A Harvest of Secrets(75)
Eventually it was hunger that made him get to his feet and start down the hill. There might be food in the barn, surely there would be. Gingerly, watching the place to his left where the truck had disappeared, he went down past the vines, picking off a bunch as he walked and eating one succulent grape at a time. Standing in the smoky air of the courtyard, he noticed what seemed to be patches of dried blood in the dirt. No mule. The barns were empty—no delivery truck, no wagon, no horses. He went from room to room on the ground floor—nothing—then climbed the steps and found, in the workers’ kitchen, part of a stale loaf of bread and some prosciutto wrapped in paper. Dazed, caught by an almost unbearable sorrow, he took a glass, carried the food down to the keg room, and sat on a bale of hay eating the food, drinking wine from a barrel he’d never been allowed to sample, holding himself on the edge of tears. What was the point of living now? Where was he supposed to go? How was he supposed to eat? Stay there and live on grapes and vegetables and apples and wine? And what? Wait for the Nazis to find him, for the war to reach him?
When he’d finished the food, he wandered back and forth in the barn, slightly drunk, worn out, broken. He decided to go up to his room and see if he might have left some clean clothes there, at least, his almost-new work boots, a beautiful piece of polished white stone Vittoria had given him on his last birthday, too large to have carried off to war. He climbed the stairs, walked down the narrow corridor, the old boards squeaking beneath his sore feet. His door was open. He’d taken one step inside when he realized that something had been tacked to the door, at the height of his shoulder. He turned and saw a piece of paper there, folded in half. He tore it from the nail, unfolded it, and saw a strange sight. The paper looked as if it had been placed there recently, but on it was a sketch—done in haste, it seemed—not very different from a drawing Vittoria had made for him when they were small. He’d been eleven, she was eight. It was summer. The family had gone away for a month, and when they returned, she’d hurried over to the barn to see him, carrying a drawing she’d made of the house they’d stayed at near Lake Como. Her godfather’s house, she said it was. The four columns, the fountain out front, it looked like a palace. He recognized it immediately, but this was an adult’s work, not a child’s. He stared at it for a full minute before he understood that she must have left it there for him. Lake Como was hundreds of kilometers away, but that didn’t matter. Before leaving the property, Vittoria had left this sketch.
For him.
Forty-Seven
Vittoria didn’t ask why Paolo had to stop in the church. Confession, she supposed, strange as that seemed at such a moment. Cinzia had told her once that, among the people of the barn, Old Paolo had a reputation as the most religious. During the few minutes he and Enrico were inside, Vittoria sat very still on the wagon’s bench seat, her head tilted slightly downward, eyes open, rosary beads clutched in her left hand. She was no longer praying, no longer looking around to see if they were being chased by Nazi soldiers. She felt as though an enormous church bell were ringing inside her, shaking every organ and bone the way the cathedral bell in Montepulciano made the ancient pews tremble and caused the huge hanging lamps to sway slightly above their heads. As a girl, she’d been terrified that the oblong metal-and-glass lamps would come crashing down on them, and her mother would always rest a hand on Vittoria’s leg when the bells were rung.
What she’d give now to feel that touch, to feel Carlo’s. The incredible fact that Paolo had revealed to her an hour earlier seemed to be staring back at her, a pair of eyes, watching, waiting, filled with a pure, steely truth. A surprise, yes, but wrapped around the unsurprising. Behind those eyes, surrounding that incredible fact, the horrors of the day rang again and again inside her—violence was its own music: loud, discordant, ugly. She thought she heard two or three sharp reports from inside the church, like sticks being snapped. She looked up: no movement there, no other sounds, but small waves of fear were running across her skin. She thought of what Carlo’s existence must be like, with the constant threat of death and injury, and she wondered if Paolo had gone into the church to ask for news of him. To see if the priest—what was his name? Costantino?—might have heard something.
After a short time, Paolo and Enrico stepped out into the daylight, hurrying it seemed. The pace of their movements threw more fuel on the embers of anxiety inside her. Enrico jumped up into the seat. Paolo untied the wagon, climbed up more slowly, took hold of the reins in both hands, and led Ottavio away from the church. Out through the north end of the town they went, then onto a quiet farm road, two dirt tracks with a strip of grass between them.
They rode until dusk, watered Ottavio in a stream, fed him a few handfuls of hay, ate something themselves, then pushed on in near-darkness. Toward Arezzo, her brother climbed into the back and fell asleep, but Vittoria didn’t move to her right, away from Paolo. She sneaked a glance at his profile. There was a quarter moon, and in its light she watched him for a moment, studied his workman’s face, his rough hands, and struggled and struggled to fully believe what she now knew must be true. She felt words in her mouth, but held them there. Ottavio’s hooves clopped a quiet rhythm. The wagon shifted and bounced, wheels squeaking too loudly. The cool darkness, filled with terrors, secrets, and hopes, brushed against her skin, and at last she managed to speak. “All these years,” she said. And then, after a long, slow inhalation, “All these years, after you saw my face, you had to live with what you knew. You couldn’t speak of it. How terrible that must have been.”