The Secret of Santa Vittoria (10 page)

“That concludes the program for the afternoon,” Captain Rampey said.

The shadow of the plane was leaping over the green fields, and behind us the city was burning like a crown set afire.

“I will tell you one thing,” Marvell said. “We did us a job of work.”

Those were the last words that I remember hearing on the
Odessa Darling.
I have no recollection beyond that, but I must have done all the things that must be done to cut oneself loose from an airplane, as complicated as cutting the umbilical cord that ties the baby to its mother. I have no recollection at all of stepping out through the bomb bay doors or of pulling the rip cord on my parachute because at that moment I had no desire to do it. My first recollection is of dropping down onto Italy, the rays of the late afternoon sun glowing in the white nylon of my canopy as if I were hung to a silken lantern, and it must have been this that caused me to glitter in Santa Vittoria, far to the south of me then, like a star or an omen in the evening.

I was happy at that time, sometimes it seems to me like the happiest moment of my life and I don't know why. At other times I see it as the saddest, because it cut me loose from myself, perhaps forever. I dropped out of the sun into the shadow of the mountains to the north of me, and it was cold, and the gold of the canopy turned to a whitish blue, and then I struck the terraced side of a mountain that was no longer farmed. The earth was hard, the earth was clay and rocks, and when I hit it I heard a bone snap in my leg and a little later I felt it. The cooling air of the late afternoon caught in my canopy and I began to be dragged down and across the old terraces until I finally became caught in some old vines and was held there by them. I pulled the parachute around me and made a nest for myself as a wounded animal would do.

Later, in the night, I was wakened by some small dark men who smelled of manure and wine. They said nothing to me. They lifted me up and put me in a large basket that stank of earth and manure and grape mold and they put the basket on the back of a mule and took me back up the mountain I had landed on. I thought they were going to kill me, and I didn't care then. I was in great pain. I was now a deserter. I was alone. Of all the Americans I knew I had for some reason declared my personal end to the war and I was ashamed of myself. Who was I, to have attempted such a thing? The arrogance of my act overwhelmed me and I would close my eyes and soon as I did I would see the burning boy. As I look back on it now, there was very little reason to wonder why I wanted to die.

They kept me in a little hut made of branches and twigs and straw, out in the middle of a field. I have no idea for how long. They fed me some kind of white runny goat cheese and hard bread and bitter olives and wine, and if it hadn't been for the wine I think I would have starved to death. One night they came and got me and put me in the basket again and toward morning, when I could stand it no longer, I heard the clop of the mule's hoofs on stone, and looking up from the basket I could see the roofs of houses and I knew I was in some sort of town. They dumped me here then, in the shredded old grape basket, in the Piazza of the People at the door of the Leaders' Mansion. Italo Bombolini was mayor of the city, as I was to learn, and he had already been mayor for several weeks by then and perhaps for longer.

 

From
The Discourses
of Italo Bombolini:

The duty of the people is to tend to their own affairs.

The duty of government is to help them do it.

This is the pasta of politics

The inspired leader, the true prince, no matter

how great, can only be sauce upon the pasta.

—Bombolini

T
WO WEEKS
after Italo Bombolini had taken over as mayor of Santa Vittoria, everyone—with the exception of the priest Polenta, who despised him, and the cobbler Babbaluche, who wasn't prepared to see him as he was—recognized one thing about him. Bombolini was a leader; he was a born leader, he was a natural leader. He was, at times, an inspired leader. He was, in his own words, “sauce upon the pasta.”

His leadership was so natural and he seized power with such grace that people who only several weeks before could not say his name without first prefacing it with “boob” or “fool” began to realize they had seen these traits of leadership in Bombolini all along.

“Do you remember the time he kept Giovanetti from killing his wife by talking to him and getting the pick out of his hand? I said to myself right then ‘He may
look
like a clown, but here is the soul of the leader,' I said. I can say this much: I was one of the first to recognize it.”

Everyone had his own way of discovering Bombolini. In the end even Babbaluche was forced to admit that the wine seller possessed certain qualities that were surprising at least.

“But they won't last,” the cobbler would say. “He's running on nerve and luck alone. You watch. Somewhere inside that fat bastard a clown lives, and sooner or later the clown will come out, because a clown is a clown and will always be a clown.”

There were others, some of the old men who no longer believed in anything on earth except hunger and work and finally death. “He'll stop running,” they said—there is a saying here: An ass's trot doesn't last long—but when Bombolini continued to run even the old men began to turn on Babbaluche.

“The ass is still running,” one of them shouted at the cobbler. “Maybe this ass is a horse.”

“An ass is an ass and will always act like an ass,” Babbaluche said. “You wait. You'll see his long ears soon enough.”

*   *   *

From his first day Bombolini seemed to have a feeling for the correct thing to do. The day after Vittorini had handed him the mayor's medallion a group of citizens went across the piazza to the Leaders' Mansion to ask Bombolini to surrender the office and put someone in it who wouldn't ruin the city.

“All right, Italo,” they wanted to say to him, in all kindness, “the fun is over now; we've all had our good laugh. Now let's settle down and get ourselves a leader.”

But they didn't find Bombolini home that day. They couldn't find him any place. When they finally went down to the terraces to tend their grapes Bombolini came out of hiding to tend to the town.

He had the streets swept. He had the fountain repaired and the water-catch cleaned of all its mold and moss and all the old glass and potato peelings that washed around in it cleaned out and thrown away. The third morning, the people woke up and found that all the old slogans in Santa Vittoria had been changed in the night. The one in the Piazza of the People that read

BELIEVE    OBEY    FIGHT

had been changed to

TRANQUILLITY    CALMNESS    PATIENCE

The three great virtues of the Italian people

A public service

(Signed) Italo Bombolini, Mayor

On the old fallen wall of the Chapel of the Bountiful Grapes the old Fascist party slogan “I Don't Give a Damn” now read

WE CARE

In High Town where for years the sign had read

LIVE DANGEROUSLY

—D'Annunzio

Bombolini had added:

BUT DRIVE CAREFULLY

—Bombolini

Although there were no cars in Santa Vittoria then, it gave the people a feeling of belonging with the times.

