“In a Nazi victory, you mean.”
“Enough, Vittoria,” her father said. His cheeks were trembling. Arrabbiato, she thought—the masculine adjective—and she lowered her eyes and began to eat.
“She’s exactly like her mother,” Vittoria heard her father say, as if he were apologizing. “The same politics. A palace radical.”
“Yes, and Celeste was also beautiful,” Massimo noted. “I still sense her wondrous spirit during every moment I spend in this house.”
Vittoria looked up and saw him smiling at her. Such a confusing man! Full of praise for Il Duce when he spoke with her father, and yet best friends with her mother, who’d despised Mussolini with every fiber of her being. The two of them would sit together on the patio, conversing quietly and intently over coffee, and when Vittoria approached, they’d look up at her and smile and start talking about the weather, the vines, the price of bread in local markets, in a way that made her feel she’d interrupted something neither she nor her father was supposed to hear.
She tried to concentrate on the delicious meal. The two men went back and forth, piling one agreement upon the next, as if taking turns polishing each other’s shoes.
Il Duce’s generals will prevail.
Yes, of course they will.
The Americani will never be allowed to make landing on Italian soil.
Never. It isn’t possible.
And if they do, they’ll lose a million men.
Yes, yes, exactly, and be unable to fight their way this far up the peninsula.
Terrifying as it was to have German soldiers and military vehicles everywhere, shameful as it was to see Mussolini acting the part of Hitler’s younger brother—sending troops to foreign lands as if it were he, not the deranged führer, who commanded a fearsome war machine—her father and his friend had made their accommodations. Powerful men themselves, they shared an idolatry of power, seemed to see it as the defining trait of true masculinity. Praise for Mussolini decorated their every conversation—over a game of chess, at a meal, during a walk in the flower gardens. And so far, at least, they’d found ways to placate the Nazis. In her father’s case, regular deliveries of fine wine to the SS headquarters in Montepulciano had been enough to convince the Germans to let the grapes be grown and harvested, and the wine sold to those places of business that had managed to remain open during the war. Massimo Brindisi, not a public a supporter of Il Duce like her father, had a different kind of leverage: his factories, a bit farther north, were essential to the Axis war effort. The threat of starvation, the violence of Mussolini’s Blackshirts and OVRA, and the worry about Nazi retaliation were enough to keep his workers from striking, as they’d done at times leading up to the war years. Profit drove both men, she thought. Profit, luxury, power. Those were their gods, and that was the twisted view of life that had caused her mother to grow ill and die at age forty-nine, Vittoria was certain of it.
She stayed silent through the rest of the meal. First the reginette, then tender cutlets of veal in a light tomato sauce with vinegar peppers and polenta; for dessert, a selection of their own cheeses, and glasses of sweet wine from Sicily. Eleonora served them, then stood like a statue in the corner of the room.
Same as me, Vittoria thought. Listening, and pretending not to.
“A strange occurrence the other day,” Massimo was telling her father, who grunted in response, as if only half-curious, and refilled their wineglasses. “I was driving, just at dusk, through the center of Montepulciano, and I had to take a small detour because of the damage caused by the most recent bombing there. I turned down a road I don’t often use, and I happened to go past the house the Germans have occupied. The SS house, everyone calls it. Do you know it?”
“We send them wine,” her father said.
“The property is large. It extends from one street to the next, across the entire block. I was driving by the back side, and who do I see coming out the back door?”
“I can’t guess, Massimo. Badoglio? The king? Il Duce?”
“The priest! Dressed in layman’s clothes, as if in disguise.”
“The one from the cathedral? Father Giampero?”
Massimo shook his head. “No, no, the local priest, the one in the village. I’ve crossed paths with him here a few times when he comes to visit you.”
“Costantino?”
“That one, yes. The light was weak, but I saw him, I’m sure of it. And he saw me, as well. I drove on. But I kept thinking: What is the village priest doing in the house of the Nazis, dressed like a merchant?”