The Secret of Santa Vittoria

by Robert Crichton

  “How much,” Bombolini said.

  They began at twenty per cent.

  “I can’t ask my people to rape themselves for that amount,” the mayor said.

  “I could force them.”

  “No, this can’t be done by force,” Bombolini said, and the German knew he was correct.

  “I ask you one thing. Has this been done by any other town?”

  The German was honest about it. He told him that it hadn’t.

  “Then the price will be fifty per cent for you and fifty per cent to stay with us.”

  “It’s high,” the German said. “I don’t know if they will accept it.” He went to the window of Constanzia’s bedroom and looked down into the piazza. Bombolini hoped the people weren’t gathered in the piazza looking at the house. At last he came back in and when he did he was smiling.

  “An ox for a mule and a mule for an ox,” the German said. “We help each other.”

  There was a good feeling in every part of Santa Vittoria that night. Von Prum, of course, was consumed with joy which he was forced to conceal.

  “Do you know what this means?” he asked Sergeant Traub. “Can you conceive of what this means?”

  Traub was more worried that the card players and the wine drinkers would never speak to them again. He had gotten to like their company and along with the rest he looked forward to the games and the drinking at night. He didn’t like this stealing of their wine. And so he was pleased and even amazed when they came to the wine cellar office that night.

  “We know that you’re soldiers and you have to follow orders,” one of them said. “We don’t hold it against you. Who has the cards?” They even got out the grappa that night.

  There was good feeling, and it remained in the city until the morning we were due to carry the wine to Montefalcone. The feeling remained even when it was found that the order which von Prum had shown to Bombolini had required him to requisition only fifty per cent of the wine in the first place.

  Maybe we are realists. We were content with our victory, it was more wine than we had counted on, and we were content to let the German have his.

  NO ONE HERE likes to look back on the journey to Montefalcone. It began as if we were going on a picnic, and it ended in misery. Tufa tried to tell us, but no one listened to Tufa, because no one wanted to hear what he had to say.

  “Have you made any arrangements for anyone dying?” Tufa asked Pietrosanto, who was the leader of the march.

  “Why should anyone die?”

  “You had better plan for someone dying,” Tufa said.

  We should have known better, but Tufa alone seemed to know what was involved in carrying 150,000 bottles of wine so many miles by so many mules and donkeys and oxen and carts and people and backs all the way over the hills to Montefalcone. Some of us can still recall Tufa’s words as we started through the Fat Gate and down the mountain for the River Road. The sun was not quite up then and it was cool and damp, and we felt light and as if we could go on forever.

  “This will be a terrible day for Santa Vittoria,” Tufa said.

  “Do you know that sometimes you are a troublemaker,” Pietrosanto said. “You’ve seen some bad days and think that all of them are bad. We were all right before you came along.”

  The people were actually gay at the beginning.

  “They should be crying,” Sergeant Traub said. “I tell you, I don’t understand these people.”

  “They have accepted what can’t be changed,” Captain von Prum said. “Why not make the best of it? As this Bombolini says, the people are realists.”

  “I don’t know,” Traub said. “I don’t know.” By his standards it was carrying realism too far.

  The trip down the mountain, even in the dimness before dawn, was easy, because the people know the mountain and how to take it and they know every stone on it and every turn and hole where one might twist an ankle. When we reached the River Road the sun was up and the column began to spread out along the road. The wine baskets on the people’s backs began to get hot and heavy even then. Many of the people had never been to Montefalcone before, and they looked ahead toward it as an adventure although Montefalcone was many miles away and out of sight.

  When we passed Scarafaggio the people all stood in the Piazza of the Brass Urinal, their mouths gaping open wider than usual, and pointed down the hill at us and then began running. I could tell you the story of how the piazza got its name, how they came to Santa Vittoria and stole a huge brass urn we used for the wine during the harvest festival and how they used it for a public urinal and how we then went down and put dynamite in the pot and blew it into a thousand pieces so that every home in the city had some brass chip of Santa Vittoria in it, but the story is too long and involved and sad. They came down their mountain and across their part of the valley until they were lined up along the opposite bank of the Mad River, where they stared at us.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” one of them finally shouted to us. “What are you doing with the wine? What are they making you do with it?”

