The Secret of Santa Vittoria (47 page)

“Let's go,” Pietro Pietrosanto said. They began to back away and make the motions of leaving then.

“Sometimes the only decent thing a man can do is to die,” Roberto said. He wanted to tell the cobbler that he knew, that he had tried it once. He knew that if he closed his eyes he would see the burning boy and the white ball bouncing. Perhaps there was something in the voice itself that made itself heard to the cobbler.

“Now you are saying something,” Babbaluche said. “Aren't you ashamed of yourselves, leaving it to an outsider to say something? You may be smart, or you may have said it because you are a fool,” he said to Roberto. “I don't know about you. But you have said something.”

“We know that you are going to die soon, Signor Babbaluche,” Roberto said. “We know that and you know it as well. That is why we came to you.”

“But why didn't you say that when you came?” the cobbler said to the others. His wife had lit a lamp in the next room, and so there was light in the outer room where we stood. We could hear the woman and her two daughters moaning and crying.

“And that's just it,” Babbaluche said to them. “I want to die on my own terms. I want to die my own way. I don't want to give them the satisfaction of killing me.”

Roberto didn't know what to say because his mind doesn't work in the right ways for this place, but Bombolini knew what to say after that.

“But that
is
just it, Babba,” he said. His voice was triumphant now. “When they kill you, you cheat them. You rob them of what they think they are getting. They demand a life and we give them a corpse.”

And the cobbler began to smile, differently than before. Even though it hurt him, he began to laugh, from the stomach and not from the throat the way he had done before.

“You make fools of them,” Bombolini said. “At the moment of your death you're laughing in their faces.”

Now everyone was excited. It was the ancient thing here, something for nothing all over, this time turned inside out.

“You make them do what God would do next week, and they must
pay
for it,” Vittorini said. Babbaluche told them to keep God out of this.

“Will you tell them? Will you make sure, before they go, that they know?”

“No,” Bombolini said. “Absolutely not. They must carry the shame and guilt of Babbaluche the cobbler around in their minds and in their hearts and rotting their souls until the day comes for them to die.”

The cobbler actually tried a little leap in the air. “Italo,” he shouted, “you are marvelous. You are so clever.” He looked at Roberto. “You are honest, you see, but Italo is clever, and that is always better.”

Then he was sad. As bright as he had been, the light had gone from him, and they could all read at once that death was indeed already sitting inside his body, waiting.

“But they'll know,” he said. “They'll take one look at me and know.”

But Bombolini had thought of that. “We're going to paint your face so you look fresh and healthy. We'll put walnuts in your cheeks to make them bulge. We'll stuff things under your shirt to make you look fat. Your voice is still good.”

The cobbler was brightening again. It was amazing to see the way he could come back from the front door of death.

“Italo,” he said. “We should have been friends. We could have done terrible things together.”

Bombolini shrugged. “I was a clown and you didn't like clowns.”

“But I should have seen through your mask.”

“Yes, but I was a clever clown and so I wore a clever mask.”

They made the plans for the morning, which was by then not too far away. As few as possible should know, so that when the name was picked from the wine barrel it would come as a surprise and a shock to the people. They decided at first that every name in the barrel should read “Babbaluche,” but realized that would be a dangerous thing to do in case any German put his hand into the barrel. It was decided to put all the names into the barrel and to have Padre Polenta hold Babbaluche's name in the sleeve of his cassock.

“But would the priest do such a thing?” Roberto asked. They looked at him as if he were Fungo.

“Have you ever known a priest to lose at cards?” Babbaluche said.

They were going to take his wife and daughters away that night, but Babbaluche was against it.

“They should be in the piazza to faint and fall down and cry,” he said. “No one can act the way they will act. Then take them away and have three other people take their place. The Germans will never notice.”

The others left then, to start making a list of all the names and to set up the wine barrel in the Piazza of the People and to send someone down to paint the cobbler's face.

“Oh, I look forward to this,” Babbaluche said. “My last trick on life, my death.” The two men smiled at each other.

“Do you know what is even better?” Bombolini said. “Do you know what will happen over this? You will become a martyr. You will become a hero of Italy. The story will go all over Italy—the little cobbler who died for the secret of the wine.”

It caused Babbaluche to laugh.

“Oh, if only I could be here to see it.”

“You can't have it both ways, Babba,” Bombolini said.

“It's the one problem of being a martyr. You never know for certain if they put you in the book.”

“We'll put up a plaque to you, Babba: ‘Santa Vittoria. The city where Babbaluche the Cobbler surrendered his life for his people.'”

The mayor was quite excited then. “Perhaps we won't have to make this a shrine for bakers after all. People might come here to see the home of the heroic cobbler.”

“You might make it a shrine for cobblers. That would be better yet. Put a statue up with a halo on my head.”

Bombolini shook his head, however. He had meant it seriously. “Cobblers don't make enough money,” he said.

They sat for a time enjoying the wonderful joke. There were many things they might do with it. The cobbler couldn't take wine, but he could hold
grappa
down and he got a bottle and they shared it, drinking for a time in silence. Because they had both had nothing to eat for a long time they got a little drunk very easily.

“You know,” Babbaluche said, “I
am
going to die tomorrow. In the joke I forget that sometimes. It's strange. I keep thinking of the trick and forgetting that I'm not going to see how it comes out. That I'm going to die.” He looked around the room. “Think. This is the end of it. All of those years of work and pain and sickness, all the hopes I had as a young man, and this—this—this is the end. Nothing more. Can you imagine it? That I came all those miles and all those years for this? That my mother starved those years to bring me to this? Isn't that strange?”

After that, Babbaluche said something that was truly strange for him, and many people wonder if he really ever said it.

