The Secret of Santa Vittoria

by Robert Crichton

  “There is no sense going on,” Bombolini said. “To home and to bed. There is a purple arrow in our heart.”

  They didn’t know what the Captain was talking about. They sat in the dim coolness and looked into the dark mouth of the second cellar where the tiers of wine sat.

  “We came a long way,” one of them said. “We made a try. We didn’t quit without a fight.”

  Suddenly Vittorini got to his feet. You see Vittorini in the dim light, because he was already wearing his uniform so that he might stand at Bombolini’s side in the piazza when the Germans came, a representative of tradition, the kind of man another soldier might respect.

  “Everybody to his feet. We have a solution,” the old soldier said. “We shall wash the mountain.”

  They tried to think of ways that it wouldn’t work, because they had given up and the effort to save the wine once more was too much then to face.

  “There is no water,” Guido Pietrosanto said. “We used the last of it last night.”

  “We’ll pump some more,” Vittorini said. “Longo? Can you get the pump back up the mountain?”

  Longo was asleep against the wall. When his work was done he had drunk a good deal of wine. But when they woke him he said he could get the pump and the generator up the mountain and that the bricklayers would have to go on by torchlight.

  “I don’t want to be the one to wake the people,” Fabio said. “I couldn’t bear to look at them.”

  “They’ve had two hours’ sleep. It’s all they need,” Pietrosanto said.

  There were the carts and oxen which had brought down the bricks. They got in the carts, and on the way back up most of them slept. When the oxen stopped—since some of them were as tired as the men and had less to gain for their work—they kicked them, and when the kicks no longer worked they burned them on the bellies with the pieces of rope that had been dipped in tallow.

  It would be good to say that the people responded to the crisis with good humor, but it wasn’t true. Most of them were angry at being awakened. “You lied to us,” they said.

  “Come on, get up,” the men would say to them. “Get your water jug, get your chamber pot, get your buckets. We’re going to wash the mountain.”

  They got up, but they were angry. Once again there was a line on the mountain. This time they lined up along the spillway and when the water came they filled the jugs and bottles and walked back across the terraces to the goat path.

  At first it was no good. The water didn’t thin the wine, the wine here is so heavy and dark, but it spread the wine and made it brighter and the air was thick with the smell of sour wine. There was nothing to do, however, but to go on and finally at ten o’clock in the morning, after perhaps a hundred thousand gallons of water had been poured on the side of the mountain the wine began to thin and the earth began to swallow the wine and the water. Young boys had been coming down the path with grape baskets strapped to their backs and these were filled with glass. The people’s spirits kept rising, because in another hour, if the sun stayed out and the wind held, the earth would begin to dry and by noon no one would be able to tell what had taken place there. It had rained the day before, when it shouldn’t have rained, and now clouds were swarming up from the south. If they brought rain again it might do good, but if the clouds only served to hide the sun it could prove fatal.

  “Send for the priest,” Bombolini ordered. Before Padre Polenta was brought down from the bell tower, Capoferro was already in the little piazza before the Fat Gate rolling his sticks on the goatskin drum and shouting at the sun.

  “Come on, you bastard up there, burn us,” he shouted. “Bake us, fry us, boil us, singe us, dry us up.”

  Capoferro is one of those here who believe that God lives in the sun, just as there are those who believe He lives in the moon, although they never tell that to Polenta. When they brought the priest down the mayor seized him.

  “We need your prayers,” Bombolini said. “Say the prayers for sun.”

  “There are no prayers for sun,” the priest said. “People always pray for rain.”

  “When Noah was in the Ark I suppose the people prayed for rain?” Babbaluche said.

  “That was before organized religion,” Polenta said.

  “Ah, all they had was God, the poor bastards,” the cobbler said.

  In the end, however, they came to a sound religious compromise. The priest agreed to read the prayer for rain and everytime he came to the word he paused and the people said “sun.” At times the prayer made little sense, but God must have been able to understand what the people were trying to tell Him, since mysteries are nothing new to Him, and not too long after the prayer was said the clouds slid over Scarafaggio on the other mountain, and our wet earth began to bake again.

