The Secret of Santa Vittoria (3 page)

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he cried. “Take your hands off me.”

They used the baker like a soccer ball. He went from one end of the piazza to the other, and every player along the way had a penalty shot at him. When he could move no more they called his family to come down and take him away, and when they couldn't carry him Fabio had to help them carry him back up the steep lane to High Town, more dead than alive. That is the way Fabio is. When he got back down to the piazza the people were starting back to their houses. The bloodletting had had a soothing effect. As the baker's blood had flowed, the blood pressure of the people had dropped.

“They shouldn't do that,” Fabio said.

“The people are entitled to their blood,” Babbaluche said. “The people have a need for blood. They have a taste for it. Now give them big blood, important blood,” the cobbler said. “Tell them how the Duce died.”

“They don't want to hear that,” Fabio said. “They want to go home.”

“The people always want to hear when the mighty stag is brought to the ground by a pack of common dogs,” Babbaluche said.

The cobbler was right. Fabio told them how the Fascist Grand Council had gathered in a palace in Rome the night before and how one man, the Count Dino Grandi, rose to his feet and in the face of Mussolini, before the eyes of the Duce, began to read a resolution.

Resolved: The members of the Grand Council and the people of the glorious nation of Italy, having lost all confidence in the ability of the leader to lead any longer, convinced that he has destroyed the will of the army to fight any longer and the people to resist any longer.…

The people sat on the wet stones of the piazza and listened to Fabio.

“Die,” one of them shouted. “How does he die?”

Fabio told them how at the end the Duce turned to his son-in-law, husband of his own flesh and blood, and said to him, “And you, Ciano. Flesh of my flesh. Even you.”

“Yes, even me. You have done all that you can do.”

And how the next afternoon, on the burning hot empty Sunday afternoon in Rome the king had summoned the Duce to the royal palace and met him in the garden and behind the hedges so no one could see them, sang the Duce a song that the soldiers were singing.

“What have you done to us, Mussolini?

What have you done with our Alpini?

I'll tell you what you've done, Mussolini.

You have murdered our Alpini

That's what you have done, Mussolini!”

“And you? Do you believe it?” the Duce says.

“All the soldiers are singing it,” the king says.

“Then there is nothing more to say.”

“No, there is nothing more to say.”

He told them how they put the Duce in a long black ambulance and took him through the streets of Rome. The Duce tells the guard that he isn't sick and the guard says, “But the people of Rome are fickle.”

And how they took him through the ancient burning city, past all the monuments to the past Caesars, through the arches built for the great men, until they come to the walls of Rome and the Appian Way, the route that all the conquerors have taken to come to Rome. At a crossroads the ambulance stops and the people of the village look inside.

“An old man is dying,” one of them says.

Mussolini says one sentence: “The people of Rome have always destroyed their greatest sons.”

And how after that they drove past the country towns and then into the upland villages, the hills and the mountains growing higher, into the Abruzzi and then up into the snow fields into those mountains where the snow never ends. In the valleys it is night, but the snow fields are still touched by sun, and here he is met by four members of the Alpini who tell him to undress and when he is naked two of them take his arms and two of them take his legs and they lower him into a hole they have cut into the hard ice and they begin shoveling snow into the upright grave until only the great head is not buried.

“You dishonor Italy,” the Duce says. They are simple men but one of them was equal to the job.

“No, we honor the dead of twenty years by doing what we do.”

So in the manner of the Alpini, Fabio tells them, the Duce has died, frozen to death in foreign snow.

When he was through with the story some of the women were crying, not for the Duce, but for the men of Santa Vittoria who were sent to the Alpini. They left one morning in May 1941, twenty-three young men, marching down the mountain, singing and shouting all the way to the Montefalcone road, the feathers on those silly hats bending with the breeze, the people standing on the Fat Wall waving and waving until the last of them could be seen no more. Not one of them was ever seen or heard from again.

