The Secret of Santa Vittoria

by Robert Crichton

  “Very good wine.”

  “Help yourself sometime,” Pietrosanto said. “Take a few bottles sometime. Even when we’re not here.”

  “I’ll take you up on that some day,” Heinsick said.

  “I am sure you will,” Pietrosanto said.

  In the beginning, in those first fear-filled days, we followed von Prum around the city with our eyes, from behind windows and half-opened doors. He never moved without being watched, and it was known where he was every minute of the day. He was known as the Rabbit then, and the first question anyone coming up from the terraces would ask was “Where is the Rabbit?”

  The Rabbit was in the Piazza of the People, he was counting houses, he was in Constanzia’s house writing in a book.

  “Has the Rabbit seen the garden? Has he been in it? Has he been nibbling?”

  As the days went by, many of the people began to believe that perhaps the Rabbit wasn’t interested in the garden after all.

  “Maybe he doesn’t like lettuce,” people would say, and nod as if they heard some word from God Himself.

  “All rabbits eat lettuce,” Babbaluche would tell them.

  “But this is a German rabbit,” they would say.

  “Rabbits are rabbits are rabbits. They eat the same thing and shit the same shit,” the cobbler said. People hated Babbaluche for saying things like that.

  We called the secret wine, the secret wall, the entire secret, “the thing.”

  “How’s the thing getting along?” someone would ask someone who went to the Roman cellar.

  “It’s all right,” he would answer. “It’s growing older. It’s growing a beard.”

  They worked on the wall every day. Men were stationed all the way down the track in the terraces to sound an alarm if the Germans were to come down, but they never did. They continued to paint the bricks, until even to those who knew and worked on them there no longer was any way to tell which part of the wall was real and which was false. “Right here. Here’s where the wall starts,” they would say and tap the stones and find they were wrong.

  The cellar was filled with lichens and mosses and fungus, and they had taken these growths and transferred them to parts of the new wall, and some had taken hold of the stained bricks. This was the beard that the thing was growing.

  The people had confidence in their thing, and the feeling grew so strong that some of them began to object to the way Bombolini acted with the German.

  “I know he has to deal with him, but does he have to crawl before him?” a member of the Grand Council said.

  “It’s not manly,” one of the Pietrosantos said. “No man with any real eggs could do such a thing.”

  “If we have him for a leader,” one of them said, “what must the Germans think of us?”

  “I agree with what Fabio said,” a young man said. “It’s time we got our honor back and showed them we can be brave too.”

  Babbaluche and Tufa stopped that kind of talk—Babbaluche only because he had come to hate the words courage and honor and Tufa because he knew where they led men to.

  “If you want to be brave you had better go up to the mountains and start being brave,” Tufa said.

  “But don’t be brave here,” Babbaluche said.

  “Go up to the mountains and be brave on your own, but don’t be brave at other people’s expense,” Bombolini told them.

  Even Vittorini agreed. It made him sad to say it. “Tufa is right,” he said. “This is no country for brave men now. We have better things to do.”

  “You should bless the butter on Bombolini’s nose,” Babbaluche said.

  It had been a meeting, and after the meeting the men went out into the Piazza of the People, where they saw the soldier who we called Private Impossible, because no one could pronounce his name, putting up a strange-looking machine at one end of the piazza.

  “What is it?” Bombolini asked.

  “You turn the handle, see,” the soldier said, “and sausage comes out the other end. Try it.”

  The mayor turned the handle and a terrible sound, a scream of loneliness, filled the piazza. It was a sound that one might expect to hear from the cave when the evil spirits controlled it. Von Prum had joined them.

  “An air-raid alarm,” he said. “Now all we need is the proper shelter.”

  He said afterwards, Bombolini, that at that moment there was the feeling of a shadow passing over his mind.

  “The church would be good,” Bombolini said. “It’s strong and there’s a deep cellar and, besides, they never bomb a church. God won’t let them bomb a church.”

  It caused the German to laugh and then he looked at all of them, and it was a look of disdain.

  “There is a better place than that,” he said.

  When he left they looked at each other, and none of them said anything, but they looked at one another and the words formed on their lips.

  He knows. He knows.

  “We should kill him now,” Pietrosanto said.

  “No,” Bombolini said. “Not now, not yet.”

  He tried to work that afternoon. He was putting down the rules that would guide his policy with the Germans. There had been many rules and ideas, but he had reduced them to three.

  All men can be reached by flattery, even God can. (What, after all, is prayer?)

  All men can be led to believe the lie they want to believe.

  All men can be corrupted, each in his own way.

  He wrote them down on the back of a photograph, the last clean piece of cardboard he could find in the city. It was a picture of himself taken on the day of his marriage to Rosa Casamassima. He no longer liked to look at it. In the picture they appeared to be in love, as much in love as people here are likely to be when they marry. They were not an unbeautiful couple. At the bottom of the picture is printed: “May this marriage become a vine and produce a bountiful harvest.” The words always caused Bombolini to wince and turn away from them. It had produced one grape, sweet and beautiful, and a wine barrelful of bitterness.

