Young man, do you know what love is?
It's that everyone believes they know love. Instead many are those who do not know how to love. They believe they do it but they can't do it. They think that if there is someone who loves us, then we love. But love is not just that.
Don't love only those who return your love. Live to love everything that makes your heart happy and your heart cannot love one person. You will love, if you look deeply into it, every wrinkle on your father's face as well as every hard rock on the earth where you were born.
You will love, if you have a soul, even the one that is not yours, but that becomes it over time. It is not easy to give oneself to others because on the way of giving love you will find many obstacles. Don't get yourself down anyway. In the end it will still remain that noble feeling of having given part of you in exchange for nothing but having done it with joy. The joy of giving.
You can be generous, but I think I've never met a person who was much more than my father. Nothing was his because he had everything he had at all times for all our villagers.
In such a small country, my father was born practically in the midst of hay and oxen. My grandparents were shepherds and massari. Their belongings were only the flock and the cows. Don't look at these walls, young man, my ancestors slept together with cattle, or inside the huts of reeds and trunks of oak and olive trees.
There was little difference between the meal of the pigs and theirs. Those were the times when we also ate rushes and poppies due to hunger, that was the time when there were no schools in our country.
I watched the sea from the top of the hill. With my eye I followed the river that flowed beside me and chased its curves between the tall trees and the hedges of reeds, thorns and prickly pears. He ran away that water, he passed through the hands of the women who, later on, soaped white sheets and beat them hard on the stones. The current warped when he arrived just outside the town and his bed widened and deepened. At that point the lands that my father treated as a colonist began. There were many very large and shaded olive trees. He always wanted to remind us that this land was not ours. But in any case he didn't want us to despise her. We should have loved that land as if it were ours. A rich baron gave it to my grandfather so that he could take care of it, make it yield something, and that something shared it equally with him; the "Signor Barone", which appeared in those parts only on Good Friday every year. For that period, in fact, the harvest was over and the oil had been made, the wine had been decanted and ready for Easter, the women had begun to prepare Easter cakes and breads and the salami down in the cellar after the cold winter were ripe. My father rubbed his hands when he saw him coming out of the gate, he looked up and then he always said: "He smelled it."
Mr. Baron did not use half words, he asked for his part, he demanded it, he wanted it to be loaded on his mules then he looked at us children and with a worried face he murmured to my father: "The family grows". My father let him go only after he noticed that in the pockets of the good lord there was nothing left and the last loaf of bread came out like a saber put upside down.
My father prayed to the Saints, he loved the earth and he loved its fruits. This was the religion that taught us children. We learned how to hoe the garden before the Ave Maria. I couldn't go to school, there was no time. My friends, young girls like me, told me they had sold bundles of dry branches to the bakers of the nearby hills. With the money they bought half a kilo of strawberries and a bit of spaghetti. Others walked to the nearest town to buy sweets in the pharmacy and then returned home with full underpants. Who cared that they were very powerful laxatives, they had earned it. I wanted to do the same.
My first job was to collect dry branches in the woods, tie them into bundles and carry them on the shoulder to the village and sell them to bakers. On the fifth day my shoulders were sore and the candy-filled guts writhed desperately. I would not have been able to reach Mastro Gianni's oven on the road to the sea on the other side of the river; I would have arrived dead and the darkness of the evening was advancing.