We know now that this isn't the way the Duce died, but we always tell it this way because we like his death this way and it is more fitting to us.

 

T
HERE WAS
no way to keep the people in the piazza after that, because the sun had come up. It had not yet reached down into the piazza itself, but the people could see it touching the tiles on the roofs of the houses and nothing could hold them after that.

“No one works today,” Babbaluche shouted. “A day of holiday.”

“A day of celebration,” Bombolini called. But the people didn't listen to either of them.

The sun drives the people here. It is an instinct that has been bred into them. Even when they can't see the sun or it can't be seen, in the darkest lanes in Old Town, when the sun comes up the people get up. It drives them out of the houses and it drives them down to the terraces to tend the vines.

“Tell them, Fabio,” the cobbler said.

“This is a great day for Italy,” Fabio said. “No one should work today.”

They poured out of the piazza and down the streets to get their tools, deaf to anything now but the needs of the grapes, and in a few minutes there were only five or six of them left in the Piazza of the People. These men went across the piazza from the church and sat around the edge of the Fountain of the Pissing Turtle, while Fabio climbed up and took down his bicycle.

“For twenty years I dreamed of this day,” Babbaluche said, “and now look at it.” He swept his hand around the empty piazza. “This is the kind of people you have in this place, Fabio. Don't ever allow yourself to forget it.”

They sat and listened to the water until the priest passed in front of them on his way to the bell tower.

“There will be a Low Mass for the dead,” he said to Fabio.

“For one of the heroes of the Church,” Babbaluche said.

“The dead will be respected,” the priest said.

“And when do you think the Vatican will get around to the living?” the cobbler said.

It was an old game that the two of them played, and neither of them heard the other any longer. But it bothered Fabio.

“To think that I, Ugo Babbaluche, outlived that bastard Mussolini,” the cobbler said. “It's something. I'm alive and that bastard's dead.”

“It calls for a drink,” Bombolini said, and all of them, at once, as if someone had set off a silent alarm, stood up and began to follow the wine seller across the piazza to his wineshop. He was unlocking the folding iron gate over the front door, when his wife looked out of the window above the door.

“See that they pay,” she said to him. “See that you make them pay.” He was embarrassed.

“She lacks a sense of history,” he said.

It was damp and chilly in the shop, but the warm air from the piazza and the warmth from the wine soon warmed them.

“What do you think is going to happen?” one of them asked.

“Nothing,” Pietrosanto said. “Why should anything happen?”

It is the feeling here. No matter what takes place in Rome or happens in the world, for a few days or a few weeks things might be a little different, but they always return to the way they were before.

“The Germans will come,” Fabio said.

He had put his head down on one of the tables because he was tired. He was suddenly embarrassed to be the center of the men's group. He had never spoken much with the men before, and now he was one of them.

“No they won't,” one of them said. “Why would they want to come here?”

“If Italy gets out of the war,” Fabio said, “the Germans aren't going to leave Italy for the Americans and the English.”

“No,” Pietrosanto said. “There's nothing here for them.”

“There's nothing here for
us,
” Bombolini said.

Fabio could only shrug his shoulders. He couldn't push too far, but still he told them about the tanks and armored cars he had seen coming into Montefalcone.

“Montefalcone is Montefalcone and Santa Vittoria is Santa Vittoria,” the cobbler said. “One is a jewel and one is a shit house.”

They drank to this.

“Only a man born in Santa Vittoria can ever learn how to make a living out of it,” one said. “What would the Germans do here?”

They drank to this as well.

The wife of Bombolini came down the back stairs and into the wineshop and she looked at their glasses of vermouth and anisette and she stared at their eyes.

“Did they pay?”

“They paid,” Bombolini said.

“Let's see the money.” She went to the drawer in the table by the big wine barrel. There was nothing in it.

“This is a historic day,” Bombolini said. “You don't ask for money on a day like this and you don't accept it.”

