“As long as the Signorina stays, I’ll stay,” Paolo told Eleonora. “Where would I go?”
“If they come back, they’ll kill you.”
Paolo didn’t answer. Until that moment, he realized, the commotion in the barn had made him forget about the new assignment the priest had given him. Tonight, it was supposed to be. Eleonora’s boyfriend would come to the barn, late tonight, carrying another explosive. If the Germans returned and killed him, they’d have reason to do so. He thought of what Eleonora had said, that her boyfriend had found him frightening. An unarmed old man. He wondered, briefly, what he looked like to other people—to the priest, to Eleonora’s Antonio, to the Germans, perhaps. To Vittoria. He wondered if the killer inside him, that hidden beast, was visible.
He grunted and climbed to his feet, thanked Eleonora, and went back to work.
The girl hadn’t climbed even as far as the crest of the hill when Paolo heard a series of muted thuds in the distance. Boom . . . boom . . . boom echoing in the hills. “The Allies,” he said, before Enrico could ask him. “The Americani. Bombing the Nazis.”
“The war will be over soon!” Enrico said. “Soon it will be over, Paolo! And then we’ll all be happy!”
Thirty-One
On the hard bed of the jail cell, Carlo fell asleep after a time and dreamed of Vittoria yet again. They were in the keg room, opening a bottle of the wine saved for the manor house, the good wine. Vittoria had brought cheese and bread and was holding the food up to his mouth, holding out a glass of water . . .
He was shaken roughly awake. After a few seconds of confusion, he focused his eyes on a smiling, round-bodied man on the plank bed across from him, and then on the soldier who’d pulled him from sleep.
No pointed rifle, no tied hands now, this new German soldier—quiet and businesslike—led him and Carmine outside into the bright morning and gestured for them to climb into the truck. Another soldier with a holstered pistol sat there, watching them, and, until yet another soldier appeared and climbed in, Carlo wondered if it might be possible to overpower him.
Off they went. A five-minute ride with the sun rising over the hills. “The beginning of our vacation abroad,” Carmine joked, and Carlo just glanced at him and shook his head. What would it take, he wondered, what amount of misery would it take to dampen the man’s spirits?
When the truck stopped, Carmine laughed his joyful laugh and announced, “Stazione,” as if to a group of passengers sitting on a tour bus.
They were marched through the empty train station, its waiting room, hallways, and unused café dimly lit by the sun and by a lamp left on in an empty office. One soldier ahead of them and one behind, they passed the toilets and the ticket window and two closed kiosks. There were propaganda posters glued to the walls on either side. The usual scenes: Mussolini with his chin thrust out, smiling peasants working the fields. Carlo had seen them many times on the deliveries, sometimes explaining to the other workers what the words meant. He went tiredly along, thirsty, hungry, weak, wondering if there would ever be a propaganda poster that showed a hungry peasant, a victim of the Blackshirts, a soldier who’d lost an eye in the war, or parents who’d lost a child.
The only trains he’d ever ridden were the ones that had taken him from Padova to Reggio Calabria, and then, after the crossing of the strait into Sicily, from Messina to Siracusa. The station reminded him of those rides, which reminded him of Pierluigi, which reminded him of Ariana and her family and the life he’d chosen to leave. Regret was an emotion alien to him. Like everyone else who lived in the barn and worked the SanAntonio estate, like every other contadino he’d ever met, he lived in the moment, neither remorseful about the past nor holding to great hopes for the future. Once in a while, with a word or a few words here and there, Paolo had alluded to an old flame, the love of his youth; other than that, they worked, they slept, they inhabited the moment, they took their small pleasures and endured the rest of life in silence.
The train station, with its sense of some unfamiliar destination, made him realize that it was Vittoria, with her kisses and their moments of lovemaking, that had broken apart the shell of the present moment in which he’d always trained himself to live. He’d made love with other young women, but those experiences had been purely physical, a brief release from the monotony of their days. Those encounters had never pointed toward any future dream, any destination along a rail line; they’d never moved him to imagine a life different from the life he led. He had no lust for wealth or property, none at all, no fantasy of marrying Vittoria in a church ceremony and inheriting the vineyard. But he did imagine spending the future with her, and it was impossible to picture that future as being lived in the upstairs room of the barn. So, after each of those times with her behind the secondary barn, tentatively, half-afraid, he’d allowed himself to imagine something, to hope for different days, perhaps a small house and a few hectares of their own vines somewhere. The dream was vague, the particulars blurred by the confinement of the ancient cables that bound each of them to their separate lives. But it was a dream all the same, and it had lifted him up through the hardest days of his service, pulled him away from Ariana and Sicily, sustained him through all the hours of walking, the hunger, the fear.