  After the prayers it was a time for listening again and for waiting for the false wall to grow and for re-laying the wine in the Cooperative Wine Cellar.

  It was Fungo the idiot who thought of the last, and perhaps Fungo too deserves a plaque as things turned out. There are many ways to put down wine, but in general there are two ways, the tight way which we use here and the loose way which is used in wineries that have a great deal of room to spare. In the loose way, the bottles are placed in such a fashion that they don’t touch one another. It takes a good deal of room, more room than we have here, but it reduces the chance of bottles breaking when accidents happen, and so it is used when there is room. Where Fungo learned of it no one knows, because Fungo wouldn’t say. Some people think that Fungo hears holy voices that direct him; and who is prepared to prove they don’t? Instead of going home to bed the wine-layers were put to work in the Cooperative cellar and all that morning and afternoon they spread the last of the bottles, so by midafternoon the 300,000 bottles almost filled the great room and were made to look as if they were at least 600,000.

  The listening was for the boys who were stationed in the drainage ditches and in the reeds and rushes along the side of the River Road with high-pitched little whistles carved from reeds by Babbaluche and his family in the night. The boys were spread out along the road as far apart as they could go and still hear the next whistle down the line. When the first of them saw the Germans approach he was to blow on his whistle and it would be picked up by the next along the line and all the way up to Santa Vittoria so that we would have an early warning of their arrival in case they came too soon or in case they came late under the cover of darkness. In that way we would have some chance to put away things and to hide signs that might be revealing, to sweep the sand around the entrance to the cellars, to put back up the brick wall of the Cooperative cellar, to get the people out of the piazzas and to get people down onto the terraces.

  But most of the worry was with the wall.

  “How does it grow?” the people asked.

  “It grows, it grows,” Bombolini would say. But the work went slowly. The light of the flares was bad and it caused smoke, and the men were on the edge of exhaustion. But, as Bombolini said, it grew and it wouldn’t stop growing. It was two feet by eleven o’clock, and six feet by noon, and eight feet by the time the people had had their bread and soup and the old people at least and some of the women had fallen asleep. At one o’clock a boy rode up the mountain on a mule and he had good news to tell the town. The wall would be finished no later than two o’clock that afternoon, three good hours before the Germans came.

  At fifteen minutes before two o’clock, Italo Bombolini and Tufa and Pietrosanto and Vittorini and Fabio and Roberto and twenty other members of the Grand Council of Santa Vittoria went through the Fat Gate and started down the mountain. Every so often they stopped to listen for the sound of a reed whistle, but when they heard nothing they went on.

  The men had done a good job. They had done a fine job. It is not too much to say that it is doubtful if such a wall could have been built in such time and under such circumstances in many parts of the world. It is not to boast, but it is a fact and part of history that Italians have a gen
ius for stone and brick.

  From the floor of the cellar entrance in the back wall of the Big Room to the arched ceiling, the bricks had been fitted with enormous care, shaped and fitted to the old bricks of the wall so that they looked as if they had grown there and not been laid by the hand of man.

  “You have done a great thing for yourself and for the people of Santa Vittoria,” Bombolini said. He cried. What had been that morning a gaping entrance to a great ancient wine-filled cellar was now one solid blank wall. The cellar and the wine were gone.

  Many of the men were already asleep on the floor and others, too tired to listen and even to sleep, rested against the wall, so almost none of them, the first time at least, heard what Tufa said.

  “The wall will have to come down,” Tufa said.

  The ones who heard him, or wanted to hear him, turned around.

  “Why did you say that, Tufa?” one said.

  “The wall will have to come down,” he said again. Tufa at times can have such a voice, so cold and hollow and distant that it seems like an echo from the back of a cave.

  “It’s no good,” he said. “The wall won’t do. It will have to come down.”

