The Secret of Santa Vittoria (6 page)

“Now throw the bucket,” Bombolini said. Fabio threw the first bucket far out over the town, away from the piazza, out over the Fat Wall so that no one could get hurt.

“Now the brush.” He threw the brush. There was a shout from the crowd. He threw the cheese, the olives, the second bucket, and each time the crowd roared and the noise grew louder and by the time Fabio threw the knapsack the piazza was in an uproar.

“All right, let's go now,” Fabio shouted. He had counted on the excitement to stir the wine seller. He came around to the side of the catwalk where Bombolini sat, and as he did the rusted iron bolts that had been drilled into the concrete years before suddenly cried out,
screamed,
in protest. He ran along the narrow walk and past Bombolini and on to the spiked pipe so that his weight was no longer on the catwalk. Now the people in the piazza were silent. There was no sound from the city at all.

“They don't want you to fall, do you see?” Fabio said. “If they wanted you to fall they would be shouting for you.”

While he talked he reached up and began to work the lengths of rope under the arms and across the back and around the waist of Bombolini. His plan was crude, but Fabio felt it might work. He would tie the wine seller to the pipe, literally lash him to it, and then bring him down it spike by spike. He would place Bombolini's foot on the next rung, or spike, below and then work the ropes down around him and the pipe and when he was secured there he would lift the next foot down. He would bring him down, all bound with ropes, like a bear being brought down from the high mountains. He made Bombolini slide along the narrow catwalk until he was at the pipe and then dip down until his feet could find the spikes to stand on. Even from where they were, so high above the piazza, they could hear the people suck in their breaths. When he was tied to the pipe they didn't start at once, because both of them were tired even then.

“Why are you doing this for me, Fabio?” Bombolini asked. Fabio didn't answer him. How could he mention Angela? He wondered if he would have been on this pipe now for anyone else's father, but then he realized that only Angela's father would be doing such a thing.

“Why?”

“Because you were a man in trouble. It is people's responsibility to help others in trouble.”

“Oh, Fabio,” Bombolini said. “I don't know where you get ideas like that. It is people's responsibility to look after themselves and nothing more. Let us try a step.”

Fabio lifted Bombolini's right foot and brought it down to the next spike below, and then he climbed up so that his head was level with Bombolini's waist and he worked the ropes down a foot or more. They did it several times and rested.

“Fabio?”

“Yes.”

“I want you to know one thing, Fabio. If I ever get off this tower and I am alive, if there is ever one thing in the world that you want and I can give it to you, I want you to ask me for it and I will give it to you.”

Why couldn't he say it right then? Why couldn't he be honest with himself and with this man he had lashed to a spiny pipe and whose life he was saving at the risk of his own? One word. A few words—Yes, there is one thing: Angela; I want your daughter Angela in marriage. Instead, all he could do was murmur, “Come on, come on,” and feel himself turning red.

Just before they began again, Bombolini began to point to the north. “Oh, my God,” he said. “Can you see that? Can you see there?”

“Yes. Something is burning,” Fabio said. “Some city is on fire.”

They could see a cloud of gray, which the late afternoon sun turned gold at the top. It rose from a city which sat on the top of a mountain like a crown, and the crown was in flames.

“The whole mountain is burning,” Bombolini said, and it was true.

 

I
N THE
Leaders' Mansion they could hear the shouts from the piazza, and the cheering. The noise was now steady and they knew the crowd was growing, but none of them was ready to believe that the cheering was for Italo Bombolini.

“Why would Pelo tell a thing like that?” Mazzola asked.

“Because Pelo is a bastard, that's why,” Copa said.

Pelo had come back from the Piazza Mussolini and when no one in the Piazza of the People was looking he had knocked twice on the door as directed.

“Who are they cheering?” Vittorini had called.

“Bombolini.” Vittorini could not believe his ears.

“Italo Bombolini,” Pelo said. “The wine seller. The wine merchant. The Sicilian boob.”

