A Harvest of Secrets(57)

A freight train, six or eight blood-colored cars behind a huffing locomotive, sat before them on the tracks, and, studying it with a tired eye, Carlo imagined the endless ride north into Germany, all the things that could happen to him there, all the maybes that had to turn into facts in order for him to even see Vittoria again, never mind make a life with her. The last of his hopes seemed to break apart then; he could feel himself releasing them. It was best to live in the moment, try to survive, not torment himself. I had to let go of that love, Paolo had said to him once, as they walked back from the Gracciano festival where they’d shared a couple of bottles of wine. I had to turn my eyes from it. Carlo hadn’t asked for details, but now he felt that he understood.

The soldiers marched them down to the next-to-last car and pushed them inside, into a crowd of shadowy figures, sweaty men, like animals being taken to slaughter. The car smelled horribly of urine. The door was rolled closed, and clicked loudly, and they were encased in complete darkness. Carlo and Carmine managed to find a piece of dry floor, and they sat there with their backs against the wall, listening to murmured conversation in the language of exhaustion going on around them. There was a brief wait, then the train whistle sounded up ahead, someone in the group burped, someone spat, someone sneezed. For a moment it reminded Carlo of the barracks at night—snores and grunts and burps and whispers—and the feeling of being sent off into a deadly future. There was a clanging yank, the car jerked forward, tilting them sideways, and they were rolling north.





Thirty-Two

Vittoria sat at the desk where she liked to draw, resting both hands on her mother’s unopened journal and watching dusk throw a blanket of gray over the property. For the tenth time in the last few hours she sorted through the conversation with Sister Gabriella. What a strange, truncated encounter that had been! She wondered if somehow the mother superior had sensed the sins—the sexual sins—of the young woman sitting opposite her and had been either so revolted or so terrified that she’d chased her out of the office like a demonic spirit.

Or if it was something else. A tainted spiritual inheritance from her father. An evil inside her that was visible only to a woman of God.

Vittoria lingered over the memory of those “sins” for a few minutes, almost feeling again the soft, cool grass beneath her bare body, Carlo holding some of his weight just above her, every part of her alive and singing, the need to be silent battling with the urge to cry out. Afterward, the sense of complete ease in her limbs, in her spirit, the sense of him lying against her, breathing with her. What a gift, Carlo had said to her. What a gift you are.

She shook her head gently, setting the memory aside as if it were too painful to hold. She removed the pistol from her dress pocket and slid it carefully to the top of the desk, still within reach. She took a long, slow breath, whispered a prayer, and opened her mother’s dusty diary to its first page. The handwriting immediately brought tears to her eyes—so elegant, all swirls and curlicues and unique s’s. She remembered having an argument with the nuns in her fourth year at school, insisting that the way she wrote her s, with a little twisted squiggle at the top, had to be correct because it was the way her mother wrote it. It took Vittoria less than a page to realize that the book she held in her hands wasn’t really a diary at all—not a record of her days, but more like a collection of musings. Her mother setting down her thoughts in ink on parchment, as if to see them more clearly and enable herself to penetrate life’s mysteries.



I look back on the wondrous childhood I had, running across the fields of my parents’ estate, riding horses, swimming in the river, making trips to Milan and Venice and Rome and Paris, and I wonder why I wasn’t able to pass on a life as enjoyable to my own daughter and son. I suppose the political surroundings (and now, of course, the war) made things more difficult. But there’s more to it than that. My choice of a husband, my evolving feelings of guilt—or, at least, discomfort—with our great wealth. The condition of my lovely Enrico. Over time, an enormous distance swelled between the life I imagined when Umberto first took me to this place as his young wife, and the life I’ve actually lived here.

I can sense now, and Dr. DeMarco confirms it (though I can’t yet bear to burden Vittoria with the news) that I’m moving—too soon!—into the last stage of my time on earth. These are my last few months, perhaps my last few weeks. I wonder at times if, via some evil magic, the strains and dissatisfactions of my days here have broken this body, the way the strain of overwork can cause a mare to sicken and die.

I have so much, and yet, so many regrets. It’s almost the opposite of the workers’ lives—or the way I imagine them to be. They have so little. They exist in a cage of blunted dreams, fed scraps of pleasure. And if they try to break out of that cage, what dreams they have are soon crushed beneath the wheels of the great societal machinery that has given me the enormous house in which I sit and write this.

And yet, despite their limited lives, one hears them singing as they work the vines and fields, and laughing in the barn in the evenings. No wonder Vittoria enjoyed spending time there with them, until Umberto forbade it. What a row he and I had over that issue! “You don’t know the men of the barn like I do!” he shouted—such a strange irony there, for me. “To them, the sight of a girl like Vittoria is like the sight of an apple to a hungry horse! Would you want her to have one of them as a husband? To bear his child?”