Thirteen
Late that night, when Paolo had checked the wine barrels in both the main and secondary barns, as he’d done every evening for the past four decades, making sure there were no leaks and that the mice and rats hadn’t made a nest or started chewing through the oak, he heard a familiar signal—three well-spaced taps—at the main barn’s back wall. He went quietly through the door there, walked a little way, and, when his eyes adjusted, saw Eleonora standing half-hidden behind the trunk of the massive chestnut tree. A glint of starlight caught her bare left forearm and the braid hanging at the left side of her face. As Paolo approached, she moved back into the shadows. “He’s coming,” she whispered. “Father Costantino. He called the house and let the phone ring once, an hour ago. The signal. Please give him this for my Antonio.” She pressed a folded scrap of paper into his palm and whispered, “I brought the Germans in the attic more food.”
“Good, good,” Paolo said quietly. Eleonora, he now understood, was a true partigiana, a fact that, given her sweet, bashful disguise, still seemed almost impossible to grasp. She had been the one to suggest he speak with Father Costantino, and that conversation had drawn him into the secret work, but Paolo didn’t know whether it had been her own idea, or the priest’s. In either case, why had they chosen him? What had made one or both of them believe a simple old field-worker would be willing to risk his life for a cause that seemed, at times, to have no chance at all of success: a few Italians fighting against an entire army!
Then again, he’d always seen Eleonora as a strange and mysterious person, a young woman of many secrets. And so, as a man of many secrets, he’d always gotten along with her. Part of the mystery came from the fact that she hadn’t been born on the property like the rest of the household and field staff, but had been brought to the vineyard to care for the Signora when the illness was first taking hold of her. Another part was linked to the fact that, unlike the rest of the help, she could read well, knew German, and spoke Italian with a slight accent. Brown braids, brown eyes, freckled skin, a way of walking that made it seem she was floating along, half-connected to the earth, Eleonora seemed so shy, but Paolo sensed a fierce courage beneath that thin surface layer. How and why she’d been brought to the vineyard, how and why the village priest had started to work with her, Paolo didn’t know, but he trusted her, admired her. Had he been younger, he might even have been in love with her.
“The three men, they’ll be gone soon?” she asked, with the smallest note of fear running beneath the words.
“Sì.”
“Good, because everyone’s afraid.”
“We’d be afraid anyway, wouldn’t we? Even without them.”
Instead of answering, Eleonora shifted her weight in the darkness and asked, “How did you know I speak German? I’ve always tried to hide that.”
Paolo shrugged again, embarrassed, and then, when she kept her eyes on him, he admitted that he’d overheard her swearing once, in the kitchen, when she thought she was alone. He’d been standing at the back door, waiting for her to leave the stove so he could hand her a basket of eggs. “You were having a kind of fit, swearing—I think—and going on.”
“I have a temper,” she admitted. “And I was born in Bolzano, which was Austrian before the first war.”
“Bolzano. To the north.”
“Yes, near the border. Bozen is the German name. My father was Italian. My mother, Austrian, but Jewish.”
A long pause. Paolo tried to read her face in the darkness. She shook her head so that the braids swung gently side to side, willow branches in a wind. “My mother. There were camps there. She was taken to one. But, Paolo—”
“Yes, yes, I won’t say it to anyone. I give you my word. I’m sorry about your mother . . . You go to Mass, though.”
“I do, for protection. But in the church I say Jewish prayers in my mind.”
“Ah.”
“And I know the Mass because nuns raised me after my father left and my mother was taken. The nuns helped me get away, and sent me here, through Father Costantino.”
“I wondered.”
“So I have been trusting him. I don’t know why he asked me to do these things. He thinks I’m Catholic. He asked me to tell him what I hear in the house, what people are saying there, the Signore and Signorina especially, and their visitors. He asked me to see if you wanted to, you know . . .”
“Yes, I also trust him,” Paolo said, but without as much conviction as he’d intended.