaws opening of their own accord and heard himself saying, “Baldasare Forestiere, at your service.”

He would always remember that moment, through all the digging and lifting and wheelbarrowing to come, because she looked hard at him, as if she could see right through to his bones, and then she turned up the corners of her mouth, pressed two fingers to her lips, and giggled.

That night, as he lay in his miserable bed in his miserable shack that was little more than a glorified chicken coop, he could think of nothing but her. Ariadne Siagris. She was the one. She was what he’d come to America for, and he spoke her name aloud as the rain beat at his crude roof and insinuated itself through a hundred slivers and cracks to drizzle down onto his already damp blankets, spoke her name aloud and made the solemnest pledge that she would one day be his bride. But it was cold and the night beyond the walls was limitless and black and his teeth were chattering so forcefully he could barely get the words out. He was mad, of course, and he knew it. How could he think to have a chance with her? What could he offer her, a girl like that who’d come all the way from Chicago, Illinois, to live with her uncle, the prosperous Greek—a school-educated girl used to fine things and books? Yes, he’d made inquiries—he’d done nothing but inquire since he’d left the drugstore that afternoon. Her parents were dead, killed at a railway crossing, and she was nineteen years old, with two younger sisters and three brothers, all of them farmed out to relatives. Ariadne. Ariadne Siagris.

The rain was relentless. It spoke and sighed and roared. He was wearing every stitch of clothing he possessed, wrapped in his blankets and huddled over the coal-oil lamp, and still he froze, even here in California. It was an endless night, an insufferable night, but a night in which his mind was set free to roam the universe of his life, one thought piled atop another like bricks in a wall, until at some point, unaccountably, he was thinking of the grand tunnels he’d excavated in New York and Boston, how clean they were, how warm in winter and cool in summer, how they smelled, always, of the richness of the earth. Snow could be falling on the streets above, the gutters frozen, wind cutting into people’s eyes, but below ground there was no weather, none at all. He thought about that, pictured it—the great arching tubes carved out of the earth and the locomotive with a train of cars standing there beneath the ground and all the passengers staring placidly out the windows—and then he was asleep.

The next morning, he began to dig again. The rain had gone and the sun glistened like spilled oil over his seventy acres of mire and hardpan. He told himself he was digging a cellar—a proper cellar for the house he would one day build, because he hadn’t given up, not yet, not Baldasare Forestiere—but even then, even as he spat on his hands and raised the pick above his head, he knew there was more to it than that. The pick rose and fell, the shovel licked at the earth with all the probing intimacy of a tongue, and the wheelbarrow groaned under one load after another. Baldasare was digging. And he was happy, happier than he’d been since the day he stepped down from the train, because he was digging for her, for Ariadne, and because digging was what he’d been born to do.

But then the cellar was finished—a fine deep vaulted space in which he could not only stand erect—at his full height of five feet and four inches—but thrust his right arm straight up over his head and still only just manage to touch the ceiling—and he found himself at a loss for what to do next. He could have squared up the corners and planed the walls with his spade till all the lines were rectilinear, but he didn’t want that. That was the fashion of all the rooms he’d ever lived in, and as he scraped and smoothed and tamped, he realized it didn’t suit him. No, his cellar was dome-shaped, like the apse of the cathedral in which he’d worshipped as a boy, and its entrance was protected from the elements by a long broad ramp replete with gutters that drained into a small reflecting pool just outside the wooden door. And its roof, of course, was of hardpan, impervious to the rain and sun, and more durable than any shingle or tile.

He spent two days smoothing out the slope of the walls and tidying and leveling the floor, working by the light of a coal-oil lantern while in the realm above the sky threw up a tatter of cloud and burned with a sun in the center of it till the next storm rolled in to snuff it out like a candle. When the rain came, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to move his clothes and his bed and his homemade furniture down into the new cellar, which was snug and watertight. Besides, he reasoned, even as he fashioned himself a set of shelves and broke through the hardpan to run a stovepipe out into the circumambient air, what did he need a cellar for—a strict cellar, that is—if he couldn’t grow the onions, apples, potatoes, and carrots to store in it?