  When he finished the three rules he lay down and tried to sleep, and the thought wouldn’t go away from him. He knows. He was not surprised when Heinsick came to the Palace of the People and told him the captain wanted to see him.

  He crossed the piazza and he realized that it was the same way he had gone years before, when they came and told him his brother Andrea was injured in the rock quarry and that they wanted someone to sign a paper and he knew at that moment Andrea was dead and yet he went pretending he wasn’t.

  Von Prum came to the point at once. “You have one of the finest air-raid shelters I have ever seen and you mention the church to me,” the captain said. “I’m surprised at you.”

  Bombolini said nothing to this. He looked at the stones of the floor as if they were the most important objects in the world. He turned his head to the left and to the right, and he bent down to look at the stones again.

  “Sometimes it takes an outsider to see things an insider cannot see,” von Prum said.

  “We don’t go in there,” Bombolini said. “It’s filled with evil spirits.”

  “Oh. So you know where I mean?”

  Why must he play this game? the mayor thought. “Yes, I know,” he said.

  “It used to be an ancient wine cellar, I believe,” von Prum said. “Roman, perhaps. Or even Etruscan. I would not discount Etruscan.”

  “I wouldn’t know. No one goes in there.”

  “Someone goes in there,” von Prum said. “Someone.”

  The mayor said nothing. There was no further use for a fight or for lies, he felt.

  “There is a string of electric light bulbs in there.” Von Prum’s voice was harsh now. “What are you hiding in there?”

  Bombolini was only able to lift his hands in front of him as if the German was about to strike him.

  “Who uses it?”

  He could bring himself to say nothing.

  “The Resistance,” von Prum said. “You allow them in there. Y
ou harbor them.”

  “No, it isn’t true,” Bombolini said, but it was a shout.

  I must not laugh. Oh, God, I must not laugh aloud.

  “It’s true,” the German said, and Bombolini lowered his arms and then his head. Von Prum looked at the mayor and finally laughed at him.

  “They say the Italians are good liars, that you are all good actors. It isn’t so. You’re a rotten liar.”

  Instead of laughing, Bombolini found that he wanted to weep.

  “You will get them out of there and keep them out of there.”

  “Yes.”

  “You lied to me about the wine.”

  “Yes. Not much of a lie.”

  “You lied.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you lied about this.”

  “Yes.” Then he looked up at the captain and was serious. “I am not a good liar,” he said. “I won’t lie to you again.”

  “It does you no good.”

  “I am ashamed,” Bombolini said.

  * * *

  He went out into the piazza and he saw no one and heard no one. Once there was a man in this city who was dying of some strange disease and they took him to Montefalcone to die. When he got there they found nothing the matter with him and he came back and danced through the piazza because he was alive again. “I am born again.”

  It was this way with Bombolini. It was the happiest he had ever felt in his life. He had died and been reborn. The Roman cellar would be used as an air-raid shelter and it was frightening, too, but he was alive again.

  That day wasn’t over for Bombolini, however. That night he got drunk. By nightfall the story was known all over the city and the entire city drank wine and drank wine and told the story again and again. It was the secret drunk of Santa Vittoria. They drank, but they kept their mouths closed except to drink or to talk in low voices. It was a drunk that was owed to them all. A soldier came to get Bombolini while he slept drunkenly in his bed.

  “Despite your behavior I have decided to continue the policy of informing you about affairs. Tomorrow night we will commence using the cellar at the foot of the mountain as a shelter.”

  “I understand. I am grateful to you.”

  “You should be grateful,” von Prum said.

  “But it is the evil spirits,” Bombolini said. “You must understand. The people would rather face the bombs.”

  What Bombolini was unable to understand then was that von Prum needed the people as much as he himself did. Without the people there would be no Bloodless Victory.

  “I have thought of that. I am going to have your priest—what is his name?”

  The mayor told him.

  “We will have this Polenta sanctify the place first. There is a ritual, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t know.”

  “They say it is very beautiful and very impressive and very effective,” the German said. “We will have a ceremony and we will purify the place.”

  “I am grateful to you.”

  “We will clean it out.”

  He wrote that night: “I have a man here now who is grateful to me. He owes me everything. The time is right.”

  BUT THEY DIDN’T get into the cellar, not then at least, because something happened the next morning that was to change the whole course of events in Santa Vittoria, not only for then but in some ways for generations to come and perhaps for all time to come, as long as this city clings to its mountain. A little after sunrise a messenger came up the cart track and stopped at the Fat Gate, which was guarded by Private Impossible, and he held out the message.

  “To be delivered by hand,” he said.

  “You’ll never get that motorcycle up there,” Impossible told him. “I’ll take it up if you want. I’m going up there now.”

  The young men looked up the length of the Corso and at the rows of stone steps, and handed over the message.

  “By hand,” he said.

  “I heard you,” Impossible said. But he didn’t go up then. He stopped first at the wine cellar office and had an eye opener of grappa with some of the Good Time Boys, and in the end the message went up the Corso in the hands of Paolo Lapolla. He took it, of course, to Bombolini first. They could not read a word of it. With his knowledge of English, Roberto was able to figure out a few of the words.

