“No, it all stinks of an experiment,” the colonel had said. “It’s all right to experiment with Poles. It’s all right to try things with Jews. It’s not all right with the grandson of Schmidt von Knoblesdorf. If anything happens to Captain von Prum, Willy Scheer will be the one to hang for it.”
Scheer was a rare case, the peasant who had risen through the ranks to a position of power without discarding his peasant ways. His manner was rough and direct, his speech was filled with folk sayings, most of them coarse, and he looked as if he had been carved from a potato. It amused him and it flattered him to have aristocrats around him and beneath him.
“No, I can’t let you go,” Scheer said. “The cream of our culture, the flower of our people.” He was being sarcastic but good natured. “If your name was Schwartz you could go. But a blood relation of Alfons Mumm von Schwarzenstein? Oh, no. It’s not your ass I worry about, it’s Willy Scheer’s ass.”
The captain had stared at him. Von Prum knew it was the correct thing to do then. For reasons he didn’t understand, Scheer enjoyed being stared at in a cold haughty manner.
“You look at me as if I was manure in the field,” he said. “Like I was shit.” But he smiled. “You heard what happened at Castelgrande,” the colonel said. “They went in with fifty men.”
“And Moltke,” von Prum said. Captain Moltke was famous for his short temper. When he had encountered a small road block, Moltke had ordered his men to fire on the people of the town and they had no choice but to fire back.
“Well take a tank at least,” Scheer said. The captain shook his head and continued to stare at the colonel.
“What are you going armed with,” he finally asked.
“The culture of the German people,” von Prum said. “Our national sense of purpose. Our genius at working with disciplined order.”
“Oh you are such a good boy,” Scheer said. “My God what a fine noble boy.” He was shaking his head by then. “Do you really believe this.”
“I really believe it,” von Prum said. “It isn’t the idealist’s way. It isn’t the dreamer’s way. It’s the only sensible, practical way to do it. You’ll see.”
These were the words that angered the colonel and this was when he told the captain that the army had not yet become a debating society. What the captain said went against all the rules Scheer had had to learn so painfully in his life.
“You listen to me,” Scheer said. “We don’t learn much in the turnip fields but we learn some things that are never forgotten, and one of them is that the one thing that gets respect, the only thing that gets respect, is strength. The weak respect the strong for one reason. Because they’re not weak like themselves.” The colonel thumped his hard brown stubby hand down onto the hard wooden table. “Here’s one of those quaint peasant sayings, Captain von Prum. ‘One must be either the anvil or the hammer.’ You think about it. There is no other way.”
But in the end von Prum had won, as he knew he would win, because in the end he was what the race aspired to, and he knew this and knew that Scheer knew it and approved of it. His Nordic bleaching, as the colonel called it, the blondness and whiteness and the cold blueness of him, was not just the symbol of racial purity but the fact of it. Most Germans, like most of the people of the world, are dark and short, but unlike other people the Germans despise their darkness and their shortness and they don’t believe in it. It is von Prum they put on all their posters, and when they have a baby it is von Prum they hope to produce.
“You push me too Goddamn hard,” Scheer said, “but then again the German army has not yet become a place where officers go back on their words.” They smiled at one another then. “Take a tank,” Scheer said. Von Prum shook his head.
“My God you’re stubborn,” Scheer said. His voice became hard again.
“This experiment has only one solution, and that is that it must work.”
“I understand.”
“If it doesn’t, I come up there and do things in my way,” Scheer said. Von Prum nodded his head.
“Because I’m committed for that wine.”
“You will get your wine.”
The colonel began to walk toward the door of his office and by this the captain knew the interview was over.
“I want the wine, I want it soon, and I want all of it.” He stopped at the door. “When you are ready you let us know, make it soon, and we will come and get the wine.”
“But that’s all part of it,” von Prum said. “When the time comes I intend to have the people bring it out themselves.”
“You expect the people to collaborate in their own robbery,” he said. His voice was bitter.
“Yes,” von Prum said, so quietly and with such little doubt that his arrogance finally caused the colonel to laugh aloud.
“You know one thing that isn’t right for a Schmidt von Knoblesdorf?” He ran his stubby fingers down the front of the captain’s tunic. “You’re a virgin here. No decorations.”
It had bothered von Prum’s father. Once he had even offered to lend the captain several of his before they went to church.
“I will tell you what I will do,” Colonel Scheer said. “If you can get the people of this place … what’s the name?”
“Santa Vittoria.”
“If you get these people to bring their own wine to the railroad here I will recommend you for the Iron Cross.”
Von Prum smiled at this.
“Third class, of course,” Scheer said, “but an Iron Cross nevertheless.”
The captain was excused then, but at the foot of the stairs he turned back to the colonel.
“As for you,” he called up, “I’ll put your name on the cover of the Bloodless Victory.”
“No, to hell with that,” Scheer said. “After the war you invite me to your home for dinner. Let me come in the front door.” He smiled his hard tough smile. “Have me with that fellow you’re always quoting.”
Von Prum was puzzled.
