A Harvest of Secrets(29)
Now the protection was gone. The guarantee of a comfortable tomorrow—of any tomorrow—was gone. She felt the rawness of being alive, the icy reality of evil, true evil. Of sin. Her own and others’.
She felt a fresh wave of remorse, a putrid wash of bitterness tinged with a feeling about Old Paolo that was a mix of puzzlement and anger: she’d clearly helped him to murder her own godfather! She tried to ease the regret by wondering what secret crimes Massimo Brindisi must have committed in order for the partisans to have imposed a death sentence on him. His factories made clothes for Mussolini’s army, tires for its jeeps. But, unless Paolo and the partisans were grievously mistaken, there must have been more. Her godfather, her father’s closest friend, a man who’d been so kind to her at times, who had loved her mother, must have been deeply involved with the Nazis; otherwise, why would the partisans have decided to kill him?
Eighteen
A fisherman, steering a patched and rusty boat with three worm-baited lines over the side and torn nets hanging from the foremast, agreed to ferry Carlo across the Strait of Messina to the Italian mainland without asking for payment of any kind. They bounced along on a choppy sea, past the hulls of sunken German naval ships and as far as a half-broken pier on the mainland at Reggio Calabria. It seemed to Carlo that, among the many other riches that had been lost—the abundance and enjoyment of food, even for poor people like himself; the elaborate festivals in which every man, woman, and child participated—the war had stripped Italians of the pleasure they took in language. So much lay below the surface now, unspoken, as if the enormity of the suffering caused by decades of fascism, the Allied bombing raids, the German occupation, and now the actual fighting on Italian soil, had rendered words so insufficient that people no longer bothered to use them as they had in the past, freely, creatively, joyfully. Everyone had been made wary—of the Germans, the OVRA, the Blackshirts, the Allied bombing raids, of each other’s political views, of the cruel hand of fate. In the past, he and the boat owner might have enjoyed a leisurely conversation, asked about each other’s lives, talked about love, work, food. From the least to the most educated, every Italian loved those kinds of impromptu encounters. Now, instead of engaging in a lively conversation, they sailed along in silence. At the pier, with the steep hills near the shoreline hovering over them, he thanked the fisherman with a nod. The man nodded in return, left him, then pointed his boat out to sea again, probing the invisible underwater world for something to sell, or eat.
As the days passed, Carlo pushed himself north through Calabria on tired legs, caught rides on farmers’ carts, and, once, in an American military truck, though he and the driver couldn’t understand more than a few words the other was saying. To his right, east, as the truck bounced along the rutted roads, the peaks of the Apennines rose like a ragged line of gray-blue sentries, beautiful and still and unfazed by the wars they’d seen, the centuries of occupation. To his left he caught glimpses of a sparkling sea. A day later, walking again, he was able to shoot a rabbit with one of the precious bullets left in his pistol, butcher it and cook it over a fire (started, gratefully, with one of the matches Ariana’s mother, Miracola, had thought to give him) in a grove of olive trees somewhere in the long toe of the boot, and it was as glorious as any Easter feast at the Vineyard SanAntonio. He sucked the bones clean of every last morsel of meat.
From time to time he’d spy what he assumed to be Allied planes high overhead, but, though the wounds of war grew more apparent by the day—freshly dug graves with makeshift crosses, abandoned German and American tanks burned black, cisterns with fresh water stains below bullet holes—he had not yet drawn close enough to hear the sounds of conflict.
South of Sambiase, he walked along the edge of a small vineyard, the vines here better kept than Bruno and Miracola’s, yet still nothing like the prized and vibrant plants he’d nurtured from before he was old enough to shave. They made him think, for the thousandth time, of home, of Vittoria’s face, of all the taken-for-granted joys of peacetime.
In spite of the way he and his mother had been made to live, Carlo felt a bond to the estate, and indebted to its owner. Umberto hadn’t thrown him out on the street to starve, as he might have done all those years ago when he was orphaned. And then there was also Vittoria’s younger brother, Enrico—body of a fifteen-year-old, mind of a small child. Enrico adored him, Carlo knew that. And he supposed that, even if he arrived back at the vineyard and Vittoria had married the son of some nearby landowner and gone to live on his estate, Carlo would likely remain, keeping Enrico company, pruning grapes and making wine for the rest of his days, like Gennaro Asolutto before him, living above the barn, moving into a lonely old age, teaching some younger worker what he himself had been taught, someone who loved the grapes as he did, who felt the life in them, the gift of them, who understood that wine, consecrated or not, was God’s blood.
Not far beyond Sambiase, when Carlo came upon another vineyard, with a stone farmhouse beyond, it reminded him so much of the SanAntonio property that he almost believed he would see Vittoria standing in the doorway.
He knocked, two hours before dusk, and a woman in a stained apron opened the door for him and invited him inside. Violeta, she said her name was, a woman of early middle age, plump even in these difficult times, with black hair touched with the first strands of gray. She asked Carlo where he had come from and where he was going, then prepared a simple meal—peas and olive oil with a few anchovies mixed in, and set it on the table. “My husband is gone,” she said to him. Unlike the fisherman, she seemed not to have lost the love of language. “Killed in Russia. My sons, also gone there. Our daughter is married to a Milanese, and I’ve barely heard from her since not long after the war started. One letter, ‘A lot of bombing here, Mother,’ she wrote, and then silence. You can cut your beard with my scissors and shave with my husband’s razor. And you look like you haven’t slept in a bed in a long time. Well, you can have my sons’ room. We never use it now. You can stay as long as you like. It’s safe here. The trouble is north of us now. We live in the ruins.”