The Secret of Santa Vittoria (32 page)

“Can you read this?” Bombolini said that he couldn't. “It is a pity, since it would make my work easier.” The captain got up and turned away from Bombolini. “It is your fate to be a civil authority and it is mine to be a soldier. What do soldiers do?” Bombolini didn't answer. The German turned around then.

“Soldiers take orders. I want you to remember one thing now. I do not want to do this personally. This is not my business. I can only follow my orders because I am a soldier.”

An
aperitivo
or two would help right here, Bombolini thought. The wine of the night before was still throbbing in his temples.

“It is also true that we are at war with one another.”

“I forget,” Bombolini said.

“And in a war someone gets hurt. Someone loses things and someone pays a price.”

Bombolini dropped his head then. “I know who pays,” he said.

“I am asking you to be mature,” von Prum said.

“Mature, yes,” Bombolini said. “What is it they want?”

The directness of the question had upset the order of the captain's approach and he was for the moment off balance. Many men might not have recovered it, not in the manner that von Prum did. In the end he turned it to his advantage.

“Some wine,” he said. “Are you strong? Are you able to hear it?” Bombolini nodded.

“They want your wine.”

It is not necessary here to put down all the things Bombolini did after that. He did what was expected of him, he did what he had been rehearsing every night in his sleep since the day they had hid the wine. He slapped his hand over his heart as if he were suffering a stroke and shouted, “The wine!” and he gripped the region of his heart as if he were squeezing a grapefruit.

“They want our wine?” he cried, and he fell to the floor.

It was only the start. It is embarrassing today to put down all the rest that he did—the running into the piazza and the bathing of his head in the fountain, the cries and the tears, the hitting of his head against a stone wall, the drinking of a bottle of wine without taking the bottle from his lips, always with cries of “No … Never … No … No … Never … No … It is too much … too much,” and finally running back into the headquarters with eyes as wild as those of a calf who has been hit with the sledgehammer and who has not died but has gotten loose from the ropes that hold him. In the end he collapsed, as he had planned, on the floor of Constanzia's house, where von Prum could talk to him.

It was the signal, of course. Everyone knew then. The Rabbit had gone over the fence. The Rabbit was in the garden. The Rabbit was eating. The Rabbit was gorging himself.

“In the name of God,” Bombolini shouted. “The wine is
us.
”

“You must stop,” von Prum ordered him. “I trusted you, as a mature man.”

“But my God above, the wine. The
wine!
”

The German leaned down toward him then. His voice was almost a whisper. “It is not all that you think,” he said. “You must hear me.”

“The body and blood of my people.” He tried to sit up. “Captain von Prum. I want you to shoot me, to destroy me now.”

The captain wouldn't listen to him. Instead, he would try the last trump, short of violence, that he held in his hand.

“I have a proposition to make to you,” he said.

Bombolini succeeded in sitting up.

“Didn't I know when I said that,” von Prum wrote later, “that the wop would listen? His face lit up, the tears went away, his tongue hung out, his eyes bulged at the word. They are all alike; they are Arabs in their souls.”

And the captain told him. In payment for the cost of occupying and thus protecting their town, the town would be required to surrender its stock of wine.

“It's like paying an intruder to sleep in your bed with your wife,” Bombolini said.

Part of the wine would be considered a payment, but part would be considered a loan to the German government which would be returned with interest when the war was won.

“What if you lose?” Bombolini said.

Von Prum went on then to the proposition. Because transportation was becoming increasingly hard to obtain, any city that would volunteer to bring its own wine to the railhead at Montefalcone could retain for itself some part of the wine.

“How much,” Bombolini said.

They began at twenty per cent.

“I can't ask my people to rape themselves for that amount,” the mayor said.

“I could force them.”

“No, this can't be done by force,” Bombolini said, and the German knew he was correct.

“I ask you one thing. Has this been done by any other town?”

The German was honest about it. He told him that it hadn't.

“Then the price will be fifty per cent for you and fifty per cent to stay with us.”

“It's high,” the German said. “I don't know if they will accept it.” He went to the window of Constanzia's bedroom and looked down into the piazza. Bombolini hoped the people weren't gathered in the piazza looking at the house. At last he came back in and when he did he was smiling.

“An ox for a mule and a mule for an ox,” the German said. “We help each other.”

There was a good feeling in every part of Santa Vittoria that night. Von Prum, of course, was consumed with joy which he was forced to conceal.

“Do you know what this means?” he asked Sergeant Traub. “Can you conceive of what this means?”

Traub was more worried that the card players and the wine drinkers would never speak to them again. He had gotten to like their company and along with the rest he looked forward to the games and the drinking at night. He didn't like this stealing of their wine. And so he was pleased and even amazed when they came to the wine cellar office that night.

“We know that you're soldiers and you have to follow orders,” one of them said. “We don't hold it against you. Who has the cards?” They even got out the
grappa
that night.

There was good feeling, and it remained in the city until the morning we were due to carry the wine to Montefalcone. The feeling remained even when it was found that the order which von Prum had shown to Bombolini had required him to requisition only fifty per cent of the wine in the first place.

Maybe we are realists. We were content with our victory, it was more wine than we had counted on, and we were content to let the German have his.

 

N
O ONE HERE
likes to look back on the journey to Montefalcone. It began as if we were going on a picnic, and it ended in misery. Tufa tried to tell us, but no one listened to Tufa, because no one wanted to hear what he had to say.

“Have you made any arrangements for anyone dying?” Tufa asked Pietrosanto, who was the leader of the march.

“Why should anyone die?”

“You had better plan for someone dying,” Tufa said.

