The Secret of Santa Vittoria

by Robert Crichton

  I cease to preach to you. Don’t take a brother’s word, take instead the words of a man you profess to admire.

  “You say it is the good cause that hallows even war.

  I say unto you: It is the good war that hallows any cause.” Need I say more, Klaus?

  “It is a sad fact, but a fact, that war and courage have accomplished more great things than love of thy neighbor. Not your pity but your courage will save the unfortunate.”

  Need any more? One more, then.

  “What is good?” you ask. “To be brave is good.”

  Your men were not brave, Klaus, and for that they paid the price, as any evil person must pay.

  I finish with Nietzsche.

  “What matters long life?

  What warrior wants to be spared?”

  Your brother,

  Sepp

  Klaus: We move out within two days, as I intimated to you. I have my duty, you have your duty. Wish me luck, Klaus, even as I wish you the same.

  * * *

  The effort to hide the wine was a failure. Within the first half hour of the experiment, before twenty thousand bottles had been taken from the Cooperative Wine Cellar and brought up into the Piazza of the People it was clear to anyone who wished to see it that the experiment was no longer worth going on with. But people sometimes are more willing to go on with the work than face up to the failure.

  They piled the bottles in the piazza and then the different families began to hide them in their houses. They put them in closets and under beds and behind pictures and in the backs of fireplaces and then in the drains and on the roofs and under loose tiles and then in the manure piles and on grapevine hung down the chimneys.

  “Keep the wine in the shadows, the sun is bruising it,” Old Vines shouted at the people. “Would you put a newborn baby in the sun? This wine isn’t even born yet. Don’t shake the wine. Would you shake a newborn baby? This wine isn’t born yet.”

  Sometime in the early afternoon Bombolini summoned the courage to ask the keeper of the wine how many bottles remained to be hidden, and when Old Vines told him, it was a matter of several minutes before he could make himself hear the figures, and when he did he wrote them on a card—“1,320,000.”

  Each time he looked at the number he found it hard to comprehend. He held the card up first on one side and then on the other, as if somehow, if he twisted it in enough ways, the value of the numbers might change. Even if they hid 100,000 bottles, which was impossible, it was only one thirteenth of the wine and by enormous effort they would have achieved nothing. At four o’clock there was to be an inspection of the hiding, and the teams went out even though all of the people knew what they would report. A few minutes later the first of them came back.

  “It’s no good, Captain. It isn’t working right,” Longo’s son said. “You can see bottles everywhere. Everytime you turn around in the Pietrosanto house you sit on a bottle, you step on a bottle, you break a bottle. The beds are lumpy with bottles.”

  It was the same everywhere.

  “Bring the bottles back out,” Bombolini ordered, and he felt at that moment the dread of failure. To the credit of the people he passed, none of them said anything to him. He went back across the piazza, passing the bottles piled on the cobblestones and piled in carts, seeing and not seeing at the same time the people going into the houses and starting to bring the wine back out. He had the weight of the city and of one thousand people and now one million bottles of wine to carry. It was too much for any one man, he thought. He felt someone pulling on him and he turned to look. It was Fungo, the idiot.

  It is said that when a man is drowning, just as he goes down, he will grab at a twig in the water and for that moment really believe that it will hold him; and so, at this moment, Bombolini stopped to listen to Fungo.

  “I have something to tell you,” Fungo said.

  “Tell. Tell me.”

  Out of the mouths of babes and idiots and drunks— Who could tell until he listened?

  “Tufa’s back,” the boy said.

  “Oh, Christ above!”

  “You have a filthy mouth,” the boy said.

  “Excuse me. How do you know?”

  The boy told him how he had gone to Tufa’s house to see if he could find any bottles and he had found Tufa there, in the dark, lying on the floor.

  “He’s dying,” Fungo said.

  “How would you know that?”

  “Someone told me.”

  “Who?”

  “Tufa. And he should know.”

  I will attend to Tufa, he thought. It was at least something positive to do. I will make every effort to save Tufa’s life. He thought for a moment that he was crying, and then he looked up and was surprised to see that it was raining.

  The people were running past him, getting out of the piazza before the full force of the rain reached them. The people here love the rain and they love to see it rain. It is not going too far to say they adore the rain in Italy, but as soon as they see a drop they run from it.

  Old Vines caught up to Bombolini. “Stop them,” he shouted. “You have to order them to stay. We can’t leave the wine out here. The rain will wash the dust from the bottles. The rain will chill the wine.”

  Bombolini looked at the old man as if he came from some other town. “Who cares?” he said. “Do we have to have the wine at room temperature for the Germans when they come?”

  “Wine is wine no matter who has it,” the old man shouted. “To abuse wine is to abuse life itself.” Now he was shaking Bombolini by the shoulders and shouting something about killing him.

  “Then fuck the wine,” Bombolini said. Old Vines fell away from him.

  “Oh, you sin,” he said. Neither of them felt the rain that was falling hard by then. “You sin against the wine.”

  I fully expect the next bolt of lightening to strike me in the heart, Bombolini thought.

  He pushed the cellar master to one side and started down the Corso Cavour to Old Town and Tufa’s mother’s house. He had made up his mind to keep all of his thoughts on Tufa.

