As Ciro stood on the deck of the SS Caserta, the Atlantic Ocean was the color of green carnival glass. In the distance the depths turned a charcoal gray as the waves ruffled the surface in iridescent silver.
This was an entirely different view than it had been upon his passage from New Haven almost two years ago. Ciro was now twenty-four years old, a veteran of the Great War. The family he once knew was gone, the mother he longed for still absent, and his only brother, his last connection to Vilminore di Scalve and his dream of a house on the mountain, had left the comfort of the ordinary world and become a priest.
Ciro’s desire to remain a lifelong confidant to Eduardo and an uncle to his brother’s unborn children had disappeared into the air like puffs of smoke from the urn of burning incense with which the cardinal blessed the seminarians, who were turned into men of God with a drop of holy oil.
Eduardo was a far better person than any of the priests that Ciro knew. Eduardo was generous where Don Martinelli was stingy and chaste where Don Gregorio was not. Eduardo had the best heart that Ciro had ever known—man or woman—fair, competent, and contemplative. The seeds of wisdom were planted deep within Eduardo, just as an appetite for life—good food and beautiful women—was planted deep in Ciro.
Ciro mourned Eduardo’s new life, because it meant that he had lost his brother for good. Perhaps they would see each other a few times in the decades to come. There would be letters, but they would be infrequent. For two boys who had been inseparable, two brothers who were completely simpatico, to lead such separate lives was a terrible sacrifice. Ciro couldn’t help but feel cheated by the church; after all, with the recommendation of Don Gregorio, it had broken up two brothers who were the only living family each had. So much for the healing love of the Sacred Heart.
Eduardo’s devotion to Ciro would now be given instead to the priests of the order of Saint Francis of Assisi, and whatever was left beyond that would go to the Holy Church of Rome. Eduardo had given up any possibility of finding a wife and making a family when he became a priest. Ciro had wanted so much more for his brother. He wished that Eduardo could know the comfort, ease, and abiding serenity that came from the company of a good woman, and how the appetite for love and its simple but glorious connections made a man seek more in the world, not less.
Ciro imagined that Eduardo would try to save the world one soul at a time, but why would he want to?
Before the war, Ciro had thought he too was capable of great things. But now, with the landscape of France carved up and scarred forever by the trenches, filled with the broken dead, Ciro wanted no part of government and the men who ran it. Rome had been a great disappointment to him. The Italians were losing their way, he thought. There was something fragile about his Italy now. The Italian people had been poor for so long, they no longer believed they had any power to change the country they lived in. Even in the wake of victory, they couldn’t see better times. They no longer believed these were possible. They would grasp the next ideology that came along, just as a drowning man grabs at any sliver of wood. Anything is better than nothing, the Italians would shrug, an attitude that cleared the way for despots and their reigns of cruelty, for wars and their blighted landscapes.
Ciro had learned that life was never better after a war, just different.
He would always long for the Italy he knew before the war. The borders were soft; Italians traveled to France without papers, Germans to Spain, Greeks to Italy. Nationalism had now replaced neighborliness.
As a soldier, Ciro had learned that good men can’t fix what evil men are intent on destroying. He had learned to choose what was worth holding on to, and what was worth fighting for. Every man had to decide that for himself, and some never did. He had not survived the Great War to return home the same man.
Ciro had faced death. This was when a man was most likely to turn to the angels for intercession. Instead, Ciro had turned inward. He’d