As you went down the Corso Mussolini it had been impossible to avoid the sign on the wall of the house where the Corso curves down to the left:

BETTER TO LIVE ONE DAY AS A LION

THAN 100 YEARS AS A LAMB

Today when you go down the Corso you read

BETTER TO LIVE

    
100 YEARS

—Bombolini, Mayor

After the third day, the group of men who had wanted Bombolini's resignation no longer tried to see him, and he began to show himself in the streets.

It is impossible now to know whether the things the wine seller did came to him from study and thought, or whether they were the reactions of instinct. It doesn't really matter. The important point is that he did them.

The trouble with government in this country is that it is composed of the Ins and the Outs. There are blacks and whites, but no grays here. When the Outs get in, they kick all the Ins out, and the new Outs do everything in their power to destroy the programs of the Ins, even when they might help them. It is brutal and sometimes bloody and almost always exciting and usually no good for the town, but that is the way it always has been.

Bombolini's genius, for that is what it must be seen as now, was that instead of throwing people out he invited everyone in. He formed the Grand Council of the Free City of Santa Vittoria and in two days every faction that could be counted upon to be fighting one another, every family and every force in the city, had a member in the government. Everyone was an In or had a member of the family who was an In. Membership in the Council was almost evenly divided among Frogs and Turtles and Goats. Half of the members were young, and half of them were old, and every one of the large or powerful families was represented. The real secret was, perhaps, that if not everyone was In because that was not possible, almost no one was Out.

Giovanni Pietrosanto was made Minister of Public Waters, which meant that he was in charge of the fountain and the water tower. Under Giovanni's direction the spillways were cleared and the pump was put back in working order by Longo, and all the drains on the terraces were cleared and patched, and for the first time in twenty years there was water on the terraces for the grapevines. It isn't a great deal of water, but it is enough to keep a dry spell from becoming a drought, something that Someone greater than Bombolini had not seen fit to do.

Under his brother Pietro, the other powerful member of the family, the organization called Minute Men of Santa Vittoria was formed.

“Why do you want to waste your time on this?” Fabio asked Bombolini.

The mayor held up his hand. “‘The chief foundations of all states are good laws and good arms.' I have no say in the matter. The Master says we must have an army.”

At the start people laughed at the army, but as they drilled in the Piazza of the People after work and the twenty men got better at their drill, the people began to turn out to watch them. Pietrosanto has a voice that can break windows, and the drill was impressive. Every soldier was allowed to wear a red arm band on Sunday and to sport a hawk's feather in his hat, and soon every young man in Santa Vittoria was hungry for a feather, but the army was held to twenty because that was the number of weapons we had.

There were others. Commissioner of Sanitation, Master of the Scales, Minister for Bread and Pasta, Minister for Advanced Education, Minister for Affairs of the Aged.

He closed the second meeting of the Grand Council with these words. “A wise man once said, “The first impression one gets of a new ruler and his brains is from seeing the men he has chosen to have around him.'” He put down his hand. “Men of Santa Vittoria. By these standards I submit that I must be judged a genius.”

At first they felt that Bombolini was being egotistical, but as they went home and the words rolled around in their heads and they began to see what they meant, they were, of course, flattered. And as Bombolini had told Fabio, if you can't buy your way by money the next best way is to buy your way with flattery, because as every Italian knows, flattery will always get you somewhere.

There were mistakes. One morning Bombolini decided to please the people by bringing democracy to the water fountain. For several hundred years, for reasons no longer known, several families had had the right to go to the head of the line waiting for water at the fountain and to fill their jugs first. One morning the women found this sign on the fountain.

In The Eyes of God There Are No Preferred People.

First Come, First Served.

Order of Bombolini, Mayor

The proclamations were now signed with one initial only in the manner of the Caesars. The experiment in democracy went well until Rosa Bombolini came across the piazza with her seven-gallon aluminum jug, modern and progressive, the only one of its kind in Santa Vittoria, and went to the head of the line as was her privilege. Pietro Pietrosanto, as head of the army, was in charge of the new policy that morning.

“Back,” he told her. “To the end of the line. You know the order.”

“I know my rights,” she shouted. She pushed against Pietrosanto with her large and powerful chest. “You go tell him this. Tell him that no fat-ass Sicilian ragpicker is going to come up here and rob the rights of any Casamassima.”

“There is nothing to do,” Bombolini told his general, “but to seize the offender's water jug.”

A seven-gallon water jug is a true weapon, especially when it is used unexpectedly. The head of the army went down in the Piazza of the People exactly like a bull struck with a sledge hammer. Pietrosanto might have pressed charges. They might have taken her down the mountain to Montefalcone on the charge of intent to kill, but Pietrosanto's pride would not bear it and Bombolini was not yet ready for such a challenge to his young regime. The next morning the sign was down and the old ways were restored, and this was the death of pure democracy in Santa Vittoria. That night Bombolini had Fabio copy in his book: “There is nothing more difficult to carry out and more doubtful of success than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who prosper by the old order.” He was training Fabio to become mayor of the city when he would no longer be available.

This, then, was the way things were going in Santa Vittoria for Italo Bombolini. The people had trust in him, and then as the summer went on the harvest began to look rich and strong. The grapes were plentiful and they were fat; they had the look of healthy animals. When the grapes are good, things in Santa Vittoria are good.