By the time he reached the outskirts of Catania, he was starving and exhausted. He’d been walking for days through mostly empty interior countryside, a landscape little touched by the fighting. But now, on both sides of the road close to the big city, he came upon the scars of war: chassis of burned-out German army vehicles; stone houses broken in half by bombs or tank shells; an American helmet stained with blood; the half-rotted carcass of a mule that had been blown up and left in the scorching sun. Here and there he passed old men scraping the parched earth of garden plots, women hanging clothes on a line, kids playing in the dust. He waved or nodded to them, but even the bravest ones eyed him warily, an armed stranger with a black patch over one eye, dirty, tired, shuffling along, wearing on his broken face an uneven week-old beard.
It seemed to him that he was seeing Italy without its clothing, naked and crude, stripped of niceties. In the North, “Sicily” and “The South” had always been synonyms for poverty and hopelessness. That made sense to him now: everything he could see bore the mark of generations of want. The words of Pierluigi kept coming back to him. When the war is finished, his friend had said more than once, we will change the way we live. You’ll see. The poor won’t be so poor. The rich won’t be so rich. You’ll see. What Carlo saw was that they had each been clinging to a dream intended to get them through to the end of the fighting. Pierluigi was imagining an Italy of fairness and justice, free of want, some heaven of shared labor and shared luxury, as if, once the country was finished with war, the nobles were going to be so grateful to the soldiers that they’d voluntarily portion off pieces of their huge estates and give them away. And it was the same for him: a different dream, but with the same purpose. Where were he and Vittoria going to live? In the manor house? The barn? On their own piece of property at the edge of the vineyard? Did she ever wonder about these things?
But he kept repeating her name, kept walking. Vittoria.
As the ninth or tenth night fell—he’d lost count—Carlo realized he could go no farther without asking for help. North of Catania, on the outskirts of a small city—Acireale, a bullet-ridden metal sign said it was—he came upon a house that seemed undamaged and inhabited, and, after mouthing a prayer, he walked up and knocked on the door. A woman answered, stooped, gnarled hands, crooked nose, watery eyes. Half his height, she stood before him either unafraid or so accustomed to being terrorized that fear had lost its power over her. “Sì?” she said, as if, before him, scores of men had knocked, or simply broken in, taken what they wanted, and left. A stranger at her door, and yet her “Yes?” held no surprise in it at all.
“Could you give me a little food? I’ll work. I’ll help, but I—”
The woman reached out, took hold of him by the side of his shirt—a grandmotherly gesture—and pulled him inside. She sat him at a table in an unlit kitchen, fussed at the stove for a while, and lay a bowl of cooked lentils and a spoon in front of him. Then a glass of a pale wine, some kind of rosé. It took Carlo less than three minutes to clean the plate and empty the glass. The woman sat down wearily opposite him.
“Was the fighting here?” he asked.
She nodded.
“The Germans?”
“For a long time. And then the Americani for a short time. Gone now. To the mainland, people say. To Calabria. Now Sicily is left to stand up again, like a beaten child. On its own feet.”
“I can help you. I can work for a few hours. Do you have grapes?”
“I have a small garden,” the woman said. “They left it alone. My son is in Albania, I think. Or Russia. I don’t know why.”
Because of Il Duce and his insanity, Carlo almost said, but he bit down on the words. As was the case with Ariana’s parents and Umberto SanAntonio, there were still many Italians who worshipped Mussolini, in spite of the wreckage he’d brought them. It was unwise to insult him in front of a stranger. “I was wounded,” he said. “At Licata. Lost my eye.”
“Yes,” the woman said, without sympathy, as if, from her life, so much more than an eye had been lost. And then, “Have you heard the news?”
“I’ve been alone for more than a week. Walking. Sleeping in the hills.”
“He’s gone.”
“Who?”
“Il Duce.”
“I thought it was a rumor. Gone where?”
The woman lifted and dropped her bony shoulders. “No one knows. His own people, traitors, have sent him away. Kidnapped or killed him, no one knows. I pray for him every hour. If Il Duce comes back, we’ll win the war,” she said. “If not, we shall lose it, and starve.”