The Secret of Santa Vittoria (24 page)

“I am going to get you an egg if I have to sell myself to do it,” Caterina said. She was conscious that he didn't approve of her joke.

“I'm going to go with you,” Tufa said. He began to get out of bed, and for the first time she was able to see him.

“Aren't you going to turn around?” he said.

“If you wish.”

“It's what the women here do. When the man gets up they turn around.”

“I didn't know,” Caterina said.

“I don't see anything wrong with it,” Tufa said.

“I'll make it a point to turn around,” Caterina told him.

But she had seen him and he was the way she expected. Had he been born rich he would have to be described as beautiful, the kind of model a sculptor would use. But time had done things to Tufa. The body now showed the effects of life on beauty, the way life attempts to destroy it and bring it down to its own level. The body was too hard in places and too damaged. The arms were too heavy, too veined and muscled from too much hard work, the wrists were thick, the texture of the skin was rough from too much sun and wind and too much sweat. Everything about the body was bone and sinew, and hard. But still the beauty was there, beneath it, especially in Tufa's face and eyes.

“If you will look by the bed you will see some clothes,” she told him. “They belonged to my husband. I didn't think you would mind.”

“Mind? No, why should I mind?” He began to pick up the clothes. “He had good taste,” Tufa said.

“He had money.”

“You can turn around now,” he said. He was wearing brown corduroy pants with leather patches on the inside of the knees and a white linen shirt that opened at the neck and a large brown leather belt and a soft dark hat. He was very handsome and he knew it.

“They'll think I'm a landowner,” Tufa said.

“It's better than knowing you're a Fascist officer. Come. You must be starving.”

“I am starving.”

When they were halfway down the hill that goes into the Piazza of the People they were able to see the piazza itself, and Tufa stopped in amazement. “What in the name of God are they doing down there?” he said.

“Something to do with the wine we saw last night,” Caterina told him. She wanted to take the lane that cuts down and around the back side of the piazza so they would be alone and quiet, but Tufa wouldn't allow her. When they came down into the piazza itself he stopped and watched them.

“Look at the way they're loading those carts,” he said to her. “They should take down the sides and then put the wine in and put the sides up again. They could go twice as fast. And look at this one over by the front of the church.”

“Come,” Caterina said. “It's not our concern.” She looked at him and made him take his eyes away from the scene in the piazza. “We have so little time, you know?”

“Oh, you're right,” Tufa said. “It's a habit. You see them doing it wrong and you want them to do it right.” He took her by the hand, in the daylight, something that isn't done here, and they started around the outer edge of the piazza. Not many noticed them. It was hot in the piazza then and loud, and the ox manure and mule droppings steamed on the cobblestones and there was the smell of people and wine from broken bottles and the sound of them all mingled into a thick soup.

“I can smell this town miles away,” Tufa said. “Every town has its own smell.”

“I don't know if I like it or not,” Caterina said. “I used to hate coming back here.”

“I like it.”

“Then I think I'll try to like it,” Caterina said. “I'll make an effort to cultivate the smell.”

They were in the part of the piazza where the oxen had been put, and the smell was very strong then and they pushed their way in and out between the animals.

“Then you'll have to fall in love with an ox first,” Tufa said. “That's the first step.”

“No it isn't,” Caterina said; but he didn't understand her.

They went around the far side to one of the lanes that leads out of the piazza down into one part of Old Town to where the dung heaps are and the chickens are and where they might be able to get an egg. Before going down it, Tufa stopped to study the scene once more.

“Whoever is running this is an idiot,” Tufa said and turned away from it, and so he failed to see Bombolini with several of the other leaders come up into the Piazza of the People, although they saw Tufa.

“Look at them,” the priest said. “Everyone in Santa Vittoria knows there's only one bed in that house.”

“Who would have believed it?” Bombolini said. “It's hard to believe your own eyes. A Tufa with a Malatesta in one bed. That's democracy for you.”

For the past several hours Bombolini had refused to believe the evidence of his eyes. He had come all the way up the mountain lying to himself. The traffic in the Corso Cavour had by then backed up so far and so deeply that the river of wine had become a trickle. It was because of the turn in the road and because the men were becoming exhausted from the loads they carried and the trips back up the mountain. The ox carts locked wheels in the turn and the traffic going down had to stop entirely to allow the traffic to come back up.

“It's all going wrong,” Pietrosanto said. “I don't know what's happening, but it's all going wrong.”

“It will work its way out,” the mayor said, and although he felt the cold hand on his heart again, he believed it at the moment. The Italians have made an art out of their ability to deceive themselves, a German once wrote about us. “And why not?” Babbaluche would say. “It's the only thing that keeps the poor bastards going.”

“It's the thing that destroys us,” Fabio once said. “We have to face the truth.”

“And do you have a gun to put to your head?” the cobbler said.

There is no way of telling how long the mayor would have gone on this way if Pietrosanto had not seen Tufa pass through the piazza. “I'm going to ask Tufa,” he said.

“We don't need people to come in from the outside and tell us how to run our affairs,” Bombolini said. He was openly hurt.

“Outside?” Pietrosanto shouted. “Outside? Tufa's one of
us.
Tufa's a Frog. Tufa's our blood. What are you? A Sicilian…” He didn't say the rest, but began running for the back lane, pushing and shoving people as he went.

Caterina and Tufa were already far down when Pietrosanto reached the head of the lane but they didn't stop or turn around.

“No one looked at us in the piazza,” Caterina said. “I thought they liked you here.”

“They saw. Under the veils, behind the oxen. They don't know what to say to us. They don't know how to speak to us. They don't know whether to call me
signor
or
don
because I'm sleeping with the Malatesta.”

“Do you think they know about last night?”

