The Secret of Santa Vittoria (4 page)

“What was all the noise about?” she shouted at him. She was hard of hearing.

“A death,” Fabio shouted at her. “Someone died.”

“Who?”

“Mussolini. Benito Mussolini.”

She looked at him and shook her head. “No, no,” she mumbled, “no, I don't know him.”

“It's nobody from here,” Fabio told her.

“Oh.” Her face became as dark and blank as the doorway.

The house smelled. In truth, it stank. Ernesto was no housekeeper. There was a pot of hard cold beans over the fireplace and although they were hard to swallow Fabio ate them with enjoyment.

“So this is my feast. This is the reward,” he said aloud.

He found a mat and cleared it off and stretched out on it and looked up at the smoke-darkened ceiling. There was no sound at all in the city, not a cock or a child or an ox, and Fabio fell asleep. It was now nine o'clock in the morning.

This then was the extent of the celebration of the death of the dictator. Thus did the twentieth year of the glorious reign of the Everlasting Imperial Fascist Empire come to a close in the city of Santa Vittoria.

 

F
ABIO WOKE
in the early afternoon. He was still tired, but he woke because he was hungry. He looked around the small house, but there was nothing in it to eat, not a piece of stale bread or hard cheese. He was sorry he had eaten all the cold beans. He left a note for Ernesto, “Ants would starve to death in your house if ants would come into it,” and he went out into the Corso Mussolini and started up it toward the Piazza of the People to try to buy some bread and cheese and wine. The midday sun blinded him and he was forced to hold onto the walls of the houses until his eyes could adjust to the glare. When he reached the piazza he was conscious of groups of people standing about in it looking back down toward Old Town, but he was too blinded to see what it was they were looking at.

The Piazza of the People is the center of Santa Vittoria. It is a flat plateau of cobblestones that divides the city in two parts. Above the piazza is High Town where the houses sit on a saddle of land in the sun. No one knows why the city wasn't built there in the first place. The people who live in High Town are called Goats. The people who live around the piazza are called Turtles because of the fountain. Below the piazza is Low Town, or Old Town, where the Frogs live, because in the spring, after a rain, little green frogs hop in the dank, moss-green streets until the rats and the cats and the children get to them. On a tourist map, although tourists don't come here, Old Town is listed as the Medieval Section which makes it sound better. Frogs almost never marry Turtles and Turtles don't speak to Goats. That's the way they are here.

The city is steep. The Corso Mussolini, which runs through Old Town up to the Piazza of the People, is so steep in places that the street becomes flights of stone stairs. The Corso runs down to the Fat Gate which is the main passage through the Fat Wall which the Romans began and which someone else finished and which runs all of the way around Santa Vittoria. There is another way out, the Thin Gate, but this is used mainly by small boys and goats since the track that leads down the mountain from it is so steep.

If you stand in the center of the Piazza of the People, where Fabio was standing, you are almost at eye level with the second pride of Santa Vittoria, the one achievement of the Fascist movement here, the tall soaring cement-skinned water tower which rests on three great long thin steel legs like the head on the top of an enormous spider. Written on the cement tank in black block letters were these words.

MUSSOLINI IS ALWAYS RIGHT

On the other side, although little of it could be seen from the piazza, was

DUCE DUCE DUCE DUCE

DUCE DUCE DUCE DU

Below the tower in Old Town, near the Thin Gate, was the first pride of the city, the Citizen's Cooperative Wine Celler, and on the roof of the celler was a large blue and red sign which read “Cinzano” since most of the wine made here is sold in the end to the Cinzano family.

Fabio could see none of it. In the wineshop his problem was reversed. In the shop it was dark and he was blinded again. He had passed Rosa Bombolini, standing in the doorway with her arms crossed and staring toward Old Town, but she had not followed him when he entered the shop and he was forced to feel in the darkness for a chair. He waited for his sight to return and as he sat he heard someone crying.