  “All I can tell you is this, that it’s about the wine,” Roberto said.

  Babbaluche was beside himself. “O Christ above!” he cried out. “This is the kind of country we are. We deserve to die. We deserve everything that happens to us. Here we are, handed the plans of the enemy and we are too Goddamn dumb and stupid and uneducated to read them.”

  We only found out later what they said and I can print them now.

  Von Prum:

  Here is your chance to earn your medal!

  The time of the wine is upon us.

  May Schmidt von Knoblesdorf have reason to be proud of you.

  Scheer

  I must admit that you have surprised me. I was certain that you would send a call for help and for reserves. What do you do to them up there?

  But the real test, of course, is now.

  The second paper was the official order authorizing the taking of the wine.

  They waited all of that morning for von Prum to make his move. In the afternoon he summoned Bombolini.

  “Sit down,” he said. It was the first time he had ever allowed the mayor to be seated in his presence.

  “I think that so far we have worked together well,” von Prum said. Bombolini was forced to admire the direct manner in which von Prum was able to come to the point of his business. It would have taken an Italian six aperitivi to arrive at this stage of the talks.

  “I think we have been able to act in a mature and realistic fashion,” the German said. He stressed the word realistic. “You told it to me and now I tell it to you. One of the reasons has been that I have lent you my mule and you have lent me your ox.”

  Except, you son of a bitch, Bombolini thought, you want to steal my ox. Bombolini nodded. The captain picked up the official orders that they had been unable to read.

  “Can you read this?” Bombolini said that he couldn’t. “It is a pity, since it would make my work easier.” The captain got up and turned away from Bombolini. “It is your fate to be a civil authority and it is mine to be a soldier. What do soldiers do?” Bombolini didn’t answer. The German turned around then.

  “Soldiers take orders. I want you to remember one thing now. I do not want to do this personally. This is not my business. I can only follow my orders because I am a soldier.”

  An aperitivo or two would help right here, Bombolini thought. The wine of the night before was still throbbing in his temples.

  “It is also true that we are at war with one another.”

  “I forget,” Bombolini said.

  “And in a war someone gets hurt. Someone loses things and someone pays a price.”

  Bombolini dropped his head then. “I know who pays,” he said.

  “I am asking you to be mature,” von Prum said.

  “Mature, yes,” Bombolini said. “What is it they want?”

  The directness of the question had upset the order of the captain’s approach and he was for the moment off balance. Many men might not have recovered it, not in the manner that von Prum did. In the end he turned it to his advantage.

  “Some wine,” he said. “Are you strong? Are you able to hear it?” Bombolini nodded.

  “They want your wine.”

  It is not necessary here to put down all the things Bombolini did after that. He did what was expected of him, he did what he had been rehearsing every night in his sleep since the day they had hid the wine. He slapped his hand over his heart as if he were suffering a stroke and shouted, “The wine!” and he gripped the region of his heart as if he were squeezing a grapefruit.

  “They want our wine?” he cried, and he fell to the floor.

  It was only the start. It is embarrassing today to
put down all the rest that he did—the running into the piazza and the bathing of his head in the fountain, the cries and the tears, the hitting of his head against a stone wall, the drinking of a bottle of wine without taking the bottle from his lips, always with cries of “No … Never … No … No … Never … No … It is too much … too much,” and finally running back into the headquarters with eyes as wild as those of a calf who has been hit with the sledgehammer and who has not died but has gotten loose from the ropes that hold him. In the end he collapsed, as he had planned, on the floor of Constanzia’s house, where von Prum could talk to him.

  It was the signal, of course. Everyone knew then. The Rabbit had gone over the fence. The Rabbit was in the garden. The Rabbit was eating. The Rabbit was gorging himself.

  “In the name of God,” Bombolini shouted. “The wine is us.”

  “You must stop,” von Prum ordered him. “I trusted you, as a mature man.”

  “But my God above, the wine. The wine!”

  The German leaned down toward him then. His voice was almost a whisper. “It is not all that you think,” he said. “You must hear me.”

  “The body and blood of my people.” He tried to sit up. “Captain von Prum. I want you to shoot me, to destroy me now.”

  The captain wouldn’t listen to him. Instead, he would try the last trump, short of violence, that he held in his hand.

  “I have a proposition to make to you,” he said.

  Bombolini succeeded in sitting up.

  “Didn’t I know when I said that,” von Prum wrote later, “that the wop would listen? His face lit up, the tears went away, his tongue hung out, his eyes bulged at the word. They are all alike; they are Arabs in their souls.”

  And the captain told him. In payment for the cost of occupying and thus protecting their town, the town would be required to surrender its stock of wine.

  “It’s like paying an intruder to sleep in your bed with your wife,” Bombolini said.

  Part of the wine would be considered a payment, but part would be considered a loan to the German government which would be returned with interest when the war was won.

  “What if you lose?” Bombolini said.

  Von Prum went on then to the proposition. Because transportation was becoming increasingly hard to obtain, any city that would volunteer to bring its own wine to the railhead at Montefalcone could retain for itself some part of the wine.