The Secret of Santa Vittoria (46 page)

“He wouldn't want someone like me,” a man would say. “Why would he pick someone like me? You're more the kind he would want.”

By afternoon, work on the terraces had almost come to a stop. Everyone was preparing for someone else's death and praying to God that it wouldn't end up being his own. By evening the city was in such a state that Bombolini was forced to go across the piazza and ask to speak to Captain von Prum. He was surprised to be invited inside Constanzia's house.

“I'm sorry to have to bother you on this day,” Bombolini began, and he was embarrassed. He had almost said on your wedding day. He told the captain about the state of the city.

“If you must have a hostage, and it is a very bad idea,” Bombolini said, “the people want you to pick one. Until you do the entire city is condemned. We have been tortured enough.”

The words should have angered the German, but instead Bombolini found the German looking at him with a smile.

“There never really was any other choice from the start,” von Prum said. “I had always thought of you, Bombolini.”

During all of this time it had never once occurred to Bombolini that he would be the one to be the hostage.

“No,” he said. “That wouldn't be a good idea.” It caused the captain to laugh, but Bombolini was serious. “The city would lose a good leader. Without me here there could be serious trouble.” It was a simple fact.

“And who would you suggest then?” von Prum asked. “Do you have some enemy you might enjoy seeing in front of a firing squad. Do you want the power of picking?”

He could hear Caterina moving in the other room and wondered if she was listening. He wondered if it had occurred to her that the next death would belong to her.

“I think the only way to do it is the way we did it before,” Bombolini said. “Take it out of our hands and put it in God's hands. Let Him be the one to make the choice.”

“The first one in the piazza?”

“No, no, they would never go into the piazza again,” the mayor said. “I have in mind something different. A lottery.”

He could see that the idea appealed to the captain.

“Put the names of all the people in a wine barrel and then let the priest draw out the name.”

The idea of using the priest had an even stronger appeal to the German.

“You might call it a lottery of death,” he said.

They said the words over in their minds, “A lottery of death.” There is an excitement to the words.

“Would the priest involve himself in something like this?” von Prum said.

“Oh, yes,” the mayor said. “This is God's work now. No matter who puts his hand into the barrel it will be God who chooses the winner.”

“I would prefer the priest,” the German said. “It's a strange word you use—
winner.
What if you are the winner?”

“No man ever believes he'll be the one to win a lottery.”

“And if you are?”

Bombolini shrugged his shoulders.

“What could I say then?” he said. “God will have decided He doesn't need my kind of leadership.”

The German called into the next room.

“And what if Tufa is picked by God this time?” he called into the room where Caterina must have been. “Wouldn't that be funny? What would you do then?”

“Then I'd threaten to leave you.”

Von Prum smiled, and to his own surprise Bombolini found that he was smiling also.

Before Bombolini left they drew up the rules for the lottery of death. Women and children would be excluded. The honor of dying would belong to all men between the ages of sixteen and sixty, the same ages that the Italian government in the north of Italy had set for the conscription of soldiers.

“When?”

“The drawing must be held tomorrow morning so the people will be able to go to work,” Bombolini said.

And so it was agreed.

When the mayor was at the door Caterina called to him and he went back inside and stood at the door of her room.

“Does he know yet?” she said to him. “How does he seem?”

Bombolini told her that he was tired and confused, but that he didn't know.

“Do you think he will understand?” Caterina asked him, and Bombolini was surprised by her question.

“You know Tufa. You know how he is made,” Bombolini said.

“I couldn't let him die when I had a way to save him.”

“It doesn't matter,” the mayor said. “You put the horns on his head.”

“But he's too old for that,” Caterina said. “He's been other places.”

“Yes, but he comes from
here,
” Bombolini said. “To buy his life, you sold his honor.”

“He knows I love him.”

Bombolini was able to laugh at her for not knowing any better.

“It doesn't matter, don't you see?”

“And Tufa loves me.”

“It doesn't matter,” Bombolini said. “You broke the rules.”

When Bombolini was gone von Prum took Bombolini's place at the door.

“Do you think he really believes that God picks the name from the barrel?” he asked her.

“Of course. It's the way they think here.”

“It's very simple, isn't it? Very childish.”

“Yes, they're very simple here and very childish,” Caterina told him.

*   *   *

Before an hour had passed Bombolini had called a meeting of the Grand Council, and they met in Santa Maria of the Burning Oven, going in through the side doors one at a time so as not to attract any attention. They gathered to pick the winner of the lottery.

“I don't like to say this, because I admire you, Bombolini,” one of the older men said, “but at a time like this, doesn't honor require that the leader make himself available to his people?”

Bombolini was gratified when the members of the Council voted the idea down before he had to answer. It is not easy to turn down the role of martyr when it is offered to you.

It was surprising, the number of people who the Grand Council felt were qualified to die for the city and the wine, and who they felt would not mind doing it.

“Take Enrico R——,” one of them said. “He has no friends, he has no land, he doesn't owe anyone money. He's got no real reason to live. I'm sure if you ask Luigi he would be glad to do this for us.”

“You forget,” another member of the Council said. “Enrico happens to be married to my sister. She wouldn't let him do it.”

They started down the list of names in Padre Polenta's record book, one at a time. When they came to the name of a member of the Grand Council they had the good manners not even to mention it but to go on to the next name. When a name that seemed to be a possible winner came up they would judge him, and some of the things that were said in Santa Maria that night, if they were to be repeated even at this time, would lead to vendettas and more bloodshed than was ever seen in those times. For a time they thought they had found the right man, the perfect winner of the lottery, in N.

