The Secret of Santa Vittoria (23 page)

Polenta waved his finger at him, and the mayor leaped forward to seize the book.

“Don't lose your place, Padre, in the name of God,” he said.

It wasn't easy even after that. The priest read to himself for a long time and then announced that he needed water. There was no water and they offered him wine, but since the book said water it must be water. It was fortunate that it had rained the night before and the drainage ditch alongside the cart track to the road was filled with muddy water. They got the water in Vittorini's leather hat and the cock feathers were limp with water and clogged with clay. Bombolini handed the hat to the priest.

“Now go in there and start blessing, Padre,” he said.

Polenta went inside the entrance and several of the braver men went with him, staying behind the cross and the aspergillum and the priest while he flayed and scourged whatever evil spirits were hiding in the darkness of the Big Room. When he started further in, back toward the two wine cellars built into the back wall and dug far into the mountain, even Bombolini lagged behind, and so the priest was all alone when he stepped down into the first of the cellars and fell head first into the water. When he came up again and shouted for help no one went to his aid at once, because it was felt that the battle between evil and good must have been joined there and that good was losing to evil, as sometimes happens. Finally Bombolini and Vittorini crossed the room and found the priest standing waist-deep in the water and they led him out onto the dry sandy floor of the Big Room.

The ice-cold hand had slipped over Bombolini's heart once more and his heart, or perhaps his soul, which he felt was associated with his heart, was as cold as the priest's skin.

“It's all over now,” one of them said. “There's nothing left to be done.”

The cellars were flooded with four feet of water. Men began to come into the Big Room, although no one would go to the cellars. Some of them had been afraid even to stand by the entrance, for fear that the spirits, chased out of the cave by the holy water and the cross, might somehow fly down into them.

Five people at least now claim to be the one who first suggested what to do. “Get Longo,” someone said. “If anyone can do anything now it is Longo.”

When you write a history and look back you see there are many points and times when everything might have changed if it had not been for some one act. If Fabio had not gone to Montefalcone that evening, if Gambo's bike had not been available because Gambo had been hit by a rock and Gambo had not shared a room with a woman like Gabriele and Fabio had not been pretty enough to please her, and if Tommaso Casamassima had not made his speech about brave men and good wine—Longo belongs to one of these moments.

They seized his name and began to shout it in the Big Room, booming it off the rough stone walls, “Longo, Longo”—a miracle in their midst, one more twig for people who were drowning. One of the youngest men ran out of the cellar and started up the mountain. He ran until his legs would not go any farther, and then he cried out Longo's name to one of the men coming down. There was now a steady line of people coming down the mountain with their burdens of wine, and the man turned and called the message back to the man behind him and that one called it back to another, and in this way the message flew up the mountain from mouth to mouth, leaping up at fifty feet a step. By the time Bombolini and the priest came out of the cave and into the sun and looked up at the city, Luigi Longo, as puzzled as most of the people in Santa Vittoria, was already on the way down.

Longo is an example of something that can happen to a man here. When he was young he had somehow managed to get away and go to Switzerland and become an apprentice electrician. But he came home one day for his father's funeral, and a few months later there was a letter from Constanzia Casamassima telling him that she was crrying his child and that he had better come back and make her honest or her father and her brothers would go up there and make him something she would rather not describe. Longo came back, and then there was the grape harvest and the baby was born and he had inherited a piece of a terrace and some vines, and one day Longo woke up to find that his visa had expired and he couldn't go back to Switzerland and he was bound to the soil of Santa Vittoria as securely as were the roots of the vines he tended in a subdued rage.

We were spoiled by Longo here. He never lost the dream of wires and when he was sober he was a genius with electrical things, a first-rate electrician with tenth-rate equipment. There was no piece of wiring that Longo had not at some time restored or re-created. The wiring here was our Lazarus, sickly and dying and dead, and to them Longo was our Christ, performing a miracle a week.

