The Secret of Santa Vittoria (49 page)

We know a little of what he did. There are notes and letters that he wrote, even to his dead brother Klaus, which he never sent. He was attempting through himself and through writing and reading and through his love for Caterina to remake himself. He began to strip himself before her, layer by layer, which is a very dangerous thing for any man to do. He wrote this in his log:

I must look deeply into the chaos of my soul and plumb its depths so that the riddle of my existence will be revealed to me.

No one in Santa Vittoria could ever write a line like that. Fabio, perhaps, before he experienced his torture, but never after that. Caterina gave him some help by telling him one thing her husband, who had admired the Germans, had told her.

“The difference between the Italians and the Germans,” he had said, “is that when the Italians do something bad they know they are doing something bad, but when the Germans do something bad they are able to convince themselves they have done something good. And that is why they are so much more effective than we are.”

“I did some bad things,” von Prum said. “See? I know that. But everything I did was for the country.”

“What you forget,” Caterina told him, “is that every place is someone's country.”

“Someday, when this is all over, I'll come back here and I'll do something for the people here. I'll build them a new fountain, I'll help them build a school. Do you think they would like that?”

“Oh yes,” Caterina said. “Come back and build them a school.” And she was right about that. It's the way we are. We'll take a school from anyone just so they don't try to teach in it.

His plans for returning here some day and doing good works for us occupied his time. There are more notes on that as well. In the course of this he must have scoured his soul and bleached it a bit, because his sense of well-being began to return.

“I have looked into the chaos, I have plumbed the depths,” he wrote later. “I have dropped a bucket into the inner well of myself and it begins to come up with clear water. The riddle of my existence is this: That although I have made errors and I admit to them, at the same time I am forced to conclude that, like it or not, in the end I am dedicated to the good life.”

After that, he began to go out a bit, a few short walks in the piazza, and he smiled at the women at the fountain and was pleased to find that the smiles were sometimes returned.

“I think they understand,” he told Caterina. “These are good people. They know that at the bottom of it all I am only a soldier and that sometimes a soldier is forced to do things that aren't nice but which duty demands be done.”

He was happier with himself after that. He felt secure in himself once more. He had done his best, and he was content with most of it. If some people had been harmed, he hadn't wished it to go that way. He was at ease except for the one thing that always came back to haunt him. He was secure enough one afternoon, a day or perhaps two days before the harvest began, to ask Bombolini to come to see him.

“Don't go,” everyone told the mayor. “It dishonors us.” But he went.

He was surprised to see the Malatesta. Everyone had said that she was wasting away, it was what they wished to believe, but in truth she had never looked better to Bombolini. The hot tubs and the good food and the warm bed had not harmed her. He looked at her and when their eyes met he understood her at once. Why should she waste away because of him? Whose victory would that be? Babbaluche would have approved, Bombolini thought.

“I'm going to do something for you,” von Prum said. “I am going to risk my entire professional future for you. We are not going to be the only Germans here, you understand. Sometime soon there will be a general withdrawal from the south and a stand will be made somewhere along a new line here. At that time there may be thousands of soldiers here. It is possible that a major battle could take place and it is possible that then the wine—oh, don't make that face, Bombolini; we aren't children—that the wine will be uncovered. The headquarters of my unit has already withdrawn. Records are in disorder. As commander of Santa Vittoria I am prepared to swear that the wine they find is legitimately your wine, that you have paid your share to the Reich, and the wine must not be touched.”

Bombolini thought about the proposal, because there was in truth some merit in it.

“Then you would be the savior of the wine,” he said.

“Yes, you can look at it that way. I have no interest in the wine. The wine is nothing to me. You know that. But now I would like to help your people. Give me the opportunity to save your wine for you.”

Bombolini had gotten to his feet. He wanted to leave because he was afraid of doing something ridiculous or even dangerous.

“I cannot express how much I appreciate your generosity,” he told the captain. “Only an extraordinary man could make such a proposal. It is with a sense of true sadness that I once again must tell you that there is no other wine.”

There was nothing for them to say after that, and they looked for ways to leave one another.

“If you were a true host,” Caterina said to Bombolini, “you would hide some wine so he could save it for you.”

“Do you think a trick like that would work with Captain von Prum?” Bombolini said.

“Ask the captain,” the Malatesta said, and Bombolini looked at him.

“No,” Captain von Prum said.

Even the fear of the arrival of new Germans, possibly thousands of them, could not make itself felt here then. The only real fear left was Tufa. We were afraid of what he would do. If he killed Captain von Prum, even though the captain was dead to us already, the entire city could be made to pay the price for Tufa's honor. We were very thoughtless. We didn't think then that the one to pay the price would be someone else.

The German had called Bombolini for a second conversation, but it was never held. Before the mayor could cross the piazza he was stopped by the ringing of the bells and after that by Capoferro's drum and then by the people who came out of the houses into the piazza.

“The time has come,” Capoferro shouted. “The time is now. Old Vines has made the test.”

Von Prum came out of Constanzia's house and was forced to fight his way through the people who were running and shouting in the piazza then and getting the carts and animals ready.

“What's happening? What's wrong?” he asked Bombolini.

“Nothing's wrong,” the mayor told him.

“I had wanted to see you about something important,” von Prum said.

Bombolini gave him what we call the Fungo look, the eyes wide and staring and the mouth open.

“To hell with that,” Bombolini said. “The harvest is on.”

