She whirled around and was out and through the door before her father could speak again. Half blinded by tears, she ran down the curving marble stairway, tripped on the bottom step, fell forward, and let out a cry that echoed in the foyer. For several minutes she lay there, sobbing, arms spread out above her head as if in surrender. She sobbed small puddles on the tile, sobbed and wept and pounded the marble with one fist and eventually fell silent. There was no sound in the house beyond the ticking of the grandfather clock, another item her father claimed had been passed down for generations. What difference does it make? she thought. The grandfather clock and chandelier and silver cutlery and emerald-studded gold rings. What difference does any of it make?
After a time, she got up and sat back on her heels, staring at the framed photo of Mussolini on the far wall. Their Duce seemed to her at that moment to stand as a symbol for everything that was wrong in the world. The divisiveness, the violence, the mistreatment of women, the pitiful urge so many Italians seemed to have to idolize someone.
She wiped the tile dry with the bottom of her skirt, stood, and walked out into the starry night. Once she turned thirteen her father had ordered her to stay away from the barn—she’d loved the place with its rich smells and textures, enjoyed joking with the workers, and had been Carlo’s childhood playmate for as long as she could remember. Her mother, a lover of horses, had insisted that she learn to ride, and Paolo had even taught her to drive the wagon, sitting beside her at first, and then letting her sit alone on the bench with the slick reins in her hand. When her father forbade all that, there had been a terrible fight between her parents, shouting in the upstairs study, a slammed door, days of icy silence afterward. Her father’s remark, more peasant than noble, reminded her of that argument, which had caused a fissure to appear between different stages of her life, and, day by day, an entire cold ocean to form between her and Carlo. After that, years passed with them hardly speaking, as if they’d been made into enemies overnight, forced to look at each other not as friends and fellow humans but as members of different classes and nothing more. The princess and the servant.
The guilt of that, the frustration, had caused her to become physically ill, stomach upset, periodic headaches that chained her to her bed. Her friends—mostly girls from other estate-owning families that gathered for picnics on summer Saturdays, or after Mass at the cathedral—began to seem superficial and false, waiting only for a husband of means, an adulthood of luxury. Carlo avoided her, spending time with the older men, working the vines or the wheat, caring for the horses, never even turning his eyes toward the manor house. She imagined him meeting secretly with servants from nearby properties, girls of his own class, and finally, unable to bear it, she confided in her mother. They had made a retreat at the nunnery in San Vigliano and, halfway home, were walking their tired horses along an uphill stretch of road. “We’re both human beings, Mother. We’ve been friends our whole lives. Now, suddenly, I’m forbidden from speaking to Carlo. Father must have said something to him, as he did to me.”
Her mother kept her eyes forward, seemed suddenly uncomfortable. “In this country,” she said at last, in a voice lined with pain, “there are walls between the classes. Those walls have been there for centuries, Vittoria.” She paused, made brief eye contact, looked forward again. “But sometimes you can find a door in them, and step through it. Perhaps later, in a few years, in some better future, you and Carlo will be able to resume your friendship.”
Her mother hadn’t said anything more on the subject, and hadn’t lived to see that better future, to know about that friendship. Standing with her back to the manor house, still trembling with anger, Vittoria thought back over that conversation, and the silent years that had followed it, and wondered why she and her mother had allowed her father—with his shouts and threats and table pounding—to rule over them like some kind of domestic duce. Much later, she had, in fact, discovered a doorway in that ancient wall, and found the courage to step through it, and, in that risky territory, she and Carlo had made something more than a friendship. Much more. But they had never been brave enough to talk about the lost years, not yet at least. She felt too guilty, and, no doubt, his hurt was too deep.
Now, in the warm starlight, she walked across the courtyard to the barn, as if she might find him there and apologize for old insults. Inside the large, open doorway she stood and let her eyes adjust. The air smelled of hay and horseflesh and, faintly from another room, old wine. There were tools of all shapes and sizes lined up neatly against one wall, and, through another door, the horses. She felt wrapped in a warm blanket of memories.