The Secret of Santa Vittoria (7 page)

*   *   *

So the shout, then; this noise—now it can be understood. They put Fabio in the back of the cart and Bombolini was propped up in the high front seat and they began to push on the heavy wheels, back and forth at first to gain momentum to start the cart back up the Corso Mussolini, when he motioned to them. They didn't hear him clearly at first.

“Say it once more,” a man shouted at him. “Clearly.”

He made a last effort. He swallowed and cleared his throat and called out.

“Free wine for the people of Santa Vittoria.”

He slumped down in the seat, face forward, and it is doubtful if either he or Fabio ever heard the sound itself that greeted the words, although it soared up the Corso and it cascaded into the Piazza of the People and it thundered against the door of the Leader's Mansion and it caused the stained-glass windows of Santa Maria of the Burning Oven to tremble.

The Corso is steep and narrow, and it was hard to get the cart moving, because not enough people could get behind it. But a crowd also has a will that makes itself felt, and just the sheer pressure of people, the desire of the crowd, seemed to be enough to start the cart moving upward. At the stone steps the men were forced to stop and rock the big iron-rimmed wheels back and forth to get up over the stones, and as they did they began shouting—
“Bom”
as they went forward,
“bo”
as they rolled back, “li-i-i-i” as they strained up over the stone, and a short, explosive
“ni”
when they made it over the lip to the next step. The people behind the men pushing the cart took up the shout, and soon the Corso and then the whole of Santa Vittoria was vibrating with it. They could hear it in the highest part of High Town—
“Bom bo li-i-i-i ni! Bom bo li-i-i-i ni!”
—and over the walls and in the high pastures. One old woman who was watching oxen said it sounded like the start of a great storm and made her afraid, and Luigi Longo, who was coming back from another town after fixing a pump there, said it sounded like a trombone announcing the angel of death.

*   *   *

Vittorini had not been idle. In the Leaders' Mansion they were ready for Bombolini. They stood behind the heavy oak door and listened to the shouts of the people and waited for the proper moment. The barricades had been pulled aside and the door was opened a crack to allow Vittorini to see into the Piazza of the People, and behind him were The Band. Copa stood just behind the old soldier with a medallion of the office of mayor held in his hand. Mazzola, behind Copa, held the great brass key to the city, which unlocks nothing here. Dr. Bara had put on a white coat and hung a stethoscope around his neck. Polenta, unfortunately, was dressed only in a soup-stained cassock, and on his head was the little skull cap which was ragged and stained with oil, but because he thought he had been coming to offer the last rites he had his tall silver crucifix and this would be important. The women had been sent through the Mansion and they had stripped it of every religious statue and holy picture the house possessed. Those who had no picture or soapstone saint were given a baby or young child to hold in their arms.

Vittorini himself had taken the Italian flag from a hallway and had worked the flag down the edge of his sword so that it hung like a banner when the blade was extended.

“Open it just a little wider,” Vittorini said. The sound coming up into the piazza from the Corso was deafening. The soldier was at military attention.

“The timing is everything now,” he called to the doctor, but Dr. Bara was unable to hear him.

*   *   *

Before anything else, they saw Bombolini's head rise from the Corso Mussolini, up toward the piazza, and then they saw his neck and his shoulders and then they saw the top of the Sicilian cart and finally as the cart came up into the Piazza of the People, they saw the bodies of the people pushing him.

“My God,” Dr. Bara said. “He comes like a king from the East.”

He was above them all, riding along above them, swaying back and forth above them, as if he were floating on a restless sea. The people were still shouting his name, and they came flooding out of the confines of the Corso, spilling out into the vastness of the piazza and around Bombolini and the cart, like the first wave of a tide.

Someone in the Leaders' Mansion moved toward the door then, but Vittorini held him back.

“Not yet, not yet,” he shouted.

