The Secret of Santa Vittoria (36 page)

The next explosion was a little less than that and the one after that far less, and we waited and waited until finally there were no more sounds at all and they were gone and it was over.

“It's all over,” one of the Germans called to us. “They won't come again tonight.”

The sigh from the people was like a wind that comes a night just before the rains begin. The next morning all of the people of Santa Vittoria went to Mass.

“And what is this?” von Prum asked.

“Deliverance Day,” Bombolini said. “Every Santa Vittorian gives thanks to God for protecting the fruits of the harvest.”

“I thought you weren't a religious man,” the German said.

“I have become one today,” Bombolini said.

They found that morning that the mortar that had held the bricks in place had shivered itself apart. If one man, an unknowing German, had leaned against the wall, the entire structure would have come down on top of him and the treasure been exposed. Later in the morning some of the men took a cartload of bricks out through the Fat Gate and into a field where one of the ventilators was located and they dropped the bricks down the shaft on the inside of the false wall. After that they took out enough of the bricks to allow three or four men to step inside the cellar, and then they put the bricks back and rebuilt the wall from the inside, twice as thick as before, except for one little section they crawled back through.

We learned something else that day. The bricklayers came back up from the field with the empty cart. The bricks were gone.

“What did you do with the bricks?” Private Zopf said.

“Fixed something,” one of the men said.

“That's good,” the guard said. “It's always good to fix something.”

They weren't really interested in what we did. They really only cared about themselves. They didn't really see us as people at all. As Babbaluche once put it, when the Italian looks into the mirror he sees the pimple on his nose, but when the German looks in the mirror he sees those blue eyes and tries to look through them into his soul.

*   *   *

It was this same Zopf, one day before the wine began to explode, who came closest to exposing the wine. He had been drinking in a corner of the cellar and smoking his pipe. On the way back across the cellar to the card game he stopped and tapped the bowl of his pipe against the brick. When the tapping failed to dislodge the tobacco he took a few steps more and tapped the wall again. He tapped once and he went back and tapped again.

Hard tap—
tap.
Hollow tap—
poonk. Tap, poonk, tap, poonk.

“Do you know something?” he said. “You could play a tune on this wall.”

They got him very drunk that night. They played a game where the winner was to be treated with drinks and they made certain to lose. When Zopf woke up the next morning he had no memory of the wall and the pipe at all and only a vow, which he broke that night, never to mix
grappa
and wine again. There was one positive result of the Zopf affair, however. It was decided the morning after that if any soldier, or all of them, discovered the false wall, he or they would have to die, even if it meant the deaths of fifty or a hundred of us, since without the wine we were as good as dead in any case.

On the fifth day of October the wine began to explode. Not all at once—a bottle now, several a few minutes later, a long pause perhaps, and then a succession of explosions. It was fortunate for us that they began in the early afternoon. The sounds of the explosions came up out of the air shafts and carried across the terraces and up into the streets of Santa Vittoria, as if someone were throwing little hand grenades or little hollow glass bombs, somewhere in the valley.

Something had gone wrong with the weather. In October it is dry here, hot in the day and cool at night, but on this morning the wind began to come from the southwest, hot and steaming and moist, and it settled down on the streets and lanes of the city and clogged the piazzas as if a wet hot shawl had been dropped on Santa Vittoria. The people sagged with sweat, and the mules looked as if they had been lathered with soap. By afternoon the moist heat had worked its way down into the air shafts and had settled on the valley floor; and when it was hot enough the first of the bottles, for reasons we don't know, began to explode. We only guess that it was the result of some kind of imbalance in the fermentation process, caused by layers of cool air and layers of hot moist air.

After the first several bottles exploded, they dropped Rana, our frog, on a line down one of the air shafts, and he told us that the bottles had become beaded with sweat and that some of them, especially the special bottles of
spumanti,
a bubbly kind of wine that some of the growers experiment with, were boiling inside. Beards of white fungus hung down from the corks like hair on the chin of a goat. Sometimes only the cork would go, and then there would be a hollow pop that could be heard through the wall. When the cork held, however, and the drive of the wine was strong, then the bottle gave, and the sound of the explosion was a sickness and a terror in our hearts.

When they first heard it in the Piazza of the People, Bombolini felt that he knew what it was. Fabio and the Petrarch Brigade, the four or five young boys who made up the Red Flames, must have decided to fight.

Sergeant Traub came across the piazza toward them. “What the hell is that?” he asked.

“From the rock quarry,” Pietrosanto said. “Someone is shooting off blasting caps. Some kid is wasting them down there.”

The answer satisfied the sergeant then.

“It was a very good answer,” Babbaluche said. “I didn't know you could think that fast.” A compliment from the cobbler was a very rare thing.

“What? Isn't that what it is?” Pietrosanto asked.

With the setting of the sun and the cooling of the day the explosions stopped and we felt we were safe, at least until the next day. But when the people came in from the terraces to settle for the night the heat of their bodies was enough to make the heat rise once more and cause the first of the bottles to explode.

And once again, to most of the people here at least, the only explanation for what took place is that a miracle occurred. On this night, as if stationed there by God, spread out along the floor of the wine cellar just in front of the false wall, were the families of Constanzia Muricatti and Alfredo del Purgatorio, who were preparing for their marriage. The families, using sheets and blankets and the canvas covers from the grape carts, had set up two large strange-looking Oriental tents. In one of them the women were all working and sewing on the bridal gown and their own dresses. In the other tent the men were singing and dancing and drinking. The people were very gay and very loud because everyone was very happy about this marriage. It had long been conceded by the Muricatti family that no one would ever marry their Constanzia, and it had long been conceded by the del Purgatorios that it would be a miracle if Alfredo, who was very small and very shy, would ask a woman to share a bed with him.

