For him.
Forty-Seven
Vittoria didn’t ask why Paolo had to stop in the church. Confession, she supposed, strange as that seemed at such a moment. Cinzia had told her once that, among the people of the barn, Old Paolo had a reputation as the most religious. During the few minutes he and Enrico were inside, Vittoria sat very still on the wagon’s bench seat, her head tilted slightly downward, eyes open, rosary beads clutched in her left hand. She was no longer praying, no longer looking around to see if they were being chased by Nazi soldiers. She felt as though an enormous church bell were ringing inside her, shaking every organ and bone the way the cathedral bell in Montepulciano made the ancient pews tremble and caused the huge hanging lamps to sway slightly above their heads. As a girl, she’d been terrified that the oblong metal-and-glass lamps would come crashing down on them, and her mother would always rest a hand on Vittoria’s leg when the bells were rung.
What she’d give now to feel that touch, to feel Carlo’s. The incredible fact that Paolo had revealed to her an hour earlier seemed to be staring back at her, a pair of eyes, watching, waiting, filled with a pure, steely truth. A surprise, yes, but wrapped around the unsurprising. Behind those eyes, surrounding that incredible fact, the horrors of the day rang again and again inside her—violence was its own music: loud, discordant, ugly. She thought she heard two or three sharp reports from inside the church, like sticks being snapped. She looked up: no movement there, no other sounds, but small waves of fear were running across her skin. She thought of what Carlo’s existence must be like, with the constant threat of death and injury, and she wondered if Paolo had gone into the church to ask for news of him. To see if the priest—what was his name? Costantino?—might have heard something.
After a short time, Paolo and Enrico stepped out into the daylight, hurrying it seemed. The pace of their movements threw more fuel on the embers of anxiety inside her. Enrico jumped up into the seat. Paolo untied the wagon, climbed up more slowly, took hold of the reins in both hands, and led Ottavio away from the church. Out through the north end of the town they went, then onto a quiet farm road, two dirt tracks with a strip of grass between them.
They rode until dusk, watered Ottavio in a stream, fed him a few handfuls of hay, ate something themselves, then pushed on in near-darkness. Toward Arezzo, her brother climbed into the back and fell asleep, but Vittoria didn’t move to her right, away from Paolo. She sneaked a glance at his profile. There was a quarter moon, and in its light she watched him for a moment, studied his workman’s face, his rough hands, and struggled and struggled to fully believe what she now knew must be true. She felt words in her mouth, but held them there. Ottavio’s hooves clopped a quiet rhythm. The wagon shifted and bounced, wheels squeaking too loudly. The cool darkness, filled with terrors, secrets, and hopes, brushed against her skin, and at last she managed to speak. “All these years,” she said. And then, after a long, slow inhalation, “All these years, after you saw my face, you had to live with what you knew. You couldn’t speak of it. How terrible that must have been.”
For a full minute Paolo didn’t answer her, didn’t even turn his head. She watched him in the moonlight, waiting. La pazienza dei contadini was a phrase one often heard. The patience of the peasants. Vittoria could almost hear her mother saying it, and she wondered what torments her mother had lived with, what kind of coldness or fear or societal chains had kept her from seeking out the man she loved and speaking with him, having one conversation at least, explaining, asking forgiveness. She wondered, over all those years, with Paolo so wounded that he eventually refused even to look in her direction, what measure of guilt her mother had felt. Guilt, doubt, confusion, shame, regret. She wondered if her father had sensed the truth, or discovered it.
She would never know.
At last, Paolo swallowed and coughed once. “Sì,” he said into the night, his voice tight with an old, long-subdued sorrow, “dirlo non potevo. Ma ogni giorno potevo vederti.”
Yes, I couldn’t speak of it. But every day I was able to see you.
He’d used the ti with her, the informal pronoun. A first.
Vittoria felt that ti echoing inside her. She shifted the beads, reached over and rested a hand on her father’s arm, just inside the elbow. She squeezed once, then took her hand away and felt, in spite of everything that had happened on that day, and everything happening in the world around her, something that resembled peace.
Epilogue
Even though they’d been at Lake Como for the better part of a month, Paolo found that he still wasn’t comfortable sleeping in the enormous house that had belonged to Vittoria’s godfather. He’d killed the man, for one thing; the guilt of that act still tormented him. And, for another, the bedroom there was far too rich for his blood and bones. Vittoria seemed to feel perfectly entitled to it, almost at home there, and he was not surprised about that. It was a beautiful house, set less than a kilometer above a small town on the lake’s eastern shore, with flower and vegetable gardens, columns and a fountain out front, and balconies on the second and third floors that offered views of the lake, and of the mountains on the western side, near the Swiss border. Vittoria and Enrico and the hired woman, Zenia, who cooked for them in exchange for her food, a place to live, and a bit of money, slept in a wing of the main house. Paolo took his meals there but asked to sleep in an outbuilding that must have been used by Brindisi’s servants before the war. The room there was luxurious compared to his room at the barn, and he slept well. He spent his days tending to the vegetable garden and fruit trees to one side of the house （Vittoria worked in the flower garden to the other side） and taking long walks with Enrico up into the hills, or fishing with him from one of the piers that jutted out into the lake.