  There were strange things about Tufa. He was, for one, an officer in the army, and that should have separated him from the people here, but it didn’t. Even worse, he was a Fascist, but this had never stopped him from being a hero to the young people here and a person to whom the old were not afraid to turn for help when he was home.

  The thing about Tufa was that he was a true Fascist, a real Fascist, who believed all the glorious words and tried to follow them, and that had made him a very strange person here and in all of Italy. As a young boy he had been chosen from all the rest in Santa Vittoria to go away and be trained as a Young Fascist Scout. He had believed every word he heard at the camp. Later he became a soldier and after that was made an officer in the Sforzesca, one of the aristocratic regiments, a very rare thing to happen.

  When he came home on leave people would go to him and ask him to intercede for them with The Band or with the Fascists in Montefalcone.

  “What is this I hear you are doing to Baldisseri?” he would ask them. “Only Communists would do a thing like that.”

  It must have been a mistake, they always told him, and it would certainly not happen again.

  “Well of course not,” he would say. “We don’t do things like that.”

  “No, we don’t,” they would say. They were afraid of the innocence in his eyes and the anger that could replace it. He was a believer in a nation of nonbelievers, people who believe that to believe in anything is dangerous and even evil itself, since believing limits one and to be limited is to court disaster. None of the Fascists in the region could wait for Tufa’s leaves to be over, and they breathed easier when he was gone and hoped to God that he would meet a glorious end in Albania or Greece or Africa.

  The room was dark and it felt wet and it was dirty. It smelled bad. Tufa’s mother had never been able to run a house.

  “Where is he?” Bombolini asked. The soldier’s mother pointed to on
e end of the room, where the mayor could eventually make out Tufa’s shape lying on the floor facing the stone wall.

  “He’s going to die,” the mother said. “I can see it in his eyes. All the life is gone.”

  Bombolini crossed the room and stood over Tufa’s body, not knowing what to say to him. Tufa had never liked him because he had been a clown and Tufa didn’t understand clowns. With a terrible slowness Tufa turned away from the wall and looked at Bombolini.

  “Get out of here,” he said. “I have always despised you.”

  The mother was wrong about the eyes. There was the recognition of death in them, but there was also hatred, which had not been seen there before, and beneath both of these a kind of terrible hurt.

  “You had better get out,” the mother said. “He means what he says. He always means what he says.”

  “Tufa? Can you hear me?”

  “Get out of here.”

  “I’m not a clown any more, Tufa. I’m the mayor here now. Can you hear me? Can you understand that?”

  “Get out of here.”

  The hatred was so strong that it defeated Bombolini. He backed out of the house and stood in the Corso Cavour and allowed the rain to fall on him until his hair was streaming with water. The people looked at him from the doorways. Now there wasn’t even Tufa as a reason for existing. He started back up the Corso. Before he reached the piazza, Pietro Pietrosanto came down the steps toward him. “We can’t put it off any longer,” Pietrosanto said. “We’ve got to do something with The Band.”

  Bombolini took in a large breath. Pietro was correct, the time had come. It was the one problem he had been unable to face since the day he had taken office. He knew the words of The Master: “Men must either be caressed or annihilated and the injury must be such that the victim cannot pay you back for it. Whoever acts otherwise is obliged to stand forever with knife in hand.” At night he could hear the words tumbling through his mind and he would resolve in the darkness to do something about them, but in the morning when the sun lit the walls along the piazza and the people went down to work, another day would pass with the problem unanswered. Now, with the Germans coming, there was no room left for the luxury of indecision.

  “Do away with them,” Bombolini said.

  Pietrosanto found this hard to believe.

  “I am tired of standing with my knife in my hand.”

  “I don’t understand you,” Pietro said.

  Bombolini took Pietrosanto by the arm. “Do you have a rifle? You own a rifle, don’t you?”

  “Shoot them? Is that what you mean? Shoot the sons of bitches?”

  “I don’t mean to caress them,” the mayor said. “Come.” They both went back up toward the piazza. “Try and look as if we have a plan,” Bombolini said. “It gives the people heart.”

  It had stopped raining. It had been a good drenching rain. As Old Vines had feared, the rain had washed all of the dust off the backs of the dark-green bottles, and in the greyness of the light the wetness caused them to sparkle as if the stones of the piazza were strewn with jewels.

  “I don’t know about shooting,” Pietrosanto was saying but Bombolini didn’t hear him. Now that he had ordered the final solution to the problem of The Band it didn’t concern him any more. He looked instead at the wine.

  “What do you think they would think if they were to come now?” Bombolini said.

  “That we were trying to butter them up. That it was a gift for them.”

  He was probably right, the mayor thought.

  “They’d take it as their due,” Pietro said. “It’s the way they are.”

  “Yes, that’s how they are,” Bombolini agreed.

  THAT EVENING Bombolini asked Roberto to go and ask the Malatesta to take a look at Tufa. “She’ll listen to you,” Bombolini said. “You’re not from here, and she thinks you’re brave.”

  “She doesn’t think I’m brave,” Roberto said. “She thinks I’m afraid of pain.”

