The Secret of Santa Vittoria (34 page)

“Because the people here aren't idiots and you didn't treat us as idiots,” Bombolini said. “As a result you took some of our wine but we still have half of it.”

The little talks between the two men gradually grew into longer ones and finally even into mild debates.

“There is something rewarding about a debate,” Captain von Prum wrote to his father, “when you know that in the end your view will prevail. In this way you get to share another's view without the debate getting out of hand or losing its final discipline.”

The subject that seemed to interest him above all others was why the star of Germany was rising so high and why that of Italy had sunk so low.

Why were the people of Germany so vigorous and virile and young, and those of Italy so decadent and corrupt and tired?

“Look at your soldiers. Item: Why do all Italian soldiers run away in battle?”

At times like these Bombolini would study the floor. There was a certain truth in these things. Even Tufa now had left the battlefield and was in bed in a woman's arms.

“Perhaps it's because our soldiers love life more than your soldiers do,” Bombolini said.

It caused von Prum to laugh. “But what good is life without honor?”

“I don't know,” Italo said. “I don't think I ever tried one with honor yet. It's a very great luxury for people like us.”

On another day he complained about and then studied the Italian lack of organization and civic responsibility. “The streets,” Captain von Prum said. “Why are the streets falling apart and filled with filth? Why is that? Your sewage disposal: a stream through the middle of your town. Why is it that we have toilets and you have ditches? Why is that?”

At times Bombolini grew angry at his inability to answer the captain's questions, and the captain would give the screw one more turn.

“We may not be good organizers,” Bombolini shouted one day, “but we're good improvisers. That's why we make bad soldiers but good partisans.”

“Is that some kind of threat?” the German said, and they didn't talk for several days afterwards.

One afternoon von Prum announced that Italy had not won a major battle in over six hundred years.

“What can I say to things like that?” the mayor asked Babbaluche.

“Tell the son of a bitch that we are easy to conquer but hard to defeat,” the cobbler said. “Tell him he'll find that out.”

“Sometimes I die to tell him about the wine,” Bombolini said. “Just to see his face. Sometimes I think it would almost be worth the price.”

“The difference between the German and the Italian is that when the wop walks into a room he wonders how many people in it are going to like him, and the kraut wonders how many will despise him. I don't understand why it is, but all Germans despise themselves,” Babbaluche said.

“Should I tell him that?” Bombolini said.

“Yes, and then report to Padre Polenta for Extreme Unction,” the cobbler told him.

One morning, very early, the morning of the day on which Captain von Prum received the message that was to change things here so swiftly and so terribly, he actually came to the Palace of the People to visit the mayor.

“I think I'm on to something,” the captain said. “It is as simple and direct as this: a matter of sex. Germany is the Fatherland. Italy is the Motherland. A matter of sex. As simple as that.” He grew very excited about the discovery. “I am amazed that I have never read this before.

“Male and female. What is the male? The male is aggressive, the male takes. What is the female? The female is passive, the female gives. Give and take. Strong and weak. Do you know that one of the reasons things have worked out so well here is that we make a good marriage?”

“You might ask him when we can have a divorce,” Babbaluche said later in the morning, before the messenger came.

“Man is reason. Woman is emotion. One reason you can't organize anything properly is that organization is an act of reason. Can you see that? We in turn probably don't feel things deeply enough. It's not
all
on our side.”

“Yes, we tend to act from the heart,” Bombolini said. “It's the trouble with our soldiers. They tend to act like people. You can't have a real army and people at the same time.”

“Yes. Well,” the German said, “in any case, this is what I have been leading up to, I think I have the answer. The ultimate answer.” He read from some notes in his hand: “The Italian exists by emotion, and emotion exhausts energy. This is a fact of simple observation. For a time it sustained you and you flamed briefly and brilliantly. And then you used up your source of energy, you burned yourself out, you wore yourself thin, and now you are old. Italy is old.”

“And you, then, are young,” Bombolini said.

“Because reason attaches itself to nothing, it never wears itself out. Reason is restless, adventurous,” Captain von Prum said. “It's why the whole spirit of the race, the thing we call the German soul, remains a repository of youth. We are as young now as we were in the beginning, while all the rest of Europe is dying of old age.”

There is no question that it bothered Bombolini. He was telling these things to Babbaluche in the hope of finding an answer, but before he had come down the Corso Cavour to the cobbler's house he had taken one tour of the Piazza of the People. He had walked along the old broken cobblestones by the edges of the houses and tried to see the old things in a new way—Santa Maria of the Burning Oven, built hundreds of years before; the fountain of the Pissing Turtle, the last piece of constructive water engineering, done almost four hundred years before. Roberto Abruzzi was always asking the question:

“How were you able to build all these things then when you can't even repair them now?”

It was what had always driven Tufa wild. Where had all the money gone, and the energy? What happened to it, who took it away, where did we lose it? Why was everything broken?

Bombolini had just finished explaining the German's view to Babbaluche when the messenger's motorcycle shook the window of the house. He forced women to jump to one side, and a girl with a basket of laundry was sent sprawling and the clothes fell into the street. They went to the door and they saw Sergeant Traub come over the top of the Corso and come down the street to get the message even before it arrived.

“Something is up,” Bombolini said. “Somthing big.”

They went back inside after the motorcycle had passed down the Corso again.

“You tell him this,” Babbaluche said. “Ask him this. We may be old, but just when do they plan to grow up?”

*   *   *

Traub stood in the doorway with the message in his hand and von Prum did not look up. He was working on “Bloodless Victory,” and his notes were spread over the packing case he used as a desk. Although Traub was aware that he was not to interrupt when the captain was at work on his report, he decided this time to risk it.

