A Harvest of Secrets(11)

“I am called Ariana.” She waved an arm with her hand flapping at the end as if shooing away a fly. “My family lives here. This is our barn. I found you on the hill after the war went past us. Blood all over you. My father carried you here on his back. Your friend beside you was . . .” She paused. “Gone to paradise. We made a grave for him. You’ve lost one eye, but you’re awake now. You’re alive.”

Carlo felt an enormous weight descend upon him. He managed one word—“Grazie”—but pronouncing it seemed to require every last drop of his willpower. Pierluigi gone. His left eye gone. For a moment, a few awful seconds, he wished the blast had taken him, too. He stared at the girl’s beautiful face, and it was as if she existed in another dimension, a vision, a spirit. Not real.

“Your name?”

“Conte,” he managed, and then, after another few seconds: “Carlo . . . Conte.”

He watched her stand and walk away, and he ran his eye back and forth across what he could see of the barn. One thought upon the next, like a stone foundation being laid, the world began to reassemble itself. A barn. A poor place it was, crooked stone walls and a wooden roof. Bales of hay. A few rusty tools in one corner. Hens pecking in the dust of the doorway against a background of too-bright Sicilian sun. His chest was bare, his feet bare. Instead of his army pants, a pair of worker’s trousers covered his legs, rough brown cloth in the peasant style. He was very hungry.

Back through the doorway came the girl—how beautiful she was, sixteen or seventeen—with a man and a woman behind her; the parents, he guessed. Unlike their daughter, they were short, squat people, with coarse hands and blunt noses. The mother had fine, dark eyes, the father a high forehead. The girl—Ariana—was holding a ceramic bowl. Her mother was carrying something, too, making the sign of the cross with her free hand. Her father stayed back a few paces, hands clasped in front of him, face set in an unreadable mask, neither kind nor unkind, neither calm nor worried. Carlo tried to imagine the man carrying a stranger’s broken body from the battlefield to his own home, blood streaking down his clothes. He thought of them digging a grave and burying Pierluigi.

Ariana knelt beside him, plucked one grape from the bowl, placed it at the edge of his lips and squeezed so that the pulp popped into his mouth and the skin remained in her fingers. She tossed it aside, fed him three more. Her mother stepped forward with a ceramic cup of what turned out to be warm goat’s milk.

He could not remember tasting anything sweeter.





Eight

In August, with the grapes ripening but not ready to be harvested, the main job was the bringing in of the wheat from the SanAntonios’ southeastern field. Even as a young man, Paolo had found the work exhausting—the scything and bundling, the hoisting of sheaves into the wagon, hour upon hour in the brutal heat. Now, as foreman, he could have merely supervised, but he’d never been comfortable watching others sweat, and, with the stronger, younger ones at war, every peasant on the property—man, woman, and child—needed to share the labor. Lifting bundles with the women and children, scything, then resting, then scything again; drinking well water from the clay pitchers in short breaks; leaving the others every few hours so he could go into the trees and empty his bladder—it all made him feel he’d been given the right nickname: Old Paolo.

When the day was at last finished, and the others were accompanying the wagon back to the barn, Paolo walked with them only as far as the grassy fallow field between the wheat and the grapes and lay on his back there, gazing up at the clouds. His hands, knees, and shoulders ached, and he knew that when he awoke the next morning, it would take him an hour or more to stop feeling like a piece of machinery that needed oil.

The loss of hair, of muscle, the struggle required now to hoist a case of wine he could have tossed into the air in his youth, the sense that parts of himself—cheeks, belly—were being drawn toward the earth as if yearning already for the grave—he felt, at times, worn down by the decades of labor. Still, there were benefits. The passions of youth had loosened their grip. It took him longer to get angry, and the anger quickly faded, a summer shower now instead of a true tempesta. He wanted to tell himself, Yes, and you no longer make the foolish decisions you made in the past, but on certain days the decision to get involved with Father Costantino in the secret work, morally right as he believed it to be, felt like a risk he would have been wiser not to take. Then again, in one of their private conversations, Eleonora had told him that people all over Italy were involved in the resistance and, as the priest had said in their first probing conversation, What are your options, Paolo? Wait for the Nazis to line all of you up in the courtyard and shoot you?

Lying there with the tall grass like a soft bed beneath him, searching his thoughts for a bit of comfort, he cast his mind back to the times—how many, five, eight? He used to know exactly—when he’d made love here with the one woman who’d ever truly seemed to touch his soul.

He was drifting along in the past, remembering, half dreaming, when he heard voices. Real people, not memories. A couple, he thought it must be at first, come here late in the day, as he had once done, to make love. But then the speakers moved closer, the quiet conversation grew clearer, and Paolo froze where he lay. He didn’t understand the words, but he knew what language it was. Two men; no, three. Speaking quietly in German, as if worried they’d be overheard, or as if plotting something. Paolo drew in and let out a series of shallow breaths. He could feel the pulse pounding in his neck and temples. The men came closer still, the voices slightly louder. He waited, only partly hidden by the tall grass around him, expecting at any moment to be seen. At the very least, he’d be questioned. If the Nazis had caught and tortured the Nameless One with the beak nose, and if that man had given a description of the old field-worker on the SanAntonio estate, then he’d be tortured, too, forced to give up names, taken out in the courtyard and shot in front of all the others.