The Secret of Santa Vittoria (19 page)

A great cheer then and the eyes turned on the mayor, because it was he who had painted out the sign. All these brave words, these cries of valor. How to answer them? He thought of one more saying of Machiavelli:
Deceit in the conduct of war outweighs valor and is worthy of merit.

How could that be explained to them? How to tell a bunch of men bent on becoming heroes that it would be more heroic of them to practice being cowards?

Just as Fabio had once been saved by Babbaluche, now Tommaso Casamassima, Rosa Bombolini's uncle, stood up in the room and struck the floor with his mulberry stick until there was silence.

“You forget who you are,” he shouted. “You forget where you come from. You think you're warriors and you shout like heroes and you are a bunch of grape growers.”

There was silence, because everyone knew what Tommaso said was so.

“A bunch of grape growers.”

Silence.

“We have no heroes here. This is no country for heroes. If you want to be martyrs, go be martyrs somewhere else. We can't afford martyrs in Santa Vittoria.”

Silence.

“Tend to your grapes.”

Silence.

“Because you forget the one lesson that every Santa Vittorian has known for the last thousand years: Brave men and good wine don't last long.”

*   *   *

Everyone went outside after that. All idea of the fight was ended. The people were waiting for them in the piazza.

“We're thinking. Don't worry. We're coming up with something.”

As if it were a command, they began to go across the Piazza of the People and down the Corso Cavour to the Cooperative Wine Cellar. In the absence of anything to do they were making a pilgrimage and performing an act of faith in the wine, the way people in other places might go into a church and pray for guidance.

They filed in through the narrow door, into the cool dimness and smelt the incense of the cellar, that sweet sharp smell of the herbs that go into the vermouth, and went down through the tiers of wine which look like tall pews in an attitude of reverence.

It is a true sea of wine in that cellar, a rich dark-red sea held in bottles. To the south of here there are towns where people make the sign of the cross over each crust of bread before they eat it, and we are the same way with the wine. To say something loud or vulgar, to utter an obscenity in the presence of the wine, would be the same as urinating in a cathedral. The sight of so much wine, all that wine to be stolen, was too great for Bombolini to bear, and he went out of a little-used side door and back up a narrow back lane until he reached the piazza and the Palace of the People and found Roberto.

“Have you figured out the story yet?” he said.

Roberto looked puzzled.

“The dream. My dream. What does it mean? You're the American. You know everything.” He was shouting at Roberto, but then he stopped and sat down. “What are you doing?”

“Arithmetic. My arithmetic. I'm figuring out the hours until they come.”

Bombolini didn't want to know. He preferred it that way. Without any plan it was better to just let them come when they came, unprepared for and unannounced.

“All right,” he said finally. “How many.”

“They'll be here in fifty-three hours.”

When he heard the hour now it began to flash in his mind in large block letters, as bright and clear as the lights on the theater in Montefalcone, flashing on and off—53 … 53 … 53 … 53—and it was minutes before the glow of the lights would leave his brain.

He went to the window of Roberto's room and looked down at the people standing in the midday sun in the piazza, and he looked at the wall and at a picture of St. Sebastian being rent with arrows.

“Quick, now. As fast as you can say the words. If you were me what would you do with the wine?”

“Hide.”

“What?”

“Hide it.”

“You would hide it?”

“Yes, hide it,” Roberto said.

“Oh, Roberto. So simple and clean and beautiful that it's almost stupid,” the mayor said, and he struck Roberto such a blow on the arm that it was weeks before the American could raise it without feeling pain.

 

O
N THAT
same afternoon, Captain von Prum wrote this, the second letter to his brother Klaus.

Klaus:

You falter, you lose sight again.

I cease to preach to you. Don't take a brother's word, take instead the words of a man you profess to admire.

“You say it is the good cause that hallows even war.

I say unto you: It is the good war that hallows any cause.” Need I say more, Klaus?

“It is a sad fact, but a fact, that war and courage have accomplished more great things than love of thy neighbor. Not your pity but your courage will save the unfortunate.”

Need any more? One more, then.