“Can I help you?” Fabio said. The girl didn't answer him. “Do I bother you?” He waited. “Is it you, Angela?”

“Yes, it's me.”

He tried to say something that would sound helpful or sensible, but he could think of nothing to say to her. Nothing at all. Not any single word would come to him. He closed his eyes and tried to force one single word to come and nothing came, only her name, and he knew that wouldn't do.

There was this about Fabio then. Although he had never actually spoken to this girl alone or said her name aloud before or heard her say his name, he was in love with Angela Bombolini. This kind of thing happens here more often than in other places. There is a kind of love here that is called “thunderbolt love.”

A girl looks out of the window and she sees a boy she has seen ten thousand times before and all at once a thunderbolt hits her and she realizes that she is madly in love with him. From that moment she dedicates her life to him and is even ready to submit for the Final Proof, the Final Truth, if he were to demand it of her, even though he might not know her name or that she exists. When it happens they say, “Fabio sees Angela in his soup.”

She is everywhere.

The great torture and fear of the thunderbolt lover is that the one he loves will not return the love. Life is impossible then and unbearable. So great is the fear of being rejected, of being left with the empty horribleness of a life deprived of love, that many thunderbolt lovers never admit to their love and suffer their love in silence. Every once in a while they kill themselves and people always are amazed because they have no idea of the hell the dead person was fleeing from.

Most people, girls and boys, when struck by the thunderbolt, show the effects as clearly as if they had been struck with a true bolt. But Fabio is more clever than most people. All that he did was blush. When Angela's name was mentioned he turned scarlet or if he passed her in the piazza he turned a deep red, but no one so far was conscious of what was taking place. He was still trying to think of the proper thing to say when he realized that Angela's mother was standing over him.

“Did she get what you want?”

“Oh. Oh, no. She didn't. I want some bread and cheese and wine.”

“Why didn't you get him what he wants?” Rosa Bombolini shouted at Angela. “He sits here dry while you wet the floor.”

He saw Angela get up and go into the back room, and his heart flew out to her. It was the only word. The heart flew to her. He had now managed to say six or eight words and get her in trouble. When she came back she put a plate of cheese in front of him and a glass of wine.

“No bread,” she said.

“Why not?” It wasn't what he had wanted to say.

“Francucci,” she said.

“Oh, yes. The baker. Of course.” She must think that I am an idiot, Fabio thought. “I didn't mean to get you in trouble.”

“She doesn't like my crying.”

“You have a perfect right to cry,” Fabio said. “Cry all you want.” He felt his face turning red. He sat at the table and ate the cheese, listening to her cry.

“Why are you crying?” he said at last.

“You know why,” Angela said. “Why are you torturing me?”

He found himself turning red once more and wondering what it was he did that caused him to harm the person he least in the world wished to harm.

“I don't know why,” Fabio said.

“Him,” she said. “You saw him.”

She nodded her head in the direction of the door and the piazza beyond. He went across to the window and cleaned a section of it and looked out. The groups of people were still in the piazza. He could see across the piazza and down toward Old Town, toward which all the people were looking, even though he was forced to look over Rosa Bombolini's broad shoulder. He could see nothing at first, but finally his eyes were able to pick out the movement and he felt his heart jump. He could feel his heart at that moment actually rise in his chest and touch something in his throat, as if he had a live fish in his chest.

“Oh, Mother of God,” Fabio said. He made the sign of the cross. “What is your father doing up there?”

Two thirds of the way up the water tower, still at least one hundred feet below the concrete tank and the safety of the little iron railing that runs around it, not moving at all now, silhouetted against the sky and the mountains beyond Santa Vittoria, gripping the little thin, narrow, rusty ladder that climbs up to the tank itself, clung Italo Bombolini.

“What is your father doing up there?”

As soon as he said this for a second time Fabio knew two things: that someone was going to have to help Italo Bombolini and that it was going to be himself.

“Why does it have to be me?” Fabio said aloud.

