The Secret of Santa Vittoria

by Robert Crichton

  The night gave us protection from the eyes on the road and although the idea of morning was desired by the people it frightened them as well. But what frightened the people most of all was the knowledge that as hard as they had gone—and each hour they were going slower and slower—the Cooperative Wine Cellar on the mountain was still more than half full.

  Some time after ten that night, when the wine was moving badly, Tufa decided that the time had come to risk the use of light. The pine boughs that had been cut that night were bound with wire and dipped into barrels of ox fat and lengths of rope were dipped in the same barrels and they were lit and passed down the mountain, one every fifty feet or so. It was dangerous. Beneath the fog the light of the flaming torches was magnified and the line glowed like some flaming arrow pointing down from the city to the ancient cellar below. It was dangerous, but it gave the people heart again. The people here are afraid of the night. Many of the men were afraid to step off the line and go into the vineyards to relieve themselves, and the women also worked in fear and pain both. The lights gave them courage.

  And it was these lights which drew Roberto down to the wine-passing line. He had recovered from the blow and gone to bed, and when he awoke he went out of the Palace of the People and, not finding Bombolini, took a walk in the piazza to clear his head. He had thought the city was asleep until he saw the lights. He went down the Corso to witness what his words had begun.

  “What happened to you?” Bombolini said.

  “You know what happened to me,” Roberto said.

  “Oh, yes,” the mayor said. It seemed to have taken place weeks before. “It was excitement. I know you understand. A blow of admiration. A blow of love. I am Sicilian, you understand.”

  “Being Sicilian must be a very strange thing,” Roberto said. “It provides an excuse for everything.”

  He watched the wine going down the mountain and he knew what was taking place, and then he went back up to the Cooperative Wine Cellar. He could see that almost half or perhaps even more than half of the wine was gone by then and he could also see that the people on the line were working by instinct, at the level of the lowest animals, like blind mules grinding grain at harvest.

  “It’s good that you are almost done,” Roberto said. “The people can’t go on much longer.”

  “What do you mean, done? There’s still half of the wine to go,” the mayor said.

  “But you wouldn’t take it all. You have to leave some of it for them.”

  “We don’t leave a drop for the bastards,” a man shouted to Roberto from the line. “Don’t give away our wine, friend.”

  He felt guilty not helping, and although his leg pained him to work he took a place in line from a woman and was pleased to find that he could do the work and that he was near Caterina Malatesta and Angela Bombolini, although he knew he shouldn’t think of such things. The work helped, but it bothered him, because he knew they were wrong about the wine. While he passed the bottles he remembered something from his youth and he knew he was right and that he also could tell it to the people in a way that they could understand.

  It was the Rabbit Garden that since has become famous in Santa Vittoria. When Roberto was a boy his father put in a large vegetable garden in the back of the house, because no Italian could stand the sight of soil going unused. Roberto was ashamed of it, filled with broccoli and other goomba foods. At night the rabbits came from the woods along a parkway and stole from the garden. The first year the garden was a failure, until some people told his father what the Americans did. They made their garden and they fenced it in, and then they made a second garden, smaller, with a low fence around it, for the rabbits. The rabbits came and ate the rabbit garden and they never touched the main garden again.

  “That’s America for you,” his father would say, and he would tap his head. In Italy, he would say, they would put boys in the garden all night if they had to, but they never would build a garden for the rabbit.

  “Signora,” Roberto said. “You have to take your place again.” She was disgusted with him.

  “You Americans, you have no guts,” she said. “You have forgotten how to work.”

  He went to Bombolini and he told his story, and Bombolini knew at once that it was true, that Santa Vittoria, if the Germans weren’t to tear it apart brick by brick and stone by stone, needed a Rabbit Garden of its own. The only question was how large the garden should be.

  The mayor told it to Tufa, and Tufa was impressed, and Pietrosanto was made to understand, and so they stopped the flow of wine and allowed the people to rest, and by the light of the pine torches they held a meeting of the Grand Council.

  The council members looked into the wine cellar, and some of them walked around the bottles and tried to count them in their heads, and they came back outside with long faces.

  “Ten thousand bottles,” one of the older men shouted.

  “Ten thousand. It’s enough,” another said. “Not a drop more. It’s all that we can afford.”

  Everyone knew the number was wrong, but none of them wanted to be the one to give the wine away; it goes against everything in the blood. Pietro Pietrosanto is tougher than the rest and a realist, and it was Pietro who began the bidding again.

  “One hundred thousand bottles,” Pietro called out.

  One older man clapped his hand over his heart as if a knife had been put in it. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” he said, and he made the sign of the cross.

  For a time after that, no one dared to talk, because although there was not much time shocks such as these need time to be absorbed. Tufa and Roberto knew that a hundred thousand bottles were not enough, but it was Babbaluche who let them know it in the manner they could understand.