“I think I have good news, sir,” the sergeant said.

“Then it can wait,” von Prum said.

“I think by this time tomorrow I might be calling you Major von Prum, sir.”

He heard the pen drop down onto the packing case, but still the captain did not come out.

“One thing I have learned,” he said, “is to rely on nothing. Do you know your Clausewitz? ‘The only true plan in war is that plan which plans for the unplanable.' Something like that.”

He worked for another fifteen minutes—a good discipline, he felt—and finally he came out into the other room.

“If I forget to call you major at times,” Sergeant Traub said, “please forgive me. It will take time to learn.”

“I will give you a month,” Captain von Prum said, and they both laughed then.

Inside the envelope were two messages. One, from his brother Klaus, had been forwarded from Montefalcone.

Dear Brother:

Everything. It is all there is.

This one.

Your brother

I think that I am going mad. What do you have to tell a young German boy who is going mad?

Because he knew that the other message contained good news, he was sorry that he had opened Klaus's letter because it took some of the joy away. It also annoyed him that he couldn't recall his previous letter, since it was clear that Klaus was answering questions; but he was grateful that he had made a habit of keeping copies. He found the letter. Nietzsche's two questions: what was life to the soldier, and what soldier didn't wish to die for a glorious cause. The question of Klaus's madness, in which he believed, he decided he would have to think about later. He opened the second letter and was surprised to find that his hand was trembling. It was not an official letter and it was written by hand.

Von Prum:

This is not what you expected to receive; it is not what I expected to send.

I submitted your name for promotion and decoration as promised.

Both requests were rejected.

They have ridiculed your performance and through it my endorsement.

A study of sales figures for the past 20 years obtained from wine wholesalers in this city and from the Cinzano company reveals the fact that your quota of wine should have approached 600,000 bottles and not the 150,000 bottles that you so “miraculously” brought to Montefalcone.

The question is very simple: Where is the rest of the wine?

An accounting will be expected from you by ten o'clock tomorrow morning.

Scheer

He went into his room and closed the door, and he was not seen again until evening. There were obvious conclusions. They would claim that he had managed to get the people to carry the wine by letting them keep most of it. A check of the remaining wine would answer that.

It could be claimed that it was a simple case of thievery and collusion—that, in return for money or rewards to be paid after the war, he had taken the wine not for the Fatherland but for personal gain. The wine in that case would have to be hidden somewhere and it could be found.

It could be a case of cowardice as happened at San Pietro di Camano, where the people had warned the officer in command that if the wine went, no matter what, he would die, and he believed them and turned in false reports about the wine. The Germans obliged him by doing the killing.

Or there could be wine hidden somewhere in the city and he had been fooled. There was wine and he had been made a fool of, there was actually wine and he was the fool of Italo Bombolini. He was not ready to believe any of this. The answer, he was convinced, lay somewhere else.

He made a mistake that afternoon. He left Constanzia Pietrosanto's house and began to walk through the city, looking up the lanes, sizing up the city, moving swiftly and restlessly, an intelligent curiosity, the expression of the fox looking for a proper hiding place before leading the hounds on a chase informing his face and so informing us.

Everyone knew. So the element of surprise which every good soldier covets was lost to him. In the evening he came back up into the piazza of the People and everyone knew and was waiting, and when he saw Italo Bombolini with the others around the fountain he went, as was his way, directly toward them. He didn't want the mayor alone, he wanted the eyes of the others as well. His own eyes were hard and cold, and yet disinterested, as if the question was one of curiosity and not of importance. His voice was just as cold and as level and as impersonal.

“I know now,” he said. “Where is the rest of the wine?”

“The rest of what wine?” Bombolini said. His face showed shock and anger.

“The rest of
all
the wine.”

“You can't have the rest of the wine,” Bombolini said. He was beginning to shout, and the men around him were angered. “That wine is our wine. You promised us. Are you lying? Is the word of a German officer nothing but shit?”

“You know what wine I'm referring to.”

“We will fight for the rest of the wine, Captain. We will fight because there is nothing left for us but to fight.”

“We will die then,” Pietrosanto said, “and God damn you, you will die with us.”

Someone stopped him and put his arms around Pietro and pulled him back across the piazza.

“He didn't mean it that way,” the man shouted to von Prum. “It's only that the rest of our wine—it would be death to us.”

It has been said here and it has been said by others that all Italians are actors and all of them know the subtleties of the good lie and perhaps again this is true, because all of them played their parts so well.

“Not that wine,” the German was forced to say. “We don't take that wine. My word is my bond on that. The other wine.”

And they came back around him then with their mouths open and their eyes dazed as if trying to see something and not being able to make it out, none of them with as much wisdom on their slack faces as was owned by Fungo or shouted aloud by Capoferro.

And so the German had to tell them about the records of the wholesalers and the records of the Cinzano people and the one million or more bottles of wine, and as he talked they looked at one another and their mouths fell open and they said, in low bewildered voices, “No, oh no, it couldn't be … there is something wrong … wrong … wrong…” When he was through one of them said that no people in the world could be that rich; and they all nodded and were silent.

*   *   *

It is a pride of many men who make it a habit to tell the truth that because they possess this virtue they are qualified to know when another man is telling a lie.

In von Prum's case, it was a belief that if you watch a man's lips as he talks and if you seal your eyes on his eyes, the man who is lying must falter and stammer and then turn away, because truth and honesty when confronted with the lie must overcome in the end. He should have known that a good lie is always better than the truth, because a lie has been tailored to look like the truth, but the truth is just its clumsy self. If you look at an Italian in the mouth when he is telling the truth he might stammer, but never when he is telling a good lie. The Master himself has said: Never tell the truth when a lie will do as well.