When the bottle exploded behind the false wall, several of the German soldiers turned around from their cards and looked back into the cellar.

“What's going on back there?” Corporal Heinsick asked. One of the Good Time Boys winked at him.

“The celebration has begun,” he said. “They're popping the corks. There will be some action in here tonight.”

They sent wine to the soldiers, and a little later, when the music began and the dancing started, we knew we were safe. At the start there was a mandolin and an accordion, and while this worked well as a cover for the sound, Bombolini ordered every musician in the city to play. There were tambourines and one old man with his pipes, there were Capoferro's drums and, finally, the singing and the dancing and the clapping of hands. If you listened with your ear to the wall you might be able to hear a bottle explode now and then, but this was the only way it could be heard.

At nine o'clock that night the dancers, who had worked all day in the vineyards, grew tired and the wine was having its effect and the musicians wanted a rest.

“Play,” Bombolini ordered. “Dance,” he shouted at the men and the women. “Sing,” he told us, “and clap your hands while you do it.”

“We can't go on,” Tommaso del Purgatorio complained. “We've danced our legs off.”

“You'll go on because you have to go on,” the mayor told them. “The whole city is depending on you now.”

“And look as if you're having fun,” Pietrosanto said. “Get that long look off your face.”

At eleven o'clock, when they would normally have been asleep for hours, the dancing still continued. It went in shifts now, fresh dancers every fifteen minutes or so, and when the mandolin player stopped, the tambourines beat a little more loudly, and they pounded Capoferro's goatskin drum with heavy wooden spoons. At midnight, while taking a walk in the Piazza of the People, Captain von Prum heard the noise of the gaiety and went down the mountain to see what it was. No one knows how long he might have watched us from the entrance to the Big Room.

“They don't seem to be having very much fun,” the captain said.

“They're tired now, but they'll get a second wind, you'll see,” Bombolini said. Pietrosanto and some of the others went around the back of one of the tents and gave out new orders.

“Get a smile on your faces,” the people were told. “Get some spring into your steps. Start having fun, and don't you dare forget it,” Pietrosanto warned them.

“Now, you see,” Bombolini said. “Now they're perking up. They can go all night.”

And they did.

The dance, Bombolini explained to von Prum in the morning, was a tradition in Santa Vittoria. It might go on for days, he said, through night and through day, until the bride and the groom were exhausted and were too tired to be embarrassed in each other's presence any longer. When the moment was reached they were put to bed together, where they often slept for a day or two at a time, but when they finally woke they were strangers no longer.

“It's not beautiful, perhaps,” Bombolini said, “but it is very effective.”

“What happens to your work? You can't dance all night and all day and do your work.”

“What does it matter about the work if it helps to create a beautiful marriage?” Bombolini said.

“The Italian mind,” von Prum said. “You jump from realism to romanticism in the middle of one sentence.”

“Oh, it's realistic,” Bombolini said. “It keeps up our population. It grows future grape growers.” And the German was forced to admit that there was a hard peasant wisdom behind it all.

And then began some of the hardest days and nights ever spent by the people of Santa Vittoria. As long as the city sat stewing in the heat wave, the party would have to continue, all the time, dancing at eight o'clock in the morning, singing and dancing in the heat of the day, people coming down hot from the terraces to take their places at the drums or in the singing, wine flowing until people were sick of wine, and throats raw from singing and faces frozen from smiling.

“One more night of joy and I shall go mad,” Angela Bombolini said. Her thighs and legs cried out in pain from the continual dancing, and she was no different from all of the rest.

On the fourth day of the wedding celebration, because they were forced to do it, the people began to take chances with the bottles. They would sit by the instruments and not move for fear of raising the heat, and when a bottle would go, but only then, they would all get to their feet and hit the tambourines and begin to sing and shout in a tired and mournful way and to shuffle about in the sand.

“The gaiety has died down, the laughter has cooled,” von Prum remarked.

“It's coming to that time now,” Bombolini told him. “The bed time. We begin with the lullabies, the siren songs, you see. Soon they will sleep.”

But it wasn't to be for another two days. The mandolin player wore pruning gloves and he hit the strings with his knuckles. Several members of the del Purgatorio family had already had fights with Muricattis. The sound of the tambourine grew more painful than the crashing of glass behind the walls. If there had been a vote then, it is possible that the people might have surrendered the wine, anything to stop the wedding party.

One night we thought we heard the bombers coming and we were pleased because the sound of the engines and the roar of the explosions would drown the sound of the bottles. Then we felt the first of the wind coming into the mouth of the Big Room, and after that we heard the rain and the thunderclaps and saw the flashes of lightning. And then came a hard, cool wind with a hard, cold rain.

The bottles didn't stop right then. If anything, for the next hours it was worse than ever before, and we feared that all the effort was in vain, that there couldn't be a bottle left to save; but we also knew that the heat was gone, that the autumn was back with us and that in the morning the party would have ended. So we danced then with some wild last source of energy called from the very bottom urge of desperation, beating the tambourines until they split and strumming the mandolin strings until they broke and striking Capoferro's drum until the goatskin burst.

In the morning we held the wedding of Constanzia Muricatti to Alfredo del Purgatorio. We shivered in the cold in the Piazza of the People, pleased by our goose-pimples, our backs turned to the cold wind that was blowing over Santa Vittoria, the city washed bright and shining by the cold hard rain, and it was the most popular wedding ever held in our city.

They had earned their right to bliss, and it was a wedding that we would never allow to fail. Because this was truly a marriage made in heaven and ordained by God Himself.

“They are very sweet,” Captain von Prum said, “and very tired.”

“Very tired.”

“Now you have no music? A week of music and just when they're married the music ends. It's just the opposite with us.”