A Harvest of Secrets(60)

For a few seconds he considered jumping out of the moving car and running away. But where? Into the trees? And how was an old man going to outrun someone like this Antonio next to him? Paolo kept his eyes forward, fingers splayed on the tops of his thighs, package held between his wrists, and he waited as long as he could before saying, “If you’re going to kill me, kill me now. Let me pray, and kill me while I’m praying. I won’t fight with you.”

He risked a look sideways, saw the man’s huge nose, a dark blade, heard a nasty one-note laugh. Then nothing.

The motor muttered and skipped, the car splashed and skittered from one side of the road to the other. Antonio peered through the windshield as if searching there for the expected firing squad that would help him with his evil errand. Paolo realized that the tiredness in his limbs and the murkiness in his thoughts had disappeared, replaced by a strange burst of energy, as if he were required to remain absolutely alert now in order to have any chance at all of staying alive. He waited another minute, trying to hold it back, and then a river of words rushed out of him. “I understand nothing,” he admitted helplessly. “Father Costantino said there would be a train carrying Italians to the camps. Italian Jews. And that I was supposed to place this terrible thing”—he gestured to the package on his lap—“at a certain place, and send the train off the tracks so the people could be rescued. But it made no sense to me even then. There’s a river there, and steep banks. How would I save the Italians by sending the train into the river? And if the Nazis driving the train and guarding the Italians survived, how would they let anyone go? How would I fight them with no weapon? How would the Italian prisoners fight them? With their bare hands? And why am I the one who has to use the explosives, when you could do it, anyone could do it? Why was I the one who had to put the bomb under the American car? Why was Vittoria the one who had to take the German deserters to the nuns? Why are she and I being put in danger this way?”

Silence.

In all his decades of spending time around working people, Paolo had known many men who spoke only rarely—Gennaro Asolutto was a perfect example. But, so far at least, this Antonio seemed like the most tight-lipped of them all, the king of silence, as if words had to climb an icy mountain path in order to reach his mouth, and then slip out between his lips one at a time. Paolo turned to look at him again. Nothing. “Explain to me what you know,” he said at last. “Or I’ll open the door and jump out and you can shoot me if you want to shoot me.”

Antonio grunted skeptically. “First, tell me,” he said, and then there was another dark stretch with no sound in it beyond the slip and slop and bump of the tires and the irregular struggles of the Fiat’s old motor. “Did you do something to your Signore? Did you steal from him? Cheat him on the weights when you took the olives to the mill the way all the fattori do?”

“I’m not a fattore. We don’t have that system on our vineyard. The Signore’s father changed it long ago. We have a wine boss—Carlo now—and a foreman—me—that’s all. And no, no, no, never! I never cheated!” Paolo shouted at the windshield. “I never did anything wrong to him!”

So the Signore was the one who suspected him, who’d decided he should be killed! The word “wrong”—scorretto—echoed in the small car. “I’m sixty-four years old! I lived on this vineyard all that time! Sixty-four years I worked here. Every day but Sunday. I never stole one bunch of grapes, one bottle of wine, one ax, one hammer. Nothing. Never. I never cheated anyone in my life! Why do you even ask me? Does he speak badly of me? Has Eleonora heard him curse me?”

Another grunt. Antonio retreated into his silence and wrestled with the wheel.

But then, in the moonlit darkness, with the seat of the car shifting and bumping beneath him, Paolo understood that Antonio’s remark—Did you do something to your Signore?—had been not merely a question, but an answer: he began to suspect that what he had done to his Signore, in some ways the worst thing one man could do to another, might very well be root of the harvest of troubles he was reaping now. Depending on what the Signore knew of the past, and how he had come to know it, the man who controlled Paolo’s life might have been nurturing a ferocious bitterness inside himself all these many years, biding his time, planning a complicated revenge.

Once that understanding struck him, layer upon layer of lie and half truth, years of the most terrible, impossible, agonizing pretense began falling away from him like scales of diseased skin. After a few minutes he felt as though there were no clothes on him at all, no skin; his flesh was raw. The touch of the cool night air was like the cut of a blade. The war, the secret work, the Nazi officer tormenting Vittoria, the priest with his odd, superior smiles, the murder of the Signore’s friend, the Nazi slapping his face and putting the gun to his head, the killing of the horse, the screams and weeping, Enrico’s misery, the tears of anger on Marcellina’s face as she broke open a thousand years of obedience and subservience—all of it had scraped from him every last bit of pretense, everything that was less than perfectly true.

Antonio held to his silence, and that, too, was like a sharp blade on flesh, scraping, scraping, ripping the pretense away, exposing the raw truth. “Io,” Paolo managed to say into the terrible silence. I. And then, though he tried to hold them back, something in the middle of him pushed hard against the memories buried there. His mouth opened, and no flex of muscles or act of will could close it again. “I . . . with the Signora, Umberto’s wife . . . alcune volte . . . A few times. Many years ago. We were still young. She and I in the field . . . several times. She was unhappy, and I thought . . . and we . . . And then we stopped, we had to stop. She had to make us stop.”