The Secret of Santa Vittoria

by Robert Crichton

  “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.

  * * *

  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.