 

T
HERE IS
one
moment when it is right to begin to pick the grapes. One day too soon, and the grapes will have been deprived of all the richness that God intended them to receive; a day too late, and a touch of the devil's rot begins. On the right day the last of all the possible moisture has been taken from the air and the soil and the vines and the leaves and sent to the clusters of swollen fruit. The last bit of the sun has been absorbed by the leaves to warm the juice and cause the sugar to bulge against the skins. And when that balance is reached, which is known by men like Old Vines who have roots in the soil and their soul in the vines, the time has come to pick.

Nothing else exists for Santa Vittoria after that but the grapes.

There is no war, there is no other world. God doesn't exist, except as he lives in the grapes. The man who dies, for example, dies unnoticed and in silence. He goes unburied or, if the time is too long, the funeral is held and the mourners, usually only his immediate family, close the lid and run for the terraces. What tears are shed fall on the grapes and not on the grave. Children go unfed, but they understand they have no right to eat when the harvest is on. He who can move goes down to the terraces and cuts the fat grapes free from the vines and puts them in the baskets, which are carried to the carts and taken up the mountain to the wine presses where the grapes are pressed to death, only to be born in a new and beautiful form just as Christ was. The liquid runs clear and with no taste to it, into the great oak barrels which hold two thousand gallons each and are the pride of the city, since they hold the blood of the civic body. On the third day the liquid begins to storm (the word we use). The process of fermentation has begun and the grapes are struggling to be born again. The wine boils and hisses in the barrels like the waves at sea; the wine is storming. And when the storm is over, in a week or ten days, depending on the quality of the grapes, Old Vines will dip his glass into the barrel and hold it to the sun and at that moment we will know what the entire year has meant, whether we will go hungry in the winter ahead or eat when the rains and snow come.

On the morning of the day after the wine is tasted, the harvest festival begins. If the wine is good and plentiful, the harvest can be gay and even violent and wild; but if the wine is thin and the harvest is small, the festival can be sad and even bitter.

In the early days everyone works. Bombolini goes down to the terraces and sweats. Vittorini goes down. This year, for example, Roberto, although his leg pained him, worked with Rosa and Angela and the Casamassima family from dawn until dark and until he thought sometimes he would die. But he liked the work when it was not too painful. There was something satisfying about picking and holding the heavy clumps of ripe fruit, and he liked working by Angela's side, sweating together in the October sun, walking up the mountain together in the coolness of the evening. Once, next to her in the darkness of the leaves, without thinking about it, he put his hands on her hips and then around her waist and kissed her on the back of the neck, and she didn't turn or pull away or even move.

“You shouldn't do that,” she said.

“Why not? I wanted to do it.”

“We don't do that here. The boy who does that to the girl means he wants to marry her.”

He had said nothing at the time, but later in the day he told her that maybe he would marry her.

“No.” She pointed to her bare feet. “Americans don't marry girls with bare feet. Besides, what would I do there? I only know how to pick grapes.”

“Do you know how to go to the movies?”

“Yes.”

“You could go to the movies. You could sit in the movies all day and play the radio all night.”

She thought about it. “No, I wouldn't like that. I like to pick the grapes.”

“I was joking with you. They do more than that in America. You think about it.”

“I like to pick the grapes. I like it here.”

“You think.”

To make up for the men who had been hurt by the SS, von Prum sent some of the soldiers down to work. Some of them had worked with grapes before and they were good at it. When Roberto saw Corporal Heinsick looking at Angela, watching her bend and straighten up and reach, he found that he wanted to shout at him. But then he went back to work.

There was excitement on the terraces. No one could remember heavier grapes and fatter grapes and bigger clusters. The baskets were the heaviest baskets ever and the presses were running behind, working finally by Longo's light far into the night, despite the threat of planes. All day the rich juice ran from the presses down the spillways into the barrels, a rush of wine filling the barrels more swiftly than they had ever been filled before. The wine was plentiful and if it was good too it could be the finest year in the memory of any person in Santa Vittoria.

There was excitement, but there was a humor too, since as the new wine began to run, thousands of gallons running from the presses and then a hundred thousand gallons washing down the wooden spillways, the answer to the first part of the secret, whether there was wine or not, was being spilled out in front of the Germans before their very eyes, and they were unable to see it, because they had no eyes for the wine.

When the harvest was almost over, when the vines were stripped so naked they looked indecent on the terraces, ravaged and even castrated, Bombolini decided on a daring thing. He went across the Piazza of the People and invited Captain von Prum and the soldiers to share in the harvest festival.

“I don't know. I understand it's like some kind of religious orgy. There's a great deal of drinking, and a kind of frenzy takes over. I don't think it would be a good idea,” von Prum said.

“But it's a joyous frenzy,” Bombolini told him. “There's no bitterness then. There are no enemies at the harvest festival. Not when the wine is rich.”

“I'll give it thought,” the German said.

“We've never had outsiders. It's in return for your offer about the wine. The people respected that.”

Von Prum put a finger to his teeth and stared at the ceiling. “The people respected that,” he said.

“They felt it was generous. We want you, in fact, to be honorary marshal of the festival.”

“It's a very great honor,” Caterina said.

“The greatest we have,” the mayor said.

“What do you think?” the captain said to Caterina.

“I don't see how you can refuse,” she said.

So Captain von Prum, in his soldiers' name, accepted the offer to come to the festival.

“I suppose you will want us in our dress uniforms,” he said.

“It would honor the people,” Bombolini said. “We're going to allow you to carry the statue of Santa Maria in the procession. And to press the last of the grapes. To tread on them in the old way, for tradition. The last of the wine.”

“It's you who are generous,” von Prum said. “You understand the art of forgiving. It is something I am only learning.”

Bombolini prepared to go.

“Some of the traditions are a little strange and I hope you understand that,” the mayor said. “It would dishonor the people if you didn't go along. We're very strong on our traditions.”