For a few minutes Paolo stood there, alone, listening. Out in the courtyard he heard the mule bray, as if, at last, after years of servitude, it had been granted its freedom. Someone came back inside and sprinted loudly up the steps, and he thought that maybe one of them—Gaetano, Costanza—had realized the foolishness of the plan and decided to come back. But then the footsteps pounded down the stairs. Paolo heard a woman’s voice call out, a child answer. Then silence.
He sat down hard in his chair. He stared in a dull trance at the hay bales, the stone-and-plank walls, the spilled tea, the eggs, the worn wooden handle of one of their pitchforks leaning in the corner. Crazy though she might be, Marcellina was leading the barn family in a way that, as foreman, he should have been leading them. But he had reasons for staying that they didn’t have. He would pay a price they didn’t deserve to pay. The long-disappeared old priest, Father Xavier, had been right: Sins are seeds. You plant them, then eat the fruit they produce.
Twenty-Eight
Vittoria sat down to dinner with the nuns—a simple, silent meal, all of them at two long tables. Afterward, she joined them for an hour of evening prayer and then was shown to one of the rooms that had been set aside for women who wanted to make a silent retreat for a few days. It had been nine years since she’d stayed in this building with her mother, and what struck her about the convent now, in contrast to the frenzy of the outside world, was the complete absence of drama. Three German army deserters had been brought to them—men within the enclosure! The risk involved!—and the nuns had acted as if Vittoria had brought nothing more than the cases of wine in the back of the wagon, or a few kilos of wheat.
True, the conversation with the mother superior had been charged with things unspoken, with secrets and allusions, but even that talk seemed to have been held against a background of quiet steadiness, of cares larger than those of this world. From what Vittoria could see, the nuns’ emotions had been set aside, or so deeply buried they could never reach the surface. Their lives were as bland as the small, bare-walled room in which she lay herself down to sleep, as bland as the polenta and greens they’d eaten for dinner, the tepid well water they’d drunk. As an adolescent visitor, she’d felt nothing but pity for these women, who were sacrificing every one of life’s pleasures in the hope of moving closer to God. Now, though she knew she could never trade places with them, Vittoria had at least a small appreciation for what they’d gained. She thought of the tension that filled every room her father sat in. She thought of the sometimes-fierce arguments she’d overheard between him and her mother, the fits of emotion she’d heard in the kitchen, or among the people who lived in the barn. She thought of her own foolish worries: what to request for dinner, how to have the meat cooked, what to wear, in which part of which room to place a new divan, lamp, or painting. All of that was missing from this whitewashed stone building, and the absence made all of it seem so petty.
She had an urge to write Carlo a letter, even though she knew it could never be sent. She longed for a true, open conversation, heartfelt, honest, free of secrets. Talks like that had been one of the gifts he’d given her, brief and quiet and so rare in her life, more valuable than diamonds.
The day had exhausted her, but before she fell asleep, she was visited by a memory of bringing her mother four peeled slices of pear on the last day she was able to eat. Propped up against the pillows, one of Vittoria’s ink drawings framed on the wall behind, her mother took a slippery slice in her fingers and laughed quietly when it twice fell back onto the plate. Eventually she was able to bring it to her mouth, chew and swallow it, and then she wiped her fingers on the blue silk napkin and shifted her eyes to Vittoria. So much love shone there. Love, and something else, compassion perhaps, fearlessness, a secret understanding. By then, the affair with Carlo had begun, and perhaps her mother sensed that, or had somehow found out about it. But her mother, also from a wealthy, landowning family, had been bred to silence and propriety, as if, in Italian high society, it was undignified to speak openly about life’s more treacherous subjects. Love, sex, death, disappointment. But on that afternoon, her mother studied Vittoria for a moment, blinked, swallowed, and said, very quietly and deliberately, “My beautiful daughter, until you have your own children you may never understand how having a child opens your heart to the deepest possible love. There are so many things I haven’t told you. My political views, my past, my secrets.”
“Tell me, Mother. Tell me now, please.”