A Harvest of Secrets(5)
But then, Pierluigi, shaking violently and unable to look at him, said, “The rich,” and Carlo realized that his friend, in his abject terror, had reverted to a favorite theme. “The rich don’t care about us,” Pierluigi went on. “They use us. To make their food. To do their labor. To build and clean the palaces where they live. And now, to die for them.”
“I’m in love with a rich girl,” Carlo said to him. “I think about her every minute.”
“You’ve told me, many times. May God have mercy on you. May you return to your beautiful Vittoria alive and unhurt.”
Carlo tried to picture Vittoria’s face—the long black hair, fine mouth, beautiful green eyes—but the fear had its grip on him, too. His neck and sides were dripping sweat into the cloth of his uniform. Dry-mouthed, he tried to spit into the ridge of dirt just in front of him but succeeded only in sending a thin spray of saliva onto his shirtfront. Now, he thought, now the war has come home. The seeds of trouble planted by Mussolini and Hitler had grown like weeds during the past few years, but always in the soil of faraway places. Now the death and misery would belong to Italy, too. He loved his country, loved its food and warmth, the magnificent cities he’d seen on wine deliveries, its people’s faith in another world, its music, its laughter. But Pierluigi wasn’t wrong: the lower classes were little better than serfs, housed and fed by the landowning families, stranded on the huge estates to work themselves into old age with no hope of escape. You didn’t require a rich person’s education in order to understand because, in Italy, that style of life stretched back centuries, and the stories had been passed down from generation to generation. Evil landowners, kind landowners, but, as the saying had it, the situation was always the same: Noi lavoriamo, loro mangiano. We work, they eat.
It had been that way for centuries, yes, but in recent years a kind of madness had infected his country, a perverted patriotism, the idolatry of a madman. When Carlo made the wine deliveries, he found that the owners of small shops in Pisa and the workers at famous restaurants in Rome were saying the same thing: Mussolini will make us great again. Il Duce is creating another Roman Empire. A true man, he’ll never let Italy be disrespected on the world stage!
Vittoria saw how stupid it all was, and so did Carlo. Now, every Italian was going to pay the price for that insistence on respect, for Il Duce’s alignment with the German devil. And Pierluigi was right—the poorer you were, the higher the price would be.
Close beside him, Carlo could hear his friend’s quick breaths, a kind of ticking clock. He could smell his own rancid sweat. He stared over the dirt mound they’d fashioned, down across a wrinkled sea that was shimmering in the last light of day. The fleet seemed to have crept closer. Beside him, Pierluigi moved on to a new theme. “They’ll start with the shelling, Carlo,” he said quietly. “And then the paratroopers. And then the ships landing men on the beach. We’re in the worst place we can possibly be. Right where the shells will fall.”
It was true. He and the rest of the company had their combat knives and pistols, and in their sweaty hands the outdated M91 Carcano rifles the Italian army had been burdened with since the fighting in the Alps in 1915, and the invasion of Ethiopia twenty years later. With some bitterness, soldiers joked that two-thirds of the time when you squeezed the trigger, the M91 actually spat out a bullet. Half the time the bullet flew where it was aimed.
Positioned a dozen kilometers behind them were the German forces with their modern tanks and armored vehicles, their long-barreled artillery, their sadistic commanders and superior arms. The Nazis had stationed the Italians exactly where the ships’ guns could shower them with death, and Carlo was sure that, after the opening salvos, they’d order any survivors to charge down the hill toward the beachhead and fight hand to hand against the Allied invaders. A slaughter, it would be. Not a single Italian would survive. But Italian survival wasn’t the point. The point was for them to delay and thin out the Americani enough so the Nazi tanks would have a chance to push them back into the sea. That was the strategy: Italians up front, Germans behind. And, according to twisted wartime logic, that was only fair: it was the Italian homeland they were fighting for, after all. Occupied by Nazis from bottom to top, yes, but still Mussolini’s great and invincible Italian homeland.
Pierluigi was shaking so violently that his helmet rattled against the barrel of his rifle. Carlo reached out and gently pushed his friend’s shoulder back a hand’s length, and the noise ceased. To their right, the sun dropped over the horizon, but enough light remained so he could see that the ships, even closer now, were certainly within range. The commanders were waiting for full darkness so the assault would be more terrifying, the paratroopers safer. Full darkness. And then the massacre would begin.
Carlo closed his eyes and tried again to picture Vittoria, and her family’s vineyard, a thousand kilometers to the north, her beautiful skin and hands, the neat rows of grapevines he and Old Paolo and Gennaro Asolutto had worked for as long as he could remember, each vine staked and tied to a waist-high wire so that the vine ran horizontal to the ground, air would circulate freely around the buds, and the bunches of grapes would hang down for easy harvesting. Prugnolo Gentile was the main varietal, but there were others, too: Canaiolo Nero, Mammolo, Foglia Tonda. From the time he was a ten-year-old, fourteen years ago now, he’d been pruning, mulching, and harvesting those plants, filling the great oaken barrels with the harvest, crushing the grapes, straining out the skin and seeds and bits of stem, monitoring the kegs until, by a mysterious alchemy, ordinary juice was turned into precious wine. For most of those years, too, he’d watched Vittoria SanAntonio grow from his feisty childhood playmate to a beautiful woman. He’d studied her face and body, dreamed of her, eventually summoned the courage to speak a few words in her presence. Courage, because it had become obvious to Carlo that Vittoria’s father, Umberto, known all across central Italy for his wealth, political connections, and the quality of his wine, had no interest in allowing his grown daughter to maintain anything but the most superficial friendship with a manual worker, a poor orphan, even one as skilled and knowledgeable as his own young vineyard-keeper. When they were very small, a friendship had been tolerable, harmless, another game. Once they grew, it moved into forbidden territory. On a cold winter day, her father had taken him aside in the courtyard, grabbed hold of the front of his work shirt with one hand, and said, Mia figlia, non toccare. Capito? My daughter, don’t touch. Understood? And what could Carlo have said? What were his options? He nodded obediently, too shaken to speak. Umberto turned his back and walked away.