  “Ah, but that’s just it. Because you’re afraid of pain, the way you acted to it makes you a brave man,” he said. “Besides, I think she has an eye for you. She thinks you’re handsome.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I heard her say so once.”

  It was a lie, a complete and shameless lie, which Roberto recognized as a lie and treated as one, and yet it made his heart beat faster. Despite himself, the heart beat faster.

  He dressed and went into the rain and crossed the Piazza of the People. It was the first time he had seen all the bottles in the piazza. At the wineshop he decided to stop and get some cheese before making the hard climb up to High Town and when he thought of facing the Malatesta he ordered a full bottle of wine as well.

  “What’s all the wine doing in the piazza?” he asked Rosa Bombolini.

  “Do you think I know? Do you think I care? Do you think I give a shit what idiot tricks that boob is up to?”

  He determined never to ask her a question again. When he came out it was dark and he felt a little drunk from the wine, but it made the ache in his bone feel better. At the street that runs up into High Town someone whispered his name. It was Fabio.

  “I thought you were up in the mountains.” Roberto said.

  “I am in the mountains. Five of us. The Petrarch Brigade, formally. The Red Flames, informally.” He named four young boys who were with him, none of whom was over fifteen years of age. “They’re young, but they can fight,” Fabio said. “They also are hungry.”

  With some of his own money and some of Fabio’s, Roberto went back to the wineshop and bought two loaves of bread for the Red Flames.

  “Now you do a favor for me,” Roberto said. He made Fabio go with him to face Caterina Malatesta. They walked up the hill in silence for a long way.

  “How is she?” Fabio said at last.

  “Who?”

  “Angela,” Fabio said.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen her. That’s why I was buying cheese. She doesn’t bring us our meals.”

  “I suppose you two have a lot of fun together when he isn’t around.”

  “Angela and me?”

  “Yes, Angela and you. A lot of fun together, if you know what I mean.”

  “Oh no, nothing like that. Angela isn’t like that.”

  Fabio made a sound like a mule. “They’re all like that,” he said. “Don’t tell me. I know them from top to bottom. Put a grape basket over their heads and turn them upside down and—”

  “Oh, do they say that here, too? We say ‘Put a sack over their heads.’”

  Caterina lived in the next to the last house on the mountain. It was a long way.

  * * *

  Neither one of them wanted to knock on the door, but it was Fabio who finally did it, and when she came to the door and opened it they were surprised to see her. She was wearing long slender pants and little slippers and a sweater that revealed the outline of her breasts. None of these things are worn by the women here, even today. She had pulled her hair back and tied it with a scarf the way the peasant women do, and yet it looked nothing like a peasant’s. She didn’t wish to come and she resisted, but Fabio was persuasive and there is something about Tufa, even to those who had barely known him, that was special. She got a raincoat that looked like the kind of coat army officers wear, and she went with them down the dark winding back lane into Old Town.

  She didn’t knock at the door of the house, but opened it and went in and put down the medical bag Roberto had carried for her. She took a lamp from the bag and when it was lit she could see Tufa, not lying down any longer but propped up against the wall looking at her the way a wolf looks at someone coming for him from the back of a cave. In the light his teeth were as bright as his eyes, and he looked very sane and very mad at the same moment, like someone who could kill or become a martyr with equal ease.

  He frightened Roberto. He had never before seen a man who seemed to burn. Caterina had known him from when she was a girl, but when she saw him she made a so
und, a stifled sound of astonishment. She was not able to take her eyes away from him.

  “You are hurt,” she said.

  “You aren’t going to touch me.” Tufa has the finest voice in the city, sweet and yet strong. Sometimes it sounds as if Tufa was whispering through the pipe of an organ.

  “You’re badly hurt. I can help you. You’d like to die, but your body won’t allow you to.”

  He said nothing.

  “It’s the fate of your kind,” she said. “My kind die easily.”

  All of this while Caterina kept moving toward him. Somewhere in this book it tells of thunderbolt love, but this was something different. There was an awareness of each other that was so acute and powerful and immediate that it went beyond anything we know as love. It is an understanding of each other so immediate and so total that there is nothing they don’t know about one another and they are able to share things with each other at once, even in front of others, that they have never been able to share with anyone before.

  They have always known each other, at once. Some people feel that this is proof that people must have lived before, people such as this are playing out again a love affair from some other age. Except for one thing: There is no love; it goes beyond love. They exist totally for one another, and nothing else exists. The attraction supplants all else, and yet there is no love, not even any tenderness, only the attraction and the understanding of one another. They are like vacuums, and when they meet the crack is formed and they rush into each other, each into the other, the souls are sharing one another, the way the wind rushes into the wine cellar when the door is swung ajar.

  When she touched him he stiffened. She didn’t move her hand for a moment, but then she began to take off the officer’s jacket he wore to examine the wounds in his chest and upper arms that he had received the week before from an exploding grenade.

  “They told me you were a good man,” she said. Roberto brought her the medical bag. “How can you be a Fascist and a good man at the same time?”

  For a long time Tufa said nothing, but it didn’t seem to bother her. She was willing to wait. She dressed several of the wounds.