A Harvest of Secrets(2)
There was no radio in the barn, and neither he nor any of the other field-workers could read well enough to make sense of a newspaper. But the news reached them anyway, passing from one estate to the next, mouth to ear, servant to worker to servant. Paolo knew—everyone knew—that the Allies had been victorious in North Africa and were now on their way to Italy. Their arrival would surely mean that the German and Italian forces would be pushed up the peninsula. Eventually, the fighting would reach this place, north of Rome, east of Pisa, and then suffering would pour over their lives like spring floods over bottomland. Was one supposed to wait for that to happen? Do nothing and wait?
Breathing hard from the climb, sweating, praying, doing battle with his own fear, Old Paolo went quietly along the forest path until he reached a boulder, taller than a man, wider than the delivery truck was long, shaped like a huge table. L’altare, everyone called it. The altar. He leaned his shotgun against the stone and left it there, in order to seem as unthreatening as possible, and then, murmuring a last prayer, he took three more steps around the side of the boulder. There, as expected, stood a man he’d never seen before. The man was young, not in uniform, with an enormous beaked nose, dark-brown hair hanging down over his forehead, and an Italian army rifle in his hands. He was pointing the rifle directly at Paolo’s face, and Paolo stood still and felt a bit of urine squirt into his pants. “I am sent by the priest,” Paolo said. For a long minute the young man held the rifle that way, finger on the trigger, and then he slowly lowered it.
There was something in the young man’s eyes—a murderous iciness—that Paolo found alien and terrifying, as if it belonged to another world, a place of hatred. These are the kinds of people I’m involved with now, he thought. May the Lord protect me.
Three
From her place at the mahogany dining table, Vittoria SanAntonio watched one of the servants carry in a large platter of reginette. The long twirls of pasta touched with red sauce were her favorite dish, and as the girl—Eleonora was her name; she’d been with them just over a year—walked past to set the platter near the head of the table, Vittoria could smell the peppers and garlic. Arrabbiata, the sauce was called. The feminine adjective for “angry.” Arrabbiata.
Like the table at which she sat, the formal dining room was ridiculously large, with two serving girls in attendance (one of them did the cooking now that their longtime cook had been called to war). There were curtained windows that reached from the parquet floor to the gilded molding at the ceiling; a sparkling glass chandelier her father said had been in the family for six generations; a tablecloth and napkins of Como silk; eight mahogany chairs with velvet seat cushions; heavy silverware set just so; and a decanter of their own wine—last year’s vino nobile—on a sideboard near her father’s right hand. The flowers she’d picked the afternoon before sat on a marble windowsill like another spirit in the room. Part of her was grateful for the beauty and luxury, especially now, when so many others were suffering. But another part—when she met Eleonora’s eyes—felt dressed in finely tailored guilt. As if to intensify those emotions, the room echoed with absence. Her mother’s essence seemed to haunt the empty chair. Her beloved younger brother, Enrico—“damaged,” their father always called him, danneggiato—had been sent to play in the barn with the workers. Anything to keep him from embarrassing the perfect family in front of a guest.
And there was the other absence, as well, the secret one, the most painful. She lifted her eyes out the window, up along the vine-covered slope, as if she might see Carlo tending the grapes, as if he might straighten his back and turn toward the manor house, hoping to catch a glimpse of her; as if, long after darkness had fallen, she might slip out of the stone manor, hurry along the path to the smaller of the two barns, and meet him there behind the building for an hour of quiet lovemaking and the rare, rare joy—entirely absent from this house—of straightforward conversation.
“They say the Allies will try to land soon. Sicily or Sardinia, they say. Perhaps Apulia. No one knows where.”
The voice belonged to Massimo Brindisi, her father’s closest friend, and, as far as Vittoria was concerned, the most mysterious and puzzling man on earth. Massimo was her godfather, and for years during his frequent visits, he’d plied her with gifts and stared at her as if she were a painting in a museum. Love, lust, admiration—she couldn’t read his eyes, and she wondered, at moments, if he was biding his time, waiting for the right visit during which to ask her father for her hand. The night before, a new layer of confusion had been added to her impression of him. Very late, after Massimo and her father had emptied several bottles of the best recent vintage, someone had tapped on the door of her room, tentatively, as if checking to see if she were awake. When she climbed out of bed and opened it, Massimo stepped inside and swung the door most of the way closed behind him, then put his hands on her shoulders in a way that might have been the gesture of a beloved relative, or might have been something else. “You don’t know who I am, you don’t know,” he murmured. He didn’t force her, didn’t move his hands, didn’t try to kiss her or press against her, but she was half-asleep, and he was clearly drunk, in her room, that late, and—she regretted it now—she’d panicked and started screaming.
“Quiet, quiet, please quiet, Vittoria. It’s not what you think!” Massimo said, squeezing her shoulders a bit more tightly. But she screamed and yelled and even scratched at his cheeks and neck until he let go. By then, Eleonora was at the door, and Massimo was making excuses. “A nightmare,” he said, the words slurred. He seemed chastened. “My dear godchild was having a nightmare. I came to the rescue. Are you all right, my Vittoria? What was it? The war? The Germans? Of what were you dreaming, sweet girl?”