“What is good?” you ask. “To be brave is good.”

Your men were not brave, Klaus, and for that they paid the price, as any evil person must pay.

I finish with Nietzsche.

“What matters long life?

What warrior wants to be spared?”

Your brother,

Sepp

Klaus: We move out within two days, as I intimated to you. I have my duty, you have your duty. Wish me luck, Klaus, even as I wish you the same.

*   *   *

The effort to hide the wine was a failure. Within the first half hour of the experiment, before twenty thousand bottles had been taken from the Cooperative Wine Cellar and brought up into the Piazza of the People it was clear to anyone who wished to see it that the experiment was no longer worth going on with. But people sometimes are more willing to go on with the work than face up to the failure.

They piled the bottles in the piazza and then the different families began to hide them in their houses. They put them in closets and under beds and behind pictures and in the backs of fireplaces and then in the drains and on the roofs and under loose tiles and then in the manure piles and on grapevine hung down the chimneys.

“Keep the wine in the shadows, the sun is bruising it,” Old Vines shouted at the people. “Would you put a newborn baby in the sun? This wine isn't even born yet. Don't shake the wine. Would you shake a newborn baby? This wine isn't born yet.”

Sometime in the early afternoon Bombolini summoned the courage to ask the keeper of the wine how many bottles remained to be hidden, and when Old Vines told him, it was a matter of several minutes before he could make himself hear the figures, and when he did he wrote them on a card—
“1,320,000.”

Each time he looked at the number he found it hard to comprehend. He held the card up first on one side and then on the other, as if somehow, if he twisted it in enough ways, the value of the numbers might change. Even if they hid 100,000 bottles, which was impossible, it was only one thirteenth of the wine and by enormous effort they would have achieved nothing. At four o'clock there was to be an inspection of the hiding, and the teams went out even though all of the people knew what they would report. A few minutes later the first of them came back.

“It's no good, Captain. It isn't working right,” Longo's son said. “You can see bottles everywhere. Everytime you turn around in the Pietrosanto house you sit on a bottle, you step on a bottle, you break a bottle. The beds are lumpy with bottles.”

It was the same everywhere.

“Bring the bottles back out,” Bombolini ordered, and he felt at that moment the dread of failure. To the credit of the people he passed, none of them said anything to him. He went back across the piazza, passing the bottles piled on the cobblestones and piled in carts, seeing and not seeing at the same time the people going into the houses and starting to bring the wine back out. He had the weight of the city and of one thousand people and now one million bottles of wine to carry. It was too much for any one man, he thought. He felt someone pulling on him and he turned to look. It was Fungo, the idiot.

It is said that when a man is drowning, just as he goes down, he will grab at a twig in the water and for that moment really believe that it will hold him; and so, at this moment, Bombolini stopped to listen to Fungo.

“I have something to tell you,” Fungo said.

“Tell. Tell me.”

Out of the mouths of babes and idiots and drunks— Who could tell until he listened?

“Tufa's back,” the boy said.

“Oh, Christ above!”

“You have a filthy mouth,” the boy said.

“Excuse me. How do you know?”

The boy told him how he had gone to Tufa's house to see if he could find any bottles and he had found Tufa there, in the dark, lying on the floor.

“He's dying,” Fungo said.

“How would you know that?”

“Someone told me.”

“Who?”

“Tufa. And he should know.”

I will attend to Tufa, he thought. It was at least something positive to do. I will make every effort to save Tufa's life. He thought for a moment that he was crying, and then he looked up and was surprised to see that it was raining.

The people were running past him, getting out of the piazza before the full force of the rain reached them. The people here love the rain and they love to see it rain. It is not going too far to say they adore the rain in Italy, but as soon as they see a drop they run from it.

Old Vines caught up to Bombolini. “Stop them,” he shouted. “You have to order them to stay. We can't leave the wine out here. The rain will wash the dust from the bottles. The rain will chill the wine.”

Bombolini looked at the old man as if he came from some other town. “Who cares?” he said. “Do we have to have the wine at room temperature for the Germans when they come?”

