A Harvest of Secrets(24)

But he kept repeating her name, kept walking. Vittoria.

As the ninth or tenth night fell—he’d lost count—Carlo realized he could go no farther without asking for help. North of Catania, on the outskirts of a small city—Acireale, a bullet-ridden metal sign said it was—he came upon a house that seemed undamaged and inhabited, and, after mouthing a prayer, he walked up and knocked on the door. A woman answered, stooped, gnarled hands, crooked nose, watery eyes. Half his height, she stood before him either unafraid or so accustomed to being terrorized that fear had lost its power over her. “Sì?” she said, as if, before him, scores of men had knocked, or simply broken in, taken what they wanted, and left. A stranger at her door, and yet her “Yes?” held no surprise in it at all.

“Could you give me a little food? I’ll work. I’ll help, but I—”

The woman reached out, took hold of him by the side of his shirt—a grandmotherly gesture—and pulled him inside. She sat him at a table in an unlit kitchen, fussed at the stove for a while, and lay a bowl of cooked lentils and a spoon in front of him. Then a glass of a pale wine, some kind of rosé. It took Carlo less than three minutes to clean the plate and empty the glass. The woman sat down wearily opposite him.

“Was the fighting here?” he asked.

She nodded.

“The Germans?”

“For a long time. And then the Americani for a short time. Gone now. To the mainland, people say. To Calabria. Now Sicily is left to stand up again, like a beaten child. On its own feet.”

“I can help you. I can work for a few hours. Do you have grapes?”

“I have a small garden,” the woman said. “They left it alone. My son is in Albania, I think. Or Russia. I don’t know why.”

Because of Il Duce and his insanity, Carlo almost said, but he bit down on the words. As was the case with Ariana’s parents and Umberto SanAntonio, there were still many Italians who worshipped Mussolini, in spite of the wreckage he’d brought them. It was unwise to insult him in front of a stranger. “I was wounded,” he said. “At Licata. Lost my eye.”

“Yes,” the woman said, without sympathy, as if, from her life, so much more than an eye had been lost. And then, “Have you heard the news?”

“I’ve been alone for more than a week. Walking. Sleeping in the hills.”

“He’s gone.”

“Who?”

“Il Duce.”

“I thought it was a rumor. Gone where?”

The woman lifted and dropped her bony shoulders. “No one knows. His own people, traitors, have sent him away. Kidnapped or killed him, no one knows. I pray for him every hour. If Il Duce comes back, we’ll win the war,” she said. “If not, we shall lose it, and starve.”

We’re starving now, Carlo nearly said. But he kept all expression from his face. What he wanted to say was: This is the man who has ruled our country for twenty-one years, who befriended Hitler, stripped the Jews of their jobs, sent his Blackshirts to torture anyone who opposed him; the man who brought the Germans here, who sent your son to Albania or Russia to die. And you pray for him?

“A good man, don’t you think so?”

Carlo hesitated a moment, then: “I don’t know him.”

The woman’s face underwent a sudden change, lips tightening, eyes narrowing. She watched him suspiciously, and for a moment Carlo thought she’d chase him out the door or call some local Blackshirt police chief to come drag him away. Mussolini was truly gone, apparently, and the war was gone, too—from this part of Italy, at least—but no one could say what the country would look like when the fighting was finished. Maybe Il Duce would reappear and take power again. Maybe the Blackshirts and Fascists would continue to dominate Italian life, painting their slogans on the walls and drumming their philosophy into schoolchildren. Or maybe, as Pierluigi had believed, things would be different.

“You can sleep here.” The woman gestured to a sofa in the small stone-walled room next to the kitchen. “I have a bathroom. I have food. You’re not a deserter?”

Carlo shook his head, pointed to his eye, but the woman’s wariness had been sparked to life and it lingered in the air between them like the smell of burning rubbish.

“They killed a young man in Catania yesterday,” she said proudly. “Beat him to death in the square, in front of his mother and sister. The man was a deserter. A traitor to his country.”

“I didn’t run. I fought, or would have fought. I was wounded on the first day of the invasion. My friend was killed. A family saved me.”

The woman kept nodding, but it seemed to Carlo that no amount of truth would sweep her suspicion aside. He wasn’t like her son, wasn’t fighting, didn’t adore Il Duce. Nothing else mattered.

She handed him a single sheet, and Carlo removed his boots, lay down on the couch, and rested, turning this way and that, clinging to old memories.

He and his mother had lived in a small room—just a corner of the barn loft walled off with wooden planks. They’d been sweating and mosquito-bitten in summer, shivering in winter. They had a rusty toilet downstairs for their needs, a spigot of cold water for washing, and they’d eaten the worst cuts of meat from the manor house kitchen, day-old bread, fruit and vegetables from their plot and from the fields, in season; pasta, polenta; old potatoes, onions, and turnips in the cold months.