What We May Become, page 21
‘I could not save you all, I could not even save most of you. So many died, from the evil we did, and from the evil we fought. To those of you who died – alone and scared, hungry and cold and in pain, unsure of what had happened to your world, to human decency – I stand here now, to beg your forgiveness. No, not that, exactly, but something like that. I ask for your love, and I give you mine, because even though you died alone, I still believe my love can reach you, then and now. If love is outside time, I send my love back to you then so that, even for a minute, even for a second, you can know that someone loves you. That you are not alone. That this evil that threatens you now will pass away, and the world will become beautiful again. Shoots will spring up, the world will be renewed as long as there is love. I give you my love and I ask for yours, too. Because I have lived a long time, perhaps too long. But long enough for me to come back here and say what I needed to say before the end, because … because I am joining you soon.’
The woman opens her eyes. For a moment, she is not old, but young again, her feet bare in the grass and the fabric of the new dress she has just sewn whipping in the wind. Slowly, she raises her arms, stretching them out like she is on a cross. But what comes across the field towards her now is not the pain of youth, or the disappointment of middle age, or even the fear of obliteration at the end of life. What races towards her now is love, and she knows its voices, recognizes them in every tongue. They are coming for her, arms outstretched, full of joy and laughter and life. And Diana reaches out her arms and embraces them.
AFTERWORD
I’ve only ever told two lies in my life.
The first was when I told my parents I had made Varsity (which was true) and that I was such an asset to the girls’ basketball team they couldn’t risk my getting injured by continuing to feed livestock (which was false). Despite the patent deception, however, my parents sold the troublesome goats the following week, and that positive reinforcement set me up for my next lie – some twenty years later – that would result in this book.
I lied and said there was an earlier flight out of Houston. Which was ridiculous (the common denominator of my lies being how obvious they are). Back then, anyone with dial-up internet could have logged into their home PC and confirmed, after only a twenty-minute search, that I was already booked on the first flight out of town. But my sister and I had had our first – and last – real argument. And I was immature, and eager to get back East, and said the first thing that popped into my head to make her drop me off early. My sister – being an actual grown-up – didn’t even bother to call me out.
I stood at a lone kiosk in the bustling airport. I was checking in so early (as a result of my lie) that the computer was asking if I wanted to switch my seat for one that had just become available in the bulkhead. I typed in 2C to accept the new seating assignment and sat down to await the boarding call, never imagining I had just changed the trajectory of my life.
They canceled every flight East, starting with Fort Lauderdale, moving up the coast through Savannah, Charleston, and Raleigh, an enormous storm rolling in off the Atlantic. By the time they canceled Washington, our small waiting area had accumulated stand-by passengers for the entire East Coast. A flight attendant stepped forward, announcing in clipped tones the flight for Philadelphia was still departing but would have to depart now to beat the storm. No carry-ons, no handheld items, no questions, and we filed in obediently.
We didn’t beat the storm. The plane shook with turbulence nearly the whole way back, dropping and gaining altitude continually in an attempt to avoid the worst of it. When we finally landed (amid lightning that lit up the night), we had to stay seated, strapped in, on an active runway, for another three hours, amid the crying of babies and the despairing moans of nearly everyone else aboard.
And I just wanted it to go on forever.
My new seatmate and I had started out with shared interests (basketball figuring in prominently, a nice, karmic hat-tip, I feel, to my first lie), but moved on quickly to deeper topics, our love of medicine, our utter devotion to our families. By the time we hit 30,000 feet, we were recounting our childhoods, and by the time we reached our cruising altitude we were energetically debating ethics, and practicing the right way to pronounce our (very difficult) first names.
Once the captain turned off the seatbelt sign, we were quickly separated amid the rush to disembark. But we had memorized our email addresses (our phones being stowed away in the overhead compartment) and kept in touch over the years, sending good wishes at holidays and birthdays, condolences at the loss of a loved one. When he bought a villa in Tuscany, he lent it to my daughter and I with the graciousness – and casualness – with which one usually lends a friend a ballpoint pen. And the two summers my daughter and I spent studying Italian in Tuscany – in the medieval, hill-town of Montepulciano – became the foundation for this book.