  No one noticed Luigi Casamassima, who had been the leader of bricklayers, get up from along the wall and come behind Tufa and put his hands around his neck.

  “You’re crazy, Tufa,” Luigi shouted. “You’re a Fascist. You’re in the pay of the Germans.” He turned to the rest of them. “Don’t let Tufa say things like that.”

  “You’re doing that, Luigi, because you know it’s true.”

  Casamassima took his hands away then, but Tufa turned to him and his voice was low and not cold.

  “You should have stopped, Luigi. You should have had the courage to stop.”

  “We couldn’t stop,” Luigi said. “We were too tired to stop. All we could do was go on.”

  When they turned back to the false wall, all of them could see it then.

  “It stands out like a new grave,” one of them said.

  “Like a priest in a whorehouse,” Babbaluche said.

  CAPTAIN VON PRUM’S convoy was scheduled to move out of the Piazza Frossimbone and start down toward the Constantine Gate at 2:30 P.M., and at 2:25 Sergeant Traub gave the order to start up the engines. The truck motor started but the motorcycle was silent. Sergeant Traub climbed off the saddle of the motorcycle and apologized to Captain von Prum who was sitting in the sidecar and got down on his knees to examine the engine. Heinsick was looking over his shoulder.

  “The spark plugs,” the corporal said. “Some son of a bitch has stolen your spark plugs.”

  Traub looked defeated. “It will take me two days to get some plugs,” he said.

  Heinsick put a hand on the sergeant’s shoulder. “Field expediency,” he said. He walked down the lane that leads out of the piazza until he came to a line of vehicles pulled up in the shadows of the lane hiding under camouflage nets. He looked both ways in the lane and then slipped under the netting and several minutes later came back up the lane juggling several spark plugs in his hand.

  “When in Italy,” Heinsick said, “do as the wops do. Rob the bastards blind.”

  Only one minute late the convoy started down toward the gate. The motorcycle was at the head and behind it came the truck, driven by a soldier under the command of Heinsick. In the back of the truck, squashed tightly, were five other private soldiers and behind the truck was the dual-purpose gun. At the gate they were forced to wait for clearance.

  “I wouldn’t want to be going up there,” one of the German guards said. “Eight men.”

  The Italian guard was very upset about it.

  “Not enough men,” he said. “An insult, don’t you see? Fifty men, a hundred men, what can anyone do. But eight men. They have to fight if only to defend their honor.”

  “Maybe they have no honor,” one of the Germans said. The Italian was hurt.

  “You insult them,” he said. “I’m warning you. You insult me.” They laughed at him.

  “Even so, I wouldn’t want to be going up there,” a German said.

  “Shall I tell them about the Bloodless Victory, sir?” Traub said.

  “No, let them read about it in history,” von Prum said.

  At a little after three o’clock a sergeant came out of the guard house at the gate and handed Sergeant Traub their convoy clearance.

  “Santa Vittoria, eh?” he said.

  “That’s right, Sanda Viddoria,” Traub said.

  They drove down the long steep hill that leads from Montefalcone to the River Road and there they turned left toward the city. There was no traffic along the road, and although it was filled with small potholes from aerial cannon fire they made very good time. The road from Montefalcone is said to be very beautiful. The tourists today come and get out of their buses and take pictures of it and so there must be something beautiful about it. But the people who are born here never notice it at all. The road represents an enemy who must be overcome; the road is so much sweat and so many hours.

  Captain von Prum enjoyed the ride. He was glad to be moving and he was anxious to begin putting his ideas to the test.

  “And so begins the first phase of the Bloodless Victory,” the captain said, and Sergeant Traub nodded.

  “We can find a place for ourselves in history up there, Sergeant,” the captain said, and Traub nodded again. And a grave too, he thought.

  When the convoy was a mile from the road—it is a cart track, really, made for oxen and carts by the feet of oxen and the wheels of carts—von Prum raised his arm and signaled, and they came to a stop under the shade of a beech tree that for some reason had been allowed to stand.

  “We’re early, we must wait,” the captain said.

