The next day, avoiding the main roads with their mines and patrols, he passed through an apple orchard, gorged himself on the fruit, and was sick to his stomach. He drank from streams, shot at and missed a fleeing deer, was given shelter in the barn of a woman so terrified by whatever it was she’d seen or experienced that she couldn’t stop shaking and couldn’t speak. He tried reaching out to touch her and soothe her, but she recoiled like a beaten animal. She had food, though, and left a plate of cooked white beans just inside the door of her lopsided barn. By the time Carlo found it, next morning, it was covered with ants, but he picked them off one by one and ate the beans and drank the glass of sourish water she’d put beside the plate. When he tried to thank her before leaving, she wouldn’t answer the locked door, wouldn’t show her face at the window, so he left two of the coins the priest had given him in the empty glass as a thank-you.
On he went, and at moments now he could hear the sounds of war in the distance. He passed Teano and then, near Pontecorvo, noticed thin twisting towers of smoke in the northern sky, and heard the faint tat tat tat of machine guns and the thumping boom of artillery fire. He had no idea how he was going to cross the battle lines. Somehow, in the deepest part of the night, he’d find a way to slip through. He’d stay in the central forests, he’d travel only in darkness; he’d steal clothing from a line and food from a garden if he absolutely had to. The soles of the work boots the priest had given him were worn paper-thin, his feet were cold, and he felt feverish, hungry, so weak that, in the middle of the afternoon, wrapping himself in the German blanket, he lay down in another apple orchard—this one with half the trees charred and withered—and couldn’t make himself stand up again.
He lay there, trying to cling to a vision of Vittoria’s face, staring at the nearest tree’s gnarled trunk, telling himself he’d rest for an hour, regain some strength, head toward the sounds of fighting, and trust, as the priest had suggested, in the light of goodness. Somehow, he’d make his way home, another few hundred kilometers. His childhood had toughened him, and it seemed to him at moments that his entire life had been a preparation to endure what he was enduring now.
He fell asleep staring at the gnarled tree trunk, remembering what it had been like to make love with Vittoria.
Blanket wrapped tightly around him, he didn’t awaken until he felt the morning sunlight on his face. He opened his eye, shivering, and turned it upward to see a soldier in a German uniform, the black turtle helmet on his head, the gray-green cloth. Tall, broad-shouldered, the man was standing there pointing a rifle down at him, bayonet gleaming in the sun.
Twenty-Seven
Although his work varied with the seasons—pruning, weeding, harvesting, helping Gennaro Asolutto and then Carlo with the different stages of the winemaking, tending to the equipment in winter months, and performing so many other jobs—Paolo’s morning routine was almost always the same. On Sundays, he’d spend a few happy hours in the fields with his shotgun, then walk back to the barn, wash and dress for Mass, and make the trip into Gracciano. The other six days of the week he’d rise, dress, go downstairs, use the toilet and wash his face, then take his seat at the head of the low table and eat whatever the women had prepared. Coffee, bread, eggs, sometimes prosciutto or mortadella or a piece of hard cheese. Sometimes a plum or a peach.
Before the war, his duties had been clear, the rhythm of the days predictable, the hierarchy rigid—from temporary traveling workers upward through the house and field staff and all the way to the Signore and Signora—dating back five hundred years, impossible to alter. War had taken away the younger men—Carlo, Gianluca, Giuseppe—and changed, to some extent, the working arrangements of those left behind. But his mornings remained what they had always been.
This morning was no different, though the wagon wasn’t sitting in the barn, and one horse was dead, the other off with Vittoria at the convent. Face and hands still slightly damp, Paolo had taken his place at the table and was waiting for his food when he heard a commotion above him, and then a strange kind of noise echoing down the stairs and into the other first-floor rooms. More trouble, was his first thought. The horse was dead and rotting in the ravine, the deserters gone, Enrico miserable, the Signorina and the wagon still with the nuns—safe there, he prayed. The grapes were almost ready. The rest of the wheat had to be taken in. Now, something about that unusual noise made him think: more trouble.
Another minute and, one after the next, every person who lived in the barn stepped into the eating room. Marcellina and Costanza, Gennaro Asolutto, the five children. This wasn’t so unusual. What was unusual was that Cinzia, the house servant, was with them, and that all of them were carrying some kind of pack or bag. Marcellina had food for him, at least: she set a cup of tea in front of him, then a plate with a heel of bread, two fried eggs and two thick blood sausages. But she didn’t sit down.