A Harvest of Secrets(8)

During the second half of the Mass—the Consecration and Communion—he wrestled with the idea, praying silently, reminding himself to be humble, to trust. But the doubts persisted, and around them swirled a cloud of confusion that had enveloped him since sunrise. The Gospel was one thing: important, but abstract. Words from two thousand years ago. The early-morning conversation behind the boulder, so real and recent, weighed on him more heavily. He could see and hear the icy-eyed, beak-nosed young man telling him what the next assignment would be and how it would be carried out. It didn’t feel to Paolo like a Christian deed, and, looking at the crucifix above the altar, he couldn’t reconcile it with his faith.

After the Mass, while the others went out into the sunlight and chatted with friends from nearby estates, Paolo knelt in prayer for a few minutes, and then, when the confusion wouldn’t release its grip, he went and found Father Costantino in the small back room.

“You have the shadow of trouble on your face, Old Paolo,” the priest said. He seemed, almost, to be joking, even mocking. He was seated against one wall on an unpainted, backless bench and was taking off the gold-edged stole, folding it, setting it aside. The priest had come to them only a year ago, just at the time of the Signora’s illness, and no one could understand why a man of such spiritual achievement, a Milanese intellectual, would be assigned to a workers’ church in a poor village. Was it some kind of papal punishment? Like all the others, Paolo had been captivated from the first week by the man’s charisma and intelligence, his humor, his commentary on the Gospels and his firmness in the confessional. And then, this captivation—it was almost worship—had carried them into other conversations, and the conversations had taken a surprising turn, and led to the priest recruiting Paolo for what he called “God’s work. Fighting against the Nazi demons.” Small errands, they’d been, until today: carrying a note to a certain person when he made his deliveries; reporting back to the priest on the amount of hunger and unrest in the big cities; counting the number of vehicles on the road to Pisa or Florence or Rome; describing to him the train routes nearby.

Now, it seemed, now he was being led into another realm, a darker room in that secret house. He stood uneasily in the doorway, facing the priest, unable to speak. He thought of beginning with questions about the Gospel reading, but changed his mind—that would be dishonest—and so he simply stood there, mute, studying the priest’s face—the dark stubble, the dark eyes, the dark aura that seemed to encircle him. From what Paolo understood, there was a whole network of resistance fighters, and it was Father Costantino who gave orders to the beak-nosed young man, but perhaps it was the other way around. In any case, he was sure the priest must know about the assignment. “It seems a sin, Father, what I have been asked to do,” Paolo said after a moment.

Father Costantino studied him, then reached down to untie his polished black shoes. “It is a sin,” he said, and with those words Paolo felt as if he’d been pushed back hard against the wall. He started to say something more, but Father Costantino raised a hand, smiled, looked up. For a moment, one terrible second, the smile seemed almost evil. “But,” the priest went on, “your sin will cause there to be less suffering for the good people of this world. And because of that, the Lord of peace and love shall forgive you. One day He may ask you to do something difficult, as a penance, but He shall certainly forgive you, as He will forgive us all.”





Six

By Tuesday morning, as she was due to set off on the wine delivery to the house the SS had requisitioned near the center of Montepulciano, Vittoria had heard about the Allied landing on Sicily. Everyone had heard about it. Radio London was reporting that the Americani, as everyone called the Allies, had already taken three-quarters of the island. Radio Italia disagreed, saying that fierce fighting was continuing on the southern beaches—Licata and Gela—with Germans and Italians, brothers in the Great Axis Cause, putting up heroic resistance in defense of the Motherland.

Vittoria knew which report to believe. And she suspected that even the uneducated servants and field staff knew, also. Among the men of the barn, only the old and infirm had been left behind, but in their faces and voices, and especially in the faces and voices of the women, she could sense an impossible expectation, as if the arrival of the Allies would mean not only the disappearance of the Nazis, not only the end of the war and the dismantling of the reign of Il Duce, but, for them, some imaginary paradise, a longed-for liberation. It made her think about the claims her communist-sympathizing friends had made before the war, and about the oblique comments her mother had sometimes made, as if there were actual hope for enormous change, for a new social order. That was fine, but how, she wondered, did the workers think they’d make a living in that new paradise? Take over the vineyard? Live in the manor house? Upend a whole system that had been in place for centuries? Like her mother, she felt she’d be happy to see that, or, at least, to see the workers treated like human beings instead of farm animals. But it wasn’t simple. Where would she go then? To the nunnery? To Massimo’s house on the shores of Lake Como? And how would all of them live?

Loaded with twelve cases of wine and led by the family’s two beautiful horses, Antonina and Ottavio, the wagon moved slowly away from the barn and pulled to a stop near where Vittoria stood waiting at the main door of the manor house. Old Paolo the foreman, unanointed king of the workers, sat with the reins held loosely in his lap. Her brother, Enrico, came sprinting out of the flower gardens and leaped into the back, smiling up at her with his mouth hanging open, eyes like stars of innocence. Vittoria took her place on the bench seat.