Once the stove was installed and had baked all the moisture out of the place, he lay on the hard planks of his bed through a long rainy afternoon, smoking one cigarette after another and thinking about what his father had said—about the animals and how they lived in the ground, in holes. His father was a wise man. A man of character and substance. But he wasn’t in California and he wasn’t in love with Ariadne Siagris and he didn’t have to live in a shack the pigeons would have rejected. It took him a while, but the conclusion Baldasare finally reached was that he was no animal—he was just practical, that was all—and he barely surprised himself when he got up from the bed, fetched his shovel and began to chip away at the east wall of his cellar. He could already see a hallway there, a broad grand hallway, straight as a plumb line and as graceful and sensible as the arches the Romans of antiquity put to such good use in their time. And beyond that, as the dirt began to fall and the wheelbarrow shuddered to receive it, he saw a kitchen and bedroom opening onto an atrium, he saw grape and wisteria vines snaking toward the light, camellias, ferns, and impatiens overflowing clay pots and baskets—and set firmly in the soil, twenty feet below the surface, an avocado tree, as heavy with fruit as any peddler’s cart.

The winter wore on. There wasn’t much hired work this time of year—the grapes had been picked and pressed, the vines cut back, the fig trees pruned, and the winter crops were in the ground. Baldasare had plenty of time on his hands. He wasn’t idle—he just kept right on digging—nor was he destitute. Modest in his needs and frugal by habit, he’d saved practically everything he’d earned through the summer and fall, repairing his own clothes, eating little more than boiled eggs and pasta, using his seventy acres as a place to trap rabbits and songbirds and to gather wood for his stove. His one indulgence was tobacco—that, and a weekly hamburger sandwich at Siagris’ Drugstore.

Chewing, sipping coffee, smoking, he studied his future bride there, as keen as any scholar intent on his one true subject. He made little speeches to her in his head, casual remarks he practiced over and over till he got them right—or thought he did, anyway. Lingering over his coffee after cleaning the plate of crumbs with a dampened forefinger, he would wait till she came near with a glass or washcloth in hand, and he would blurt: “One thinks the weather will change, is that not true?” Or: “This is the most best sandwich of hamburger my mouth will ever receive.” And she? She would show her teeth in a little equine smile, or she would giggle, then sometimes sneeze, covering her nose and mouth with one hand as her late mother had no doubt taught her to do. All the while, Baldasare feasted on the sight of her. Sometimes he would sit there at the counter for two or three hours till Siagris the Greek would make some impatient remark and he would rise in confusion, his face suffused with blood, bowing and apologizing till he managed to find his way to the door.

It was during this time of close scrutiny that he began to detect certain small imperfections in his bride-to-be. Despite her education, for instance, she seemed to have inordinate difficulty in making change or reading off the menu from the chalkboard on the wall behind her. She’d begun to put on weight too, picking at bits of doughnut or fried potatoes the customers left on their plates. If she’d been substantial when Baldasare first laid eyes on her, she was much more than that now—stout, actually. As stout as Signora Cardino back home in Messina, who was said to drink olive oil instead of wine and breakfast on sugared cream and cake. And then there were her eyes—or rather, her right eye. It had a cast in it, and how he’d missed that on the day he was first smitten, he couldn’t say. But he had to look twice to notice the hairs on her chin—as stiff as a cat’s whiskers and just as translucent—and as far as he was concerned, the red blotches that had begun to appear on the perfect skin of her hands and throat might have been nothing more than odd splashes of marinara sauce, as if she’d gotten too close to the pot.

Another lover, less blinded by the light of certitude than Baldasare, might have found these blemishes a liability, but Baldasare treasured them. They were part of her, part of that quiddity that made her unique among women. He watched with satisfaction as her hips and buttocks swelled so that even at nineteen she had to walk with a waddle, looked on with a soaring heart as the blotches spread from her throat to her cheeks and brow and her right eye stared out of her head, across the room and out the window, surer each day that she was his. After all, who else would see in her what he saw? Who else could love her the way he did? Who but Baldasare Forestiere would come forward to declare himself? And he would declare himself soon—as soon as he finished digging.

