Six
By Tuesday morning, as she was due to set off on the wine delivery to the house the SS had requisitioned near the center of Montepulciano, Vittoria had heard about the Allied landing on Sicily. Everyone had heard about it. Radio London was reporting that the Americani, as everyone called the Allies, had already taken three-quarters of the island. Radio Italia disagreed, saying that fierce fighting was continuing on the southern beaches—Licata and Gela—with Germans and Italians, brothers in the Great Axis Cause, putting up heroic resistance in defense of the Motherland.
Vittoria knew which report to believe. And she suspected that even the uneducated servants and field staff knew, also. Among the men of the barn, only the old and infirm had been left behind, but in their faces and voices, and especially in the faces and voices of the women, she could sense an impossible expectation, as if the arrival of the Allies would mean not only the disappearance of the Nazis, not only the end of the war and the dismantling of the reign of Il Duce, but, for them, some imaginary paradise, a longed-for liberation. It made her think about the claims her communist-sympathizing friends had made before the war, and about the oblique comments her mother had sometimes made, as if there were actual hope for enormous change, for a new social order. That was fine, but how, she wondered, did the workers think they’d make a living in that new paradise? Take over the vineyard? Live in the manor house? Upend a whole system that had been in place for centuries? Like her mother, she felt she’d be happy to see that, or, at least, to see the workers treated like human beings instead of farm animals. But it wasn’t simple. Where would she go then? To the nunnery? To Massimo’s house on the shores of Lake Como? And how would all of them live?
Loaded with twelve cases of wine and led by the family’s two beautiful horses, Antonina and Ottavio, the wagon moved slowly away from the barn and pulled to a stop near where Vittoria stood waiting at the main door of the manor house. Old Paolo the foreman, unanointed king of the workers, sat with the reins held loosely in his lap. Her brother, Enrico, came sprinting out of the flower gardens and leaped into the back, smiling up at her with his mouth hanging open, eyes like stars of innocence. Vittoria took her place on the bench seat.
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.