The Secret of Santa Vittoria (45 page)

The thought both frightened and excited him.

At times he found comfort in a line that Nietzsche wrote and which he quoted in his notes and log several times that day, that in the long haul of history one life was worth nothing.

It was this line that Bombolini had once chosen to answer. “Then that's the difference between us,” Bombolini had said. “To us nothing is worth one life.”

“We shall see,” von Prum had said.

Because he was a gracious man and was anxious to show that there was nothing beyond duty in this death, he allowed Bombolini at ten o'clock to pay a last visit to the hostage. Tufa was interested in only one thing.

“Where is she? Why hasn't she come?”

Bombolini could say nothing to him. He had gone to see her and she had refused to see him. So they stood in silence, and there was only the sound of the soldiers moving about in the darkness and of the water from the fountain.

“I never told her the story,” Tufa suddenly said. He motioned with his head at the fountain above them. “Sometime when I'm gone I want you to tell her the story and tell her that I asked you to tell it to her.”

“I'll tell her, Carlo.” He wanted to go because he felt that he was about to cry and he didn't wish to embarrass Tufa with his tears. Before he went he kissed Tufa on one cheek and then the other.

“Goodbye, Tufa.”

Tufa was smiling at him. “It's not goodbye,” he said. “I have a whole half of a day ahead of me.”

It is not easy even now for us to believe that the city slept that night. But Bombolini went home and slept, and they put a straw pallet down on the cobblestones and Tufa slept, and the people looking from the windows around the piazza began to go to sleep because the people had worked hard that day and they know that even when death is in the house life goes on and that beyond Tufa there were the grapes, brimming with life, to be considered as well the next day. The soldiers who were seated around Tufa had had their wine and they too were tired. The water pouring from the turtle was as steady and gentle as the wind that whispered in every part of the piazza, and it lulled them. Across the piazza the captain was awake and, although he had gotten ready to go to bed, he got up again and, for a reason he could not explain, dressed himself again. His intuition was good, because at the time that he was dressing, Caterina Malatesta was coming down from High Town.

She carried her shoes in her hand so she would make no noise, and she stayed in the shadows of the houses. There was a thin moon that night and there was light on one side of the piazza, but the far side was buried in shadow. The old women and old men who stay at the windows because for them to sleep is to die, must have seen her moving along in the darkness, but they said nothing. Whatever happens doesn't belong to them any more; they only watch and wait.

When Caterina was opposite the piazza from the fountain she stopped and attempted to see Tufa, but it was too dark for that. There was no movement of any kind then, only the water, and the usual night sounds, a child crying out for its mother, the heavy breathing of oxen up the side lanes and the deep-throated tunk of their bells as they shifted their positions.

The door to Constanzia's house was in shadow, so even the old people didn't see her then. At the door she put on her shoes—they were shoes from the city, with heels, and not made for here—and when she was ready she scratched on the wood of the door with her fingernails.

In the manner of such things, although the captain had not heard the sound before, he knew at once what it meant. He was pleased that Traub was not in the outer room, where he often slept, but was in the piazza guarding the hostage. Before he went to let her in, he straightened up the room and lit a second tallow candle which he put before a mirror so that it gave off a warm good light and then he went to the door.

He realized that ever since he had first heard the word “hostage” in Montefalcone, without ever admitting it he had been preparing for this moment. But even so, when he did open the door to her, he was unprepared for her beauty. In the books and stories it says, that men are made breathless by the great beauty of a woman, and in this case it was as the books say. Her beauty was a force in the room that he felt; he was overpowered by it. She had spent that day in the classic way of great beauties, in warm baths, in oils, she had washed her hair and brushed it so often that the light reflected from it and she had dressed in the kind of dress no other woman has ever worn here because no other woman would know how to buy one or how to wear one, or would ever have the money to own one.

When he had dreamed of this moment he had dreamed that he would surrender, but that in surrendering, as it should be with any good soldier, the price would come high. He knew that what he was doing would in some way, perhaps a serious way, damage him; and yet he also knew that in the end he couldn't care about that, because this was what he had always wanted in his life. As it had been with Tufa all of that day, he found he could not take his eyes away from her, although he attempted to be casual and even careless with her.

“So you've come as I said you would come,” von Prum said.

“Not in the way you said,” Caterina said.

“No. Not from the snow or the rain or the cold. But you came. That's what is important. None of
them
came.”

“None of them had anything to offer you.”

“They could have brought me the answer to the secret.”

“There is no answer.”

He smiled at her. “You too, eh? No, that isn't the answer. It's because they know that after he dies, in a month or two they will have forgotten, because they know that in a month or two they themselves would be forgotten. They have souls of leather. I don't say that in disrespect.”

“And we? We have souls of what?”

“I don't know that we have souls. Maybe that's why we put such an importance on living and dying.”

The conversation was not going the way he had heard it in his mind before this night, and he didn't like it. He had wanted her to ask, to beg him just a little, to offer something that he could resist at first; and it was Caterina who was wise enough to change the way things were going.

“And what about the cognac you promised if I came?” Caterina said. “You seemed so certain I'd come you must have saved me some. I could use it now.”

He looked at her with genuine pleasure. “What a good idea,” he said.

He went to the other room to get the glasses and the brandy, but before he went into the room he turned and looked at her.

There was no need for either of them to speak then. They both understood what must take place. If someone was asked to buy something he must be allowed to examine what he was buying. She moved for him and he watched her. She crossed the room to the mirror and the tallow light, where she undid the scarf that held her hair and began to arrange it, with the knowledge that he was watching her.