Two years passed. He worked for other men and saved every cent of his wages, worse than any miser, and in his free time, he dug. When he completed a passage or a room or carved his way to the sky for light, he could already see the next passage and the next room beyond that. He had a vision, yes, and he had Ariadne to think of, but even so, he wasn’t the sort to sit around idle. He didn’t have the gift of letters, he didn’t play violin or mouth organ, and he rarely visited among his neighbors. The vaudeville theater was a long way off, too far to walk, and he went there only once, with Lucca Albanese, a vineyard worker with whom he’d struck up a friendship. There were comedians and jugglers and pretty women all dancing like birds in flight, but all the while he was regretting the two cents the streetcar had cost him and the fifteen-cent admission, and he never went back. No, he stayed home with his shovel and his vision, and many days he didn’t know morning from night.

Saturdays, though, he kept sacred. Saturday was the day he walked the three and a half miles to Siagris’ Drugstore, through winter rains and summer heat that reached a hundred and sixteen degrees Fahrenheit. He prided himself on his constancy, and he was pleased to think that Ariadne looked forward to his weekly visits as much as he did. His place at the end of the counter was always vacant, as if reserved for him, and he relished the little smiles with which she greeted him and the sweet flow of familiar phrases that dropped so easily from her supple American lips: “So how’ve you been?” “Nice day.” “Think it’s coming on to rain?”

As time went on, they became increasingly intimate. She told him of her uncle’s back pain, the illness of her cat, the ascension of her oldest brother to assistant floor supervisor at the Chicago Iron Works, and he told her of his ranch and of the elegance and spaciousness of his living quarters. “Twelve room,” he said. “Twelve room, and all to myself.” And then came the day when he asked her, in his runaway English, if she would come with him to the ranch for a picnic. “But not just the picnic,” he said, “but also the scene, how do you say, the scene of the place, and my, my house, because I want—I need—you see, I …”

She was leaning over the counter, splotchy and huge. Her weight had stabilized in the past year—she’d reached her full growth, finally, at the age of twenty-one—and she floated above her feet like one of the airships the Germans so prized. “Yes,” she said, and she giggled and sneezed, a big mottled hand pressed to her mouth, “I’d love to.”

The following Sunday he came for her, lightly ascending the sun-bleached steps to the walkup above the drugstore where she lived with uncle and aunt and their five children. It was a hot September morning, all of Fresno and the broad dusty valley beyond held in the grip of something stupendous, a blast of air so sere and scorching you would have thought the whole world was a pizza oven with the door open wide. Siagris the Greek answered his knock. He was in his shirtsleeves and the sweat had made a washcloth of his garments, the white field of his shirt stuck like a postage stamp to the bulge of his belly. He didn’t smile but he didn’t look displeased either, and Baldasare understood the look: Siagris didn’t like him, not one bit, and in other circumstances might have gone out of his way to squash him like a bug, but then he had a niece who took up space and ate like six nieces, and Baldasare could just maybe deliver him from that. “Come in,” he said, and there was Baldasare, the cave-dweller, in a room in a house two stories above the ground.

Up here, inside, it was even hotter. The Siagris children lay about like swatted flies, and Mrs. Siagris, her hair like some wild beast clawing at her scalp, poked her head around the corner from the kitchen. It was too hot to smile, so she grimaced instead and pulled her head back out of sight. And then, in the midst of this suffocating scene, the voice of a ventriloquist cried out, “He’s here,” and Ariadne appeared in the hallway.

She was all in white, with a hat the size of a tabletop perched atop the mighty pile of her hair. He was melting already, from the heat, but when she focussed her wild eye on him and turned up her lips in the shyest of smiles, he melted a little more.

Outside, in the street, she gave him her arm, which was something of a problem because she was so much taller than he was, and he had to reach up awkwardly to take it. He was wearing his best suit of clothes, washed just the evening before, and the unfamiliar jacket clung to him like dead skin while the new celluloid collar gouged at his neck and the tie threatened to throttle him. They managed to walk the better part of a block before she put her feet together and came to a halt. “Where’s your carriage?” she asked.

