A Harvest of Secrets(9)
Paolo whistled through his teeth, tapped the horses’ backs with the reins, and they started off.
“Have you heard anything from Carlo?” was the first thing Vittoria said to him, though in as casual a tone as she could manage. As if he doesn’t know, she thought. As if he isn’t like a father to Carlo. As if it didn’t seem to make him happy to see us that one time, walking together.
“Niente,” the white-headed old man replied. Nothing. “I would tell you, Signorina, if I heard.”
“He’s in the war!” Enrico shouted from behind them. As if being in the war were life’s greatest adventure. “He’ll be home safe! Soon! He’s my friend!”
“Yes, my brother. Of course he will.”
Paolo grunted and tapped the horses’ backs with the reins.
“Did they bother you, the Germans, the last time you did this?” Vittoria asked him.
The old man turned to her for a moment, and in his eyes she saw what she’d always seen there: a tenderness that softened the rough, workman’s face. Paolo had always seemed to like her, and always seemed unable to express that in words. Now, midsummer, his skin was brown as breadcrust, creased with wrinkles and scarred from old injuries, frightening in a certain way, if you didn’t know him. “They’re bosses,” he said simply, turning back to the road.
“Like all bosses,” she tried.
No response, until the silence grew uncomfortable, and then Paolo added, “They like your wine.”
Our wine, she thought. It’s your wine, too. Without you and Carlo and Giuseppe and Gianluca, there would be no wine. But she didn’t say it.
For the rest of the hour they rode in silence, with rounded green hills like sleeping creatures to either side, the horses working hard on the uphill stretches, and a long plume of dust lifting into the air behind, then slowly flattening and settling, like a shaken bedsheet. Enrico was singing quietly, comforting himself as he did when he was nervous. It was a first trip for him, too, and Vittoria supposed he’d been hearing tales of Nazi cruelty when he sat with the workers over their simple meals and helped the man they called “Old Paolo” with the currying of the horses.
Despite the wild tufts of white hair to either side of a bald patch, and despite his deliberate movements and wrinkled face, Paolo wasn’t really that old, probably a year or two younger than her father, in fact. The connection she felt with him—subtle, persistent, never acknowledged—must have stemmed from her mother’s affection for him and the other workers. She and her mother would be strolling through the flower gardens they both loved, or sitting out on the stone patio on a summer evening sipping lemonade and wine. They’d see Paolo returning from the fields, or repairing a wagon axle in the courtyard, or carrying one of the other servants’ little children—he had none of his own—on his shoulders after a hard day of labor, and her mother would say something quietly. Look at him, how he works. Or, Such kindness. It seemed a one-sided admiration. Vittoria noticed that Paolo never looked in her mother’s direction, as if in silent protest of the fact that he toiled all day, while she basked in her luxuries.
Among Vittoria’s long list of regrets was the fact that she’d never thought to have a deep discussion with her mother about politics. A remark here and there—We have too much, Vittoria, too much!—and the radical Montepulciano soirees her mother loved and her father grumbled about, those were her only clues. It seemed to her that every family had its unspoken rules. In her family, her father imposed them: which subjects could be discussed, which publications and books could be brought into the house, which people one should speak to, or avoid.
Why had she always been so obedient?!
As they approached the crest of the last hill, Vittoria saw the buildings of the city appear, first the towers of two churches with their gray slate roofs, then four-and five-story homes coated with brown-and cream-colored stucco, and then, as they crested the rise and the horses’ hooves began knocking loudly on cobblestones, the smaller houses and shops on the outskirts. In the centro, the streets were narrow, steep in places, and she noticed that one whole block lay in ruins, stones and wooden beams scattered about, making the street resemble a room littered with a child’s broken toys. A smashed table with one good leg, a sofa torn in half, a bicycle wheel, the remains of a ruined radio console. Broken roof tiles. Water pipes bent like strands of straw. “What happened here?” she asked, then remembered Massimo Brindisi saying something about it at Sunday’s meal. The debris. The village priest coming out the back door dressed as a merchant.
“The bombs,” Paolo said. “The Allies. Mostly they try for the factories farther north—Torino, Milano, Genova. Sometimes they miss. Or they see a few army trucks parked together and think it’s a secret headquarters. Or they want to frighten them in other places.”
“Which ‘them’?”
“The Germans. The Fascists.”
Just as he finished pronouncing those words, almost spitting them, soaking them in disdain—tedeschi, fascisti—Paolo turned the cart off the main street, made a short detour to avoid the rubble, and pulled the horses to a stop in front of an elegant stone house, four narrow stories with wrought iron balconies, fruit trees, a small lawn with empty metal chairs set in a half circle, and behind, a yard that extended, front to back, across the whole block. A wrought iron gate guarded the entrance to the property. Beyond it she noticed a bespectacled Nazi officer standing on the house’s top step with his booted feet spread and his chin slightly lifted.