  He began by calling them bottle-grubbing bastards and penny-pinching peasant pigs and he ended by saying things that in Italy it is forbidden to put on paper, even in one’s own home, and in the end he named a proper figure: 500,000 bottles.

  He was correct and at the same time he was wrong.

  No bearer of the blood of the men who cut the terraces an inch at a time out of the stony sides of the mountain, no sons of those whose sweat watered the vines that had first been planted here a thousand years before, was capable of giving away 500,000 bottles of wine, even if it was the only correct thing to do. There is a limit to how far men will go even to save themselves. But the figure had the virtue of making the figure that was finally decided upon seem believable. After more minutes of bidding and debate, during which men wept and threatened to put themselves to death first, it was agreed to plant the Rabbit Garden with 300,000 bottles of wine.

  It is possible that at any other moment in the city’s history such a figure would have led to rebellion, but the people were then too tired to rebel, and the truth, which was not admitted for a long time afterward, was that to many it meant 300,000 fewer bottles to carry down the mountain. It gave the people on the line a second or third or last source of energy, the way it must be with a runner when he finally sees the tape ahead of him. There was at last a goal in sight and it was one that could be reached.

  At a little after four o’clock in the morning, when the sun had warned of its coming by making the torches useless, Tufa stepped in front of the man who had just bent once more and picked a bottle off the floor of the Cooperative cellar and he took it out of his hands.

  “This is enough,” Tufa said. “You can rest. This is the end. This is the last bottle.”

  The last bottle. They started it down the line with tenderness, they handled it with enormous delicacy. “Don’t drop it,” they said, “this is the last.” People expected it to look different from all the rest, but it was the same, and it was hard to believe that one more would not be coming after it. They passed it along the way women pass around the newborn child or as if they were passing the Holy Eucharist, the Body and Blood of Christ, down the mountain, which in a manner they were, since this was the wine of God and the body and blood of Santa Vittoria.

 
; It was strange when the bottle had gone past. There was no sense of joy, but only one of emptiness.

  “What do we do now?” a woman asked Tufa.

  “We go home to our beds,” he said to her.

  “But it’s time to get up.”

  “We go home to our beds.”

  They began to leave the line, the young helping the old, many so bent over they could not then straighten up. They went up the Corso Cavour and off into the lanes and were lost in the corners and dark pockets of fog in the piazzas. It was agreed that the city should sleep until four o’clock in the afternoon, and then some of them should go down onto the terraces so that the Germans would not be suspicious and some should be in the piazzas and the streets.

  Tufa waited for Caterina to come up the line because he was too tired to go down after her.

  “This is the man who saved Santa Vittoria,” Bombolini said to the Malatesta.

  Tufa doesn’t like this kind of thing. “We aren’t saved yet,” Tufa said, “and if we are, the people saved the people.”

  “We know,” Bombolini said. “Everyone knows.”

  “Oh Christ, he can be a bore,” Tufa said.

  “And Christ, he can be true,” Caterina said.

  “Don’t use language like that,” Tufa said.

  They stayed behind the others in the cellar and rested, because they were too tired to climb up through the city without rest. She slept again, but he woke her.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “They’ll be here in twelve hours.”

  “And what if they come sooner?”

  “They won’t come sooner,” Tufa said. “If they’re supposed to come at five o’clock, they’ll come at five o’clock.”

  Everyone had gone by then, except the men who couldn’t be seen who were still laying wine in the Roman cellar and the men who were preparing the mortar and the brick to build the false wall. The street ahead of them was empty and the street behind, and when they went through the Piazza of the People it was empty as well. If it is possible to hear a city sleep, Santa Vittoria slept.

  Caterina slept when she reached the bed. She had taken off her gloves, and he could see the soreness and the blisters of her hands. On the table was the egg she had found, a small one, a jewel of an egg, still stained by the dung heap in which she had found it. He broke the shell and drank the egg and put his head back on the bed. He had no idea whether he had slept or not when there was a shout at the door and he tried to get up and could not and then someone was beside him.

  “Tufa?” He shook him. “Tufa, you got to get up. You hear me?” Tufa nodded.

  “Something terrible has happened on the mountain.”

  Caterina didn’t hear him get up and go.

  THE EXPEDITIONARY force to Santa Vittoria. They were ready to go by ten o’clock that morning. They could have left and been in Santa Vittoria before noon, but they remained in the street that leads into the Piazza Frossimbone and waited for later in the afternoon. They wanted to move while it was still light, but late enough in the day so that any planes that might strafe them would have gone home for the night.

  There was the motorcycle and behind it the small truck, and behind the truck the 20-millimeter dual-purpose gun. They were dressed not for war, but as if they were going on parade.

  “If I had flowers I would put flowers in your buttonholes, is that understood?” Captain von Prum had told them that morning. They had all nodded.

  They were restless. They wandered from the convoy out into the piazza and back into the shadows and out into the sun again, and as they waited they began to talk with the informality that boredom can induce. From the piazza it was possible to see from Montefalcone across the river to where several villages and towns, much like Santa Vittoria were hanging far up on the sides of their mountain.

