A Harvest of Secrets(30)
Before darkness fell, before he accepted her kind offer and shaved and bathed, Carlo spent an hour in the vineyard, trimming, plucking, bringing back a bowl of purple grapes and explaining to the woman what she might do with the plants when the cold came.
Violeta shrugged, as if caring for the vines mattered little to her, and she wished him a restful night. Not long after he’d gone to sleep, she came into the room, partly clothed, shook him awake with one hand, and asked if she could get into the bed beside him. “Not to do anything,” she said. “You said you have a woman waiting for you at home, and I’m old and sad and the urge for lovemaking has been wrung out of me.” She was standing there, close beside the bed, in the darkness. Carlo could see her white undergarments and her hands clasping and unclasping in front of her. “I just . . . I’d just like to lie beside someone again for one night. Can you do that?”
He nodded, said a quiet, “Yes,” and Violeta climbed into the bed with him, her skin warm against his, a strand of her hair resting on his bare shoulder. She said not one word, just lay on her back at first, and then rolled over and leaned against him, weeping, tapping her forehead again and again against his collarbone as if nodding in prayer. “You’ve lost an eye,” she said, when the spasm of pain had left her, and she was lying still again. “I’ve lost a husband and perhaps also two sons and a daughter. For what? Me lo sai spiegare?” Can you explain it to me?
“I can’t.”
“But do you wonder? Do you think about it?” Her quiet words floated up and tapped against the stone ceiling.
“Yes. Every time a child looks at me as if I’m a monster. Every time a girl turns her face away. Every time I think about my friend Pierluigi and his family.”
“You’re walking from Sicily to Montepulciano. For love, you’re doing that. Love. The opposite of war.”
Violeta began to weep again, quietly. Carlo could feel her body shaking against his, and he wrapped an arm around her and held her against him until the crying stopped. “I know so many good people,” she said. “Simple, good people who only want to live and be left alone. Why is the world like this?”
He let the question echo in the dark room. In time, Violeta’s breathing changed and he felt her body relax into sleep. He lifted his arm gently away from her but lay awake for another hour. You have a good mind, Asolutto the old vinekeeper had said to him more than once. You’re not educated, but curious. A philosopher. The questions Violeta had asked—simple but unanswerable—swirled through Carlo’s thoughts. He wanted to understand why the God who made grapevines and clouds and the turning of day into night would allow His world to descend into the madness of war. Feeling the body beside him, its warmth and breath, he wanted more than anything to be lying beside Vittoria, to be able to discuss with her the great questions, the mysteries, the meaning and purpose of life. There had been nothing sexual in Violeta’s request, and he felt nothing sexual now, as if his urges, so long suppressed, could be reawakened only by one woman. He’d tell Vittoria about this strange, sad night, he knew that. And she would understand, he knew that, too.
Violeta left his bed before sunrise, and as first light angled into the room, Carlo lay there, awake again, thinking about the questions she’d asked. The war twisted morality into crooked shapes, made potential killers out of good men like him and Pierluigi, and turned women, crushed by grief, into people who’d grab at any pleasure, any scrap of what passed for companionship in the night. Why, as she said, did it happen?
In the kitchen, in the morning sunlight, Violeta made him coffee from chicory and, without looking at him, set the cup and a plate of grapes and a sliced apple on the table. Carlo told her he’d be leaving and felt that she was ashamed, not of sleeping next to a younger stranger, but of her own loneliness, the small puddle of emotion to which her life had been reduced. Without speaking, she wrapped a half dozen walnuts and two figs in a cloth bandanna, handed Carlo a bunch of grapes, embraced him for a long while, pressing her breasts against him, then released him and watched him go. “In Montalto, ask for Father Ascoltini,” she called, and he turned back and looked at her—silhouetted against the doorway—and raised an arm in thanks.
Nineteen
Paolo went through his days by habit, like a machine, a truck that had been started and put into gear for the thousandth time and was rolling blindly along the road. Marcellina told him that, while he was off with the wheat, the carabinieri had come to investigate, two policemen in uniform going into the manor house and spending an hour there with Vittoria and her father. A van from the police medical office followed an hour later. What remained of the body was put into a bag and taken away for burial. Two days passed. Eleonora told him that, ever since the carabinieri interviews, the Signore hadn’t gotten out of bed, was eating almost nothing, speaking to no one, staring up at the ceiling and mumbling to himself.
But, guilt feelings or no, fear or no, the work went on. Paolo and the others continued with the harvesting of the wheat, bringing it, wagonload after wagonload, to the second barn, where it would be stored until it could be taken to the mill. Although he suspected it was foolish, he held to the hope that there might be no consequences for the explosion. That it would be considered an accident, an error in the construction of the American automobile, a tragedy.
That fantasy evaporated at the end of the third workday. He returned from the fields to a scene from one of his nightmares: two German military vehicles—a jeep, and a railed, flatbed truck—coming to a stop in the dusty courtyard, men in uniform climbing out, shouting orders in what they thought was the Italian language, herding him and the other workers into the part of the barn where the horses were kept. Enrico, too, was caught up in it—he’d been grooming his beloved Antonina—and Paolo could see that the boy’s big shoulders were shaking in fear and that he was trying, without success, to speak. Faces buried in their mothers’ dresses, two of the smaller children had started to weep; all the others were pressed back against the wall. Paolo could feel the terror in his own belly and chest. How long would it take for the soldiers to decide to search the attic, find their three comrades, beat them to death, and then line up the families of the barn and shoot every child, woman, and man? As the foreman and one of the oldest, he’d be last in line, and have to watch the rest of them suffer, watch them die in terror, the children screaming, Marcellina’s eyes condemning him to an eternity of guilt and regret.