A Harvest of Secrets(14)

“It is our grapes and kegs that allow your body to be clothed, sheltered, and fed!”

“You can’t stop them?”

“Of course I can’t stop them! Nobody can stop them!” Her father looked away, drew and released a long breath, gathering himself, Vittoria thought, holding back a more serious eruption. He turned back to her and said, in a somewhat softer tone, “If you want to leave, for your safety, I can send you to Massimo. He has a beautiful second home above Lake Como and has always intended to leave it to you when he dies, as he’s promised you for years now. Your mother and I took you there three or four times when you were a girl, don’t you remember?”

Vittoria did remember, but she shook her head violently—no—one heavy tear flung to the side.

“You’ll be perfectly welcome there. You’ll be comfortable, and—”

“I don’t want to. Never. No. It will never happen.”

“This is precisely the problem,” her father said. “And has always been the problem, from the time you were a small child. Your wants are very narrow. This, not that. That, not this. Only this food for breakfast. Only these clothes for school. Only this hairstyle, no matter how impractical. You want the world to conform itself to your wishes. That never happens. One would think the premature loss of your mother would have shown you that.” He slipped a playing card into the book and set it on the table beside him, straightening it so that it sat perfectly parallel to the edge. “And in case you haven’t noticed, Massimo would marry you in an instant.”

“Never!”

“More narrow wishes. He’s a bit older, true, but he’d give you the life you’ve grown accustomed to, and more. When the war is over, you could travel the world. Have whatever you wanted.”

“I already have whatever I want, and what I want is to be able to choose the man I love, as you chose Mother.”

“And whom would you choose? What kind of man? Someone who can support you in all your thousands of narrow wants?”

Vittoria came within a second of telling him she’d already chosen, but she held the remark in her mouth and said, “I’d choose for love, as you did.”

“As I did, yes, but from among my own kind. Our own . . . stratum of society.”

“I don’t want to talk about this now, Father,” she said. “Your politics, your friends. Sometimes I think you’re more German than Italian.”

Her father’s lips stretched into a tight grin. Frightening, she thought; beneath the dignified mask he was a frightening man. “And sometimes,” he said coldly, “I think you’re more peasant than noble. Your mother had an exaggerated sympathy for the workers. You seem to have inherited that.”

She shook her head, long hair swinging, and stood up. “That’s not the issue now, Father. I’ve made my last trip to the city in that wagon, to that house. If I go again, I’ll take a pistol and shoot the German through the middle of his hideous face!”

She whirled around and was out and through the door before her father could speak again. Half blinded by tears, she ran down the curving marble stairway, tripped on the bottom step, fell forward, and let out a cry that echoed in the foyer. For several minutes she lay there, sobbing, arms spread out above her head as if in surrender. She sobbed small puddles on the tile, sobbed and wept and pounded the marble with one fist and eventually fell silent. There was no sound in the house beyond the ticking of the grandfather clock, another item her father claimed had been passed down for generations. What difference does it make? she thought. The grandfather clock and chandelier and silver cutlery and emerald-studded gold rings. What difference does any of it make?

After a time, she got up and sat back on her heels, staring at the framed photo of Mussolini on the far wall. Their Duce seemed to her at that moment to stand as a symbol for everything that was wrong in the world. The divisiveness, the violence, the mistreatment of women, the pitiful urge so many Italians seemed to have to idolize someone.

She wiped the tile dry with the bottom of her skirt, stood, and walked out into the starry night. Once she turned thirteen her father had ordered her to stay away from the barn—she’d loved the place with its rich smells and textures, enjoyed joking with the workers, and had been Carlo’s childhood playmate for as long as she could remember. Her mother, a lover of horses, had insisted that she learn to ride, and Paolo had even taught her to drive the wagon, sitting beside her at first, and then letting her sit alone on the bench with the slick reins in her hand. When her father forbade all that, there had been a terrible fight between her parents, shouting in the upstairs study, a slammed door, days of icy silence afterward. Her father’s remark, more peasant than noble, reminded her of that argument, which had caused a fissure to appear between different stages of her life, and, day by day, an entire cold ocean to form between her and Carlo. After that, years passed with them hardly speaking, as if they’d been made into enemies overnight, forced to look at each other not as friends and fellow humans but as members of different classes and nothing more. The princess and the servant.

The guilt of that, the frustration, had caused her to become physically ill, stomach upset, periodic headaches that chained her to her bed. Her friends—mostly girls from other estate-owning families that gathered for picnics on summer Saturdays, or after Mass at the cathedral—began to seem superficial and false, waiting only for a husband of means, an adulthood of luxury. Carlo avoided her, spending time with the older men, working the vines or the wheat, caring for the horses, never even turning his eyes toward the manor house. She imagined him meeting secretly with servants from nearby properties, girls of his own class, and finally, unable to bear it, she confided in her mother. They had made a retreat at the nunnery in San Vigliano and, halfway home, were walking their tired horses along an uphill stretch of road. “We’re both human beings, Mother. We’ve been friends our whole lives. Now, suddenly, I’m forbidden from speaking to Carlo. Father must have said something to him, as he did to me.”