He looked at the first of the two wine cellars, and he went into the water and walked along the walls, and in total silence he came outside and drew some pictures in the sand and then he stood up and brushed the hair out of his long, tired, ravaged face and said: “I can do this thing.”

There is no need here to put down in detail all of the things that Longo did or started. There was an old generator here which was kept in the cellar of Santa Maria of the Burning Oven and which had been left behind by a traveling circus when a juggler had attempted to kill a tightrope walker over the love of a twelve-year-old acrobat, a boy, which confused the people here, and everyone had cut everyone else and gone to the hospital or to jail, and we were left with a set of Indian clubs and the generator for the lights. He told them to get the pump from the water tower and to cut down all of the electric wires that ran from the foot of the mountain to the Fat Gate and to bring the wire to the Big Room and after that he ordered the two best bicycles in the city to be brought down the mountain with four or five of the best young riders.

Bombolini went back outside of the cave, because he didn't understand what Longo was doing and it made him nervous not to understand what was happening. The wine was now spread out all over the flat sandy place and was piling up back across the flat part of the valley.

“How's it going?” the men who were carrying the wine would shout to the mayor.

“Fine. It's going well. It's going well.”

They would smile then. They were happy and excited. They were doing something and had some work to do. Bombolini also made marks in the sand. There were 18 hours left in this day and there were 17 hours left in the day ahead. The total was 35. He added them over and over again, as if by coming up with some new answer he could change the order of the hours. He looked very sad then.

“What's the matter?” Vittorini asked him.

“Nothing is the matter. Everything is good,” Bombolini said, but the anguish was there, in the numbers: 35 and o.

The Germans would arrive in 35 hours. Not one bottle of wine had as yet been hidden.

 

A
ND
when they put up the plaques, next to the one for Bombolini and Tufa, alongside the eternal green flame that already burns in the piazza for Babbaluche the cobbler, there should be one for Longo. The things Luigi Longo did that morning are remembered here and will always be remembered here.

By seven o'clock the pump had been pried loose from the base of the water tower and the generator had been cleaned and the old fire hose had been carried down the mountain as if it were an old tired python and the bicycles had been taken apart and readjusted so that, when they were pumped and their wheels, which were elevated from the ground, were turned, they caused the drive wheels on the generator to turn and power was created and a dim light began to appear in the bulbs, which grew brighter and brighter as the young men drove the bicycle wheels. Fabio was among the bike riders.

“
Now
you have come back,” Bombolini said.

“Only for today and tomorrow,” Fabio said. “I won't be here to humiliate myself when the bastards come.”

“We're going to do it, Fabio. We're going to save the wine.”

“Even if you lose your honor.”

Bombolini was hurt by the boy's bitterness.

“You get on fire, Fabio. It's no good. Fire in the heart only ends up causing smoke in the head.”

Babbaluche, who was fashioning the leather belts that connected the generator to the bicycle wheels, had heard them.

“It's more peasant wisdom,” he said to Fabio. “Don't listen to him. It's more smooth words. What did my father say? ‘Beware of the man who makes cream with his mouth; he winds up making butter with his nose.' You watch him, Fabio. When the krauts come he'll wind up with butter all over his nose.”

Fabio was disgusted. He turned away from Bombolini, who disgusted him.

“Where are the real Italians?” he said but no one heard him, or if they did no one answered.

“That's exactly what I plan to do. When they come I plan to have butter all over my nose,” Bombolini said.

When the generator had built up a store of energy Longo connected it to the pump. At first, for the first few minutes at least, there was terror in the Big Room because nothing happened to the pump. The moving parts were heavy with old oil and stubborn like an old ox, but then Longo began to move the parts by hand and they began to move on their own after that, grudgingly, only as far as they had to go, the way a snail moves when it is prodded, but then to go a little more swiftly each moment and then to gurgle and cough and burble and finally to thump now and then and all at once to go
thump, thump, thump, thump,
and water began to gush from the mouth of the hose. They heard the cheer from the Big Room all the way up the mountain, because the hollow roars went up the ancient air shafts out into the pastures above the cellars, and they could hear them in the town.

