“You’re sick, Vita!” Enrico exclaimed. “Mama was sick! Now you!”
She reached behind her and put a hand on his head, then pulled him close against the back of the bench for a moment and circled his neck with one arm.
“Let them die,” Old Paolo said between his teeth, too quietly for Enrico to hear. The fury in his voice surprised her. “Let every one of them die. Let them burn in hell.”
Seven
When Carlo regained consciousness—with no idea how much time had passed, hours, days, a week—he was staring up at the face of a woman. Coal-black hair; kind, dark eyes; a lovely smile—for the time it took his thoughts to reassemble out of the fog of unconsciousness, he thought it must be Vittoria.
But no. Too young. A girl, not a woman. Or someone between girlhood and womanhood. The girl was smiling down at him, one of her front teeth chipped at an angle. Not Vittoria. A wave of pain rose up and over him, shaking him from skeleton to skin. He closed his eyes against it, let it pass. Something wasn’t right. The strange girl, the pain. He could feel a piece of cloth across the left side of his face, and the pain there was like nails being hammered into broken bones. His left shoulder hurt, too; at first, he couldn’t seem to move more than his fingers and toes on that side.
“You’re awake at last,” the girl said.
A Sicilian accent. Not Vittoria.
Carlo blinked, stared at her.
“Are you in pain?” she asked. Sente male?
Her voice was a line of lavender sky beneath steely dark clouds.
Carlo tried to nod but managed only a twitch of his neck muscles. He closed his eyes and felt something against his lips. A sponge. The girl squeezed it, and a few drops of liquid squirted into his mouth. Wine, it tasted like. Bitter wartime wine. And then another squeeze, different sponge, tepid water.
Very slowly, minute by pain-wracked minute, he began to form an understanding. Above him, he could see rough-hewn roof rafters. He could smell hay, hear the bubbly clucking of chickens. But it seemed the world had been cut in half; only one eye was working, the other covered by coarse cloth. The girl moved her face so that it was directly above him, strands of her hair falling across his bare chest. He closed his eyes again and remembered climbing out of the foxhole with Pierluigi, forcing himself forward into the terror. Avanti! Avanti! Then a crashing sound, then nothing.
He tried to speak and couldn’t. The girl pressed the sponge against his lips. “Wine for the pain,” she said quietly in her velvety voice. Vino per il dolore.
Carlo swallowed, lost consciousness again for a few minutes, adrift below the ocean in a dream world with the black clouds visible through a wavering prism of water, high above. He surfaced, took a breath, blinked. There was the girl again, steady as sunlight, and here came another wave. “It’s many days you haven’t been awake,” she said. And then, blushing: “My mother and I washed you.”
The accent, the beautiful smile. Working his lips and dry tongue, Carlo found at last that he could produce a word. “Grazie.”
The smile stretched. “If you sit up, you could eat,” she said. “You must be very hungry. The Germans are gone. The Americani, too. We have a little food. Tomatoes. Grapes. No bread, but some milk from the goat.”
She put a hand behind his neck and lifted gently, and though the pain was like nothing he’d ever felt, throbbing in the bones of his face, in his teeth and neck, he flexed his stomach muscles and, with her help, managed to sit up. Holding him with one hand, she dragged something up behind his back with the other. A bale of hay. He could feel it scratching against his skin, and then she leaned his upper body farther forward and lay a piece of cloth or a towel between the hay and his skin and rested him back on it again.
“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.