“I don't believe you,” Vittorini said.

“But it is the truth,” Pelo said, and then he had run.

And ever since then the noise had grown louder and with it had grown the need for The Band to know who was the leader so they could plan some kind of counteraction.

“But suppose it
is
true,” Dr. Bara said.

“Then we will have to deal with Bombolini,” Vittorini said. “In a war one doesn't choose one's enemies. If an insane mob has chosen Bombolini then we have no choice but to deal with the man the mob has chosen.”

“Ah, well,” the doctor said, “we will soon find out who the leader is, whether we want to or not.” And Francucci began to weep again.

“I want the priest. I want my priest. I want to make my last confession,” the baker said, and then some of the women began to weep as well.

“Shut up and start acting like a man,” Copa shouted at him.

“I don't know how,” Francucci said.

“He's right though,” Vittorini said. “We need the priest. Every member of the
fiancheggiatori
must be united for the common defense.”

The
fiancheggiatori
is the alliance of the Crown and the Vatican with the bureaucracy and big business which forms the traditional combination of power in this country. The man who can keep the
fiancheggiatori
satisfied and in balance with one another is said to hold the key to the kingdom. It was one of the postmaster's favorite words, but as Babbaluche pointed out one day the only thing missing from the combination was the people. They sent a young boy into the piazza to go to the bell tower and summon the priest.

“Tell him someone is dying,” Mazzola said. “That will be sure to bring him.”

They put Francucci in a far corner of the cellar, in the deepest part of the darkness, but even from there he could be heard, saying it over and over like a litany in the church.

“They are going to roll me in flour and sprinkle me with water. They are going to put me in an oven and bake me like my bread.

“They are going to roll me in flour and sprinkle me with water.…”

*   *   *

“No, I don't believe it,” Mazzola was saying when the boy came back with the priest. “I refuse to believe it. No mob, even a mob from this city, would be insane enough to choose Bombolini for a leader.”

But Padre Polenta told them the same thing, and they were forced to believe it.

“Yes, it's true,” the priest said. “The people are cheering Bombolini.”

“But why? Why Bombolini?”

“It is in the nature of mobs to cheer fools,” the priest said. “Now where is the dying man?”

Doctor Bara waved his hand around the room.

“Everywhere,” he said. “All of us. It is only a matter of time.”

There was a great shout from the piazza then. The force of it was so strong they could feel its weight on the door. And each shout was followed by one after it and then another, like soldiers on the march. The shouts grew so loud and so steady that Francucci himself could no longer hear his own litany.

*   *   *

The shouts were the counting. Fabio had gotten Bombolini three quarters of the way down the pipe when the counting began. Someone in the piazza had counted the number of rungs that still remained and when there were fifty of them the people began to shout the number left.

“Forty-nine.”

“Forty-eight.”

Great explosions of sound. The progress would come in flurries, four or five rungs, and when the two men got tired and held on, the people held the number and repeated it, over and over, until the men went on.

“Forty-seven, forty-seven, forty-seven…” Like a steam engine waiting in the station.

They had come to see Bombolini fall off the tower, but now the mood had changed. Now they were cheering him down. When there were only thirty-four or thirty-five spikes still to go, however, with the end of the ordeal so near and yet with the distance still great enough so that if he slipped and fell he would die, Bombolini found he could go no further. His leg muscles had become like strands of wet pasta. They trembled and quivered, the strength had gone, he hung from the ropes on the pipe like a quarter of beef in the market place.

What happened to Fabio then must be seen at least as having the hand of God behind it. He was coming back up the pipe to put Bombolini's feet back on the spikes to keep him from being squeezed to death by the ropes when the
grappa
flask that he was carrying clinked against the pipe. He had forgotten about it, since Fabio doesn't think in terms of alcohol; but at the moment when he needed it, at a time truly of desperation, something caused the bottle to strike the metal.

