The Secret of Santa Vittoria (13 page)

Her family had once been a great family in this region. Once they held large holdings of land, but they began to lose it, plot after plot, in all the ways a family destined for disaster can find to lose its land. They had no love for the land, and worse, no greed for it, and no one can hold onto land around here without it. There are too many who want it too much. At the time of the marriage they were reduced to a few parcels of land and several houses in the region, one of which was in High Town and which various Malatestas retreated to from time to time to lick their wounds. When they would leave they would leave the house an unspeakable mess. The Malatestas didn't seem to know how to live any longer.

No one knew how the marriage came out. There is a picture of the rich husband in the Malatesta house, but it is assumed by all that he died when Mussolini was ousted. The face in the frame is one of those faces that it takes one thousand years of privilege and money to breed.

When she came into my room she never really saw me. She took off the smelly bandages that Dr. Bara had put on the wound, and took them off with no gentleness, and threw them on the floor. I was ashamed of my wound because it stank and I began to apologize for it to her. That is the effect she has on people. She didn't hear me.

“This wound will have to be opened,” she told me. “The infection will have to be cleared up and the bone will have to be re-broken and set again.”

“If you say that it has to be done.”

“It doesn't have to be done. If you want a leg it will have to be done.”

“I want a leg.”

“It will hurt a great deal.”

“It hurts a good deal now.”

“It will hurt a
great
deal.”

I shrugged and she smiled at me, which confused me.

“You don't know the pain I am talking about. I can't take you to the hospital, you understand.”

“I understand that.”

“Americans aren't prepared for pain. They think they have a right to avoid pain,” she said. “The people here know different. They know that pain is the natural condition of life.”

I didn't understand why she was telling me these things. Angela had come into the room and although the Malatesta was conscious that she was there she gave no sign of it until, without looking at her either, she ordered Angela to pick up my filthy bandages.”

“Yes, signorina.”

“Signora.”

“Yes, signora,” Angela said, and to my astonishment she made a small curtsy.

“I will come for you when I am ready,” the Malatesta told me.

“Can't you give me some idea, to prepare myself?”

“When I'm ready I'll come,” she said. “What are you going to do when they come?”

“When who come?”

“The Germans.”

“I don't know yet,” I told her. “People say they won't come here. I speak the language. Maybe they won't know.”

She laughed at me. At the door she turned to Angela, although she still didn't seem to see her.

“You come to my house after you clean up here. I have some work for you,” the Malatesta told her.

“Yes, signora.” She made a curtsy again.

When the Malatesta was gone I was embarrassed for Angela.

“You wouldn't go up there,” I said. “Not after the way she treated you.”

It was Angela's turn to be surprised.

“Of course I'll go. We like to go. We charge her three times too much.”

“But the way she talked to you.”

I could see that Angela didn't understand what I was talking about. I could see what I should have been able to understand myself—how much a luxury pride and honor can be. It helps to be well-fed enough to nourish them both. And I should have been able to understand what they say about the peasant, that he needs two things here—a sharp mind and thick soles. The truth is that no peasant has ever died of a broken heart.

“Oh, yes,” Angela said, picking up my bandages. The sight and smell of my own bandages made me turn away. “We milk her well.”

The Malatesta was a hawk but if there was a pigeon in the room, I began to understand who it was.

The Malatesta came back several days later, with no warning. She came with some local anesthetic and a bottle of
grappa
with Fabio as a helper, and a half hour after she arrived she cracked the bone in my leg. There was, as she had promised there would be, a moment of “superior” pain (it pleases me to this day to think that she was impressed when I didn't cry out), and she began to reset the bone. During all of that time she never said one word to me to make me feel like a man or even as if she were working on a human being. At the end of it she said, “You lie in bed for one week and then you get up and try and walk. The sooner you walk on this the better it will be for you.” She went to the door of the room and turned and looked out the low window into the piazza. “But I doubt that you will do it,” she said.

It was this, of course, that sent me stumbling out into the Piazza of the People, my face stiff with pain and running with a cold sweat, exactly one week after the Malatesta had come into the room with her
grappa
and her rubber hammer.

The more I walked the stronger the leg would become. It had withered until it looked like the leg of an old man, and I began to go down through the streets and finally all the way to the wall and the Fat Gate and down onto the terraces.

The people liked me down there. I gave them an excuse to stop their work and talk. I had the strongest feeling that I had been in all of these places before, in the town and on the terraces. I seemed to know everything in advance, and there were no surprises for me. I think now it must have been caused by all the images left in my mind, even when I wasn't listening to them, by the talk of all the people from “the other side,” from “the old country,” who sat around the table in my mother's kitchen drinking coffee and wine and anisette and telling about the old days and how their children were falling to pieces in America.

In the end I would make it a point to go all the way down the mountain to the foot of the terraces and then to rest in the enormous ancient wine cellar at the base of the mountain before forcing myself to climb up again.

This was one thing that was different. I had never seen anything like the cellar before, and I came to love it for its coolness and quiet. It had been built by the Romans and then sometime in the Middle Ages it had been rebuilt entirely and so it wasn't the goal for tourists that it might otherwise have been. It had finally been abandoned in the eighteenth century.

There were two cellars actually, and one day this was to mean a great deal to Santa Vittoria. There was a small opening in the mountainside which led into an enormous room, hollowed out of the mountain itself, which was called the Great Room. It was as large as the inside of a cathedral, and I have no idea why they ever built such a room, unless in Roman times it had been used as a temple to some god of wine. From the back wall of the Great Room two long, deep wine cellars were cut into the bowels of the mountain. I didn't go into the cellars themselves, because they were humid and I could sense that they were filled with water, but the Great Room was cool by the entrance and I would lie on the dry sand and take a nap before going back up.

