A Harvest of Secrets(6)
But, in time, across the vast canyon between Umberto’s lovely daughter and the orphaned field-worker, a more mature friendship developed in spite of that warning, something reignited from their earliest years, but decidedly different. A few months before Carlo was conscripted into the army of Benito Mussolini, he and Vittoria started meeting in secret, late at night behind the smaller barn where some of the wine barrels and the delivery truck were kept. Whispered conversation at first, quiet laughter, and then a few magnificent kisses, like promises in the fragrant darkness, like gifts that had sat in a drawer, wrapped and ribboned, for ten years, waiting for the right moment to be opened.
They made love, three times. Three wondrous times, a great risk for each of them, though in different ways. They made love, made promises, nurtured next-to-impossible hopes. And then he was torn away from her, from the quiet beauty of those hills, from the vines he loved. With countless other Italian men, he was sent by the madman to a training camp outside Padova. And then, as if he were bait or fodder, he was shipped to southern Sicily and assigned to the Licata hills to obey the German commanders and await the Allies’ first bloody step onto European soil.
Carlo watched now and waited. The stink of fear and the salty fragrance of the sea. His thumping pulse. The peasant resignation to which he’d been bred.
Full darkness fell. He could feel the seconds ticking against the bones of his face. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet.
Except for the rasp of his breathing, Pierluigi had gone silent.
And then, near the line between the dark sky and the darker sea, Carlo spotted a series of small flashes, like the striking of a hundred matches, one after the next. Harmless, even beautiful, if you didn’t know what the bursts of light signaled. Two seconds of anticipation, then a hideous screaming above them, and the crashes and explosions began, one after the next after the next. Boom! Boom! Boo-Boom! Boom! BoomBoomBoom!! The ground shook, and the air around them filled with dust and smoke and whistling shards of stone and metal. The shelling went on and on, endless. Burning flesh now, screams. He and Pierluigi pushed themselves so hard into the sandy soil it felt as though they were burrowing in, helmet first. The sound was deafening, the air slamming against their arms and faces like bursts of heat from a crackling, windblown fire, pieces of shrapnel screaming past, centimeters above their heads. Boom! Ba-boom! BoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoomBoom! It felt as though they were embedded in a thundercloud, sprays of dirt splashing hard against them like driven hail. Pierluigi was moaning in terror, praying the Ave Maria between his teeth.
Salvo after salvo, an endless hell . . . and then, finally, one last explosion and a long, eerie pause. Minutes of nothingness. “It’s over, it’s over,” Pierluigi muttered.
But it wasn’t over.
They could hear horrible shrieks and screams echoing from farther down the trench. They could see the lights of the first landing craft approaching the beach. And then, the captain’s voice: “Avanti, avanti!” Forward! Forward! For a moment, Carlo’s legs refused to work. The captain kept shouting his orders, and at last Carlo stood, Pierluigi beside him. He crawled over the top of the foxhole. Crouching low, he managed to take three quick steps in the direction of the beach before there was another eerie whine, a tremendous crash, and the world went black and silent.
Five
The workers’ Mass was held at noon on Sundays, not in the elegant Montepulciano cathedral where the SanAntonios and other wealthy families worshipped, but in the small village church, Santa Serafina in Gracciano, a twenty-minute wagon ride from the vineyard. A few humble storefronts, twenty-five one-story stone houses, and the Church of Santa Serafina—Gracciano was the place where the vineyard staff went to shop, to worship, and on those rare occasions when they enjoyed a free weekday, to celebrate a holiday or religious festival. As foreman, Paolo had Umberto’s permission to use the delivery wagon to bring along those field-workers and house servants who wanted to attend Sunday Mass. For unspoken reasons—he swung this way and that with his moods—Enrico had decided not to join them, and so, on this Sunday, Paolo’s nine passengers consisted of the old retired foreman, Gennaro Asolutto; a pair of middle-aged women, Marcellina and Constanza, and their five children; and one of the house servants, Eleonora, who’d been with them only a little over a year. He and Asolutto sat on the wagon bench, the others on the straw-covered, railed bed behind.
“Hot today,” Paolo said, as the horses left the property and started along the gravel road.
“Hot, hot,” Asolutto agreed.
Physically, Paolo thought, there was almost nothing left of the man beside him. Once the strong, quiet keeper of the vines and respected boss of all the field-workers, Gennaro Asolutto had moved into his midseventies and, no longer able to do much work, had descended—thin-armed, weak-backed—into an almost impenetrable silence. He ate, he slept, he relieved himself in the barn toilet or nearby trees, he rode the wagon into the fields now and again to keep the others company and divert himself. Most of the rest of the time he sat out in the courtyard on a flimsy metal chair, watching the birds and squirrels and running rosary beads through his fingers. There were times now, since Mussolini’s alliance with Hitler, since the start of the war, when Paolo almost envied him. When he did speak, however, Asolutto seemed to be offering, with a few quiet words, wisdom of a fine vintage, thoughts that had been fermenting in a dark keg for years and had to be tasted the way a succulent glass of wine was tasted, carefully, thoughtfully, with gratitude. “It seems the war is coming to us,” Paolo said, quietly enough so that those behind them couldn’t hear. “The DellaMonica workers say part of Sicily has already been taken.”