It was late, an hour after their mostly silent dinner, and Vittoria found him sitting in the third-floor library, his favorite room, in a chair upholstered in tobacco-colored leather. She sat opposite him on the leather sofa and told him what had happened in the city.
“Well, you’re a beautiful woman,” was her father’s response.
“Papa! He’s grabbing me! Next thing he’ll be dragging me into their house and raping me!”
Her father sighed impatiently, closed the book over one finger, and looked at her across the top of his reading spectacles. “What would you have me do, Vittoria?”
“Stop trading me for protection from them!”
“Stop shouting, please. The servants will hear. And what you’re saying is absurd. I’m not trading you.”
“The servants know how evil those men are!” she said in a slightly quieter voice. “Paolo sees it. Enrico sees it.”
“Enrico doesn’t understand what he sees. And Old Paolo is simpleminded, a man I should have sent away many years ago. I keep him on as an act of charity.”
“I won’t go there anymore. I refuse to go.”
“You refuse to go,” her father said, spluttering now, his face suddenly pinching up into a mask of barely contained fury. “Which means the officer will then come here, to this house, and find you anyway and no doubt torment us. Send his men to ruin the grapes, shoot holes in the kegs!”
“And the grapes and kegs are more important than me, than my body?!”
“It is our grapes and kegs that allow your body to be clothed, sheltered, and fed!”
“You can’t stop them?”
“Of course I can’t stop them! Nobody can stop them!” Her father looked away, drew and released a long breath, gathering himself, Vittoria thought, holding back a more serious eruption. He turned back to her and said, in a somewhat softer tone, “If you want to leave, for your safety, I can send you to Massimo. He has a beautiful second home above Lake Como and has always intended to leave it to you when he dies, as he’s promised you for years now. Your mother and I took you there three or four times when you were a girl, don’t you remember?”
Vittoria did remember, but she shook her head violently—no—one heavy tear flung to the side.
“You’ll be perfectly welcome there. You’ll be comfortable, and—”
“I don’t want to. Never. No. It will never happen.”
“This is precisely the problem,” her father said. “And has always been the problem, from the time you were a small child. Your wants are very narrow. This, not that. That, not this. Only this food for breakfast. Only these clothes for school. Only this hairstyle, no matter how impractical. You want the world to conform itself to your wishes. That never happens. One would think the premature loss of your mother would have shown you that.” He slipped a playing card into the book and set it on the table beside him, straightening it so that it sat perfectly parallel to the edge. “And in case you haven’t noticed, Massimo would marry you in an instant.”
“Never!”
“More narrow wishes. He’s a bit older, true, but he’d give you the life you’ve grown accustomed to, and more. When the war is over, you could travel the world. Have whatever you wanted.”
“I already have whatever I want, and what I want is to be able to choose the man I love, as you chose Mother.”
“And whom would you choose? What kind of man? Someone who can support you in all your thousands of narrow wants?”
Vittoria came within a second of telling him she’d already chosen, but she held the remark in her mouth and said, “I’d choose for love, as you did.”
“As I did, yes, but from among my own kind. Our own . . . stratum of society.”
“I don’t want to talk about this now, Father,” she said. “Your politics, your friends. Sometimes I think you’re more German than Italian.”
Her father’s lips stretched into a tight grin. Frightening, she thought; beneath the dignified mask he was a frightening man. “And sometimes,” he said coldly, “I think you’re more peasant than noble. Your mother had an exaggerated sympathy for the workers. You seem to have inherited that.”
She shook her head, long hair swinging, and stood up. “That’s not the issue now, Father. I’ve made my last trip to the city in that wagon, to that house. If I go again, I’ll take a pistol and shoot the German through the middle of his hideous face!”