A Harvest of Secrets(26)

He hurried away from the house, leaving the road after a few hundred meters for a dusty path that wound along through bushes, cacti, and stunted trees near the shoreline. By the time the sun rose, he was shivering and hungry, but he’d put five kilometers between himself and the old woman’s narrowed eyes.

Up along the coast he went, with the triangular bulk of Etna to his left, snow-topped even in the first part of September, and signs of war wherever he looked. Piers ruined, buildings without roofs, craters in the middle of the road, and charred military vehicles lining the shoulders like the droppings of the animal of war. The path merged with the road again, and a farmer with a horse-drawn wagon stopped and took him as far as Santa Teresa di Riva, telling him that, as they fled, the Germans had come through Taormina, raping and stealing, shooting men they thought should have been fighting for them. Then the Allies, racing through with jeeps and tanks, tall men, some with pale faces. “And some of them black!” he said, as if, dark-skinned himself, those men were the most surprising thing he’d seen in his long life.

“But now the war is over,” Carlo suggested.

“Sì, sì,” the man said. “For us, for the siciliani. But it has gone to Italy, the mainland. You’re going there to fight?”

“Yes,” Carlo lied. “I’m hoping to find my unit.”

“Keep your pistola ready then, young man. The war will find you as you go.”





Fifteen

Two days after the difficult conversation with her father, Vittoria saw Massimo Brindisi appear in the courtyard again, driving his black Ford automobile and wearing a light-gray summer suit, white silk shirt open at the neck. Brindisi and her father played a game of chess—the pieces made of brown-speckled and white-banded marble—drank glass after glass of wine out on the shaded stone patio, and took a long walk together in the summer twilight. Then she was summoned to a typically late dinner alfresco, on that same patio, with a sliver of a moon rising over the hills. Eleonora carried out to them heavy silver tureens of cold vegetable soup, then platters of beef with rosemary and potatoes, an escarole salad, nuts and chocolate cake for dessert. They were accompanying the meal with one of their finest vintages, a 1938 vino nobile. One bottle. A second. A third. Vittoria wasn’t accustomed to drinking that much, but the wine was so elegant, angels dancing on the tongue, and, she realized, as the meal went on, that she was using it to hold down the volcano of doubts bubbling up inside her.

“We eat almost as well as before the war,” Massimo said, flashing his smile at her and laughing his gentle laugh.

“While others starve,” she said.

“Who starves?” her father asked. “Not our help. Not anyone on this property!”

“People in the South, from what I hear.”

“Hear where?” her father wanted to know.

From Eleonora, she wanted to say. But she shrugged the question away, paused politely, did what she could to bury her anger, and inquired after Massimo’s work.

“Ah,” he said, a flicker of delighted surprise on his face. “Two of my factories make soap, as you perhaps know, and while ingredients aren’t so easy to come by these days—one must make one’s payments in the proper places—prices are high, and soap is always needed.”

“And the others?”

Massimo’s smile widened. All was forgiven, it seemed, at least from his side of the table. “They produce cloth for military uniforms. Leather for boots. Tires for jeeps. We have to watch continually for saboteurs.”

“So the war has been a bonus of sorts.”

“Of sorts, yes.” He fixed his eyes on her and said, with some irony, “I am doing my patriotic duty.”

“But many Italians are unhappy about the war,” she said.

It was as if she’d thrown a bucket of ice water on the faces of the two men. “Politics are complicated,” her father noted after a moment.

“Too complicated for women?”

“Sometimes, yes. In this case, complicated for everyone. We try to do our work, to make our contributions to this world. I with excellent wine, Massimo with other products. We keep whole families alive and fed, each of us, and for that, sometimes, we are demonized.”

“By whom?” Vittoria asked sweetly.

“The communists,” her father said without hesitation.

“The labor unions and socialists,” Massimo added, but it seemed to her suddenly that he, too, was acting. When he veered off into politics, something in his tone of voice sounded strained, half-serious, as if he were holding up a facade for the benefit of her father. The man who’d come to her room, drunk, late at night, had disappeared along with the scratch on his neck. He was sitting there, staring at her, talking about himself so happily on this beautiful evening, but different somehow, and somehow not quite genuine. A mystery in a fine silk shirt. It’s not what you think, he said on that night. You don’t know who I am. She watched him while pretending not to. Who was he, then? Loyal Fascist? Greedy businessman? Spy for one side or the other? Secret partigiano? And why had Paolo asked that he be invited back for a visit?

“And even,” her father said, “sometimes, the very people we feed turn against us.”

Vittoria asked for more wine. She sipped, avoided her father’s eyes, took small bites of the cake. She was caught by a sudden memory. Her mother at an upstairs window, looking out at the workers in the courtyard. They were bringing the horses inside during a storm of sleet and cold rain. How they live, her mother said quietly. Look at how we make them live.