A Harvest of Secrets(38)
The ride would be short—less than an hour. She could have tea with the nuns, spend a night with them in prayer. She had Enrico to care for; the Good Lord would never let her be taken from him. And there had been a look in Paolo’s eyes when she walked into the barn. Something different there. As if he were guilty at asking her, but also secretly proud that she’d agreed. As if they were connected in some new way. There had even been a hasty sign of the cross offered from Marcellina, a woman who’d always seemed to dislike her.
Caught in the hypnosis, lost in her dream, Vittoria didn’t hear the police car until she’d turned away from the river and crested the last hill. The vehicle was slipping along, struggling up the muddy slope toward her, and the road was so narrow she had to pull to the side to let it pass. But, instead of going by, the car stopped, very close beside the wagon. A mustachioed man in uniform at the wheel. Another man beside him. The driver rolled down the window. “Going where, beautiful woman?” he asked. Without waiting for an answer, he opened his door as far as it would go, barely squeezed his big belly out, and stood there with rain plastering the hair to his head. He reached out to keep his balance and placed one hand on the wagon, close beside her left ankle.
“Delivering my father’s wine to the nuns.”
“Your father?”
“Umberto SanAntonio.”
“A great man!” The policeman moved his hand a bit farther from her ankle, ran his eyes over the tarpaulin, seemed about to inquire further. Before he could say anything else, Vittoria reached down beside her and handed him first one bottle, then another. “I’m sure he’d want you to have these. As thanks for your important work.”
The man’s cheeks were soaked in raindrops. The ends of the wet mustache squeezed upward when he smiled. “This wine is famous,” he said, holding a bottle in each hand and admiring the label. “Your father must be a genius.”
“He is,” she said. “Yes. A remarkable man.”
“Why doesn’t he have one of his workers make the delivery? Why, on such a day, would he permit his beautiful daughter—”
“Because I’m going to the nuns. I’m going to make a retreat there. No men are allowed inside the walls.”
The policeman nodded somberly, glanced at the tarpaulin again. Vittoria kept her eyes on him until he looked back at her. “You’ll be all right, going by yourself? You won’t need us to accompany you?”
“Thank you,” she said. “I know the way. I went many times as a girl. And it’s very close now.”
For just a moment, the officer seemed to suspect something. He squinted at her, shifted his eyes again to the strange arrangement in the wagon’s bed. The puddled tarpaulin. Part of a hay bale sticking out.
“Really, I must go, Major.”
“Yes, yes. I’m just a lieutenant, but yes. Thank you, Signorina SanAntonio. Go with God. Regards to your famous father. And everyone here still mourns your beautiful mother. We’ll enjoy the wine, thank you!”
Another minute and she was alone again, wondering how much the German deserters had heard, how much they’d understood, what the Italians would have done with them if they’d been discovered. Turned them in to the local SS, no doubt, because those dozen or so men in the house in Montepulciano had terrorized everyone within an hour’s ride in every direction, and because, most likely, the police were worshippers of their Duce, and perhaps of the madman, Hitler, as well. The old societal order, a severe and muscular manliness, the imaginary greatness of Italy—those were the guiding principles of their belief system, and those principles overwhelmed any human compassion, any at all. The fact that Mussolini had disappeared wouldn’t matter to these men. He was a god, a Fascist icon, and if he sided with the Nazis, then so would they . . . until the end. The deserters would have been dragged from the wagon, driven to Montepulciano, beaten, tortured, and she and Paolo and the others the same. Tortured in hideous ways, then shot.
All along a slippery downhill stretch, and then onto a two-track path across open fields—she couldn’t stop imagining it, couldn’t stop thinking about what might happen to her when the Nazi captain returned, as he’d promised. The pistol lay carefully covered at her feet, and she realized how foolish it was to put any faith there. One small weapon she barely knew how to use, a few bullets, against an army of men trained to torment.
Another half kilometer, and behind sheets of driving rain the nunnery came into view, a plain, three-story, white-stucco building with crosses at each end, surrounded by gardens that fed the nuns; the gardens, in turn, were surrounded by high stone walls that kept the women from having any contact—even visual contact—with the people of the outside world. Vittoria knew that once a week the local priest went there to hear confession and say Mass, and the rest of the time the nuns lived behind those walls with very little contact with the outside world, eating simple meals, doing manual labor, waking early, praying, having no fantasies of a lover returning from battle, no dreams of freedom, no thoughts of an elegant dish of reginette enjoyed on a stone patio with a glorious bottle of wine. Never a pair of earrings, a bracelet, a new skirt or dress or blouse. Never a trip to the cathedrals of Rome or the palazzo-lined canals of Venice. Her mother had taken her here as a thirteen-year-old girl—they’d made a two-day retreat together before Easter that year, taken Communion kneeling side by side in the chapel, hands clasped, shoulders touching—and, in her teenage certainty, Vittoria had left the convent thinking it was a terrible way to live, that it was a sin to turn your back on all the beautiful things life could offer, a kind of selfishness. Now, it seemed, the coin had been flipped over. She drew up to the walls and felt she was looking through the bars of the gate from a kind of hell to a kind of heaven, a peaceful place, safe, unbothered. No partisans here, no heroism, no interrogations by lewd German officers.