“Nitcha,” Scheer said. “Your friend Nitcha.”
“Nietzsche,” the captain said. “He’s dead.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear it,” Colonel Scheer said. “Have me with all the ancestors then.”
“I’ll do that,” Captain von Prum said. “And I’ll toast you in the wine of Santa Vittoria.”
* * *
Considering the state of things in Santa Vittoria they were good to Bombolini; they allowed him to sleep until eleven o’clock, and then they told Roberto to go and wake him. When he looked in the door he was surprised to see how peacefully the mayor was sleeping.
“They’re waiting for you down there,” Roberto told him.
“Yes, I know that. I can sense them.”
“The whole piazza is filled with people.”
“They don’t know what to do. They don’t have their leader.”
The mayor rose from the bed and moved very slowly and easily, and the manner in which he moved convinced Roberto that he must have found an answer during his sleep.
“The Grand Council is downstairs.”
“I can sense them,” Bombolini said. “I can feel them. I can smell them. They say a horse can smell water before he can see it when he needs it. I can smell them and they can smell me. Do you know what I did, Roberto?”
“No.”
“I had a good sleep.” He tapped his head and at the same time attempted to brush down his mane of hair, which was wild, so wild that Babbaluche once claimed that a bird could nest in it and Bombolini would never know it until he got egg on his face. “God came to me, I think. He put something in here. Let’s go down.”
They went down the steps into the large room where all of the members of the Grand Council were gathered.
“God put a story in my head. I want to tell it to you and you can tell me what it means. I think the answer is in the story.”
They sat down along the walls and stood against the walls, and Italo Bombolini told them the story of the peasant Gagliaudi.
*
* *
A thousand years ago, some invaders from the north called barbarians came to conquer Italy under the leadership of a man named Barbarossa. Everything fell before the barbarians until they came to one walled city to the north of here that refused to lie down and surrender. They tried everything to make it fall, but when they failed they decided to surround the city and starve it out. Winter came and the people began to go hungry and everyone knew it was only a matter of time. It was then that the peasant Gagliaudi went to the prince with a plan.
“Give me all the wheat that is left in the city and give me all the grain that is left, and I will save the city. If I don’t, then kill me.
“Don’t worry, I won’t have to do that. They’ll do it for me.” But against his better judgment, because there was nothing else to do, he gave the wheat and the grain to the peasant. The people were shocked and outraged when the peasant began to feed the precious food to his cow.
“Now bring me the last of the water,” Gagliaudi ordered. The people by then were chewing stones to keep their mouths wet, but the cow drank and drank.
“Now bring me the last of the wine.”
The watched in rage as the peasant sat before them and drank the last of the wine and got drunk before their faces. When he was drunk enough, early in the morning just before dawn, a little side gate in the wall was opened and the drunk peasant and his bloated cow slipped outside the city’s walls. Once outside, along the road where the enemy camped, Gagliaudi began to sing and laugh and roar, and he kicked the cow so that it mooed and bellowed in protest. The enemy could not believe their eyes any more than the people of the city, who were peeping from the tops of the walls, could believe theirs.
“We have been made fools of,” they all agreed.
The guards of Barbarossa realized at once that only a madman or a drunk could behave in this manner, and when they seized the peasant he fell to his knees.
“Oh God help me, what have I done?” He wept. He cried aloud. “I was taking my cow to the grainery and I opened the wrong door. Oh, don’t harm me. Please. Take me to Barbarossa. I have a proposition for him.”
They dragged the weeping drunk to the warrior, and he looked with astonishment at the drunk man and the fat sleek cow.
“I have a proposition for you,” Gagliaudi said. “Don’t kill me. Please don’t harm me.”
“Italians always have propositions,” Barbarossa said.
“It’s how we survive,” the peasant said. “We’re weak. But if you will let me go I will promise to go back inside the walls with any soldiers you select and bring you back my twelve cows.”
“Twelve like this?”
“No, not like this.” He kicked the fat cow. “Twelve that are fat and filled with meat and milk. Not this beast. I was treating her, sir. Can’t you see? She’s sick.”
It was Barbarossa who was sick, sick at the sight of all of that beef on the hoof.
“Do you mean to tell me you have twelve more like that inside the walls?”
“Only my own, sir. Just my own. All of the others belong to someone else and I can’t give them to you.”
Barbarossa was above all things a good soldier, and a good soldier recognizes when he is beaten. The city clearly had enough food to last them for two more years at least. That afternoon he packed up his army and he left. The city was saved.
* * *
They all looked at one another. It seemed to be saying something to them. The answer was in the story, everyone felt that.
“It’s in there,” Bombolini shouted to them. “Otherwise why would He have put it there, eh?”
But they were silent. It was a strange story; every man in the room felt that the answer was flitting about inside his brain waiting to fly out on his tongue, but when it came time to open the mouth nothing came out.
“It’s like those parables in the Bible,” someone said. “Just when I seem to understand and have it in my hands it hops away from me.”