The
grappa
they distill here is strong. It can be used in a cigarette lighter or in a blowtorch. On a cold day it is like carrying around a bottle of live coals or putting a stove in your pocket. Fabio took the flask from his shirt and reached up, and because Bombolini was now too tired even to drink, Fabio began pouring little surprises of
grappa
down his throat.

The effect of the brandy was immediate. From the piazza they could see Bombolini's vacant glazed stare pass from his face. His color, which had passed through purple into a whiteness like the whiteness of the dead, began to return to him. When Fabio got his feet back onto the spikes Bombolini was able to keep them there and the boy could feel muscles in the legs once more.

“Give me the bottle,” Bombolini said.

He began to pour the
grappa
down his own throat, steady strong swallows now, perhaps one a minute, an ounce or more each swallow and in five or six minutes the flask of
grappa
was emptied and he hurled it down into the piazza. He had drunk ten ounces of grappa in less than ten minutes.

“We're going down,” Bombolini shouted to Fabio. There was a great cheer from the people in the piazza.

“Take off the ropes.”

Fabio shook his head. Then Bombolini began to work the ropes off himself, and when they were loose he threw them to the people and began to start down. He was slow, but he also was steady and careful, the foot feeling for the next spike, finding it, the whole body balanced correctly before the step and then the step itself.

“Thirty-four, thirty-four, thirty-four.”

Another step.

“Thirty-three, thirty-three, thirty-three.”

They could hear it all the way up the Corso Mussolini, they could hear it through the barred doors and the stones of the Leaders' Mansion. They could hear it from every corner of the Piazza of the People, although they didn't know what it meant then.

“It's starting again,” Dr. Bara said in the cellar. “They're getting ready to come again. It's stronger now.”

Dr. Bara had no fear for himself. It was his belief that the people would be too selfish to harm their only doctor. “You had better have a plan,” he said.

“I have a plan,” Vittorini said. He said it so vigorously that the feathers rustled and it was reassuring. “I will make him take our surrender. It is now a matter of timing,” the old soldier said. “Timing is all.”

“And don't allow ourselves to forget one thing,” Dr. Bara said. “The Italian soldier is a master at the art of surrender.”

It made them feel better, all of them, and the feeling lasted until they heard a noise, the noise, one so strong that they felt it, the loudest noise almost certainly ever heard until then in Santa Vittoria.

*   *   *

He had gotten down, by himself, to the last spike on the pipe and then his feet had touched the stones of the Piazza Mussolini. At that moment there was a great cheer and he had fallen forward and they caught him before he hit the stones and began to carry him, to shove him actually, through the mass of the people in the piazza toward his cart. They put him up on a great solid two-wheeled Sicilian cart, made of iron oak with oak wheels rimmed with iron, painted pink and blue and covered with sweet religious sayings, and when the hands released him he fell off and had to be caught once more and put back up onto the seat, where they propped him up so that he wouldn't fall again. It was at this time that he said the eight words that were the occasion for the greatest single sound in the history of the city.

Before telling you the words, it is necessary to tell one thing about this place and the people who live in it. Life here is hard, harder than outsiders can ever see. No one gets anything here without working for it, and many work hard and get nothing. It sometimes seems in truth that the harder the people work the less they have to show for it, as if work creates loss. Who knows where the fault begins or where it lies? The only truth is that there is never quite enough of anything here. Why do they stay? For the same reason that all peasants stay. They hold on to hunger, which they are accustomed to, because they are fearful of starvation.

Because of this, the greatest fear of any peasant is that someone will take something from him that he has worked for. The pain of it is too unbearable.

It is one reason all peasants are ungrateful. If someone gives a peasant something, he can only assume that it is a trick, or that the person doesn't want the thing he has given, or that the person is crazy.

All of this, then, is why the greatest joy of Italian peasants, and maybe peasants all over the world as well, is to get something they didn't work for: to get something for nothing. And the best things to get are the things that are sweated for each day. A pearl is good to get for nothing, but its value isn't known in terms of sweat. Pearls are good, but bread is better.