  No one bothered to answer them, because they were Scarafaggians and because breath already was becoming valuable and because how do you explain to people that you are helping to steal your own wine?

  When the column began to fall apart and the older people to drift back through it like pebbles sifting down in the water, still being carried along by the tide but sinking all of the time, Tufa, from habit as much as anything, attempted to keep the long march organized. It was the first time the Germans noticed him. There was a manner about him, the way he controlled himself and the quiet, sure way that he gave orders, a sense of keeping within him a stronger power than he chose to reveal, that made itself apparent.

  “That son of a bitch is a soldier,” Traub said. “We’re supposed to turn them in.”

  Von Prum had been watching. There was a kind of control about the man and yet at the same time a kind of wildness hiding just beneath a mask of discipline that the German recognized as very Italian and which he found interesting in a man, and almost always fatal—one of the men destined in advance to commit the destructive act that ruins.

  “Meanwhile he’s doing our work,” the captain said. “We’ll watch him.”

  “There’s something wrong about the other one as well, sir,” Sergeant Traub said. Tufa had been talking to Roberto who was attempting to make the march. “He has hands like a girl. I went to have some boots fixed…”

  The argument had no meaning to Captain von Prum. He also had hands like Roberto. There was nothing unmanly about them; it was merely that they had never pruned vines in the wet cold autumn or dug in piles of manure or strung the wires for the vines or worked the harvest or washed dirty clothes in cold water with soap made from ox suet and strong lye. The women were envious of the hands of Roberto and Captain von Prum.

  It is something the men of Santa Vittoria don’t like to admit about their women, but it is true. Whenever the German went through the streets the women didn’t look at him directly, but when he passed they followed him and undressed him with their eyes. They peeled him like a Sicilian orange and devoured him. He was so clean, which our men are not, so clear and pink and white and blond and cool, with even a sensation of silver, shining and swift and delicate, like a trout in clear water.

  We must face a truth. The men here have skins the color of copper pots, reddish brown and as tough as leather. If a brush could be made from the hair on their legs and arms and chests, it could be used to curry a water buffalo. It is possible that the women, if given the choice, would finally choose to go to bed with a hairy copper pot because it is what they know, but it is also possible that they would at least dream of trying once someone with the white clean softness of von Prum.

  It has nothing to do with the war or loyalty, it has to do with the truth that in this town, where everyone is known by everybody, when even the chickens that run in the street are known and have names and are talked about, that someone like C
aptain von Prum becomes an unbearable curiosity walking in the streets. He was in truth all that the women talked about for some time.

  “I wouldn’t do it with him, you understand, but I’m curious, you know. You wonder how it must feel with that, it must be different, do you understand?”

  There is one other thing that must be told: In Italy all of the men are unfaithful, because, as is known by all Italians, all Italian men are by nature and birth great lovers.

  And, of course, just because they are such, all the women are faithful. The faithless woman can be killed and no one will lift a hand to defend her, because she has committed the unpardonable sin, the worst of all crimes, she has dishonored the man. And then the seducer must be harmed and punished and sometimes killed to restore the honor of the man who has been made to wear the horns. If he can’t do it alone, his brothers will help him, his family, his whole section of the city, because the honor must be restored. It is naturally because the woman must not so much as look at another man that they do look at him, that they dream of him, that they fall in love with him at a distance, that they commit rape with their eyes and adultery in their dreams.

  There is only one question that has never been answered: If all Italian men are faithless and sleep with all the women in the town, how is it that all the women, except one or two, are faithful? Either the men are not the great lovers they claim to be or all of them must wear the horns; neither of which any Italian man is willing to admit. It is a very great mystery.

  At the first of the hills the first of the people began to fall out of the line of march. The Germans had made some effort to keep order on the way.

  “I don’t care where it is or what it is,” Sergeant Traub said, “a line of march is a line of march.” But at the hills it was no good. The soldiers stopped prodding the people with their rifles. “I take it back,” the sergeant said. “A line of march is a line of march everywhere but in Italy.”