I soon found that I was the only person in Santa Vittoria who ever went into the old wine cellar. They were afraid of the spirits who lived in there. Everyone in Santa Vittoria has some story about some member of his family who strayed into the tunnel in a sudden storm and the terrible things that happened to them in there. They feared for my life, but when nothing happened to me it didn't lessen their belief in the evil spirits but only convinced them that Italian spirits and ghosts were not interested in non-Italian people.

During the week that I had spent in bed before walking I had worked on the radio of Vittorini, the mail clerk. They had brought it to me to fix because I was an American and Americans are supposed to be able to fix new inventions such as radios. I knew nothing about radios, but there is a certain logic about anything that is broken. Sooner or later there has to be something that isn't connected, and if it can be connected, as with my leg, then perhaps it may be made to work again. I finally got it to work. In those days we received an hour of electricity a day from the power station at San Rocco del Lago. Some days it never came at all.

But on one day when it did come I heard a broadcast from Egypt that was sent to Italy by the English. The Americans, they said, were almost all the way across Sicily and the invasion of the mainland was to be expected any day. I grew very excited about that, and I shouted out the news before I realized that the last thing I wished then was to be liberated. But it didn't matter in any case. Fabio had no interest, and Bombolini, even though he was from Sicily, listened to me without really understanding the words. He was far too interested in cooking his eggless omelet.

 

T
HE OMELET
Bombolini was preparing was intended to feed the entire city, and he succeeded in doing it. He gave the people great enterprises and proofs of prowess, and he kept the people's minds astonished and occupied in watching their result at a cost of nothing.

The patron saint of this place is not Santa Vittoria, as you would have a right to expect. No one even knows who Santa Vittoria is, although it is thought that she is a corruption of some earlier pagan god who had to do with the wine. But the patron saint here, as our luck would have it, does not deal with the grape and has no special power or prayers to pressure God and make Him look after the vines or the rains or the condition of the soil. The patron saint here is Santa Maria of the Burning Oven, a local peasant girl who did the kinds of things that saints do to get themselves canonized and who was then thrust upon this city.

For example, once a baker here, while pulling out his loaves, fell headlong into his ovens. His screams could be heard all over the city, but there was nothing anyone could do for him except to hope that he didn't ruin the day's bread. But then the little girl Maria walked right into the blazing oven and picked up the baker and carried him into the street. Neither suffered a burn, and the bread that night was said to be the best ever baked in the city.

Another time, some pilgrims were passing through the city on their way to Siena. They had been caught in a snowstorm and were starving. There was nothing in the city to feed them—not that many would have parted with their pasta for the pilgrims—except a crust of bread, and they were sure they were going to die.

“You mock us. What good is this crust of bread?” the leader said to Maria.

“Eat of it,” the girl told them.

They ate, and as the leader cut into the little crust at each cut a fresh slice of bread leaped onto the blade of the knife. They ate until they were fat with bread. It was said by all to be the best they had ever tasted.

One night the same baker, who must have been excessively clumsy, lost his wooden bread shovel in the oven. When Maria rescued the shovel from the oven it was only a charred crisp.

“How can I work without a bread shovel?” the baker asked.

“Weep not and God will find a way,” the girl said.

In the morning the shovel had been restored. New wood had grown where the old wood had been burned, and it is said that green leaves actually sprouted from the handle. Many here believe the shovel was certainly a part of the wood from the True Cross.

Bombolini's plan, as simple as possible, was to turn Santa Vittoria into a national and then an international shrine for all the bakers of the world. Bakers from all over the world, who lacked a saint of their own, would want to come and pay homage to the Little Saint of the Bread Oven, as Bombolini began to call her.

What novice baker would wish to begin a career without first coming to Santa Vittoria and spending a few days, a novena perhaps, nine blessed days on the mountain, praying to God through Santa Maria to favor him so that he might make money in his new career? Old bakers would want to come and give thanks for their success. Bakers who were in trouble and going broke would want to come and get God and Santa Maria on their side for a change.

The idea of Santa Vittoria as a national shrine became a craze here. It was all that anyone talked about.

If a shrine was proclaimed, a road would have to be built up the mountain to accommodate the pilgrims; and if there was a road, there would be taxis and maybe even a bus. The pilgrims would need places to stay and places to eat. Every home was a potential inn, every woman a potential cook, every vine pruner a potential waiter going around in white jackets and soft shoes collecting tips for doing next to nothing. A cooperative bakery turning out bread from the Shrine of Blessed Bread (each loaf personally blessed by Polenta for a fee) could be started, and then there would be a need for curio shops selling such things as little wooden bread shovels and clay ovens and satin pillows with pictures of Santa Maria on them and wooden plaques that read Santa Maria of the Burning Oven, bless this humble bakery. It was felt by some that within ten years' time only a fool would ever have to go down to work on the terraces again.

Most leaders would have stopped there, but Bombolini knew things most leaders never learn. There is a dark side to man that needs a way out as well as the good side. The Master had written. “Hatred is gained as much by good works as by evil.” As they say, if there is no acid in the grape the wine is tasteless and finally useless.

“The wise prince,” Bombolini told Fabio, with his finger in the air, “must foment some enmity so that by suppressing it he will augment his greatness.” It was this that led him to declare war on Scarafaggio and which also led to Fabio's leaving Santa Vittoria.

Scarafaggio! You have only to say the word and you can picture the town. There is no beauty to it. It sits across the valley on the other mountain, a feeble imitation of Santa Vittoria. It huddles over there like a sheep dog whose master beats her; it cowers there, filled with fleas and ticks and roaches. We have bedbugs here, but they only survive here; in Scarafaggio they flourish.