No one liked N., and N., as far as anyone knew, liked no one in return. His own family despised him. If N. were selected his own family would hold a celebration. He owned a lot of land, a lot of vines, he had pieces of terrace spread all over the side of the mountain and a lot of the wine was his.

“The beauty of N.,” Bombolini said, “is that, bad as he is, he is a man of courage.”

“And a miser,” Pietro Pietrosanto said. “He will die with a smile on his lips before he gives those bastards one bottle of his wine.”

But it was pointed out that N. was also related by blood to fifty-six people in Santa Vittoria and some of them were a little bit crazy. It is revealing nothing to say that Fungo the idiot and Rana the frog, for example, shared blood with N., and it was impossible to tell when one of them might have some kind of religious vision or other symptom of madness and go to the Germans to save N.'s life if not his soul.

At the end of it all, one name came up again and again and would not leave the lists.

“But who has the courage to face him?” someone asked. “And what if he says No, as I know he will?”

“Emilio Vittorini, will you be one of us?”

Vittorini nodded that he would.

“Then go home and put on your uniform.”

The delegation, when it was finally formed, consisted of Bombolini, Vittorini as a representative of tradition, Roberto Abruzzi as a representative of the outside world, Angelo Pietrosanto as a representative of the youth of Santa Vittoria, and Pietro Pietrosanto as a member of the military. For reasons that were obvious to everyone, it was decided to leave the priest at home.

Before midnight, since the curfew had ceased to be observed and the people, ever since the SS had come, no longer went down to the Roman shelter to hide from the planes, they met before Vittorini's house in the Corso Cavour and started down to Babbaluche's house to ask the cobbler if he would be good enough to agree to win the lottery of death and die the next day for the people of Santa Vittoria.

They stood outside his door for a long time before daring to knock on it.

“I think that Vittorini should knock,” Pietro Pietrosanto said. “He is the most respectable of us and an occasion like this calls for respect.”

Vittorini would not knock or be the first to go inside.

“Roberto is the only one who hasn't done something to make him be hated,” Bombolini said. “Perhaps you would like to be the first?”

Roberto did not feel that a stranger should be the one to ask a man to surrender his life for a cause that wasn't his own. In the end, of course, it was the Captain of the People who had to knock and when the door opened had to be the first to go inside. Such is the price of leadership.

Babbaluche was smart. Some think he was wise, also, and some feel he was never wise. But all agree that Babbaluche was smart—as smart as some of the cocks here who always know when you are coming to get them and manage to die of old age on the roof tops before they see the inside of a pot. The moment the door opened he knew why they had come.

“You've come to tell me something,” the cobbler said. “I only hope it's good news.”

Bombolini made the error of looking down at his shoes at that moment, and as if the movement were a magnet drawing the others with it, every other head went down. When it came time to look up again—because it would be required to look at the cobbler when posing the final question—the mayor found that he could not bring his head up. So there was a long silence that roared in the dark, dirty little room.

“There is going to be a lottery tomorrow,” the mayor managed to mumble.

“And you want me to serve on the committee.”

“Even more than that,” Pietro Pietrosanto said.

“That sounds flattering,” Babbaluche said. And the silence was as deep as before. They could hear Babbaluche's wife breathing in the next room and the stomach of his ass, St. Joseph, whom he kept with him in the house, rumbling.

“It's a strange lottery, eh?” Babbaluche said. His voice was hard and cold and keen. “All the losers are winners and the winner is the loser.”

The silence again.

“The big loser,” the cobbler said.

“I know what you want,” Babbaluche said after that. If the door to the house had opened then, Roberto says, every one of them would have backed out of the cobbler's house and into the Corso and not come back. “You want me to pick the name, because I'm the one who has no other reason to protect anyone, I hate them all.”

“
Something
like that,” Roberto said.

“Or is it the other way around?” Babbaluche said. “There's no reason to protect the cobbler, because they all hate him?”

No one could take his eyes away from the pieces of leather scattered all over the floor. They tried to make shapes and read things in the coils and scraps of leather on the stone floor. If for no other reason than for the words he said next, forgetting all the other things he did for them, the people of the city would have to honor Bombolini.

“Babba,” he said, “we have chosen you because we think that you can do it best.”

You must someday hear a peacock scream at the dawn to hear the sounds that came from the cobbler's throat. And the screams of defiance and wild joy and bitterness came, not once, but over and over again, until Roberto, for one, was fearful that he himself would begin to scream with the cobbler. It was the finest joke of all his life.

“It would be an act for all of Italy,” Vittorini said, and the peacock screamed again. His wife and children were at the door of the room and he motioned them away.

“Where was all of Italy, where were all of you when they were doing this to me?” he shouted at them. He tapped his crippled legs.

He had been the first of all to be mutilated by the Fascists. A few Blackshirts from Montefalcone had come into the Piazza of the People and had seized him and in view of the people of the city they had broken his legs one after the other, and when he wouldn't salute the Duce they had made him eat a live toad. Since then Babbaluche had been a shame for Santa Vittoria to carry on its bent back.

“Let's go,” Pietro Pietrosanto said.

“Let's go,” Angelo Pietrosanto said. “We've made a mistake.”

But the cobbler wouldn't let them go that easily. He was no longer able to eat anything, he lived on the acid in his stomach for breakfast and had the bile for lunch, he said, but this was too rich and fine a meal not to have taste for him.

“Tell me,” Babbaluche said, “give me five good reasons why I should die for all of you?”

They tried to say things about love of country and of neighbor and brother, and the words were so much sawdust in their mouths. How is it possible to tell a man who has purged himself of love that in the end he should die for it? It was all food and sunrise for the peacock, and when he was silent they were silent.