For those wishing to see the places inhabited by my characters in What We May Become, they are all still there, waiting for you to discover them for yourself. The real-life Giorgio and Giuliana run the eco-friendly agroturismo Raggio di Sole, where you can lie in Diana’s wrought-iron bed, or sneak over her balcony wall in the middle of the night. La Foce – the incredible gardens created by real-life World War II heroine, Iris Margaret Origo – form the basis for Bugari’s lavish estate. The language school my daughter and I attended, Il Sasso, is housed in the old hospital, where Diana goes seeking work when she is first stranded in town. Directly across the street from the hospital, you can see the same Etruscan tomb Travere and Diana discover together, beneath a current-day gift shop. If they have not moved off to new adventures by now, the beautiful Benedicta and Gabriella will sell you the incomparable vino nobile di Montepulciano, the noble wine of the region, and hand-tooled leather journals and ornate quill pens. Although no restaurants would have existed in Diana’s time, Osteria Acquacheta is not only one of the finest restaurants in Tuscany, but now among the best, anywhere; visitors stop there on their way to the shrine of Santa Anna with its dried flowers hung in tribute, or il duomo, the cathedral in the piazza grande, where the cats still sleep in the heat of the day.
One reason I wrote this story is because I am of Italian descent. Italian civilians suffered a great deal during the war, their government initially siding with the Axis, then with the Allies, with a year in-between in which they were relentlessly bombed by American and British airpower until they made up their mind. As Travere tells Diana, Italians had multiple governments during the war, with civilians being rounded up and shot as a result of both the occupying German armies, and the constant change in national loyalties. Italians who fled Mussolini by emigrating to America shortly before the war (like my own maternal grandparents, Giuseppe and Giuseppina Chiaramonte) faced difficulties of their own, many being conscripted by the United States to fight in Italy against uncles, cousins, and even brothers they had left behind only five years before.
But the main reason I wrote this story is because I am an American, haunted by Operation Paperclip and the deals we cut with high-ranking Nazi scientists at the end of the war.
Stephen Kinzer’s Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control and – even more stunning in the depth of its research – Annie Jacobsen’s Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America, provided actual, horrific detail to add authenticity to my novel. But, even more than that, after reading those books I became convinced the only Nazi scientists hanged at Nuremburg were the ones nobody wanted anymore. All the ‘good’ ones were already working in American laboratories – and living in plush, American neighborhoods – and they never looked back.
I love my country. But the best way – the only way – to avoid repeating our country’s mistakes is to remember what we did, the bad along with the good. Travere argues with Diana that what he is doing is expedient, is necessary, even, in light of the looming Cold War. And it’s true that secret operatives from France, England, and the Soviet Union were scavenging Europe at the end of the war for scientists of their own. But I feel there is a fundamental difference between profiting from evil and not profiting from evil. Between realizing there is a potential benefit from utilizing techniques – and technicians – trained in inhuman practices, and simply walking away from both. The end does not justify the means, but the American government chose to profit from these techniques, and promote these technicians. And despite any advance in science, I feel we suffered a loss, morally, as a result. Those who think like Travere might rail, and curse, and call me a ‘silly, stupid kid,’ but I know what I would do, given Diana’s choice. I would throw the whole lot into Giorgio’s fire.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank my editor at Severn House, Carl Smith, for his vision and passion; my agent at Trident Media Group, Mark Gottlieb, for his tenacity and professionalism; my friends and mentors in the DeSales MFA program, Stephen Myers and Juilene Osborne-McKnight, to whom this book is dedicated; James Perano, for taking a chance and hiring me when no one else would; Elango Vinjirayer for sharing his friendship and his villa with me; my sister, Andrea Messineo, for her understanding, and for double-checking my Italian; the four loves of my life, Johnny, Grace, Nicholas, and Sophia; and my little grandbaby, Jack.
Teresa Messineo, What We May Become
