The Secret of Santa Vittoria (11 page)

If the failure of democracy at the fountain was his first error out of all the things that he did, I suppose it can be said that I was his second major error, since it was I who almost brought down his government. I came to Santa Vittoria the same morning that he was forced to take down his sign at the fountain.

 

T
HIS MUCH
should be said at once. Although Fabio della Romagna, for a time at least, later came to hate me, if it hadn't been for Fabio I would have died. The first people to find me in Santa Vittoria that morning assumed that I was dead. One of them felt my legs and when he felt their coldness, since the blood had run out of them hours before, he took my shoes. When they sent news of the body to Bombolini he agreed with the people that it should be taken at once, before the sun was fully up, and buried some place in the rock quarry under the stones. Bombolini's fear was that the crime, if that was what it was, would be reported to Montefalcone and then the police would come, and the freedom of the city would be endangered. He woke Fabio, and Fabio came down the steps of the Mansion of the Leaders to see about taking me to the rock quarry, and he took one look at me in the grape basket and knew that I was alive.

They are funny about the dead in Italy. They are fascinated with death, but not with the body that death leaves behind it. Sometimes the people are so anxious to get rid of the body that errors are made. Babbaluche, who made coffins when he was not cobbling, has stories about the men and women who came to life at the sound of earth raining down on the roof of what was to be their last home. The fingernails left behind in the soft wood of the boxes, Babbaluche says, are the monuments to these silent struggles.

Instead of taking me to the quarry, they took me upstairs into the Mansion of the Leaders and put me in a bed. I have no idea of how long I stayed there. Three or four times a day the girl, Angela, came and held my head in her lap and spooned broth and pasta and soft sopping bread into my mouth, and sometimes she poured me a small glass of wine. I had no idea that I ever would get well, nor any hope that I would. I leaned toward death. The bone in my leg had joined together, but it had come together all wrong. I would lie on the bed for hours at a time in darkness and never make a move. When it was light in the piazza, I never knew whether it was because the sun was going down or coming up.

After some time, a week or two weeks, I began to realize that, with no effort on my part or any consciousness of it, I was beginning to understand all the shouting and calling that I heard from downstairs and from the piazza. The language of my father and mother was returning to me. I had learned it as a small boy, but later, although it was spoken in the house, I had unlearned it. I wouldn't speak to my family in anything but English and I wouldn't listen to them unless they spoke to me in what we called American.

I still dreamed at night about the boy, and the fat man or his daughter would have to come and restrain me while I would cry out and pound against the wall and hide beneath my blanket, which would go wet with sweat. But I knew that somewhere I had decided to try and live when one morning the girl was late coming with the broth and I was first hungry and then anxious and finally angry with her. And when she came, surrounded by all her smells, hot broth and good bread and strong soap and the freshness of herself, I found I was smiling.

For some reason I was ashamed of myself for smiling, as if I had no right in the world to smile. I wanted to say good morning to her and to talk with her, but I was afraid to begin. During all of this time I had allowed no one to know that I knew the language. I knew it was a dialect and that my parents must have come from some village in this region, but I didn't even know the name of it. That's the kind of son I had been to them. It made me ashamed, not telling them about the language. I was deceiving people who had risked themselves to aid me. I had had no bad intentions at the beginning, it was only that I was too tired and too uninterested to want to speak, and also it was a simple form of self-defense. The people would talk in front of me the way they talk in front of idiots and the deaf and small children. Only once did I come close to revealing myself.

Bombolini and Fabio were in my room with some young men who wanted to look at me. Everyone in Santa Vittoria came to look at me at one time or another. There is very little to do here, and I was an object of curiosity. They felt my clothes, and some of them even rubbed their hands along my back or arms. I used to wonder which one of them had my shoes. I never have found out. Whoever took them will keep them in the family until I am dead, for fifty years perhaps, and when I am gone they will come out into the open with them, probably at my own funeral. That is the way they are here.

The young men were about to leave, I had bored them, when one of them looked down into the piazza from my window and said, “Oh my God, the Malatestas are back.”

They all ran to the window and knelt down by it, since it is a low window and looked down into the piazza. The sound of their voices and the way they sucked in their breaths made me interested.

“It's the tall one,” one of them said, “the snotty one. What's her name?”

None of them could remember at first. They all had a nickname for her, the Colt, Long Legs, the Icicle. Bombolini called her “the hawk.”

“Caterina,” one of them finally said.

“Caterina,” everyone said. “Yes. Caterina.”

She was crossing the Piazza of the People toward the street that leads down from High Town and because she was wearing city shoes on the cobblestones she didn't walk the way the other women here walk. The women here walk as if they were carrying a burden. It is not unpleasant to watch. They move slowly, with a kind of slow graceful power to the walk, and the motion of their bodies is as much side to side as it is forward. Both were graceful, the women of the city and this Caterina Malatesta, but their graces were of different kinds. This is not meant to demean the women of Santa Vittoria, because some of them are very beautiful, but the difference was that between a work horse and a race horse. Each has its use in the world, and its beauty, but one was meant to be used and worked and one was meant to be admired and to be ridden lightly.

She carried two suitcases and although they appeared to be heavy no one made any effort to help her with them, and she didn't ask for any. The women waiting in line at the fountain all saw her, but they gave no sign that they had seen her. I know little about clothes, but her clothes were of the kind that even a very ignorant person recognizes as the kind that cost money and are what is called high style.

“The Germans must be giving them hell in Rome,” Bombolini said.

“They only come back when they're in trouble.”

“They must have put her husband in jail. What was his name?” No one knew.

“They must have killed him,” someone said, and they all nodded and were silent for a moment.

“Look at the way she walks. Zip zap zip. Like she's saying go screw yourself.”

