A Harvest of Secrets(13)

Marcellina laughed sarcastically. “So if they’re caught here, we’ll all be killed. And they speak no Italian. How are they going to escape? How will they eat?”

The questions spun in the air like hornets. Paolo studied the soldiers’ faces. They were light-skinned, light-eyed, and they watched him intently, as if he were an executioner and they the condemned. He glanced sideways at Gennaro Asolutto, the foreman who’d preceded him, and who sat now, quiet as ever, in a corner. Asolutto was the true expert on growing grapes and making wine and had lived among them for decades. Among them, yes, but half of Asolutto had always seemed to stand apart. He’d wielded his authority in the quietest of voices, never raising a hand to any of them, never cheating them of their share of the food or the small sums they were paid at the end of every season, going days without speaking to them at all. When a decision had to be made, he stood quietly in their midst and pronounced a sentence or two, and there was never any thought of challenging him. Their world was a world of hierarchy, of bosses above bosses, all the way to Rome, and, from there, all the way to heaven. When Asolutto grew old, and Paolo took his place in the hierarchy, he’d tried to behave in the same way. But whatever decisions Asolutto had been charged with making—when to harvest, how to ferment, how to settle the arguments that sprang up from time to time among the workers—none of those decisions had ever put lives in danger. Paolo stared at the old man now, wondering what he would have done. Asolutto nodded at him, milky old eyes steady, gnarled hands in his lap, and the nod seemed to contain a message. One of the soldiers coughed and turned his face away, as if he were about to start weeping, and Paolo made up his mind.

“They’ll sleep in the attic,” he said. “Only a few nights. None of us can say a single word about them to anyone outside this building. We’ll find clothes for them and burn their uniforms.”

“And they’ll keep their guns?” Marcellina asked.

Paolo just looked at her.

“And so now all our lives are in danger. If they’re found here, we’ll all be killed.”

“That’s true,” Paolo said to her. “But if our men were in the same situation, we would want people to help them.”

“Our men aren’t murderers.”

“The attic,” Paolo said. He set the pitchfork aside and walked out of the barn without touching the food. For a long time, he stood alone in the courtyard, looking at the stars. Father Costantino and the man with the beaked nose had put his life in danger, burdened him with the heaviest weight, but he’d agreed to that from the start. Now he’d passed that weight to every worker on the property, and none of them had asked for it. They were all involved now, linked by a frail bond of trust. Another sin, he supposed. He heard noises coming out of the manor house windows, a woman’s sobs, it sounded like. He listened for a moment, wondering if it was the house servant Cinzia, or Vittoria, then went back into the barn to tend to the horses and eat what remained of the food.





Nine

After many restless nights following the trauma of the delivery to Montepulciano, Vittoria decided she had to speak with her father, alone, something that had always required a summoning of courage. Since the death of her mother, it had become even more difficult to have a rational conversation: her father’s political sympathies—perhaps held in check by her mother, whose politics were totally different—had burst into the light like noxious weeds. He’d hung a photo of Mussolini in the manor house entrance; his comments on current events had turned into bitter rants. Always a gruff man, lacking in tenderness, he seemed, as a widower, to have given free rein to the harshest side of himself, as if he were somehow repaying fate for the hand it had dealt him. The Italian people are too stupid to appreciate what Il Duce has done for them! was a typical remark.

It was late, an hour after their mostly silent dinner, and Vittoria found him sitting in the third-floor library, his favorite room, in a chair upholstered in tobacco-colored leather. She sat opposite him on the leather sofa and told him what had happened in the city.

“Well, you’re a beautiful woman,” was her father’s response.

“Papa! He’s grabbing me! Next thing he’ll be dragging me into their house and raping me!”

Her father sighed impatiently, closed the book over one finger, and looked at her across the top of his reading spectacles. “What would you have me do, Vittoria?”

“Stop trading me for protection from them!”

“Stop shouting, please. The servants will hear. And what you’re saying is absurd. I’m not trading you.”

“The servants know how evil those men are!” she said in a slightly quieter voice. “Paolo sees it. Enrico sees it.”

“Enrico doesn’t understand what he sees. And Old Paolo is simpleminded, a man I should have sent away many years ago. I keep him on as an act of charity.”

“I won’t go there anymore. I refuse to go.”

“You refuse to go,” her father said, spluttering now, his face suddenly pinching up into a mask of barely contained fury. “Which means the officer will then come here, to this house, and find you anyway and no doubt torment us. Send his men to ruin the grapes, shoot holes in the kegs!”

“And the grapes and kegs are more important than me, than my body?!”