A Harvest of Secrets(19)
The sight of that grave, which was just a berm of raised dirt marked by a cross fashioned from two branches of a fig tree lashed together, seemed to say everything that needed to be said about this war, and about war in general. The life of a good man had been erased from the earth far too soon. His parents back home in Naples—Pierluigi had been their only child—would be devastated. And for what? Because Il Duce’s lust for power had driven him to emulate Adolf Hitler, another maniac? Because Italians wanted to return to the supposed glory of Rome and boast of their greatness in the world? Repulsed by the politics, bitter at the waste, Carlo would kneel there in the dirt, with the sun casting the day’s first golden light upon the Sicilian hills, and he’d feel an urge to apologize to his late friend. Apologize for leading him out of the ditch on the hill above the Licata beach; apologize for surviving; apologize on behalf of the world’s rich and powerful, who never ended up in battle themselves, but seemed all too willing to send others off to die.
The daily climb to Pierluigi’s grave was part of his exercise regimen, part of his rehabilitation, mental and physical. It took Carlo two more weeks to recover his strength, and almost that long to come to terms with the fact that, for the rest of his life, he’d live with one eye, a scarred face, and dampened hearing in his left ear. Only after he’d asked her four times did Ariana agree to bring him a small handheld mirror. Carlo didn’t have the courage to lift away the bandage and look at what lay beneath it. But even with the white cloth in place, he could see how misshapen his face had become, the skin of his left cheek disfigured by a shiny scar. He looked like a killer now, someone you wouldn’t want to meet on a dark road at night. No wonder the children were fascinated and horrified! He wondered if Vittoria would even want to look at him again, never mind kiss him, make love with him, marry him and bear his children. At times he felt it was all a fantasy in any case, all a fantasy. The princess and the peasant. But he clung to it even so, to their mutual promise, to the memories of being with her, to the sense that, out of all the many places on this earth, the two of them had been set down on that same fertile piece of land, ten kilometers east of Montepulciano.
Though there were many mouths to feed, and though food was still in short supply, Miracola made him three small meals a day—a boiled egg from one of their hens, a cup of milk from their goats with a handful of walnuts from their own trees, a ripe apricot or apple or a bunch of grapes. There was no bread—not yet—and very little pasta, but every few days that passed seemed to bring a slight improvement to the life of the Sicilian countryside. The family cultivated a vegetable plot—zucchini, peppers, tomatoes—and Bruno’s fisherman friends would bring over an octopus, or a sea bream, and sometimes Miracola would place on the table a dish of steamed clams sprinkled with olive oil.
Soon, the family was inviting him into the house for meals, though Carlo kept the barn as his sleeping place. Night after night he was tormented by vivid dreams, as if the halving of his sight during the day had doubled his nighttime visions. Time and again in sleep he kissed and held Vittoria, made the familiar jokes with Enrico, felt himself working the vines, saw himself on Umberto SanAntonio’s property, beside Old Paolo, walking that lovely, undulating piece of land with its straight rows of grapes, and groves of olive and fruit and nut trees, the woods, the wheat and hay fields, the deep ravine on the far side where he’d once watched a pack of wolves tearing a wild piglet to pieces; the stone-and-stucco, tile-roofed main barn where some of the wine kegs were stored and the horses kept, and the tiny bedroom above—cold in winter, hot in summer—where he’d lived from the long-ago days when his mother was still alive.
Waking up to the reality of the morning was a torment.
Once he was able to, he ventured up the steeper hillside to where Bruno and Miracola owned a small plot planted in wine grapes. Zibibbo grapes they were—they gave a wine similar to Marsala, or could be made into grappa—and so poorly maintained it pained him to walk along the rows and study them. He began to make the trip up there as a ritual, every morning after his visit to Pierluigi’s grave, as if convincing himself he would get back to the vines at home, as if the sight of the bunches might hasten his healing.
One hot Sicilian morning he came upon Bruno between the rows, digging near the roots so the soil would catch more of the brief, infrequent afternoon rains. Carlo wondered if Bruno knew how to properly prune the plants, to encourage them to send their roots down deep for water, through layers of dirt and clay and all the various minerals there. That’s what gives wine its richness, Gennaro Asolutto had told him. The plant is reaching down to find the secret tastes buried there, the gifts of the earth. You want to push it down, not let it rise up. The grapes Carlo could see weren’t full-fleshed and formed into firm spheres like those at home, but smaller and narrower with speckled skins, the bunches themselves meager and pocked with empty places.
Bruno was a proud man, Carlo sensed that already. So he squatted beside him and talked about other things at first—the progress of the war (word had reached them that the Nazis had been chased from the entire island, that thousands of Italian soldiers had surrendered, and, most surprising of all, “maybe just a rumor,” Bruno said sadly, that Benito Mussolini had been deposed by the king and could not be found), the number and ages of his children (eight in all, Ariana the oldest), how many years he’d lived on that land (from the day of his birth, and his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather before him).