He said that he was afraid, not of death, but of not being remembered. And then he told about the thing that had impressed him most in his life. He had once been able to go to Venice, and when he was there he saw a bridge on which there hung a blue light. An innocent man had been hanged from the bridge and ever after that time the people who lived by the bridge, for hundreds of years, had kept the light lit in his memory and his honor and in payment for their mistake.

“I want you to put a light, a green light, in the Piazza of the People for the mistake of my life,” Babbaluche said. “I want this under it:

So That All Should Learn

In memory of the cobbler Babbaluche

He lived his life wrong but had the

good fortune to die his death right.

What a waste of a life!

Bombolini tried to argue with him, but he was not to be changed.

“Now get out of here,” Babbaluche said. “I'm tired and sick and a little drunk, and I have a great deal of acting to do tomorrow. When will Angela come to make up my face?”

“Just before dawn. The lottery is at dawn.”

“Two or three hours of sleep. It's a funny thing to need sleep in order to die. But, of course, I have to die right.”

Bombolini went to kiss the cobbler on both cheeks, but Babbaluche pushed him away.

“None of that. Just because I'm going to die doesn't mean I have to put up with that.”

“Well, anyway, Babbaluche, you're a brave man and, even if you don't know it, a good one.”

“Bullshit,” the cobbler said. “Those are my last words. Now, go. I have to be fresh for my death.”

Bombolini couldn't bring himself to smile at a joke like that. At the doorway he held the handle for a moment and then turned back to Babbaluche. He was very serious.

“Babbaluche?”

“What is it?”

“Make me one promise,” the mayor said. “Promise me not to die on us tonight.”

The cobbler was shocked and his face showed it.

“What? And spoil a good joke?”

Bombolini could hear him laughing even when he reached the top of the Corso. Although it was still dark, he could see that the wine barrel was already standing there.

 

A
N HOUR BEFORE
the sun came up Rosa Bombolini went down to Babbaluche's house and woke him from his drunken sleep.

“I thought Angela was coming,” the cobbler complained. “At least I could have that on my last day.”

“You get me,” Rosa said.

She rouged his sunken yellow cheeks and darkened his eyebrows and brushed his hair. She used wax from the top of wine kegs to pad out his cheeks and old sweaters under his shirt to hide the bones of his chest and back. When he looked at himself in the mirror he was pleased. He looked something like what he must have looked years before.

“You know, I wasn't a bad-looking son of a bitch,” Babbaluche said. “It's fortunate for you you didn't know me then.”

“I knew you,” Rosa Bombolini said. “You weren't so much.”

He looked at her with admiration.

“If it weren't for you, Rosa Bombolini, I would lose all faith in life,” Babbaluche said.

“You still have one day to do it in,” she said.

“Anyone else would have said, ‘That's right, Babba, you were a pretty gay dog. How you used to strut. Why I can remember you strutting around the piazza on Sunday afternoon during the
passeggiata
like God's gift to women.' But not you. That would be asking too much with still a whole day to go.” He shook his head. “I can still learn things.”

“You're like the rest. You're like Bombolini. I don't care if you're going to die tomorrow or ten years from now. Why should I have to lie for you?”

“All right, put down the mirror,” Babbaluche said. “I'm not so much. I begin to have an idea of what hell must be like, and it frightens me.”

He had to lean on her in order to get up to the piazza, and when they arrived almost all of Santa Vittoria was already there, even though it still was dark. All eyes were on the wine barrel. Sergeant Traub was going through the names and he was satisfied that the names of most of the eligible men were in the barrel. He hadn't expected that Bombolini would put in his own, but they didn't want Bombolini dead either.

Padre Polenta came across the piazza and he made the sign of the cross over the people as he came. There was no man who could feel secure. His death was in the barrel. If the Germans found out what was taking place, a true lottery of death would take place. A young man began to stir the names with a long stick.

“It's out of our hands now,” a woman said. “The angel of death is sorting out the names.”

They watched the wine-dark barrel as if the man who was to die would come out of it, and not his name alone. They watched it and never took their eyes away from it, and as they watched it grew lighter and lighter, and the moment could not be delayed much longer. When the sun touched the highest tiles and began to slide down the dark wall and turn them bright yellow, Capoferro began to beat a slow march on his drum, a long roll followed by several short taps. Then finally Padre Polenta began a prayer and all the people knelt on the cobblestones and prayed for themselves and then for their brothers and fathers and husbands, and finally for the man who was about to die.

Captain von Prum had decided it would be wiser if he wasn't present, and at five o'clock in the morning Sergeant Traub came out of Constanzia's house and began to work his way through the kneeling crowd. The people leaped away from him as if his touch might be the one that signaled their doom.

“Let's get this over with,” he said to the priest.

“This is a terrible thing to ask a priest to do,” Polenta said.

“I didn't ask you to do it. I'm only a soldier. I carry out orders. I have nothing to do with this at all. My hands are clean.” He turned to the priest. “Do you want me to leave it to someone else?”

“No, no,” Padre Polenta said. “But it is a terrible thing to do. The choice might be God's, but the blood is yours.”

“Pick the name,” Traub said. “In the name of God, pick the name.”

Capoferro knows what to do in times like these. He should have learned things in the one hundred years he claims to have lived. He rolled the drums again, louder this time, much louder, the old sticks thundering on the rim of the goatskin drum, and then Polenta's arm went up in the air and suddenly dipped down into the barrel like a kingfish going after a fingerling in the Mad River, and while the old man beat the drum the priest swirled his hand around inside the wood. The people strained forward. There was no proof that some mistake had not been made or some trick played. When death is at hand every possibility becomes possible. And then the arm came back out of the barrel—the bird had caught its fish—and the drumming stopped and the priest held up the paper. The silence was broken by a blast on wild old Capoferro's horn.