He was astonished and ashamed that he had said it aloud. He turned away from Angela then. The figure was moving once more, moving with a terrible slowness upward.

“He's going to be all right. I've climbed mountains. I know how people climb. He knows his way around up there.”

She began to cry again.

Fabio went outside and tapped Rosa Bombolini on the shoulder.

“Do you have a length of rope? A good strong one?”

“Oh, no,” Rosa Bombolini said. “You don't risk your life to save his fat pride. He's going to fall. Let him fall.”

“He's still going up.”

“Because the son of a bitch can't come down,” she said, and Fabio turned red again. He had never heard a woman talk about her husband or a man in this fashion before. “He's going to come down in that piazza like an ox falling off a roof.”

“I'm going whether you get me the rope or not,” Fabio said.

In the end she got him a rope. She got him two good lengths of rope and she also came back with a basket containing cheese and some olives and two bottles of wine and a
fiasco
of
grappa,
the strong raw brandy the peasants distill here.

“I can't carry all of this,” Fabio said.

“Angela will meet you in the Corso with a knapsack,” Signora Bombolini said. Angela passed them then, still crying, and because she was running she was forced to lift up her skirts, and despite the fact that it was a matter of life and death, all that Fabio could seem to keep his mind on was the quality and condition of her legs, that they were so strong and well-shaped and so brown and clean-looking.

“Why are you so red?” Rosa Bombolini asked him. “Are you sure you are all right?”

I am very much all right, Fabio thought. I am about to save the father of the woman I love, and she will be grateful to me for the rest of my life. He broke into a trot, although he knew he should save his energy. He met Angela Bombolini at the curve in the Corso Mussolini down below Babbaluche's house.

“Let him fall off,” the cobbler told him. “It would be a public service to the city.”

Angela handed him a black knapsack made of imitation leather that had once been the property of the Young Fascist Scouts, and the outer flap of which read: “This sack belongs to Bruno. Don't touch or
death.
” On the other side, burned into the leather, was: “Believe     Obey     Fight—Your Duce.”

It caused both of them to laugh.

“I'll pray for you, Fabio,” she said. It was the first time he had ever heard her use his name.

The ladder shocked Fabio. He had not looked at it in many years, and he was frightened to see how narrow and inadequate it was. It was not a ladder at all, but long lengths of pipe, five or six inches around, which were joined together and into which small round iron spikes had been fixed, at intervals of six or eight inches, to serve as foot and hand holds.

“Don't look up, Fabio. Just go up,” someone said to him.

“Don't go up. You can't help him.”

He tightened his belt so his shirt would stay in and slung the ropes around his shoulders and tied the bottoms of his pants around his ankles with rough twine so they wouldn't flap.

“You're a fool to go, Fabio. Why should you get killed for him?”

Fabio pulled himself up onto the pipe and for one moment he was forced to look up, and he was astonished to see how far up the fat wine seller had managed to pull himself. The metal was hot to the touch but not hot enough to burn and he took a deep breath then and began to climb. It was not hard for him at first, but he was surprised how narrow the little spikes were; they felt even smaller than they looked. Something wet touched his hair and he realized it was paint from the buckets Bombolini had yoked about his neck. He tried to look neither up nor down, but out across the mountain slope, the green terraces down below, across the valley; he fixed his eye on Montefalcone. All at once there was a tremendous shout from the people in the piazza below. He pulled himself in against the pipe and waited for the body of Bombolini to rush by him.

When nothing happened he looked up and he could see Angela's father hanging out away from the pipe like a door that the wind has blown open. Bombolini had missed his footing; but somehow, instead of falling, he had managed to hang on with one foot and one hand and now he hung there, swaying back and forth, trying to pull himself back to the pipe. Fabio could feel the pipe trembling from the effort and it frightened him, and then he heard a second cheer from the piazza and he looked up and Bombolini was climbing upward again.

*   *   *

Across the piazza from the wineshop, in the cellar of the Leaders' Mansion where The Band had barricaded themselves, they heard the shout.