  To the left of the road were low hills, and the captain and the sergeant got out of the motorcycle and walked across to the hill and went up it and when they were near the top they were able to see our mountain and Santa Vittoria on the top of it. A few of the clouds that had frightened the city that morning were over the city then, and for a moment it would be thrown into shadows and then the cloud would pass and it would spring back into the brightness of the sun so that from a distance it looked very clean and sparkling and to some people, since it is so high up and remote from the world down around its feet, even mysterious.

  “That’s it,” Captain von Prum said. “That’s your city.”

  “It’s like all the rest,” the sergeant said.

  “Except it’s our city.”

  He had binoculars and they were good ones and he could see things all along the road and up the road and among the terraces and he could even make out the faces of people who were gathered about the Fat Gate.

  “There are people going up the road, a whole group of them,” Sergeant Traub said. His eyesight was keener than the captain’s, and he had been handed the glasses.

  “Our welcoming committee.”

  “If I knew the language that well I could read their lips,” Traub said.

  “I’ll tell you what they’re talking about. About the weather and about the grapes and about wine. It is all they talk about.”

  The sergeant had moved the glasses down the mountain and along the road and on the cart track, near where it turns off the River Road, around a corner from it, he could see some obstruction in the road.

  “They’ve put something on the road, sir,” Sergeant Traub said.

  “Is there anyone around it. Any sign of anyone?” Traub studied the area with the carefulness of a good soldier. There was no sign of any kind of life.

  “It’s a cart. Just a cart along the track.”

  It caused von Prum to smile.

  “What a splendid Italian gesture,” the captain said. “Obvious, childish, annoying and ineffective.”

  They started back down the hill toward the River Road and the convoy.

  * * *

  The men they had seen on the mountain were Bombolini and Tufa and the others coming from th
e Roman cellar. They were halfway up the mountain then, and none of them had said a word. They were too tired then and too disappointed. They had come that far, they had come that close to succeeding, they had licked it and so they knew the taste of it, and now it was denied to them. All of the pieces had fitted into place except the last one, the main one, the doorway to the wine.

  “Let’s not tell the people,” Bombolini said. “It won’t do them any good to know.”

  “Tell them,” Tufa said. “They know everything else. They have a right to know.”

  Fabio was forced to smile at hearing the ex-Fascist putting his trust in the people. When they reached The Rest, the place where everyone always stops on his way up the mountain, they stopped as much from habit as from desire and looked back down behind them into the valley.

  “Now you want to quit and I won’t let you quit,” Tufa said to them.

  “Why do you tell us now?” someone asked him.

  “Because I hope the shock of the wall has died in you,” Tufa said.

  “The shock of the wall will never die in me,” Bombolini said.

  “If the Germans don’t look in the entrance on their way up, if the Germans don’t look in the entrance tonight, if the Germans don’t look in the cellar tomorrow the wall will be built.”

  “Ah, yes,” Bombolini said. No one wanted to believe Tufa. It was too much to believe and too exhausting to hope. “The Germans won’t look in the tunnel. They’ll go right by the tunnel and not look in.” He turned on Tufa. “You yourself told us how thorough they were.”

  But the false wall was coming down. Even from where they were on the mountain they could hear the first of the bricks being dropped into the great copper kettles that we use here to blend all the wines and ingredients that go into our vermouth. The kettles, the most valuable property in Santa Vittoria, had been brought down the mountain to be hidden behind the wall along with the wine, so that they wouldn’t be taken too.

  The problem with the wall had been the bricks. They were not new, they were very old bricks, but they were bricks that had been bleached by several hundred years of sun and leached by thousands of winter rains and scoured by winds too numerous to be considered. As Babbaluche had said, they stood out in the darkness of the rest of the back wall like a monk in a house of pleasure. Now they were being dyed. The credit for this belongs to Old Vines. The bricks were being dumped into the huge copper kettles which had been filled with several hundred bottles of our best red vermouth, a painful way to use good wine.