Carriage? Baldasare was puzzled. He didn’t have any carriage—he didn’t even have a horse. “I no got,” he said, and he strained to give her his best smile. “We walk.”

“Walk?” she echoed. “In this heat? You must be crazy.”

“No,” he said, “we walk,” and he leaned forward and exerted the most delicate but insistent pressure on the monument of her arrested arm.

Her cheeks were splotched under the crisp arc of shadow the hat brim threw over her face and her olive eyes seemed to snatch at his. “You mean,” and her voice was scolding and intemperate, “you ain’t even got a wagon? You, with your big house you’re always telling me about?”

The following Sunday, though it wounded him to throw his money away like some Park Avenue millionaire, he pulled up to Siagris’ Drugstore in a hired cabriolet. It was a clear day, the sun high and merciless, and the same scenario played itself out in the walkup at the top of the stairs, except that this time Baldasare seemed to have things in hand. He was as short with Siagris as Sia-gris was with him, he made a witticism regarding the heat for the benefit of the children, and he led Ariadne (who had refused the previous week to go farther than a bench in the park at the end of the street) out the door, down the steps, and into the carriage like a cavaliere of old.

Baldasare didn’t like horses. They were big and crude and expensive and they always seemed to need grooming, shoeing, doctoring, and oats—and the horse attached to the cabriolet was no exception. It was a stupid, flatulent, broad-flanked, mouse-colored thing, and it did its utmost to resist every touch of the reins and thwart every desire of the man wielding them. Baldasare was in a sweat by the time they reached his property, every square inch of his clothing soaked through like a blotter, and his nerves were frayed raw. Nor had he made any attempt at conversation during the drive, so riveted was he on the task at hand, and when they finally pulled up in the shade of his favorite oak, he turned to Ariadne and saw that she hadn’t exactly enjoyed the ride either.

Her hat was askew, her mouth set in a thin unyielding line. She was glistening with sweat, her hands like doughballs fried in lard, and a thin integument of moistened dust clung to her features. She gave him a concentrated frown. “Well, where is it?” she demanded. “Why are we stopping here?”

His tongue ran ahead of him, even as he sprang down from the carriage and scurried to her side to assist her in alighting. “This is what I have want for to show you, and so long, because—well, because I am making it for you.”

He studied the expression of her face as she looked from the disreputable shack to the hummock of the well and out over the heat-blasted scrub to where the crown of his avocado tree rose out of the ground like an illusion. And then she saw the ramp leading down to the cellar. She was stunned, he could see it in her face and there was no denying it, but he watched her struggle to try on a smile and focus her eyes on his. “This is a prank, ain’t it? You’re just fooling with me and your house is really over there behind that hill”—pointing now from her perch atop the carriage—“ain’t it?”

“No, no,” he said, “no. It’s this, you see?” And he indicated the ramp, the crown of the avocado, the bump where the inverted cone of a new atrium broke the surface. “Twelve room, I tell you, twelve room.” He’d become insistent, and he had his hand on her arm, trying to lead her down from the carriage—if only she would come, if only she would see—and he wanted to tell her how cool and fresh-smelling it was down there beneath the earth, and how cheap it was to build and expand, to construct a nursery, a sewing room, anything she wanted. All it took was a strong back and a shovel, and not one cent wasted on nails and lumber and shingles that fell apart after five years in the sun. He wanted to tell her, but the words wouldn’t come, and he tried to articulate it all through the pressure of his hand on her arm, tugging, as if the whole world depended on her getting down from that carriage—and it did, it did!

“Let go!” she cried, snatching her arm away, and then she was sobbing, gasping for breath as if the superheated air were some other medium altogether and she was choking on it. “You said … you said … twelve rooms!”

He tried to reach for her again—“Please,” he begged, “please”—but she jerked back from him so violently the carriage nearly buckled on its springs. Her face was furious, streaked with tears and dirt. “You bully!” she cried. “You Guinea, Dago, Wop! You, you’re no better than a murderer!”

Three days later, in a single paragraph set off by a black border, the local paper announced her engagement to Hiram Broad-bent, of Broadbent’s Poultry & Eggs.