Tufa looked at her first with astonishment and then with real humor, and he began to laugh as he hadn't laughed for a long time.

“Do they know? My God, Caterina.” It was the first time he had used her name. “They know how many times.”

“They must think I'm terrible.”

Tufa was serious then. “No, no, they think I'm lucky.”

Pietrosanto seized him by the shoulder. His face was as red as a pot and he was taking big breaths, because Pietro is not young.

“I saw you looking in the piazza. Do you know something? You know something to do?”

Pietro put his hands on his knees and bent over to get his breath and stop his heart from pounding, and Tufa took a long time in answering. “Yes, I have a plan.”

Pietrosanto stood up then. “I knew he would have a plan,” he shouted at Caterina. “He's smart, do you understand? He has a head. A head. A head.” Pietrosanto isn't one to hold back when he is excited. He hit himself on the head with the heel of his hand so hard that if he had done it to someone else it would have begun a real fight. He hit Tufa in the head and he would have hit the Malatesta if Tufa hadn't blocked his hand.

“It's very complicated,” Tufa said.

“Will it save the wine?”

“If it works it will save the wine.”

Pietrosanto took off his hat, the one with the tall hawk's feather that marked him as the leader of the army of the Free State of Santa Vittoria, and put it on Tufa's head, and he took off his red arm band, which read Commander in Chief, and pinned it around Tufa's arm. Tufa looked at Caterina.

“What can I say?” Caterina said. “You look good in the hat.”

“If it was anything else but the wine, do you understand?” Tufa said. “But it's the wine. It's blood here, you know, and it's my blood as well as theirs.”

“I'll go and get you the egg,” Caterina said, and started down the lane.

Pietrosanto and Tufa started back toward the Piazza of the People. Tufa's name ran ahead of him the way they say it happens in Rome when the Pope passes.

Tufa … Tufa … Tufa's here … Tufa's back … Tufa … Tufa … Tufa's in charge … It's going to be all right, Tufa's back.

When they reached the piazza, although no one had been able to move before, a path was somehow opened in front of them. Give this credit to Bombolini. He was able to see the piazza as it was, the mess that had been created in the city. The Master would have approved of him. He came forward to meet Tufa. And give credit to Tufa. He could have seized command then with the approval of the people, but he deferred to the mayor, whom he knew only as a clown.

“Will you ask the people to clear the piazza?” Tufa said.

“Tell them to go to their homes and wait. Tell them to get something to eat and to rest and to wait.”

At first it appeared to be a failure, but then a few people got into the right lanes and started down them and as they left the jam began to lessen and soon the lanes going up and down from the piazza were filled to the walls with people and animals and carts. While they waited they heard good news. The water pump had lowered the level so that it revealed the top of the ancient drain, and a boy named Rana, which means frog (because he is shaped like a frog) was sent swimming down the darkness of the pipe with a grappling hook. He found a tree in the drain which must have been there hundreds of years, since there are no trees here anymore, not down in the valley. They pulled it out and the water began to rush down the length of the drain as if a giant toilet had been flushed.

“God has a purpose. God knows. He sent us the frog twenty years ago for just this purpose.” Everyone nodded. There had never been any other use for Rana during all that time except to make jokes of him.

While Rana had been swimming in the drain they had found the old ventilation shafts, and cleaned them of the bones of sheep who had fallen in, and all of the things that had blown in over the centuries, so that the hot African wind which was burning on the side of the mountain began to rush down into the cellars and through the Big Room, and Old Vines could say that they would be ready to lay the wine within an hour.

Tufa's second order was to take down the wall of the Cooperative Wine Cellar that faced the Fat Wall and the little opening through it that we call the Thin Gate. Some of the men were not sure about the next move.

“Are you sure you want to do this, Tufa?” Bombolini asked. Tufa nodded that he did.

“Take down the wall,” the mayor ordered.

The men were not strong about it at first. They chipped at the bricks and stones with mattocks and hammers and iron bars, and they were delicate because they didn't like to break down something which had been built with so much effort and cost. But when the first bricks came out they began to throw themselves into the work, because there is always something exciting about destroying something and about tearing something apart.

“The Corso is a pipe, you see?” Tufa said. “As with any pipe, it can take so much water and no more, no matter what the pressure behind it.”

“I see.”

“You thought you could push it through by desire, because you wanted it. But there are laws—laws of nature.”

“I see.”

“Now we have to find a stream that can handle a larger flow.”

“I see.”

“Call out the people now. Leave the carts and leave the animals and bring the people down.”

The wall was down then, and the wine in the cellar could be seen inside, naked, exposed, looking out of place, like a woman caught with no clothes on in a place she has no right to be.

“Ring the bell,” Tufa said.

They looked at one another.

“The bell doesn't play so well.” One of them said to Tufa. “Something happened to the bell.”

“It's a very complicated story,” Bombolini said.

They rang the bell, what there was of it to ring, and they sent boys running through the streets and lanes, and the people came out of their houses and gathered first in the Piazza of the People and then in a long file down the Corso Cavour right to the door and the broken wall of the Cooperative Wine Cellar. Some of them had managed to sleep for a few minutes and to eat, and they rubbed the sleep out of their eyes and the bread from their beards and lips.

As they came down, then, Tufa and Pietrosanto and the soldiers and Bombolini began to make a line of them beginning at the open wall and running down across the open area where the grapes are pressed at harvest and down to the Thin Gate and through the wall and then down the steep track that the goats take down the mountain.

“It's going to take courage,” Tufa said to the women. “It's going to take all your guts.”

“We have guts,” a woman answered him.

“When it comes to the wine we have guts,” another said.

“I'm going to ask more of you than I ask of soldiers,” Tufa told them.

“I would hope so,” someone said. There is no respect for soldiers up here.