A Harvest of Secrets(4)
She stayed silent through the rest of the meal. First the reginette, then tender cutlets of veal in a light tomato sauce with vinegar peppers and polenta; for dessert, a selection of their own cheeses, and glasses of sweet wine from Sicily. Eleonora served them, then stood like a statue in the corner of the room.
Same as me, Vittoria thought. Listening, and pretending not to.
“A strange occurrence the other day,” Massimo was telling her father, who grunted in response, as if only half-curious, and refilled their wineglasses. “I was driving, just at dusk, through the center of Montepulciano, and I had to take a small detour because of the damage caused by the most recent bombing there. I turned down a road I don’t often use, and I happened to go past the house the Germans have occupied. The SS house, everyone calls it. Do you know it?”
“We send them wine,” her father said.
“The property is large. It extends from one street to the next, across the entire block. I was driving by the back side, and who do I see coming out the back door?”
“I can’t guess, Massimo. Badoglio? The king? Il Duce?”
“The priest! Dressed in layman’s clothes, as if in disguise.”
“The one from the cathedral? Father Giampero?”
Massimo shook his head. “No, no, the local priest, the one in the village. I’ve crossed paths with him here a few times when he comes to visit you.”
“Costantino?”
“That one, yes. The light was weak, but I saw him, I’m sure of it. And he saw me, as well. I drove on. But I kept thinking: What is the village priest doing in the house of the Nazis, dressed like a merchant?”
Vittoria noticed that Massimo was studying her father’s face closely, as if searching for a reaction to his tale.
“Hearing confessions,” her father said, and Vittoria thought, at first, that he might be continuing his merry line of jokes. “They’re Catholic, the Germans, many of them.” He shrugged and started talking about the war again, and Eleonora stepped in to clear the dessert plates.
Once the table had been cleaned and the men had lit their cigars, Vittoria was able to excuse herself. She made her way down the curving marble staircase and out the front door, and stood there for a long while in the heat of the July afternoon, staring across the rows of vines and the green wooded hills behind them, missing Carlo’s company so badly she was on the edge of tears. She caught sight of her brother, Enrico, near the barn, saw him make his happy, heedless wave, then duck into the wide doorway near where the horses and some of the wine barrels were kept, and directly below the place where the workers had their rooms.
After a time, she heard two sets of footsteps on the stairs behind her, then the tiny squeak of the front door’s hinges. She turned around to find her father and Massimo joining her in the open air. Smelling of cologne and cigar smoke, her godfather gave her a gentle embrace and a kiss on both cheeks, told her she’d really have to come spend a week at his vacation house on Lake Como while the weather was fine and the swimming comfortable. “That house will be yours one day, you know that, of course,” he said, something he’d been saying to her, proudly, confidently, since she was a young girl. Then he sauntered across the gravel, sat behind the wheel of his black car, tooted the horn, and raised a cloud of dust behind him as he left.
“So few automobiles on the roads in these times,” her father said as the cloud settled. “But they know who he is. They’ll leave him alone.”
Vittoria held to a stubborn silence. The air between them felt soiled. Her blood pumped anger. Her father’s self-involvement, the impending war, Mussolini’s propaganda, Carlo’s absence, the false life they lived with their gold-edged plates and silver cutlery and conversations that never seemed to reach beyond business and politics. She was tired of it to the marrow of her bones.
“I want you to go with the next Montepulciano delivery,” her father said after a moment.
“As punishment?”
“Nonsense, Vittoria! What’s wrong with you? Just ride along in the wagon with Old Paolo, smile at the officers you see. Bring your brother if you want. Make conversation. Charm the SS officers. Let them know what good people we are. I doubt very much that it will, but if the war ever reaches us here, our German friends could turn surly. We need to cultivate good relations, now, in advance. Is that too much to ask of you? Are you so busy with other duties, your drawing and dreaming, your flower collecting?”
She shook her head and kept her eyes out over the vineyard.
“And in the future, try, if you possibly can, to be kinder to my friends when they visit.”
“I will, Father,” she said, and he left her alone at last.
Four
“Per loro, le nostre vite non significano niente,” Pierluigi said. To them, our lives mean nothing.
At first, listening to the trembling voice, Carlo thought his Neapolitan friend was referring to the American and British soldiers in the armada of Allied ships he could see so clearly, hovering there below them on the blue-gray horizon. From the narrow trench that he, Pierluigi, and the others had spent the previous three weeks digging in the hills above one of the Licata beaches, Carlo could imagine those soldiers, waiting in the massive array of destroyers, aircraft carriers, and landing craft. That steel machinery of death. In a minute, an hour, a few hours at most, the Allies would begin their assault on southern Sicily. Uneducated though he was, Carlo had always been curious about the world. From childhood, he’d paid attention—to gossip, rumor, real news, the opinions of wiser people—and lately he’d heard enough to know that the war wasn’t going well. Not for the Italians and Germans, in any case. The soldiers on those battleships had crushed the Nazi forces in North Africa, crushed what everyone had believed to be the most fearsome army in the history of modern war. And now the Allies had gathered themselves, licked their wounds and buried their dead, brought in reinforcements of men and matériel, sailed north across the Mediterranean, and set their gunsights on Italy.