They looked at each other as if by staring very hard into one another’s eyes they would unlock the answer in their minds. A long time passed. They heard the thin sound of the bell telling that it was midday, and no one in the room was any closer to the secret of Gagliaudi.
“To hell with all this,” Pietro Pietrosanto suddenly shouted. “To hell with this bum and his cow. I say fight.”
There was a cheer from the others. Their minds were tired from the pressure of the thinking, and the idea of fighting seemed good then. At least it was doing something.
“I say dig in down in the rocks by the big bend in the road in the terraces and the sons of bitches will never get us out.”
Another cheer.
“Sometimes you make people spill a little blood for what they want, and you find they don’t want it so much any more.”
The problem with Bombolini was that he was torn between voices.
Men often deceive themselves in believing that humility can overcome insolence. Any way that you read that, it meant to resist, to fight.
“I say this to you,” a young man shouted. “The German who touches my wine or my wife pays for his touch in blood.”
A very big cheer then.
And yet The Master had also said: Cunning and deceit will every time serve a man better than force.
Bombolini was confused and, even worse, he began to feel a kind of fear dancing in the back of his mind like cold needles, like the sun, cold and brilliant, on ice. The Master was failing him.
“Fabio was right, he was the one who knew,” another young man was now shouting. “What good is it to save yourself and then crawl around your own country like a dog looking for a bone?”
“Mussolini was right. Better to live one day as a lion than one hundred years as a lamb.”
A great cheer then and the eyes turned on the mayor, because it was he who had painted out the sign. All these brave words, these cries of valor. How to answer them? He thought of one more saying of Machiavelli: Deceit in the conduct of war outweighs valor and is worthy of merit.
How could that be explained to them? How to tell a bunch of men bent on becoming heroes that it would be more heroic of them to practice being cowards?
Just as Fabio had once been saved by Babbaluche, now Tommaso Casamassima, Rosa Bombolini’s uncle, stood up in the room and struck the floor with his mulberry stick until there was silence.
“You forget who you are,” he shouted. “You forget where you come from. You think you’re warriors and you shout like heroes and you are a bunch of grape growers.”
There was silence, because everyone knew what Tommaso said was so.
“A bunch of grape growers.”
Silence.
“We have no heroes here. This is no country for heroes. If you want to be martyrs, go be martyrs somewhere else. We can’t afford martyrs in Santa Vittoria.”
Silence.
“Tend to your grapes.”
Silence.
“Because you forget the one lesson that every Santa Vittorian has known for the last thousand years: Brave men and good wine don’t last long.”
* * *
Everyone went outside after that. All idea of the fight was ended. The people were waiting for them in the piazza.
“We’re thinking. Don’t worry. We’re coming up with something.”
As if it were a command, they began to go across the Piazza of the People and down the Corso Cavour to the Cooperative Wine Cellar. In the absence of anything to do they were making a pilgrimage and performing an act of faith in the wine, the way people in other places might go into a church and pray for guidance.
They filed in through the narrow door, into the cool dimness and smelt the incense of the cellar, that sweet sharp smell of the herbs that go into the vermouth, and went down through the tiers of wine which look like tall pews in an attitude of reverence.
It is a true sea of wine in that cellar, a rich dark-red sea held in bottles. To the south of here there are towns where people make the sign of the cr
oss over each crust of bread before they eat it, and we are the same way with the wine. To say something loud or vulgar, to utter an obscenity in the presence of the wine, would be the same as urinating in a cathedral. The sight of so much wine, all that wine to be stolen, was too great for Bombolini to bear, and he went out of a little-used side door and back up a narrow back lane until he reached the piazza and the Palace of the People and found Roberto.
“Have you figured out the story yet?” he said.
Roberto looked puzzled.
“The dream. My dream. What does it mean? You’re the American. You know everything.” He was shouting at Roberto, but then he stopped and sat down. “What are you doing?”
“Arithmetic. My arithmetic. I’m figuring out the hours until they come.”
Bombolini didn’t want to know. He preferred it that way. Without any plan it was better to just let them come when they came, unprepared for and unannounced.
“All right,” he said finally. “How many.”
“They’ll be here in fifty-three hours.”
When he heard the hour now it began to flash in his mind in large block letters, as bright and clear as the lights on the theater in Montefalcone, flashing on and off—53 … 53 … 53 … 53—and it was minutes before the glow of the lights would leave his brain.
He went to the window of Roberto’s room and looked down at the people standing in the midday sun in the piazza, and he looked at the wall and at a picture of St. Sebastian being rent with arrows.
“Quick, now. As fast as you can say the words. If you were me what would you do with the wine?”
“Hide.”
“What?”
“Hide it.”
“You would hide it?”
“Yes, hide it,” Roberto said.
“Oh, Roberto. So simple and clean and beautiful that it’s almost stupid,” the mayor said, and he struck Roberto such a blow on the arm that it was weeks before the American could raise it without feeling pain.
ON THAT same afternoon, Captain von Prum wrote this, the second letter to his brother Klaus.
Klaus:
You falter, you lose sight again.
The Secret of Santa Vittoria Page 14
