Another minute and she was alone again, wondering how much the German deserters had heard, how much they’d understood, what the Italians would have done with them if they’d been discovered. Turned them in to the local SS, no doubt, because those dozen or so men in the house in Montepulciano had terrorized everyone within an hour’s ride in every direction, and because, most likely, the police were worshippers of their Duce, and perhaps of the madman, Hitler, as well. The old societal order, a severe and muscular manliness, the imaginary greatness of Italy—those were the guiding principles of their belief system, and those principles overwhelmed any human compassion, any at all. The fact that Mussolini had disappeared wouldn’t matter to these men. He was a god, a Fascist icon, and if he sided with the Nazis, then so would they . . . until the end. The deserters would have been dragged from the wagon, driven to Montepulciano, beaten, tortured, and she and Paolo and the others the same. Tortured in hideous ways, then shot.
All along a slippery downhill stretch, and then onto a two-track path across open fields—she couldn’t stop imagining it, couldn’t stop thinking about what might happen to her when the Nazi captain returned, as he’d promised. The pistol lay carefully covered at her feet, and she realized how foolish it was to put any faith there. One small weapon she barely knew how to use, a few bullets, against an army of men trained to torment.
Another half kilometer, and behind sheets of driving rain the nunnery came into view, a plain, three-story, white-stucco building with crosses at each end, surrounded by gardens that fed the nuns; the gardens, in turn, were surrounded by high stone walls that kept the women from having any contact—even visual contact—with the people of the outside world. Vittoria knew that once a week the local priest went there to hear confession and say Mass, and the rest of the time the nuns lived behind those walls with very little contact with the outside world, eating simple meals, doing manual labor, waking early, praying, having no fantasies of a lover returning from battle, no dreams of freedom, no thoughts of an elegant dish of reginette enjoyed on a stone patio with a glorious bottle of wine. Never a pair of earrings, a bracelet, a new skirt or dress or blouse. Never a trip to the cathedrals of Rome or the palazzo-lined canals of Venice. Her mother had taken her here as a thirteen-year-old girl—they’d made a two-day retreat together before Easter that year, taken Communion kneeling side by side in the chapel, hands clasped, shoulders touching—and, in her teenage certainty, Vittoria had left the convent thinking it was a terrible way to live, that it was a sin to turn your back on all the beautiful things life could offer, a kind of selfishness. Now, it seemed, the coin had been flipped over. She drew up to the walls and felt she was looking through the bars of the gate from a kind of hell to a kind of heaven, a peaceful place, safe, unbothered. No partisans here, no heroism, no interrogations by lewd German officers.
A young nun, uncovered against the rain by anything more than her white habit and wimple, came and opened the metal gates, and Vittoria nodded to her and led Ottavio into the enclosure.
It was only when she was standing next to the young nun, untying the tarpaulin and helping the Germans climb out from beneath it, that she realized how foolish her thoughts had been. The nuns were risking torture and death, too, but without pistols, and without the SanAntonio name to offer protection. This young nun, apparently unsurprised at their arrival, told Vittoria that the mother superior would like her to come upstairs for tea. She smiled and led the Germans inside. Vittoria heard her ask, in Italian, if they were hungry, and the gentleness in her voice, the selflessness, the innocence—as if everyone on earth must understand Italian—sounded to her like a love song in the grayness of that day, a sweet hymn. For a moment, Vittoria could let herself believe the war would end, they’d return to the life they’d enjoyed, that her visions and fantasies about Carlo would be made into some kind of real, sane life. That the goodness of God would guarantee it.
Twenty-Three
Grimaldi, Rogliano, Aprigliano—day after day Carlo passed the small cities and towns on the instep of the Italian boot, skirting them when he could, worried he’d be seen as a deserter and shot on sight without being given time to explain. The food Violeta had given him was long gone. The patch Ariana had made for him had caused a circle of calloused skin to form around his left eye, the soles of his boots were worn through, the blisters on his feet had been opened and healed and reopened, but the more he walked, the more determined he became to get back to Vittoria. He would survive simply in order to see her again. Nothing else mattered.