Nothing moved on his old face. She waited, directly in front of him, their bodies a meter apart. She expected him to deny it again, or to tell her they had to leave, now, urgently, they could talk about this later. But Paolo only stood there, still and expressionless as the trunk of a tree, green eyes steady, face slightly swollen, her blood on his shirt collar. Seconds passed. He made a small nod, one movement.
She thought she heard the mutter of the truck engine, the deserters returning. Strangely then, she felt her own breathing change, as if, in the deepest part of her, one enormous thought was stirring from a long sleep. “But when I asked you earlier, you said no.”
Paolo didn’t move or look away. Now the truck had come into the courtyard. She could hear the wheels crunching on gravel. She didn’t move her eyes from Paolo’s face.
“You asked if I am Rico’s father,” Paolo said. “I am not.”
It took one more breath, another three seconds, for the enormous thought to rise up fully inside her. Paolo didn’t move his eyes. They were her eyes, she saw that now, green as a new leaf. She saw it, finally, after all these years, all these moments, all these conversations. The understanding swelled in her and climbed up past her heart and lungs, into her throat, and then it burst out of her eyes in an explosion of tears. She put both hands to her face and lowered her head and felt the tears dripping down her forearms, and she shook and shook. She felt two strong hands take hold of her shoulders, but she could not make herself look up.
Forty-Five
Paolo sat in the wagon, staring at Ottavio’s chestnut-brown rump and feeling the cool metal of the pistol against the skin of his belly. Driven by a strange, cold, half-familiar resolution, something that felt, at once, both utterly alien to him and completely just, he’d taken the weapon from the ground where Vittoria had dropped it, carefully washed off the bloody mud at the well, loosened his belt and tucked the pistol, not even as large as his hand, into the top of his pants. He pushed his shirt down over it to hold it there.
Behind him now, sitting in the wagon’s bed, he could hear Enrico singing softly to himself, going over and over the same part of a song the workers liked to sing in the fields, “Il Cielo Azzurro Azzurro.” “The Blue, Blue Sky.” There were four cases of wine beside Enrico, a small burlap sack with a few of Paolo’s clothes in it. Against the old man’s not very forceful objections—no, no, come with us!—Antonio had insisted on taking the German jeep. There were keys, gas, even an extra rifle in the back. My men and I will find a good use for it, he said, and, bringing Eleonora with him, he’d raced off into the hills to continue killing Nazis. The priest! was the last thing he said to Paolo, and he left it at that.
The priest.
Paolo had no urge to join them. He was done with that, or almost done with it. One more act was required of him, one more piece of what he thought of as the secret work. One more terrible thing, and then, he told himself, he would be done with that world forever.
Face streaked with tears, voice coming from far off, Vittoria said they could go and stay at her father’s friend’s vacation home at Lake Como—it belonged to the man he’d killed—and wait there for the end of the war. They’d grow food, fish in the lake. I have plenty of money, she said. We won’t starve. Paolo noticed that it had taken her several minutes to recover from what had happened, to recover enough, at least, so that she was able to speak and move. She left a note, for Carlo she said, then went into the manor house to pack a few clothes for her and for Rico.
Paolo put together his own small travel bag, then took his place in the wagon and waited for her, nervously, eyes on the south gate. It would be at least a ten-day trip to Como, he guessed. If they could leave before the other Nazis came looking for their countrymen, if Ottavio could go most of the night without stopping, then they could get far enough away from this place, from these killings, that the Montepulciano SS might not catch them. He worried that they’d take revenge on other people, though, other workers, or the nuns, but there was nothing he could do about that. He’d leave that to Antonio and his men. If they did manage to get away, he wasn’t too worried about the trip itself, as long as they traveled mainly on back roads and avoided the cities. Workers on other estates to the north would shelter them—helping each other was the tradition, the rule—let them sleep in their barn, water and feed the horse. They’d likely share their food, too. Of course, they’d know instantly that Vittoria wasn’t one of them—her clothing, her hair, the way she spoke and held herself, her hands. And they’d see the SanAntonio label on the bottles and know which estate the strange trio was fleeing. He could only hope they’d keep that information to themselves.