A Harvest of Secrets(58)
“Perhaps she’d be happier than I am!” I shouted back, which hurt him, of course, and was wrong. But it seemed that Vittoria’s movement toward adulthood brought into focus the crushed dreams in each of us, Umberto and I both, the betrayals, the distance, the deep ravines of dissatisfaction across which we could no longer really see or hear or speak kindly to each other.
Sister Gabriella said to me in one of our marvelous conversations that perhaps all the trouble in the world has, at its root, our insistence on denying others their full humanity. Surely the Germans are doing that with the Jews (what would they do to me if they knew I was part of a chain of Italians working to hide and save them?! If they knew about Eleonora! About the nuns!), but we all do that, albeit in smaller ways. We were raised, Umberto and I, to ignore the full humanity of the people who keep us alive. And it’s always seemed to me that he can’t even see the full humanity of our Enrico.
The people I’m involved with in Montepulciano—another secret; I hold so many now that at times it wearies me—see the workers and servants as human beings. Their urge for a new system is based on that, and I agree, of course. And yet their views are so rigid: all landowners bad, all peasants good. Father Xavier joined us the other week. I don’t know who invited him, and I don’t know what he thinks, because he said little and only listened. I confess to wondering for a moment if he might be some kind of spy—the Vatican made its sordid peace with Mussolini years ago. But perhaps his silence reflected only the difficulty of his position. On the one hand, the young radicals care for the peasant class as Christ certainly would have. On the other, they have little good to say about the pope or the Church, and most of them don’t believe in God.
If I live long enough and regain some of my lost strength, I’d like to invite Vittoria to one of these meetings. I think, for the most part, she’d approve. I hope she would. I so hope that she has the courage to lead her life more honestly and openly than I have.
Absorbed as she was in the pages, eager as she was to read on, Vittoria reached that short paragraph and had to close the book.
If they knew about Eleonora, her mother had written! What could that mean? Was Eleonora Jewish? Was her mother, her quiet, intellectual, flower-growing mother, involved in hiding Jews?!
And: the betrayals, the distance. What did that actually mean? Vittoria lowered her head and began, very quietly, to cry. There was so much she’d never know about her own mother, so many secrets hiding in the stone walls of this house. Part of her was afraid to read on, afraid of what she might discover there. In that beautiful handwriting her mother had written: I so hope she has the courage to lead her life more honestly and openly than I have. It was a kind of motherly lesson she was offering: Don’t make the kinds of choices I made, my daughter. Have courage.
Cinzia and the barn workers were gone. Tobias and his SS henchmen could return at any moment. The Americans were fighting up the peninsula—for the second time today she’d heard bombing in the distance, just as she closed her mother’s journal. She didn’t know where Carlo was, or even if he were still alive. The courage, she thought. The courage. She pushed back from the desk and sank to her knees and, leaning her forehead against the wood and clasping her hands together, prayed for her mother to send her a sign.
Thirty-Three
That night, after eating the supper Eleonora brought him, a delicious meal fit for the table in the manor house (a cut of pork stuffed with figs and wrapped in prosciutto, with rosemary potatoes and escarole), Paolo felt a wave of the most intense nervousness come over him. One of his teeth was loose, his face still sore. Tired from the day’s labor, he lay down for just a moment in the straw and, in spite of his worries, immediately fell asleep. He awoke to see a figure standing over him in the darkness, and realized that the figure was a man, and that the man had kicked the bottom of his right work boot to awaken him. For an instant, Paolo thought it was the German officer, but then he saw the enormous nose. He sat up.
“Time,” Antonio said.
In one hand he held a paper-wrapped package, the sight of which shoved Paolo back against a horrible memory.
“Yes, yes.” Paolo held an apology in his mouth—how could he have fallen asleep at such a time? And for hours, it seemed! He stood, brushed the straw carefully from his clothes, by habit, as if he were about to sit down to supper, or head off to Mass. At this late hour, the middle of the night, he was unused to being anywhere but in the bed in his upstairs room. The single exception had been the night he’d sneaked out, in the early hours, gone stealthily along the edges of the courtyard, and crawled on his back beneath the black Ford.
He’d been alert then, hyperalert, but now his mind felt dulled, as if thoughts were slogging through it in knee-deep mud.
Antonio handed him the package—like the last one, heavier than it looked. Terrified of dropping it, still half-buried in sleep, Paolo held the small bundle against his midsection with both hands and followed Eleonora’s lover out into the darkness and across the courtyard. It wasn’t until they reached the place where the courtyard narrowed onto a dirt road and headed into the trees that he saw the cream-colored Fiat there, leaning a bit to one side as if on a bad leg. This Antonio, this mysterious associate of Father Costantino, this frightening lover of the sweet Eleonora, had access to gasoline, to an automobile! He must have rich friends, or powerful friends, or friends who were thieves. The sight of the old car at the edge of the woods made Paolo’s hands begin to sweat. He and Antonio opened the doors, climbed in, and took their places—one of them, Paolo thought, a partisan, a soldier, young, strong, capable of finding an automobile and gasoline in wartime, and unworried, apparently, about driving a car along a lightless road with a bomb in the front seat.