She could manage only a frozen nod.
“Good,” he said, sliding the chair backward without standing up.
For a moment, her legs wouldn’t support her. She heard “Vita, Vitaaaa!” from the front porch, and Enrico’s voice gave her the strength to stand. The captain reached across and tapped the side of her face, once, lightly, with the back of his hand, as one might tap a disobedient child.
Then, in a blur, he was gone, there was the sound of engines beyond the windows, and Enrico had burst into the room, wrapped his arms around her, and pushed her back down onto the couch. “They hurt me, Vita. He killed Antonina, Vita. They made her dead! I’m going to kill him the way he killed Antonina. I will. I’m going to, when he comes to the barn again.”
“He won’t come again, Rico. I’m sure he won’t.”
“We have to take her now, Vita. Paolo said so. To the place. The . . . the . . . we have to take Antonina, can you help, can you?”
Twenty-One
When the two Nazi vehicles had driven out of the courtyard, and the wailing and weeping in the barn had settled into an undercurrent of miserable murmurs and sobs, Paolo’s mind cleared enough for him to realize that something had to be done with Antonina’s body. They couldn’t leave it in the stable to be swarmed by flies and gnawed by rodents. After thinking about it for a few minutes, he sent young Gaetano to a nearby estate to ask for help. It was a decision he made with reluctance, because the workers there—on the six-hundred-hectare hazelnut and semolina plantation owned by another noble family, the DellaMonicas—would be as tired as he was after a day of labor, and soon to sit down to their evening meal. But there was a thousand-kilogram dead horse in the barn and less than two hours left of daylight, and for centuries there had been an understanding among the workers of various estates that there were times when one group or the other would need assistance with a difficult job, repayment guaranteed.
Within half an hour, Gaetano returned with six of the ablest workers from the DellaMonica property—four men too old for military service, and two strong young women. While he waited, Paolo had tied the sturdiest canvas tarpaulin he could find to the back of the wagon and fed Ottavio a handful of hay. Enrico had returned from the manor house, and Paolo tried to gently peel him away from where he sat: in the stable with Antonina’s bloody neck across his lap.
Tugging, half lifting, using lengths of wood as levers, the six visitors and Paolo, Enrico, Gaetano, Marcellina, and Costanza were able to pull and push and slide Antonina’s corpse onto the canvas sheet. Paolo driving, the others walking alongside, they slowly dragged the dead animal out of the barn. There was no question of trying to bury or butcher her: it would have taken a day to dig and then refill a grave so large, and Enrico, already so upset, would have been pushed to the edge of sanity by seeing his beloved horse cut into pieces. The only reasonable option was to drag Antonina to the ravine along the flattest route they could find, and somehow slide her down into it. So they went along, Paolo guiding the horse, the heavily loaded tarpaulin scraping across the dirt, Enrico wailing, and the others marching somberly behind as if in a funeral procession for a human being.
By the time they reached the great cleft that marked part of the southeastern boundary of the Vineyard SanAntonio, most of the light was gone from the day, a gentle, cool rain had begun to fall, and Vittoria, summoned by her brother, had joined them. She wore the same expression as everyone else from the vineyard: a reflection of terror, an electric wariness, as if the Nazis might return at any minute. But there was something else there, something in the way she held herself, in the way she walked, and Paolo, with a piercing soul-pain, wondered what had been done to her in the manor house.
His face was swollen, one tooth loose. He was hungry, burdened by guilt, soaked in a cold fury from the events of the day, but he was still able to appreciate the incredible sight of Umberto SanAntonio’s children, two members of the famous family, working alongside contadini to try to slide the dead beast over the edge of the steepest part of the ravine. Enrico was letting out a symphony of grunts and wails broken by quick, loud sentences of grief—I love you. I’ll save you. I love you. The rest of them were grim and silent, struggling. At last they managed to push the horse’s midsection far enough over the lip that gravity drew her down into the stony underbrush. Side over side she went, stiff legs swinging up into the air, then snapping beneath her as she crashed through the bushes and came to rest a few meters from the trickling stream at the bottom.