We should have known better, but Tufa alone seemed to know what was involved in carrying 150,000 bottles of wine so many miles by so many mules and donkeys and oxen and carts and people and backs all the way over the hills to Montefalcone. Some of us can still recall Tufa's words as we started through the Fat Gate and down the mountain for the River Road. The sun was not quite up then and it was cool and damp, and we felt light and as if we could go on forever.

“This will be a terrible day for Santa Vittoria,” Tufa said.

“Do you know that sometimes you are a troublemaker,” Pietrosanto said. “You've seen some bad days and think that all of them are bad. We were all right before you came along.”

The people were actually gay at the beginning.

“They should be crying,” Sergeant Traub said. “I tell you, I don't understand these people.”

“They have accepted what can't be changed,” Captain von Prum said. “Why not make the best of it? As this Bombolini says, the people are realists.”

“I don't know,” Traub said. “I don't know.” By his standards it was carrying realism too far.

The trip down the mountain, even in the dimness before dawn, was easy, because the people know the mountain and how to take it and they know every stone on it and every turn and hole where one might twist an ankle. When we reached the River Road the sun was up and the column began to spread out along the road. The wine baskets on the people's backs began to get hot and heavy even then. Many of the people had never been to Montefalcone before, and they looked ahead toward it as an adventure although Montefalcone was many miles away and out of sight.

When we passed Scarafaggio the people all stood in the Piazza of the Brass Urinal, their mouths gaping open wider than usual, and pointed down the hill at us and then began running. I could tell you the story of how the piazza got its name, how they came to Santa Vittoria and stole a huge brass urn we used for the wine during the harvest festival and how they used it for a public urinal and how we then went down and put dynamite in the pot and blew it into a thousand pieces so that every home in the city had some brass chip of Santa Vittoria in it, but the story is too long and involved and sad. They came down their mountain and across their part of the valley until they were lined up along the opposite bank of the Mad River, where they stared at us.

“What do you think you're doing?” one of them finally shouted to us. “What are you doing with the wine? What are they making you do with it?”

No one bothered to answer them, because they were Scarafaggians and because breath already was becoming valuable and because how do you explain to people that you are helping to steal your own wine?

When the column began to fall apart and the older people to drift back through it like pebbles sifting down in the water, still being carried along by the tide but sinking all of the time, Tufa, from habit as much as anything, attempted to keep the long march organized. It was the first time the Germans noticed him. There was a manner about him, the way he controlled himself and the quiet, sure way that he gave orders, a sense of keeping within him a stronger power than he chose to reveal, that made itself apparent.

“That son of a bitch is a soldier,” Traub said. “We're supposed to turn them in.”

Von Prum had been watching. There was a kind of control about the man and yet at the same time a kind of wildness hiding just beneath a mask of discipline that the German recognized as very Italian and which he found interesting in a man, and almost always fatal—one of the men destined in advance to commit the destructive act that ruins.

“Meanwhile he's doing our work,” the captain said. “We'll watch him.”

“There's something wrong about the other one as well, sir,” Sergeant Traub said. Tufa had been talking to Roberto who was attempting to make the march. “He has hands like a girl. I went to have some boots fixed…”

The argument had no meaning to Captain von Prum. He also had hands like Roberto. There was nothing unmanly about them; it was merely that they had never pruned vines in the wet cold autumn or dug in piles of manure or strung the wires for the vines or worked the harvest or washed dirty clothes in cold water with soap made from ox suet and strong lye. The women were envious of the hands of Roberto and Captain von Prum.

It is something the men of Santa Vittoria don't like to admit about their women, but it is true. Whenever the German went through the streets the women didn't look at him directly, but when he passed they followed him and undressed him with their eyes. They peeled him like a Sicilian orange and devoured him. He was so clean, which our men are not, so clear and pink and white and blond and cool, with even a sensation of silver, shining and swift and delicate, like a trout in clear water.

We must face a truth. The men here have skins the color of copper pots, reddish brown and as tough as leather. If a brush could be made from the hair on their legs and arms and chests, it could be used to curry a water buffalo. It is possible that the women, if given the choice, would finally choose to go to bed with a hairy copper pot because it is what they know, but it is also possible that they would at least dream of trying once someone with the white clean softness of von Prum.

It has nothing to do with the war or loyalty, it has to do with the truth that in this town, where everyone is known by everybody, when even the chickens that run in the street are known and have names and are talked about, that someone like Captain von Prum becomes an unbearable curiosity walking in the streets. He was in truth all that the women talked about for some time.

“I wouldn't do it with him, you understand, but I'm curious, you know. You wonder how it must feel with that, it must be different, do you understand?”

There is one other thing that must be told: In Italy all of the men are unfaithful, because, as is known by all Italians, all Italian men are by nature and birth great lovers.

And, of course, just because they
are
such, all the women are faithful. The faithless woman can be killed and no one will lift a hand to defend her, because she has committed the unpardonable sin, the worst of all crimes, she has dishonored the man. And then the seducer must be harmed and punished and sometimes killed to restore the honor of the man who has been made to wear the horns. If he can't do it alone, his brothers will help him, his family, his whole section of the city, because the honor must be restored. It is naturally because the woman must not so much as look at another man that they do look at him, that they dream of him, that they fall in love with him at a distance, that they commit rape with their eyes and adultery in their dreams.

There is only one question that has never been answered: If all Italian men are faithless and sleep with all the women in the town, how is it that all the women, except one or two, are faithful? Either the men are not the great lovers they claim to be or all of them must wear the horns; neither of which any Italian man is willing to admit. It is a very great mystery.