The cart had no direction. Once out of the Corso, it had gotten out of the control of the men who had been pushing it. It rolled out into the center of the piazza, propelled there by the pressure of the people behind it. It wanted to turn to the left in the direction of the wineshop and away from the Mansion of the Leaders, but the men pushing the wheels were unable to make the turn, because of the press behind them, and the cart continued out toward the Fountain of the Pissing Turtle.

“Now!”
Vittorini commanded.

The door of the Leaders' Mansion was thrown wide open. The old soldier was the first to go through it, his sword pointed directly out in front of him with the flag fluttering in the wind that blows every evening in this city.

Copa came behind him, the imitaton gold of the mayor's medallion glinting in what still remained of the sun. Mazzola held up the key to the city of Santa Vittoria. After him came Dr. Bara, and with Bara was Padre Polenta with the silver crucifix held aloft for everyone in the piazza to see, and then came the women holding up the statues and the holy pictures and the old and young women with the babies held up or at their breast.

“Now!”
Vittorini shouted again.

He lifted up his sword so that the flag was overhead, the priest lifted up his crucifix and began to wave it up and down. Mazzola waved the key, and Copa flung the medallion up and down, and all the pictures and all the statues and all the babies waved up and down.

Nothing happened. The cart continued out into the piazza. Allow this much for Copa. He is a man of action, and action was required.

“The sons of bitches,” he shouted to Vittorini. “They try to ignore our surrender.”

He ran back into the Mansion and when he came outside again with the gun, the cart was no more than ten feet away from the fountain. He unloaded his first shot from the double-barreled shotgun over the crowd in the piazza and the second was even lower, so low that several people were cut and stung by the bird shot. The movement in the piazza stopped, the pushing ceased, the pressure on the cart stopped.

Copa put two more shells in the gun. One went over the heads of the people in the back of the crowd and in the silence the explosion sounded much louder. The other he fired into the bell tower and the pellets caused the bell to go
pling
and
ping
and
cling
and then the bell itself to rock lightly back and forth with the clapper just touching the brass and sounding a mournful
blung, blung
that we use on the days of death.

“Once more,” Vittorini said, and all of the pictures and the medallions and the sacred cross and the babes started to rise and fall again.

And allow this much for Bombolini. Although he was drunk and exhaustion had stolen much of his sensibility, it was he—of all the people in the piazza standing there with their mouths agape looking at the smoke curling from the end of Copa's gun and watching the wind ripple the feathers of Vittorini's hat and Vittorini's flag—who knew at once what was taking place.

There is a line by Machiavelli which Bombolini has written on a card and carries with him.

Fortune is a woman. It is necessary, if you wish to master her, to take her by force before she has a chance to resist.

Give this much for Bombolini, then. He saw his fortune and he raped her on the spot.

“To the Leaders' Mansion,” he called.

There was a moment when it seemed that the marriage might never be consummated. The will of the crowd was for wine. But the people had a decency about them, they were willing to wait for their wine and with a great effort, with an agonizing slowness, the cart was turned and the people in its path were pushed aside, and Bombolini and the Sicilian cart began to bounce along the cobblestones of the piazza in the direction of the Leaders' Mansion. It was his determination to say something memorable to seize the occasion, but he never had the chance to open his mouth.

“By the powers vested in me by the legitimate government of the city of Santa Vittoria,” Vittorini began. His voice, like that of all good soldiers, was loud and carried command.

What Dr. Bara had said about the Italian soldiers and surrender was correct. Vittorini and the rest of them were impressive in defeat. The old soldier talked for almost one half hour without, as anyone could notice, taking a breath. Since they didn't understand the purpose of the talk, the people in the piazza didn't understand the words, but they liked to hear them because they were beautiful and Vittorini was full of eloquence and his sentences flowed like rivers and his words glided like swans on still waters.

It is not necessary to put down all the details. It is enough to know this: that in exchange for a sacred and a solemn vow by Bombolini that the persons and the property of those who had gone before—which meant The Band—would be respected, he, Italo Bombolini, would be handed the key to the city and the medallion of the mayor would be placed around his neck.

“Do I so have your sacred and solemn vow?” Vittorini said. “Remember, it is witnessed by the priest and thus by God Himself.”

