I can sense now, and Dr. DeMarco confirms it （though I can’t yet bear to burden Vittoria with the news） that I’m moving—too soon!—into the last stage of my time on earth. These are my last few months, perhaps my last few weeks. I wonder at times if, via some evil magic, the strains and dissatisfactions of my days here have broken this body, the way the strain of overwork can cause a mare to sicken and die.
I have so much, and yet, so many regrets. It’s almost the opposite of the workers’ lives—or the way I imagine them to be. They have so little. They exist in a cage of blunted dreams, fed scraps of pleasure. And if they try to break out of that cage, what dreams they have are soon crushed beneath the wheels of the great societal machinery that has given me the enormous house in which I sit and write this.
And yet, despite their limited lives, one hears them singing as they work the vines and fields, and laughing in the barn in the evenings. No wonder Vittoria enjoyed spending time there with them, until Umberto forbade it. What a row he and I had over that issue! “You don’t know the men of the barn like I do!” he shouted—such a strange irony there, for me. “To them, the sight of a girl like Vittoria is like the sight of an apple to a hungry horse! Would you want her to have one of them as a husband? To bear his child?”
“Perhaps she’d be happier than I am!” I shouted back, which hurt him, of course, and was wrong. But it seemed that Vittoria’s movement toward adulthood brought into focus the crushed dreams in each of us, Umberto and I both, the betrayals, the distance, the deep ravines of dissatisfaction across which we could no longer really see or hear or speak kindly to each other.
Sister Gabriella said to me in one of our marvelous conversations that perhaps all the trouble in the world has, at its root, our insistence on denying others their full humanity. Surely the Germans are doing that with the Jews （what would they do to me if they knew I was part of a chain of Italians working to hide and save them?! If they knew about Eleonora! About the nuns!）， but we all do that, albeit in smaller ways. We were raised, Umberto and I, to ignore the full humanity of the people who keep us alive. And it’s always seemed to me that he can’t even see the full humanity of our Enrico.
The people I’m involved with in Montepulciano—another secret; I hold so many now that at times it wearies me—see the workers and servants as human beings. Their urge for a new system is based on that, and I agree, of course. And yet their views are so rigid: all landowners bad, all peasants good. Father Xavier joined us the other week. I don’t know who invited him, and I don’t know what he thinks, because he said little and only listened. I confess to wondering for a moment if he might be some kind of spy—the Vatican made its sordid peace with Mussolini years ago. But perhaps his silence reflected only the difficulty of his position. On the one hand, the young radicals care for the peasant class as Christ certainly would have. On the other, they have little good to say about the pope or the Church, and most of them don’t believe in God.
If I live long enough and regain some of my lost strength, I’d like to invite Vittoria to one of these meetings. I think, for the most part, she’d approve. I hope she would. I so hope that she has the courage to lead her life more honestly and openly than I have.
Absorbed as she was in the pages, eager as she was to read on, Vittoria reached that short paragraph and had to close the book.
If they knew about Eleonora, her mother had written! What could that mean? Was Eleonora Jewish? Was her mother, her quiet, intellectual, flower-growing mother, involved in hiding Jews?!
And: the betrayals, the distance. What did that actually mean? Vittoria lowered her head and began, very quietly, to cry. There was so much she’d never know about her own mother, so many secrets hiding in the stone walls of this house. Part of her was afraid to read on, afraid of what she might discover there. In that beautiful handwriting her mother had written: I so hope she has the courage to lead her life more honestly and openly than I have. It was a kind of motherly lesson she was offering: Don’t make the kinds of choices I made, my daughter. Have courage.
Cinzia and the barn workers were gone. Tobias and his SS henchmen could return at any moment. The Americans were fighting up the peninsula—for the second time today she’d heard bombing in the distance, just as she closed her mother’s journal. She didn’t know where Carlo was, or even if he were still alive. The courage, she thought. The courage. She pushed back from the desk and sank to her knees and, leaning her forehead against the wood and clasping her hands together, prayed for her mother to send her a sign.