“Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!” Enrico was crying out. Vittoria had her arm around his shoulders and was pulling him tight against her. The rain began to fall harder. Paolo thanked the DellaMonica workers, and they and the others went off to their meal and rest, but, instead of heading back, he stood there, one hand on Ottavio’s bridle, watching.
It seemed to him that he’d reached the very lowest point of despair, a place like the one he’d known in the recent past, the bottom of a dark, bleak cave that felt as if it were beyond the reach of God. He had murdered a man; there was no question about that. And because of his sin, these two people were suffering. He wanted, more than anything, to go and stand beside Vittoria and Rico—the closest he had to family—hold them and comfort them, but a thousand-year-old wall, high as the tops of the tallest trees, stood between them. His mouth and jaw throbbed, the rain beat down, the cold wet night closed around his shoulders and the back of his neck. War. War had brought them here. War had swept away the fence between the territories of good and evil, what God found acceptable and what He did not, what good people would do, and what they would never do. In the wet darkness it seemed to him now, at last, that he’d come to understand the Gospel passage about the workers being paid the same for different amounts of work. Jesus was trying to tell them that there was no fairness here, on this earth. Good, bad, sinner and saint, if you inhabited a human body and lived on this soil, there was a way in which you stood absolutely unprotected. Anything could be done to you, no matter how good you tried to be. Anything. Even Jesus, purest of the pure, had been tortured and killed. Why hadn’t he understood this before? Paolo listened to Enrico weep, and felt, suddenly, that his heart had turned into a dirt-coated stone. Whatever the beak-nosed man and Father Costantino asked of him now, he would do. No matter the danger, no matter the sin. If it might somehow free his nation from the yoke of Nazi evil, if it might somehow lessen the pain of the two people in front of him, the only two people he truly loved in this world, then he would do it.
That was no longer the problem. The problem now was asking Vittoria to do what Father Costantino had suggested she do: take the deserters to the convent. The problem was not his own sins so much as the further sullying of another soul, the risking of another life. But, as the priest had said: for him, for her, for all of them now—what were the options?
Twenty-Two
Next morning, Vittoria awoke in the grip of despair and lay in her bed for the better part of an hour, listening to raindrops tick against the windowpanes. The night before, after the horror of it all—Nazis in the courtyard, her interrogation, the gruesome disposal of Antonina’s corpse—Old Paolo had taken her aside and asked if she’d be willing to bring the three German deserters to the nunnery in San Vigliano. Still half in shock from the encounter with the evil captain, listening to her brother’s sobs as he trailed behind them, she could tell Paolo was hoping she’d refuse. The bottom of his face was hideously swollen, there was dried blood at the corners of his lips, and the words that came out of his mouth were slurred and muffled, as if being spoken by drunken little men crouching inside his cheeks. “It would be very dangerous,” he said. “I have been asked to ask you. I’m sorry. I don’t want to. I’d do it myself, if I could, or I’d ask Marcellina to do it, but I’ve been told—”
“It’s fine,” she said. “I’ll do it.” She reached out and put a hand on his shoulder, then touched his swollen face, gently, with two fingers, realizing, as she did so, that it was the first time she’d touched him since she was a little girl, riding beside him in the delivery wagon, or standing next to him in the barn as he showed her how they bottled the wine or how to brush the horses without startling them. “I want to.”
Paolo squeezed his eyebrows down, shifted his eyes to the side and back. “It will be very dangerous,” he said again. “And I’m sorry about asking you to . . . do the other thing. I ask you now to forgive me.”
“I know, Paolo. Don’t worry. Please don’t worry. We’re in a different world now than the one we lived in before.”
The old man nodded, and, for a little while after that conversation, she’d felt like a warrior, a partigiana. For that short time, swept up in the emotions of what had been, after the day of her mother’s death, the second most painful day of her life, and caught up in fury at the Germans for the misery they’d caused Enrico, and Paolo, and her, she’d felt as though she were cleansing the fine gold dust from her skin. Her mother had admired the workers. Enrico practically lived with them. She could almost picture her spirit leaving the manor house and migrating toward the barn to be with them, to be fighting for good instead of placating evil. To be risking some of the richness she lived with every day. To be joining with Carlo now—who must be afraid every hour of the day and night.