“She's a beast. She cuts the balls off men. She's no good for anything. If you married her you'd have fun in bed and starve to death,” they said about her. There is a saying here: What you can't have, abuse. And this is what they were doing, but I didn't know it then.

“But she's very beautiful,” I said, in Italian, and not one of them noticed. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

One morning I awoke and found that it was cool in the room, and when I leaned out of bed and looked across the piazza and over the houses to the mountains beyond I could see that they were covered with snow. Sometime in the night, unseen and unheard by us, a great storm, a battle between the heat of the south and the cold of the north, had been waged up there, and now in the morning rivers of white flowed down the mountainside. When Angela came in with the broth I said, “If you go to my window you'll see something beautiful.”

She put down the broth and went to the window and crouched down by it and that moment she looked very beautiful to me. I had not noticed that she also was beautiful in the way of simple things.

“I don't see anything,” she said.

“On the mountains. There's snow this morning.”

“Ah, the new wind.” She turned back to me. “The new wind has blown summer away. It's good for the grapes.” She spoke to me in dialect and was not at all surprised that I could answer her back or understand her. “Cool nights now and warm days,” she said. “It brings out the sugar in the grapes.”

“Aren't you surprised at my talking?” I asked.

“We were wondering when you would begin to talk,” she said. “After all, you've been here for weeks.”

“But I talk rather well, don't you think?”

She shrugged. “Little babies can speak at two years of age. You're a man.”

However, she went downstairs and told them that I was now talking and while there was no surprise about the miracle of my tongue there was interest and even excitement, because now they could do business with me. Bombolini, followed by some other members of the Grand Council, came running up the stairs to my room.

“They say you talk very well,” he said to me. “Good.” He seized my hand and pumped it violently. He turned to the others. “What did I tell you? What did I say about him?” He shook my hand again so violently that it caused my leg to ache. “This is a very superior person. This is someone very special. We are in the presence of a superior human being.”

He squeezed my hand and he went downstairs without ever hearing me say a word in dialect or in Italian.

Of all the people that I could hear downstairs only Fabio did not seem to be impressed by my language.

“It's a kind of trick really,” he told people. He told anyone who would listen about an idiot they hired at the Academy to clean chamber pots who had learned German in one month.

“You see,” Fabio told them, “the ability to learn languages in this way is in some cases actually a sign of idiocy.”

No one understood what Fabio was trying to tell them, and neither did I then.

“Why do you keep telling us this?” Bombolini asked him. “You sound as if you have something against the man.”

“I have nothing against him,” Fabio said. “I only want to correct the record, to put things in the proper perspective. Learning a language this way is no sign of intelligence.”

“But that's just it,” Bombolini said. “I expected him to learn the language. You can see he's brilliant. It sticks out all over him.”

What despair I caused Fabio in those days, and I should have known it.

Although the mayor had not stayed to listen to me speak on the first day, nothing could seem to stop him from coming back on the days that followed and I became sorry I had ever opened my mouth in the first place. He came in the afternoons when I was asleep and at night, and he stayed until I fell asleep in his face, asking me questions about how they did things in America, about the government and the setup of the states and the ruling of towns and the conduct of the police and the courts and the making of laws and the collecting of revenues—until I came to dread the sound of his step on the stairs. More than the intrusion and the effort involved was my shame at my ignorance.

“I don't know about that,” I would say. “I can't answer that. I never studied it, I never found out about it.”

“It's a wise man who can say I don't know,'” Bombolini would say. “Good man.”

I would turn my head toward the wall in embarrassment.

“It is only the wise ones who know the extent of their knowledge.”

The few answers I was able to give him he speared the way a beggar spears chunks of meat in his soup. He fished them out before they could get away from him and then he rolled them around in his mouth, savoring them, before finally swallowing them.

“Brilliant,” he would say. “These are brilliant things you tell me.”

It came so that I couldn't bear the sight of Fabio's face at such times. It was Fabio, however, who was finally able to figure out why Bombolini acted that way toward me. He had already figured out the reason for Bombolini's amazing success at government that had changed him from a clown to a prince in one night. What Fabio found was that Bombolini was no longer Bombolini at all but someone else who had lived five hundred years before him. When faced with any problem or any decision, Bombolini would not become alarmed by it but would go back to
The Prince
and
The Discourses
and have Niccolò Machiavelli provide him with the proper answer. It was from these books and this man that he drew his wisdom and his assurance and his poise and his strength. Bombolini was only a face and a body and a mouth for The Master. All of the answers weren't in the books, of course, but the important thing was that Bombolini felt they were and, believing that, he had no fear and suffered no qualms.

But somewhere along the line there were problems that even The Master couldn't provide answers for, and it was for this reason, and for no love of me, that Bombolini turned out to be such a formidable fighter in my behalf when the affair of Babbaluche the cobbler and Abruzzi the American threatened to tear the Free City of Santa Vittoria apart and bring down its government.

Life has changed little here since the days when Machiavelli went sourly through the streets of Florence, and yet some things have changed and it was these gaps in the Master's knowledge that frightened Bombolini. To close them he needed a representative of the New Ways, someone forged in the fire of the New Culture, as Fabio says he put it. And who better than me, a dropper-in from the New World? For the purposes of Italo Bombolini, for his well-being and his assurance, it was essential that I prove to be brilliant and he made certain that I was. As soon as I was able to stand with the aid of a crutch the cobbler had made for me I was invited downstairs to sit in on sessions of the government and after a week I was invited to join the Grand Council as a full member, as a minister without portfolio, to advise on current affairs. I used to wonder what they would think in Benjamin Franklin High School, which I left when I was a junior, if they could see me sitting in the Grand Council as Minister Without Portfolio.