  “Why did they build them up there, sir?” Sergeant Traub asked the captain.

  “People like us,” von Prum said. The sergeant didn’t know whether to laugh at that or not.

  He tried again later, however.

  “I have to admire those terraces, sir,” Traub said. “It must have taken work.”

  “Yes, hundreds of years work,” von Prum said. “Back-breaking work.”

  “I didn’t know the wops had it in them,” the sergeant said. At a glance from the captain he changed that. “The Italians,” he said.

  “That’s better, Sergeant.”

  Because of that, Traub decided to bring up one thing which had been troubling him and which he might have kept to himself.

  “Sometimes it seems like a shame to take their wine,” Traub said. The captain looked at him and so he was forced to go on. “They work so hard for it, I mean. It’s what Schnabel was saying, sir. He worked in the vineyards. ‘A bottle of sweat for every bottle of wine.’”

  “And then we come and take it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And then you had better think of it this way. We are engaged in a war, and wars aren’t pretty things to be engaged in.”

  “No, sir.”

  “What we do we do to aid the state, the Fatherland. Whatever aids the state is good.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And now let me tell something a very wise German once wrote, Sergeant. To put your mind at rest.”

  The others had come around them, which pleased the captain. He wanted to give a lecture at this time, but without making it seem to be one.

  “‘The essence of life is a taking over.’ Do you understand that?”

  Not only Traub, but the others too nodded. He repeated the words.

  “We don’t invent this fact. This is life itself.” He paused to allow them to think about his words. “The people who are rising in the world take over. The ones who are sinking are taken over.”

  “The Germans and the Italians,” Traub said.

  “It is the natural order of things. Nothing can alter it. The strong take; the weak surrender. Do you think that is wrong?”

  None of them was sure how to answer.

  “It isn’t right or wrong. It is nothing. It is the way of life. The fact of life. The truth of all life.”

  He was through and knew that it was a good time to get away from the soldiers and let them accept the truth themselves.

  “Let’s get going and take over then,” Heinsick said.

  “The orders say five o’clock,” Sergeant Traub said. “If it says five o’clock it means five o’clock, and we will be there at five o’clock.”

  “Do you believe that?” Heinsick said. “What he said?”

  “Yes, I believe that. There are those who are born to be on top and those who are born to be on the bottom. Like officers and soldiers. There’s von Prum and Heinsick. Von Prum is better than you.”

  “Yes, it’s true,” Heinsick said.

  “But then you’re superior to most wops.”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  * * *

  They met him in the Piazza of the People—Bombolini, Pietrosanto, Fabio and Roberto—and started at once down the Corso Cavour.

  “It can’t be described to you. You have to see it. All at once,” Bombolini said.

  Down through the Fat Gate, down the track that goes through the terraces. The sun was well up then. Fog still clung to clumps of grape leaves and tried to hold on to the vines, but they were only shreds of fog, the sun had burned the rest away.

  “Don’t turn back,” Bombolini said. “I want you to see it all at once.”

  On the sandy flat before the entrance to the Big Room the bricks had already been brought down and were stacked on the sand. Some men were taking the first bricks inside, while a second group was beginning to mix the cement and lime and sand and water that would be used to seal the bricks together.

  “They might as well stop that now,” Bombolini said, but the men didn’t hear him.

  “It’s not going to do any good. It’s all a waste now.” They didn’t hear him. In the morning Bombolini seemed to have grown smaller than he
had been in the night. He touched Tufa on the arm. “Go ahead. Look. You might as well see it now.”

  Tufa was unable at first to see what was causing the concern, and when he did see it he felt that it might only be some trick that the early morning sun was playing or that his own eyes were playing on him even though it was clear to him that the others had seen what he saw.

  From the Thin Gate down the goat path, down through the terraces and directly into the mouth of the cellar ran, unbroken, and growing darker and wider as it went, a brilliant purple stain.

  “The wine,” he said.

  “Yes, the wine,” someone answered him.

  And making the purple even more brilliant to the eye, dazzling in truth, was the glitter of the sun on the pieces of glass from a thousand broken bottles.

  “If God Himself were making a sign to where the wine was hidden He could not have done a finer piece of work,” Bombolini said.

  They could not take their eyes away from the stain. Each moment, as the sun rose higher and the mist burned away, the color grew in strength and in depth and the glass shone more brightly to match the sun itself. Old Vines came out of the cellar and looked at the mountain.

  “We never should have disturbed the wine,” he said. “This is His curse for disturbing the wine.”

  When they could stand looking at the stain no longer they went back across the sand to the Big Room. Cavalcanti the Goat, who wanted to be a professional bicycle rider and who claimed he could pedal a bike for two days without stopping, was turning the generator and the lights were glowing and the men with the bricks were ready to begin to lay them, but when they saw the faces of Bombolini and Tufa and the rest, they stopped what they were doing.