stories she knew already, since they had long since passed into local legend: the Rossi fire, the marzipan feasts, the night he had hung Ricardo Bianchi, hog-tied, from the cleft of a fig tree.
The story of his outlandish grief over his mother’s death was also well traveled in the valley: instead of throwing the handful of petals onto his mother’s casket as he had been instructed, the five-year-old Pietro had leapt into the grave with her, and when Pietro refused to take the many hands that were held out to pull him back up, a groom had been forced to climb down and retrieve him. Every step the boy or the man had taken in the course of the struggle had resounded with a horrible echo on the wooden box, a sound nobody in attendance had yet forgotten. But now Pietro confessed to Carolina that his grief hadn’t left him in the floods of angry tears he cried in the weeks after his mother’s death: it had been his constant childhood companion. In fact, his gardener still kept his trowels and shovels under lock and key out of habit from Pietro’s boyhood, when, at any chance, Pietro would sneak into the gardener’s shed to steal the tools and mount another assault on the earth that covered his mother’s grave.
“I never told another girl this,” he told her, looking into her eyes with surprise and a certain curious expectation, as if waiting for her to explain to him why he had chosen her.
But it was a mystery to Carolina as well. She had never asked for his secrets, and she wasn’t sure she wanted them. They seemed like confessions to her, not the pretty trinkets she had thought a new lover would confide. She felt their weight, and her own inability to heal or absolve, and it frightened her. She found herself wishing for the Pietro her heart had constructed over the previous years: sure-footed, understanding, and fearless, to come rescue her from Pietro himself as he rambled on at her side. The wish made her dizzy.
Still, Pietro didn’t seem to tire of their conversations, or of her. At her mother’s invitation, he returned for dinner the night after his first visit, and from then the pattern was set. Each day, he arrived at Carolina’s home on some pretext: bearing a brace of bloodied rabbits he had killed that morning because her father admitted to a fondness for them; carrying a bottle of his father’s best wine, which he hoped might alleviate the headache her mother had complained of the previous day; or insisting, to her father’s delight, that the shade of her garden was simply much more pleasant than the bright sunlight in his, so that he couldn’t help but prefer to spend his time in it.
Carolina lived through those first days with Pietro half believing that it was all a dream from which she might awake at any moment, and she moved through her days as if even the slightest sound or movement might cause the whole world to dissolve. It was the end of the week before she remembered that she had not seen her lake for days, a realization that came to her as she watched a hard summer rain beat down on her father’s drive, cutting slender streams through the gravel. It was Sunday. The night before, at the Rosetti gala, Pietro had danced over half the dances with her and spent most of the rest at her side under one of the enormous goose-feather fans Silvia Rosetti had ordered affixed to her ballroom walls, large enough that, in an emergency, they might also serve as wings for a grown man. During one of the more sentimental waltzes, Pietro had nodded at a dancer in a military jacket and repeated a story that he had told her only days before: “When I was a young man,” he murmured, with all the urgency of a new secret, “my only dream was to die in battle. I never thought I would live to be this old.”
Carolina had felt the gaze of a pair of girls on the other side of the room. When her eyes met theirs, they quickly turned away. She looked back at Pietro, struggling to compose her face into an expression
The story of his outlandish grief over his mother’s death was also well traveled in the valley: instead of throwing the handful of petals onto his mother’s casket as he had been instructed, the five-year-old Pietro had leapt into the grave with her, and when Pietro refused to take the many hands that were held out to pull him back up, a groom had been forced to climb down and retrieve him. Every step the boy or the man had taken in the course of the struggle had resounded with a horrible echo on the wooden box, a sound nobody in attendance had yet forgotten. But now Pietro confessed to Carolina that his grief hadn’t left him in the floods of angry tears he cried in the weeks after his mother’s death: it had been his constant childhood companion. In fact, his gardener still kept his trowels and shovels under lock and key out of habit from Pietro’s boyhood, when, at any chance, Pietro would sneak into the gardener’s shed to steal the tools and mount another assault on the earth that covered his mother’s grave.
“I never told another girl this,” he told her, looking into her eyes with surprise and a certain curious expectation, as if waiting for her to explain to him why he had chosen her.
But it was a mystery to Carolina as well. She had never asked for his secrets, and she wasn’t sure she wanted them. They seemed like confessions to her, not the pretty trinkets she had thought a new lover would confide. She felt their weight, and her own inability to heal or absolve, and it frightened her. She found herself wishing for the Pietro her heart had constructed over the previous years: sure-footed, understanding, and fearless, to come rescue her from Pietro himself as he rambled on at her side. The wish made her dizzy.
Still, Pietro didn’t seem to tire of their conversations, or of her. At her mother’s invitation, he returned for dinner the night after his first visit, and from then the pattern was set. Each day, he arrived at Carolina’s home on some pretext: bearing a brace of bloodied rabbits he had killed that morning because her father admitted to a fondness for them; carrying a bottle of his father’s best wine, which he hoped might alleviate the headache her mother had complained of the previous day; or insisting, to her father’s delight, that the shade of her garden was simply much more pleasant than the bright sunlight in his, so that he couldn’t help but prefer to spend his time in it.
Carolina lived through those first days with Pietro half believing that it was all a dream from which she might awake at any moment, and she moved through her days as if even the slightest sound or movement might cause the whole world to dissolve. It was the end of the week before she remembered that she had not seen her lake for days, a realization that came to her as she watched a hard summer rain beat down on her father’s drive, cutting slender streams through the gravel. It was Sunday. The night before, at the Rosetti gala, Pietro had danced over half the dances with her and spent most of the rest at her side under one of the enormous goose-feather fans Silvia Rosetti had ordered affixed to her ballroom walls, large enough that, in an emergency, they might also serve as wings for a grown man. During one of the more sentimental waltzes, Pietro had nodded at a dancer in a military jacket and repeated a story that he had told her only days before: “When I was a young man,” he murmured, with all the urgency of a new secret, “my only dream was to die in battle. I never thought I would live to be this old.”
Carolina had felt the gaze of a pair of girls on the other side of the room. When her eyes met theirs, they quickly turned away. She looked back at Pietro, struggling to compose her face into an expression
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