They nodded their heads at Rosa Bombolini. They were afraid of her. She has the toughest tongue in the city and no shyness about putting it to use. She studied them.

“What a bunch of patriots.” She began taking the glasses from them moving them toward the door. “Take your patriotism out into the piazza where it belongs.” When they were in the sunlight at the door she said, “That's the trouble with this country. The whole place is filled with penniless patriots.”

They could hear the sound of a drum coming down from one of the lanes in High Town that lead down into the piazza. Capoferro the town crier was announcing the Duce's death.

“You should put your fist in her mouth,” one of the men told Bombolini, and all of them nodded; but each one knew that if he were married to Rosa Bombolini he would keep his fists to himself.

“Women and asses and nuts require strong hands,” Pietrosanto said. They all nodded. “It's a sad house where the cock is silent and the hen crows.”

They nodded at this too, including Bombolini. There was a blast from the automobile horn that Capoferro carried and then a roll on his goatskin drum. He was coming down into the piazza.

Only people born here can understand Capoferro. He has some kind of trouble with his speech and sometimes it takes two and three people to understand him, but at least what he says is remembered. There must be some kind of law of the world, Fabio thinks, a law of compensation he calls it, that makes crippled men carry messages and unhappy people run happy places and people like Capoferro become town criers. He had come across the piazza now and was beating the goatskin drum.

“Nido Muzzlini dead.”

Barrrrombarrrummmbarrrum.
A squeeze on the automobile horn.

“Tyrant dead. All Idly weeps.”

Barrrrombarrrummmmbarrrum.
Horn.

“Benidolini is no more. Idly moans.”

“No, no,” Fabio said. “Italy is happy.”

“Oh,” Capoferro said. He struck himself on the head with his drumsticks. He looked at the men.

“You want to celebrate?” the crier said. “For some wine I'll drum you a dance.”

“Wait,” Bombolini said. He went back across the piazza and around to the back entrance of the wineshop on the Street of D'Annunzio the Poet and he came back with two bottles of wine.

“Keep your back to the shop,” he said. It was good vermouth. They passed the bottles around.

“I'll drum the tiles down from the roofs,” Capoferro said. He took a very long drink, it is said that he is over one hundred years old and it is probably true, and he began to drum. At first none of them did anything, but then Babbaluche began to dance. He is crippled because of something they did to him here, but Capoferro slowed the drum beat and the cobbler began to drag himself across the stones of the piazza in a slow dance.

“I never thought I'd dance at his funeral,” he shouted.

The sun was hot now and they had had nothing to eat since the night before, and the wine began to go to their heads. After a while Bombolini began to dance with the cobbler and they went around and around the Fountain of the Pissing Turtle while Capoferro beat the goatskin drum and some of the men clapped their hands. Babbaluche's daughter had come up from Old Town into the piazza, and when she saw her father she seized his arm and brought it up behind his back the way the
carabinieri
do it, and she began to pull him across the piazza with her to the Corso Mussolini that leads down into Old Town. He gave the bottle to one of the men and that was a mistake, because Rosa Bombolini saw it and came out of the wineshop and across the piazza to them.

“You thieving sons of bitches,” she said, and she took the bottle.

“Do something with her,” Capoferro shouted above the drum. “Control your woman.”

“You had better leave,” Bombolini said. “She's going to break your drum.”

Since the wine was gone and the drum was no longer playing and it was hot, they began to leave and soon only Fabio and the wine merchant were left in the piazza besides the children and the oxen and the old women getting water from the fountain. They had nothing to say to each other.

“The best thing I can do right now,” Bombolini said, “is to go back to bed. Goodbye, Fabio.”

It was the end of the celebration. Fabio was alone. He decided to go down into Old Town and sleep on a mat in his cousin Ernesto's house and he crossed the piazza and started down the steep Corso. It was very hot now. The door to the furnace of Africa, as we say around here, was open. An old woman was sitting in the darkness of the doorway next to Ernesto's door.