Silence.
In all his decades of spending time around working people, Paolo had known many men who spoke only rarely—Gennaro Asolutto was a perfect example. But, so far at least, this Antonio seemed like the most tight-lipped of them all, the king of silence, as if words had to climb an icy mountain path in order to reach his mouth, and then slip out between his lips one at a time. Paolo turned to look at him again. Nothing. “Explain to me what you know,” he said at last. “Or I’ll open the door and jump out and you can shoot me if you want to shoot me.”
Antonio grunted skeptically. “First, tell me,” he said, and then there was another dark stretch with no sound in it beyond the slip and slop and bump of the tires and the irregular struggles of the Fiat’s old motor. “Did you do something to your Signore? Did you steal from him? Cheat him on the weights when you took the olives to the mill the way all the fattori do?”
“I’m not a fattore. We don’t have that system on our vineyard. The Signore’s father changed it long ago. We have a wine boss—Carlo now—and a foreman—me—that’s all. And no, no, no, never! I never cheated!” Paolo shouted at the windshield. “I never did anything wrong to him!”
So the Signore was the one who suspected him, who’d decided he should be killed! The word “wrong”—scorretto—echoed in the small car. “I’m sixty-four years old! I lived on this vineyard all that time! Sixty-four years I worked here. Every day but Sunday. I never stole one bunch of grapes, one bottle of wine, one ax, one hammer. Nothing. Never. I never cheated anyone in my life! Why do you even ask me? Does he speak badly of me? Has Eleonora heard him curse me?”
Another grunt. Antonio retreated into his silence and wrestled with the wheel.
But then, in the moonlit darkness, with the seat of the car shifting and bumping beneath him, Paolo understood that Antonio’s remark—Did you do something to your Signore?—had been not merely a question, but an answer: he began to suspect that what he had done to his Signore, in some ways the worst thing one man could do to another, might very well be root of the harvest of troubles he was reaping now. Depending on what the Signore knew of the past, and how he had come to know it, the man who controlled Paolo’s life might have been nurturing a ferocious bitterness inside himself all these many years, biding his time, planning a complicated revenge.
Once that understanding struck him, layer upon layer of lie and half truth, years of the most terrible, impossible, agonizing pretense began falling away from him like scales of diseased skin. After a few minutes he felt as though there were no clothes on him at all, no skin; his flesh was raw. The touch of the cool night air was like the cut of a blade. The war, the secret work, the Nazi officer tormenting Vittoria, the priest with his odd, superior smiles, the murder of the Signore’s friend, the Nazi slapping his face and putting the gun to his head, the killing of the horse, the screams and weeping, Enrico’s misery, the tears of anger on Marcellina’s face as she broke open a thousand years of obedience and subservience—all of it had scraped from him every last bit of pretense, everything that was less than perfectly true.
Antonio held to his silence, and that, too, was like a sharp blade on flesh, scraping, scraping, ripping the pretense away, exposing the raw truth. “Io,” Paolo managed to say into the terrible silence. I. And then, though he tried to hold them back, something in the middle of him pushed hard against the memories buried there. His mouth opened, and no flex of muscles or act of will could close it again. “I . . . with the Signora, Umberto’s wife . . . alcune volte . . . A few times. Many years ago. We were still young. She and I in the field . . . several times. She was unhappy, and I thought . . . and we . . . And then we stopped, we had to stop. She had to make us stop.”
That was as far as he could go. Amazed at himself, he buried the rest of it, the most important part. All the laypeople he’d known and kept the secret from since those days, more than twenty years! Now, half-broken by the series of horrors he’d been living through, he’d chosen this person to hear it! His legs were trembling from the knees down.
“Who else have you ever told?”
“No one.”
“No one?”
Paolo’s hands were squeezed into fists. The package, held between his forearms, was shaking back and forth. The truth, the truth, the truth now. “I told the priest who used to be here, who left. Father Xavier. In confession.”
“And this priest? Costantino?”