“Wine is wine no matter who has it,” the old man shouted. “To abuse wine is to abuse life itself.” Now he was shaking Bombolini by the shoulders and shouting something about killing him.

“Then fuck the wine,” Bombolini said. Old Vines fell away from him.

“Oh, you sin,” he said. Neither of them felt the rain that was falling hard by then. “You sin against the wine.”

I fully expect the next bolt of lightening to strike me in the heart, Bombolini thought.

He pushed the cellar master to one side and started down the Corso Cavour to Old Town and Tufa's mother's house. He had made up his mind to keep all of his thoughts on Tufa.

There were strange things about Tufa. He was, for one, an officer in the army, and that should have separated him from the people here, but it didn't. Even worse, he was a Fascist, but this had never stopped him from being a hero to the young people here and a person to whom the old were not afraid to turn for help when he was home.

The thing about Tufa was that he was a true Fascist, a real Fascist, who believed all the glorious words and tried to follow them, and that had made him a very strange person here and in all of Italy. As a young boy he had been chosen from all the rest in Santa Vittoria to go away and be trained as a Young Fascist Scout. He had believed every word he heard at the camp. Later he became a soldier and after that was made an officer in the Sforzesca, one of the aristocratic regiments, a very rare thing to happen.

When he came home on leave people would go to him and ask him to intercede for them with The Band or with the Fascists in Montefalcone.

“What is this I hear you are doing to Baldisseri?” he would ask them. “Only Communists would do a thing like that.”

It must have been a mistake, they always told him, and it would certainly not happen again.

“Well of course not,” he would say. “
We
don't do things like that.”

“No, we don't,” they would say. They were afraid of the innocence in his eyes and the anger that could replace it. He was a believer in a nation of nonbelievers, people who believe that to believe in anything is dangerous and even evil itself, since believing limits one and to be limited is to court disaster. None of the Fascists in the region could wait for Tufa's leaves to be over, and they breathed easier when he was gone and hoped to God that he would meet a glorious end in Albania or Greece or Africa.

The room was dark and it felt wet and it was dirty. It smelled bad. Tufa's mother had never been able to run a house.

“Where is he?” Bombolini asked. The soldier's mother pointed to one end of the room, where the mayor could eventually make out Tufa's shape lying on the floor facing the stone wall.

“He's going to die,” the mother said. “I can see it in his eyes. All the life is gone.”

Bombolini crossed the room and stood over Tufa's body, not knowing what to say to him. Tufa had never liked him because he had been a clown and Tufa didn't understand clowns. With a terrible slowness Tufa turned away from the wall and looked at Bombolini.

“Get out of here,” he said. “I have always despised you.”

The mother was wrong about the eyes. There was the recognition of death in them, but there was also hatred, which had not been seen there before, and beneath both of these a kind of terrible hurt.

“You had better get out,” the mother said. “He means what he says. He always means what he says.”

“Tufa? Can you hear me?”

“Get out of here.”

“I'm not a clown any more, Tufa. I'm the mayor here now. Can you hear me? Can you understand that?”

“Get out of here.”

The hatred was so strong that it defeated Bombolini. He backed out of the house and stood in the Corso Cavour and allowed the rain to fall on him until his hair was streaming with water. The people looked at him from the doorways. Now there wasn't even Tufa as a reason for existing. He started back up the Corso. Before he reached the piazza, Pietro Pietrosanto came down the steps toward him. “We can't put it off any longer,” Pietrosanto said. “We've got to do something with The Band.”

Bombolini took in a large breath. Pietro was correct, the time had come. It was the one problem he had been unable to face since the day he had taken office. He knew the words of The Master: “Men must either be caressed or annihilated and the injury must be such that the victim cannot pay you back for it. Whoever acts otherwise is obliged to stand forever with knife in hand.” At night he could hear the words tumbling through his mind and he would resolve in the darkness to do something about them, but in the morning when the sun lit the walls along the piazza and the people went down to work, another day would pass with the problem unanswered. Now, with the Germans coming, there was no room left for the luxury of indecision.