And then, as they grew into adolescence, her father had ordered him to stay away from her—and apparently ordered her to stay away from the barn—and there was no choice but to obey him. In true peasant fashion, Carlo had buried his resentment, buried his hopes, and, in time, moved on to harder work and different pleasures: the nighttime visits of young women from nearby properties, as beaten down by work as he was, and as toughened, taking a little comfort for themselves on Saturday nights when there would be no work the next day, expecting nothing in the way of tenderness or commitment, leaving before dawn with strands of straw clinging to their hair and the possibility of pregnancy weighing heavily on their shoulders.
He was twenty when Gennaro Asolutto grew too old to work, and for the first time, Umberto SanAntonio seemed to regard him as something other than a threat to his daughter’s purity. There was one face-to-face meeting at the well beside the barn: both Old Paolo and Asolutto had recommended him. Would he take over the wine operations? Would he accept ten lire every two weeks in payment? Did he want to move to a small cottage in the hazelnut grove?
Yes and yes and no. Carlo remained in the barn, supervised the winemaking, rode with Old Paolo in the truck to make deliveries. He discussed the fine points of fermentation with the older foreman, helped create two of the best vintages the Vineyard SanAntonio had ever produced.
But, though his hopes were deeply buried, he’d never stopped thinking about Vittoria, never forgotten the warm thrill of their childhood friendship. A grown man by then, and she a grown woman, Carlo had started to find ways of crossing paths with her, started to risk saying hello, then making small bits of conversation—about the weather, the grapes, the deliveries, her schooling, her brother, her mother’s failing health—though now the conversations were different, with something new, an electric charge, running beneath them. Once, when her father was away, she’d accompanied him and Enrico on a short trip into the city in the wagon, and they’d stopped there for coffee, and she’d reached out and touched his hand as she spoke. Carlo felt that a new kind of connection was being made, a spark of some forbidden attraction shooting across a bridge that spanned the chasm between their lives. More conversations after that. And then the first secret meeting—her idea. A first kiss—his idea. And then more.
Remembering that “more” on the suspicious old woman’s sofa, he finally fell into a troubled sleep, that, after a time, was broken by the sound of footsteps. He lay there with his eye open, listening. He’d heard that when the Blackshirts came for someone, they forced their victims to drink castor oil, glass after glass, until their captives erupted in diarrhea so violent and persistent that, humiliated and drained of fluids, they died of dehydration. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought he could hear the murmurs of a quiet conversation just outside the back door. Weary, hungry, half-awake, he waited a minute, two minutes, then decided there could be no reason for a conversation like that in the middle of the night. No good reason.
He tossed the sheet aside, and, without even bothering to lace up his boots, slipped out the front door into cool darkness. Stars sparkled like living creatures in the black sky, and a sliver of moon shone among them, a sibling keeping watch. A dog bayed in a nearby yard. Even if he’d imagined the conversation, even if what he’d heard was only the woman mumbling her prayers, listening to the radio, or speaking innocently to a neighbor who couldn’t sleep, he wasn’t willing to take the risk. Soon enough, she’d realize that he’d fled, and that would make her only more certain that he’d deserted. She’d spread the word, the Blackshirts would be looking for him, a crazed mob of politically connected Fascists who’d avoided service entirely and whose love of their Benito overwhelmed all other considerations, all human compassion, all morality.
He hurried away from the house, leaving the road after a few hundred meters for a dusty path that wound along through bushes, cacti, and stunted trees near the shoreline. By the time the sun rose, he was shivering and hungry, but he’d put five kilometers between himself and the old woman’s narrowed eyes.
Up along the coast he went, with the triangular bulk of Etna to his left, snow-topped even in the first part of September, and signs of war wherever he looked. Piers ruined, buildings without roofs, craters in the middle of the road, and charred military vehicles lining the shoulders like the droppings of the animal of war. The path merged with the road again, and a farmer with a horse-drawn wagon stopped and took him as far as Santa Teresa di Riva, telling him that, as they fled, the Germans had come through Taormina, raping and stealing, shooting men they thought should have been fighting for them. Then the Allies, racing through with jeeps and tanks, tall men, some with pale faces. “And some of them black!” he said, as if, dark-skinned himself, those men were the most surprising thing he’d seen in his long life.