When the old hose broke, which happened often, it was Longo who fixed that as well. He sent boys up onto the terraces and they came back with grape leaves and vines, and they tied them over the breaks in the tired old fabric of the hose, like crude bandages to stop the bleeding of a wound.

Longo came out of the cave after that, and he sat down with Bombolini in the warm sun.

“We're going to do it,” Longo said. “The first cellar will be empty in an hour.”

Bombolini rose and took Longo's hand and he kissed him on both cheeks. “He says we're going to do it,” he said to Vittorini.

“Yes. I heard him say it. We're going to do it.”

Old Vines came out of the cave after that. “That was clever of you,” he said to Longo, “using the grape leaves. So the grapes will save the grapes. It is fitting.”

“We're going to do it,” Bombolini said.

“Yes, we're going to do it,” the cellar master said.

Bombolini started back up the mountain then for Santa Vittoria, and he was conscious that never in his life had he ever felt happier than he felt right then.

 

T
UFA
was like the others here. He had come awake with the sun, and in the end he couldn't stay in bed with the sun up. He wanted to stay in the bed, next to this woman, but he heard the sounds in the piazza and the oxen in the lanes and he felt that he must get out of the bed. Before he did he was conscious that she was awake also, lying next to him, looking at him.

“You should go back to sleep,” she said. “It's very important for you. You should lie here for days and get your strength back.”

It caused him to laugh and that offended her. One of them was always laughing at something the other had not meant to be funny.

“Do you really think I'd get my strength back lying here next to you all day?”

“Oh, that. Oh, I see. Soldier talk. It was uncalled for.”

“Why? You have no shame. You told me.”

She smiled at him then. “It's true. I was born outside shame. It used to worry my teachers at school. They always felt I was going to get in some terrible trouble.”

“And did you?”

“Of course not. Since I had no shame I wasn't attracted to the kind of people who get you into trouble.”

“Which is why you are here in bed with me.”

“I don't know why I'm here in this bed with you. Except that I want to be.” It was she who got up.

“What are you doing?” Tufa said. “I'm the peasant here. I'm the one who gets up.”

“I'm going to get us something to eat,” Caterina said.

“I'm not hungry for food right now.”

“You're the one with no shame.”

“I'm the one who is starved,” Tufa said.

He watched her come back across the room toward him. She had no clothes on and there was no consciousness of herself, and he knew that no other woman in Santa Vittoria would ever be able to walk that way or do such a thing.

“You're so honest,” Caterina said. “I could never say a thing that way. I haven't learned to talk that way yet.”

He reached up and brought her to the bed.

“No, I see it,” Tufa said. “It's true. You have no shame.”

When they were through he did sleep again, and it was her turn to listen to the sounds of the city and the morning. She sat in the bed and looked at his uniform, black, stained, dirty, torn. It would have to be done away with before the Germans came. The sight of the uniform saddened her, because it told by itself the ordeal Tufa must have endured. Very quietly then she got out of the bed and went into a back room and came out with a suitcase full of clothes that had once belonged to her husband. He had left them there in the event that one day he might be forced to run. They were good clothes for Tufa, outdoor clothes, estate clothes, hunting clothes.

She went back into the room and looked down on Tufa and at that moment knew real fear. Through Tufa she had invested in life again, and to the degree you invest, to that degree are you in danger of losing your investment.

There was no fear for herself—not that she was brave but because she was confident that men would not abuse her or be able to take advantage of her. Men were afraid of her kind of beauty. Tufa was beautiful, also, but his kind of beauty was different. Because he was a challenge to other men, she knew that he was a type that men were driven to destroy. She began to clean up the room, because she knew he would like that, and even to sweep and she was thankful that he wasn't awake to see her handle the twig broom. When he finally did awake again he said he was hungry, truly hungry, not for her but for bread dripping with olive oil, for some good black olives and for an egg. Caterina put down the broom and went to the door.