Soon, the family was inviting him into the house for meals, though Carlo kept the barn as his sleeping place. Night after night he was tormented by vivid dreams, as if the halving of his sight during the day had doubled his nighttime visions. Time and again in sleep he kissed and held Vittoria, made the familiar jokes with Enrico, felt himself working the vines, saw himself on Umberto SanAntonio’s property, beside Old Paolo, walking that lovely, undulating piece of land with its straight rows of grapes, and groves of olive and fruit and nut trees, the woods, the wheat and hay fields, the deep ravine on the far side where he’d once watched a pack of wolves tearing a wild piglet to pieces; the stone-and-stucco, tile-roofed main barn where some of the wine kegs were stored and the horses kept, and the tiny bedroom above—cold in winter, hot in summer—where he’d lived from the long-ago days when his mother was still alive.
Waking up to the reality of the morning was a torment.
Once he was able to, he ventured up the steeper hillside to where Bruno and Miracola owned a small plot planted in wine grapes. Zibibbo grapes they were—they gave a wine similar to Marsala, or could be made into grappa—and so poorly maintained it pained him to walk along the rows and study them. He began to make the trip up there as a ritual, every morning after his visit to Pierluigi’s grave, as if convincing himself he would get back to the vines at home, as if the sight of the bunches might hasten his healing.
One hot Sicilian morning he came upon Bruno between the rows, digging near the roots so the soil would catch more of the brief, infrequent afternoon rains. Carlo wondered if Bruno knew how to properly prune the plants, to encourage them to send their roots down deep for water, through layers of dirt and clay and all the various minerals there. That’s what gives wine its richness, Gennaro Asolutto had told him. The plant is reaching down to find the secret tastes buried there, the gifts of the earth. You want to push it down, not let it rise up. The grapes Carlo could see weren’t full-fleshed and formed into firm spheres like those at home, but smaller and narrower with speckled skins, the bunches themselves meager and pocked with empty places.
Bruno was a proud man, Carlo sensed that already. So he squatted beside him and talked about other things at first—the progress of the war （word had reached them that the Nazis had been chased from the entire island, that thousands of Italian soldiers had surrendered, and, most surprising of all, “maybe just a rumor,” Bruno said sadly, that Benito Mussolini had been deposed by the king and could not be found）， the number and ages of his children （eight in all, Ariana the oldest）， how many years he’d lived on that land （from the day of his birth, and his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather before him）。
“This is my work,” Carlo ventured at last, speaking guardedly, gesturing with his chin at the grape vines.
“Vero?” Bruno said. Truly? “Where?”
“Near Montepulciano. I work for a man who makes wine. SanAntonio, have you heard of him?”
Bruno shook his head, embarrassed.
“Northern wine,” Carlo hastened to say, dismissively, as if the famous product of Montepulciano might be inferior to its sweet white, or black-red Sicilian second cousins, as if the SanAntonio name wasn’t famous across half the peninsula. “I’d like to help if I could,” he told Ariana’s father. “I won’t stay much longer. You and your family have been so kind to me. I’d like to do a little work for you before I leave.”
A shadow came over Bruno’s square face. The man wouldn’t look at Carlo, and for one long minute he worked the soil clumsily with his thick hands. “You don’t have to leave,” he mumbled at last, still without making eye contact.
Bruno glanced at him, then quickly looked away. After a few seconds of confusion, Carlo understood. But she’s only sixteen, he wanted to say. And beautiful. And I’m . . . deformed. And I have someone waiting for me at home. But another grown man would be helpful around the farm, he knew that. And all over rural Italy it wasn’t unusual for girls to marry at sixteen. The idea that Vittoria SanAntonio would give her lifelong love to a workingman, a deformed and half-blind workingman at that, was beginning, with each passing day, to seem more like a fantasy. The idea that her father would allow it, all but preposterous. But in the center of him Carlo could feel—had always felt—a small stone of determination, almost another person, a soul, a spirit. It was the same presence that had given him the strength to live without a father, and the courage to speak to Vittoria again, once their childhood friendship had been buried by her father in the vast space between their lives. That same determination was the part of Carlo that had pushed him to learn the secrets of making wine, the part that had pushed him up and out of the trench with the battle raging around him; maybe even the part that had kept him alive, when another man with the same wounds might have perished.