An engagement wasn’t a marriage, that’s what Baldasare was thinking when Lucca Albanese gave him the news. An engagement could be broken, like a promise or a declaration or even a contract. There was hope yet, there had to be. “Who is this Hiram Broadbent?” he demanded. “Do you know him?”

They were sharing a meal of beans and vermicelli in Baldasare’s subterranean kitchen, speaking in a low tragic Italian. Lucca had just read the announcement to him, the sharp-edged English words shearing at him like scissors, and the pasta had turned to cotton wadding in his throat. He was going to choke. He was going to vomit.

“Yeah, sure,” Lucca said. “I know him. Big, fat man. Wears a straw hat winter and summer. He’s a drunk, mean as the devil, but his father owns a chicken farm that supplies all the eggs for the local markets in Fresno, so he’s always got money in his pocket. Hell, if you ever came out of your hole, you’d know who I’m talking about.”

“You don’t think—I mean, Ariadne wouldn’t really … would she?”

Lucca ducked his head and worked his spoon in the plate. “You know what my father used to say? When I was a boy in Catania?”

“No, what?”

“There’s plenty of fish in the sea.”

But that didn’t matter to Baldasare—he wanted only one fish. Ariadne. Why else had he been digging, if not for her? He’d created an underground palace, with the smoothest of corners and the most elegant turnings and capacious courtyards, just to give her space, to give her all the room she could want after having to live at her uncle’s mercy in that cramped walkup over the drugstore. Didn’t she complain about it all the time? If only she knew, if only she’d give him a chance and descend just once into the cool of the earth, he was sure she’d change her mind, she had to.

There was a problem, though. An insurmountable problem. She wouldn’t see him. He came into the drugstore, hoping to make it all up to her, to convince her that he was the one, the only one, and she backed away from the counter, exchanged a word with her uncle, and melted away through the sun-struck mouth of the back door. Siagris whirled round like some animal startled in a cave, his shoulders hunched and his head held low. “We don’t want you in here anymore, understand?” he said. There was the sizzle of frying, the smell of onions, tuna fish, a row of startled white faces staring up from pie and coffee. Siagris leaned into the counter and made his face as ugly as he could. “Capiche?”

Baldasare Forestiere was not a man to be easily discouraged. He thought of sending her a letter, but he’d never learned to write, and the idea of having someone write it for him filled him with shame. For the next few days he brooded over the problem, working all the while as a hired laborer, shoveling, lifting, pulling, bending, and as his body went through the familiar motions his mind was set free to achieve a sweated lucidity. By the end of the third day, he’d decided what he had to do.

That night, under cover of darkness, he pushed his wheelbarrow into town along the highway and found his way to the vacant lot behind the drugstore. Then he started digging. All night, as the constellations drifted in the immensity overhead until one by one they fled the sky, Baldasare plied his shovel, his pick, and his rake. By morning, at first light, the outline of his message was clearly visible from the second-story window of the walkup above the store. It was a heart, a valentine, a perfectly proportioned symbol of his love dug three feet deep in the ground and curving gracefully over the full area of what must have been a quarter-acre lot.

When the outline was finished, Baldasare started on the interior. In his mind’s eye, he saw a heart-shaped crater there in the lot, six feet deep at least, with walls as smooth as cement, a hole that would show Ariadne the depth of the vacancy she’d left in him. He was coming up the ramp he’d shaped of earth with a full wheelbarrow to spread over the corners of the lot, when he glanced up to see Siagris and two of his children standing there peering down at him. Siagris’ hands were on his hips. He looked more incredulous than anything else. “What in Christ’s name do you think you’re doing?” he sputtered.

Baldasare, swinging wide with his load of dirt so that Siagris and the children had to take a quick step back, never even hesitated. He just kept going to a point in the upper corner of the frame where he was dumping and raking out the dirt. “Digging,” he said over his shoulder.

“But you can’t. This is private property. You can’t just dig up people’s yards, don’t you know that? Eh? Don’t you know anything?”