To attempt to tell what lies behind a woman's beauty is a stupid effort. The very effort destroys the beauty one wishes to re-create. There was one thing about the Malatesta, however, that can be described. Von Prum, when he wrote about it, called it a “dark brightness,” and then once he called it a “bright darkness.” Maybe they are the same. But the thing of her beauty was the contradiction of herself. Her eyes were large and dark and the darkness of them served to emphasize the light of the eyes; the same was true of her dark hair which at the same moment was bright. She was lean and fine-boned, and yet she was voluptuous; but there is no way of describing her voluptuousness without destroying it. Because she was a capable woman the sadness that at the same time could be seen in her eyes in the end made her appear vulnerable. Everything about her was a contradiction of itself and the contradictions were so perfectly blended with one another that they created beauty. There was a maturity about the Malatesta which every beautiful woman owns, from the time she is very young, as if all beautiful women must have lived at least once before and known things that one life alone can't provide in order to arrive at the beauty they possess.

It is hopeless then to tell you. Every beautiful woman is beautiful in only her own way, otherwise there would be only one beautiful woman, and this is not so. As is said about the devil, they come in all disguises and in improbable places, and they appear in unexpected ways.

She was, as each of them is, a marvel. To von Prum there was about the Malatesta a quality beyond. That she would come to him as she did betrayed to him an instinct for destruction, a willingness to extend herself to the point of risking her own ruin. That was the thing which excited him beyond all other things; it was the thing beyond the glorious animal that he saw. Every man must have to see beauty in his own way as well.

He made an effort, as he had promised himself, to resist. He told her that he didn't like dark women, women with skin the color of olives, and that his dreams of women were of blond women with full white breasts who understood they were inferior to the men they adored, and who were happy that way.

“What do you have to offer?” he had said when he came back into the room with the glasses and the brandy.

“Myself,” Caterina had said.

He allowed the brandy to work in him before he spoke again. There was no embarrassment between them.

“Do you really think that is enough for what I will have to do?” von Prum said.

“Yes, I will be enough for you,” Caterina said. “I will be a good mistress for you. You'll see.”

He looked away from her, because when he watched her the things he wanted to say were weakened by her.

“You won't regret it,” Caterina said. It was said with the simple assurance of a woman who has known since she was very young that some part of her at least belongs in the dream of every man who has dreamed of possessing a beautiful woman.

“This thing could ruin me,” von Prum said. “It could destroy me.”

“You won't regret it,” Caterina said.

“How do I know that?”

“Because I'll show you.”

She had taken off her scarf and a dark outer coat which she had chosen to wear, and she came across the room toward him.

“Where do you stay?” Caterina asked. He motioned with his head in the direction of his room and she went past him and into the room, where she began to undress. He came to the door and stood by the entrance to the room.

“I want to watch you,” he said.

“As you wish,” Caterina said. She moved with the assurance of those who are beautiful in their bodies and as if he were not in the room. When she was halfway through undressing she asked for more brandy and she drank.

“As long as we're doing this,” she said, “there is no reason why it should be unpleasant.”

When he was beside her he began to tremble.

“That won't do,” Caterina said. “Why are you trembling?”

“Because you're what I have wanted all my life,” von Prum said, which was the moment of his surrender.

“Then we understand,” the Malatesta said. “It is me for him.”

“Yes.”

“You won't regret it.”

“No, I won't regret it.”

“I'll make you a good mistress,” Caterina said. “You'll see.”

“But I will have to take someone else,” von Prum said. “You understand that.”

“That isn't what I came for,” the Malatesta said.

They lay in the bed, and although the bed was small they didn't touch one another.

“Now what is it you want to do with me?”

“Nothing,” the German said. “I want to lie here.”

“That won't do either,” Caterina said.

“Everything,” von Prum said.

“Then come here.”

*   *   *

Sometime during the night she said to him, “Have you realized now that you're only a man after all? A man like any other man.”

She woke him before dawn because he had asked her to wake him then, before the people were up, and he got dressed and went out into the darkness of the Piazza of the People to the fountain and woke Sergeant Traub. Tufa was awake, lying on his back, looking up into the night.

“You can take the ropes off him,” von Prum said. “He's going free.”

It pleased Traub. “You heard him?”

“Yes,” Tufa said. “I don't know whether to thank someone or despise someone.”

It was still dark when Tufa crossed the piazza and started up to High Town. Once on the hill he could see the first light of the morning, and although he has never talked about that morning again it must be guessed that Tufa was happy then, because it
was
his life, and a day was beginning that he had not counted on seeing.

There was no Caterina Malatesta waiting for him, of course. When he reached the house some of the people were already up, and he asked them about her, but none of them would tell him. It was a long time, a day or two at least, before anyone in Santa Vittoria found enough heart to tell him.

 

W
HEN DAWN
came and it was found that Tufa had been freed, there was fear in Santa Vittoria. It could only mean that someone had told about the wine. But when it was found that the wine was safe, the fear became joy. They learned about the Malatesta and the contract she had made and the people approved of it. It was a very good bargain.

“She can always bring her body back when it's all over,” Babbaluche said. “It's more than Tufa would have been able to do.”

Some of the women were envious of the Malatesta.

But as the morning wore on, a new consideration occurred to some of the people and the joy died.

“Now it's someone else's turn,” Pietrosanto said. “Someone else has to die in Tufa's place.” And everyone knew it was true.

Everyone began to look at everyone else to see if they could see death in the eyes of their neighbor. There is a feeling here that death enters the body before the body actually dies.