A Harvest of Secrets(23)

“I was too tired. I tried to throw—”

“Can any of the women drive the wagon?”

“Yes, all of them.”

“Can Vittoria, Umberto’s daughter?”

“Since she was a girl. I myself taught her. But someone else should go—”

“No, no. If she’s stopped, she can say she’s a SanAntonio and they’ll leave her alone. If it’s someone else, they’ll search the wagon. Has she ever been to the nuns in San Vigliano?”

“Yes, with her mother, but long ago.”

“Then have her take the wagon and make a delivery to them. A case, two cases, five cases of wine, it doesn’t matter. Make sure she goes along the Zanita Road, understand? It’s safer.”

“The Zanita Road. I understand.”

“Find a way to hide the men in the bed of the wagon and send them to the nuns with Umberto’s daughter, and I’ll figure out what to do from there. The Nazis have left the nuns alone so far. Even if they see the wagon, they won’t follow it through the gate.”

“No men can go through it.”

“Only the sisters’ priest and confessor,” Father Costantino said. Almost a joke, Paolo thought, judging from the tone. And at such a time. “Hide them there, and I’ll find a way to help them.”

“A sin, wasn’t it, what I did? And what I’m going to do?”

“Yes, yes, you’re a terrible man, Paolo. Now go. Go with God.”

Father Costantino and his silent companion disappeared into the darkness. Paolo tucked the package carefully against his side, started to whisper a grazie, changed his mind, and turned back toward the barn. He was caught already in another swirling current of doubt, hoping the last part of the conversation had been Father Costantino’s idea of a joke. A second joke. The priest was young, new to the area, a strange figure in so many ways. Who could tell about his sense of humor? You’re a terrible man, Paolo, he’d said. What if it was true? And what if Vittoria was caught on the Zanita Road and killed because he’d let the Germans stay in their barn? How would he live with himself if such a thing happened? How was he going to live with himself in any case?





Fourteen

On the morning—a burning, late-August day—when Carlo left the Sicilian family that had nursed him back to life, Bruno crushed his hand in a goodbye grip but couldn’t meet his eyes; the young children crowded sadly around as if at a burial, reaching out to touch the one-eyed northerner, clamoring, prancing about, trying to convince him to stay; Miracola handed him a small cardboard box holding matches, and a burlap sack filled with food; and Ariana tenderly removed the bandage over his eye and replaced it with a black patch she’d sewn by hand. Her lips were trembling. Because Carlo asked her to, twice, she walked with him for a quarter of an hour, as far as the dirt road that ran not far beyond the edge of their property.

Caught between dreams, Carlo turned and stood facing her, then leaned forward and touched his lips gently to hers. When he leaned back, she had her fingers to her lips, feeling them lightly, as if they’d been electrified. “You are beautiful,” he said. “I will remember you always.” He watched her eyes fill with a silvery flood, looked at her face a last time, waited for her to speak, and then, when he couldn’t bear the moment any longer, he turned and walked off, listening to her weep and forcing himself not to look back. Vittoria, Vittoria, Vittoria, he kept saying to himself, a prayer for courage.

Up through the southeastern quadrant of the island he went, sack over his shoulder, army pistol on one hip, combat knife on the other, walking twelve and fifteen and sometimes twenty kilometers a day in the heat.

Miracola had given him a dented tin cup, which he refilled at roadside spigots and from the frail summer streams that cut through the Sicilian countryside. He slept beneath pine trees, washed himself in a desolate stretch of the Gornalunga River, lived at first on the food the family had given him, and then on pieces of too-ripe fruit he found in the dirt of abandoned orchards. He had six rounds in his pistol, and perhaps it still worked, but, though he searched and searched, he saw nothing living that might be shot and eaten. Not a capriolo or a hare, not so much as a single pheasant or quail. The war and the scorching Sicilian summer seemed to have stripped all life from the landscape.

By the time he reached the outskirts of Catania, he was starving and exhausted. He’d been walking for days through mostly empty interior countryside, a landscape little touched by the fighting. But now, on both sides of the road close to the big city, he came upon the scars of war: chassis of burned-out German army vehicles; stone houses broken in half by bombs or tank shells; an American helmet stained with blood; the half-rotted carcass of a mule that had been blown up and left in the scorching sun. Here and there he passed old men scraping the parched earth of garden plots, women hanging clothes on a line, kids playing in the dust. He waved or nodded to them, but even the bravest ones eyed him warily, an armed stranger with a black patch over one eye, dirty, tired, shuffling along, wearing on his broken face an uneven week-old beard.

It seemed to him that he was seeing Italy without its clothing, naked and crude, stripped of niceties. In the North, “Sicily” and “The South” had always been synonyms for poverty and hopelessness. That made sense to him now: everything he could see bore the mark of generations of want. The words of Pierluigi kept coming back to him. When the war is finished, his friend had said more than once, we will change the way we live. You’ll see. The poor won’t be so poor. The rich won’t be so rich. You’ll see. What Carlo saw was that they had each been clinging to a dream intended to get them through to the end of the fighting. Pierluigi was imagining an Italy of fairness and justice, free of want, some heaven of shared labor and shared luxury, as if, once the country was finished with war, the nobles were going to be so grateful to the soldiers that they’d voluntarily portion off pieces of their huge estates and give them away. And it was the same for him: a different dream, but with the same purpose. Where were he and Vittoria going to live? In the manor house? The barn? On their own piece of property at the edge of the vineyard? Did she ever wonder about these things?