Someone prodded Bombolini.

“You so have my solemn pledge,” Bombolini said. Vittorini turned directly toward the people in the piazza then. While Polenta sanctified the pledge by making the sign of the cross, Vittorini lifted his sword and the flag.

“Citizens of Santa Vittoria,” he cried out to them. “I give you your new leader.”

There was almost no response from the people. They had not understood, and it still was not clear to them. What response there was—a few cheers and a few groans, a shout of laughter from Babbaluche, the sound of snoring from Fabio in the back of the cart—soon died away in the rush of the late afternoon wind and finally the only sound at all was that of Vittorini's flag fluttering. It was beginning to grow dark in the piazza, although the sun was still bright on the roof tops of the surrounding houses. Vittorini made a small sign with his hand; he turned it upward as if to say to Bombolini, “I have done my job, the rest is up to you,” and Dr. Bara pushed up behind the soldier.

“Get the medallion,” he said. “They don't want him. Get the medallion back. We have made a terrible mistake.”

But at that moment Bara was proven wrong. Bombolini had turned around on the cart and back to his people and had said something to them, and this was followed by an enormous cheer and a great surge of movement. Vittorini turned to Bara.

“And what would you call that?”

Men seized the great cart wheels. They almost lifted that iron oak cart into the air in their eagerness to turn it around and drive it back across the piazza.

“And what would you call that if he isn't the leader?” Vittorini said. “They would have torn us apart.”

The women lowered the holy pictures and the statues, and Padre Polenta began to walk back across the clearing piazza to the bell tower. The others turned around and started back inside the Leaders' Mansion, because one of the promises Vittorini had made was that they would be out of the Mansion by sundown that evening.

The wine seller had said four words: “And now your wine.”

*   *   *

When Rosa Bombolini heard the sounds coming up the Corso Mussolini she had shut the shutters of her windows and run downstairs and closed and locked the iron gate that guards the front of the wineshop and then gone back upstairs and stood behind the shutters, where she could see into the Piazza of the People without being seen.

Her husband's cart came to a stop twenty feet from the wineshop.

“Open the gates,” Bombolini shouted. When there was no answer, someone handed Bombolini a cobblestone that had been pried out of the piazza. Bombolini gave the stone to one of the younger Pietrosantos and made a sign, and the young man sent the stone crashing against an upstairs shutter.

“Open the gates,” he shouted again. The shutter opened this time and his wife looked down from the window into the cart.

“I open no gates to no mob,” Rosa Bombolini shouted to them.

“This is no mob. These are the citizens of Santa Vittoria,” Bombolini called back. She made a gesture with the fingers of her right hand that only men ever make here and then only when they are among men.

“I
order
you to open these gates,” Bombolini called.

“Order?” She made that laugh that all Santa Vittoria is familiar with, the one they are afraid of. “Whose order?” The words were spit on her lips.

“The order of the mayor of the city of Santa Vittoria.”

He held up the key to the city and then the medallion of the office of mayor, and the people cheered. She opened the shutters wide then.

“Up the fat you-know-what of the indescribable mayor of this indescribable city,” she shouted.

The new mayor looked very tired then and sad. He pointed to the gates.

“Down,” he said. He described the action with his hands. “Pull them down.”

She was at the window again. “You son of a bitch. I own this house. I own this wineshop. You listen to me. You touch those gates and you never walk into this house again.”

It would be his first decision as mayor. He didn't look up at her when he made it, but the decision was made.

“Down,” he ordered. “Take them down.”

It was the Sicilian cart that did the job. They lifted Bombolini down from the cart and then they ran it back and forth to build up the proper rage, like a bull preparing to make his charge, and all at once they released it. The gate was no match for the cart. The iron was old and the hinges and bolts that held it were rusted. It gave almost a once, and after that the front door gave, and then the entire front of the wineshop. The plate-glass window came all apart and it shattered into the shop and into the piazza. The reign of Italo Bombolini had begun.