Seventeen
Vittoria left the others on the patio and climbed the stairs to her room. The two windows there faced in the opposite direction from the smoking ruin—out over the courtyard, the vegetable garden, and the vines. But, looking through one of them, she could still see the women with their children, and, farther up, Old Paolo and Gennaro Asolutto in the wagon. She was glad her brother had wandered off early that morning, as he liked to do, and was probably exploring the fields and woods that led toward Cortona and the central mountains. He could go like that, alone, for the whole of a day, always finding his way home for the evening meal. Although it was sometimes difficult for him to explain the encounters, Enrico had told her many times that, in the high forests and meadows there, he met with witches and spirits. They talk to me about God, Vita, he’d say. They show me where the walnuts and berries are, so I don’t get hungry in my belly.
She stepped away from the window and lay on her bed, eyes open. Automobiles didn’t simply blow up by themselves, she knew that. She understood what she’d done—felt it in the very core of her spirit—and knew what Paolo, or someone he worked with, had done, too. The partigiani getting their revenge. She wondered if her father would connect her to the killing, and, while she did feel the dark weight of guilt in her bones, she felt something else, too, in equal measure. Tobias, the disgusting SS officer, was at the center of this “something else.” Before her trip to Montepulciano, evil had been an abstraction to her. She’d heard about Mussolini’s Blackshirts torturing his opponents, and about the kidnapping and killing of Matteotti, the one member of Parliament who’d stood up to him; the alignment with Hitler; all kinds of Nazi atrocities. And she’d believed those things were real, of course. And yet, she saw now that the life she lived, the fine wine and servants, the leisurely days and luscious meals, had been like a soft fur coat protecting her from the horrors of the war. She knew—the death of her own mother had shown her—that there was suffering and pain in life. But until the Nazi had grabbed her leg as if she were an animal, she’d been protected from that at some level, in some way.
Now the protection was gone. The guarantee of a comfortable tomorrow—of any tomorrow—was gone. She felt the rawness of being alive, the icy reality of evil, true evil. Of sin. Her own and others’。
She felt a fresh wave of remorse, a putrid wash of bitterness tinged with a feeling about Old Paolo that was a mix of puzzlement and anger: she’d clearly helped him to murder her own godfather! She tried to ease the regret by wondering what secret crimes Massimo Brindisi must have committed in order for the partisans to have imposed a death sentence on him. His factories made clothes for Mussolini’s army, tires for its jeeps. But, unless Paolo and the partisans were grievously mistaken, there must have been more. Her godfather, her father’s closest friend, a man who’d been so kind to her at times, who had loved her mother, must have been deeply involved with the Nazis; otherwise, why would the partisans have decided to kill him?
Eighteen
A fisherman, steering a patched and rusty boat with three worm-baited lines over the side and torn nets hanging from the foremast, agreed to ferry Carlo across the Strait of Messina to the Italian mainland without asking for payment of any kind. They bounced along on a choppy sea, past the hulls of sunken German naval ships and as far as a half-broken pier on the mainland at Reggio Calabria. It seemed to Carlo that, among the many other riches that had been lost—the abundance and enjoyment of food, even for poor people like himself; the elaborate festivals in which every man, woman, and child participated—the war had stripped Italians of the pleasure they took in language. So much lay below the surface now, unspoken, as if the enormity of the suffering caused by decades of fascism, the Allied bombing raids, the German occupation, and now the actual fighting on Italian soil, had rendered words so insufficient that people no longer bothered to use them as they had in the past, freely, creatively, joyfully. Everyone had been made wary—of the Germans, the OVRA, the Blackshirts, the Allied bombing raids, of each other’s political views, of the cruel hand of fate. In the past, he and the boat owner might have enjoyed a leisurely conversation, asked about each other’s lives, talked about love, work, food. From the least to the most educated, every Italian loved those kinds of impromptu encounters. Now, instead of engaging in a lively conversation, they sailed along in silence. At the pier, with the steep hills near the shoreline hovering over them, he thanked the fisherman with a nod. The man nodded in return, left him, then pointed his boat out to sea again, probing the invisible underwater world for something to sell, or eat.