We’re starving now, Carlo nearly said. But he kept all expression from his face. What he wanted to say was: This is the man who has ruled our country for twenty-one years, who befriended Hitler, stripped the Jews of their jobs, sent his Blackshirts to torture anyone who opposed him; the man who brought the Germans here, who sent your son to Albania or Russia to die. And you pray for him?
“A good man, don’t you think so?”
Carlo hesitated a moment, then: “I don’t know him.”
The woman’s face underwent a sudden change, lips tightening, eyes narrowing. She watched him suspiciously, and for a moment Carlo thought she’d chase him out the door or call some local Blackshirt police chief to come drag him away. Mussolini was truly gone, apparently, and the war was gone, too—from this part of Italy, at least—but no one could say what the country would look like when the fighting was finished. Maybe Il Duce would reappear and take power again. Maybe the Blackshirts and Fascists would continue to dominate Italian life, painting their slogans on the walls and drumming their philosophy into schoolchildren. Or maybe, as Pierluigi had believed, things would be different.
“You can sleep here.” The woman gestured to a sofa in the small stone-walled room next to the kitchen. “I have a bathroom. I have food. You’re not a deserter?”
Carlo shook his head, pointed to his eye, but the woman’s wariness had been sparked to life and it lingered in the air between them like the smell of burning rubbish.
“They killed a young man in Catania yesterday,” she said proudly. “Beat him to death in the square, in front of his mother and sister. The man was a deserter. A traitor to his country.”
“I didn’t run. I fought, or would have fought. I was wounded on the first day of the invasion. My friend was killed. A family saved me.”
The woman kept nodding, but it seemed to Carlo that no amount of truth would sweep her suspicion aside. He wasn’t like her son, wasn’t fighting, didn’t adore Il Duce. Nothing else mattered.
She handed him a single sheet, and Carlo removed his boots, lay down on the couch, and rested, turning this way and that, clinging to old memories.
He and his mother had lived in a small room—just a corner of the barn loft walled off with wooden planks. They’d been sweating and mosquito-bitten in summer, shivering in winter. They had a rusty toilet downstairs for their needs, a spigot of cold water for washing, and they’d eaten the worst cuts of meat from the manor house kitchen, day-old bread, fruit and vegetables from their plot and from the fields, in season; pasta, polenta; old potatoes, onions, and turnips in the cold months.
Vittoria’s father, lord of the manor, had let them live that way, with a dozen other workers housed in similar circumstances. If they’d been walnut trees instead of human beings, he and his mother would have been cared for more kindly. But, he thought, really, they’d been treated more like animals than trees, like oxen who serviced the fields and were brought to the barn to sleep, and then buried in poorly marked graves when they perished. Pierluigi had been correct: their lives meant nothing. Nothing to Mussolini and his generals. Nothing to the Nazi or Allied soldiers. And nothing even to the lord of the manor, Umberto SanAntonio. True, Vittoria’s father had given them work, a place to sleep, enough to eat. But when Carlo’s mother fell ill, Signore SanAntonio had been notified and was finally convinced, after four terrible days, to send a doctor. “Keep her warm and give her water to drink,” the doctor had said on his one hasty visit, and it had been left to Carlo and one of the women field hands to wash her and care for her in her final agony. He, Paolo, Gianluca, and Giuseppe had dug the grave and buried her in a workers’ cemetery at the edge of the far orchard.
Carlo was ten and was immediately put to work like a grown man. Gennaro Asolutto, wine master and veteran of the first war, had taken a liking to him, brought him along when the vines needed pruning, let him help with the filtering and keg maintenance, talked to him for hours on end about the fine points of winemaking, the mistakes that could be made—overwatering, careless pruning, leaky kegs, improper amounts of sugar, letting the wine turn to vinegar—the reasons why some years produced a finer vintage than others, the different types of soil, the benefits of morning fog and cool winters, the deadly Tignoletta moths, the beetles that had to be captured and put into jars of gasoline before they chewed through all the grape leaves and devastated the crop. The threat of powdery mildew that had to be treated with sulfate and lime. Those conversations were what Carlo had instead of school. The friendship with Vittoria had persisted, which by itself was a kind of miracle. Her mother would usually allow Vittoria to come to the barn—especially when the Signore was away—and she and Carlo would groom the horses together, or walk to the cistern and sit with their backs against it, peeling away the rough chestnut skins, polishing the hard brown shells, talking about what he’d heard people say in the barn, and what she’d heard people say in the manor house, or at the Catholic-run school in Montepulciano where she took her lessons.