At dinner she waited for the right moment—her father seemed absolutely distraught at the disappearance of Il Duce—and then, honoring Paolo’s request, said, “Father, I’ve been thinking about what you said, and while I don’t ever see myself marrying Massimo, I do agree that I was rude on his last visit. I only wanted to say that to you. I hope he’ll visit us again.”
Her father had his wineglass halfway to his lips. He held it there for a moment, then set it down without drinking and looked at her more closely. “Could you possibly be learning how to become a woman?” he said.
Instead of reacting to the remark as she would have in the past, Vittoria only tilted her head and raised her eyebrows. Amid all the other emotions, she felt a twist of thrill inside her, something shocking and different and exciting: the ability to disguise her true feelings, the ability to put on an act, to fib. She had no idea where this new talent had come from.
Twelve
For the first few days, Carlo stayed in the barn, leaving only to use the outhouse and, once, to clean himself at an outdoor spigot while Ariana’s father chased away the children who wanted a peek. The face and shoulder were a constant source of pain, but day by day, gradual as the deepening of a season, the pain receded. His body began to heal.
It seemed he’d been blown far up into the air by the Allied shell and had landed in the embrace of the kindest family on earth. Bruno and Miracola were the names of Ariana’s parents, and, as he healed, Carlo became aware of a flock of black-haired children, boys and girls from ages four to fourteen, some of whom seemed to be part of the family, and others—neighbors, he guessed—who wandered in and out of the barn, and across the arid land, curious to catch a glimpse of the wounded soldier. He’d always loved being around children—he and Vittoria had talked about and looked forward to raising a large brood—and he welcomed their company now, let them stare at his face, even touch a finger gently to his scarred cheek. He told them how he’d been hurt—they listened with mouths open and dark eyes fixed on him—and he let them follow him every morning when he went to pray at Pierluigi’s grave.
The sight of that grave, which was just a berm of raised dirt marked by a cross fashioned from two branches of a fig tree lashed together, seemed to say everything that needed to be said about this war, and about war in general. The life of a good man had been erased from the earth far too soon. His parents back home in Naples—Pierluigi had been their only child—would be devastated. And for what? Because Il Duce’s lust for power had driven him to emulate Adolf Hitler, another maniac? Because Italians wanted to return to the supposed glory of Rome and boast of their greatness in the world? Repulsed by the politics, bitter at the waste, Carlo would kneel there in the dirt, with the sun casting the day’s first golden light upon the Sicilian hills, and he’d feel an urge to apologize to his late friend. Apologize for leading him out of the ditch on the hill above the Licata beach; apologize for surviving; apologize on behalf of the world’s rich and powerful, who never ended up in battle themselves, but seemed all too willing to send others off to die.
The daily climb to Pierluigi’s grave was part of his exercise regimen, part of his rehabilitation, mental and physical. It took Carlo two more weeks to recover his strength, and almost that long to come to terms with the fact that, for the rest of his life, he’d live with one eye, a scarred face, and dampened hearing in his left ear. Only after he’d asked her four times did Ariana agree to bring him a small handheld mirror. Carlo didn’t have the courage to lift away the bandage and look at what lay beneath it. But even with the white cloth in place, he could see how misshapen his face had become, the skin of his left cheek disfigured by a shiny scar. He looked like a killer now, someone you wouldn’t want to meet on a dark road at night. No wonder the children were fascinated and horrified! He wondered if Vittoria would even want to look at him again, never mind kiss him, make love with him, marry him and bear his children. At times he felt it was all a fantasy in any case, all a fantasy. The princess and the peasant. But he clung to it even so, to their mutual promise, to the memories of being with her, to the sense that, out of all the many places on this earth, the two of them had been set down on that same fertile piece of land, ten kilometers east of Montepulciano.
Though there were many mouths to feed, and though food was still in short supply, Miracola made him three small meals a day—a boiled egg from one of their hens, a cup of milk from their goats with a handful of walnuts from their own trees, a ripe apricot or apple or a bunch of grapes. There was no bread—not yet—and very little pasta, but every few days that passed seemed to bring a slight improvement to the life of the Sicilian countryside. The family cultivated a vegetable plot—zucchini, peppers, tomatoes—and Bruno’s fisherman friends would bring over an octopus, or a sea bream, and sometimes Miracola would place on the table a dish of steamed clams sprinkled with olive oil.