Baldasare didn’t want a confrontation. He was a decent man, mild and pacifistic, but he was determined too. As he came by again with the empty wheelbarrow and eased it down the ramp, he said, “Tell her to look. She is the one. For her, I do this.”

After that, he was deaf to all pleas, threats, and remonstrations, patiently digging, shoring up his walls, spreading his dirt. The sun climbed in the sky. He stopped only to take an occasional drink from a jug of water or to sit on his overturned wheelbarrow and silently eat a sandwich from a store of them wrapped in butcher’s paper. He worked through the day, tireless, and though the sheriff came and threatened him, even the sheriff couldn’t say with any certainty who owned the lot Baldasare was defacing—couldn’t say, that is, without checking the records down at the courthouse, which he was going to do first thing in the morning, Baldasare could be sure of that. Baldasare didn’t respond. He just kept digging.

It began to get dark. Baldasare had cleared the entire cutout of his heart to a depth of three feet, and he wasn’t even close to quitting. Six feet, he was thinking, that’s what it would take, and who could blame him if he kept glancing up at the unrevealing window of the apartment atop the drugstore in the hope of catching a glimpse of his inamorata there? If she was watching, if she knew what he was doing for love of her, if she saw the lean muscles of his arms strain and his back flex, she gave no sign of it. Undeterred, Baldasare dug on.

And then there came a moment, and it must have been past twelve at night, the neighborhood as silent as the grave and Baldasare working by the light of a waxing moon, when two men appeared at the northern edge of the excavation, right where the lobes of the heart came together in a graceful loop. “Hey, Wop,” one of them yelled down to where Baldasare stood with his shovel, “I don’t know who you think you are, but you’re embarrassing my fiancée, and I mean to put an end to it.”

The man’s shadow under that cold moon was immense—it could have been the shadow of a bear or buffalo. The other shadow was thinner, but broad across the shoulders, where it counted, and it danced on shadowy feet. There was no sound but for the slice of Baldasare’s shovel and the slap of the dirt as it dropped into the wheelbarrow.

He was a small man, Baldasare, but the hundreds of tons of dirt he’d moved in his lifetime had made iron of his limbs, and when they fell on him he fought like a man twice his size. Still, the odds were against him, and Hiram Broadbent, fueled by good Kentucky bourbon and with the timely assistance of Calvin Tompkins, a farrier and amateur boxer, was able to beat him to the ground. And once he was down, Broadbent and Tompkins kicked him with their heavy boots till he stirred no more.

When Baldasare was released from the hospital, he was a changed man—or at least to the degree that the image of Ariadne Siagris no longer infested his brain. He went back home and sat in a bent-wood rocker and stared at the sculpted dirt walls of the kitchen that gave onto the atrium and the striated trunk of its lone avocado tree. His right arm was in a sling, with a cast on it from the elbow down, and he was bound up beneath his shirt like an Egyptian mummy with all the tape it took to keep his cracked ribs in place. After a week or so—his mourning period, as he later referred to it—he found himself one evening in the last and deepest of his rooms, the one at the end of the passage that led to the new atrium where he was thinking of planting a lemon tree or maybe a quince. It was preternaturally quiet. The earth seemed to breathe with and for him.

And then suddenly he began to see things, all sorts of things, a rush of raw design and finished image that flickered across the wall before him like one of Edison’s moving pictures. What he saw was a seventy-acre underground warren that beckoned him on, a maze like no other, with fishponds and gardens open to the sky above, and more, much more—a gift shop and an Italian restaurant with views of subterranean grottoes and a lot for parking the carriages and automobiles of the patrons who would flock there to see what he’d accomplished in his time on earth. It was a complete vision, more eloquent than any set of blueprints or elevations, and it staggered him. He was a young man still, healing by the day, and while he had a long way to go, at least now he knew where he was going. Baldasare Forestiere’s Underground Gardens, he said to himself, trying out the name, and then he said it aloud: “Baldasare Forestiere’s Underground Gardens.”

Standing there in the everlasting silence beneath the earth, he reached out a hand to the wall in front of him, his left hand, pronating the palm as if to bless some holy place. And then, awkwardly at first, but with increasing grace and agility, he began to dig.