  By midday those who could march had settled into themselves and had developed a rhythm, an almost silent, shuffling cadence, that pulled people along with it, the same way it had been on the day of the passing of the wine. There was the sound and then the smells that chained the people to each other, of sweat and leather and salt against the wicker of the baskets, of urine and oxen and manure and the stale water of the drainage ditch alongside the road, and the sound of the Mad River itself, rushing against the stones and boulders in its bed.

  People came down along the road to look at us, the cafoni who for shares worked the vegetables and the corn of the landowners’ farms along the river bottoms, but they said nothing to us, not one of them, and we said nothing to them. They would never understand.

  Sometime in the evening, fourteen hours after we had started in the coolness of the morning, the first of us started up the steep side road that leads to the Constantine Gate and then Montefalcone itself.

  This was the cruelest part, the last long hill before the end and, after that, the people who met us. The word had gone down the river that the people of Santa Vittoria were surrendering their own wine and bringing it in on their backs. The streets of Montefalcone were lined with people and they were making a great noise, and for a moment we thought they were cheering us in. How simple we must have been. Why should we have thought they would do such a thing?

  The first one was a butcher. He broke away from the sidewalk along the main Corso and out in front of us, his apron spattered with blood, and he was holding the skull of a goat in his hands, and he was screaming. “Tell me these are lying.” He put his bloody hands to his eyes. “Tell me I’m not seeing what I see.”

  “Don’t look at him,” Tufa said.

  “Tell me, just tell me. I will believe you,” he screamed at us. “Because I cannot believe what I see.” He shoved the goat’s head into Tufa’s face and tried to pull the wine off his back. “No son of Italy could be doing what I see you people doing. Tell me you are Greeks.”

  And this was the beginning. It is too painful to tell the rest. They spat on us, on our heads and in our faces, they grabbed our hair and lifted up our heads so that our faces, looking down at the stones, could be seen by everyone. The priests in the streets turned away from us and one of them encouraged a boy to urinate on our heads from a terrace of the rectory. An Italian soldier in the pay of the Germans aimed his rifle at our heads.

  A woman who appeared to be a respectable woman broke through the line of German soldiers, who now were needed to protect us from our own people, and she ran to Tufa, who was in the lead, and she seized him by his private parts.

  “Did you see?” she screamed to them. She held out her arms and then turned her palms downward. “Nothing,” she cried out. “I swear to you, nothing.” She ran along the line of people. “I felt nothing. No eggs,” the woman shouted. “They have no eggs.”

  We have never lived it down. Even later, when they learned why we had done what we did we were not excused. “I don’t care,” they would say. “Only bastards could do it.” When people from here go to Montefalcone they don’t tell where they are from.

  “Santa Vittoria?” they would say in Montefalcone. “Oh yes, that’s the place where the men have no eggs. It’s been proven.”

  In the end, to add to the shame, it was the Germans who saved us and they despised us for having to do it. Captain von Prum had sent a soldier ahead, so that when we came into the Piazza Frossimbone (where none of us can bear to walk) on our way with the wine to the railroad yards in back of the city, Colonel Scheer was on the terrace of his headquarters with other officers of his command. We marched in front of them with our wine, now their wine, in the same manner that Fabio tells us the slaves were marched in front of Caesar when the armies came back from their wars.

  “I salute you,” Colonel Scheer called to Captain von Prum. “We all salute you.”

  The people of Santa Vittoria, bent with their loads and with their shame, filed by the German officers.

  “I don’t know how you have done this,” the colonel called to the captain. He sent a young officer down to pinch one of our people to see if it was real.

  The officer pinched Guido Pietrosanto’s face. “Yes, they’re real people,” he said.

  When Captain von Prum passed in front of the steps on which Scheer stood, the colonel stopped him. “Unless I am mistaken you are soon to be Major Sepp von Prum. How does that sound?”

  Captain von Prum told him that it sounded very pleasant.

  “And about the other thing”—Colonel Scheer tapped the region of his chest where a medal would go—“I haven’t forgotten. I don’t go back on my word.”

  It was one of the few times that we ever saw the captain openly smile.

  * * *

  The journey back was even worse because many of the people had planned to spend the night in Montefalcone and rest before turning home. But that was now impossible, and we began to pray for darkness both for the coolness it would bring and the cover of secrecy it might provide.

  The long march back is remembered now as the time when Captain von Prum first met Caterina Malatesta. The captain had promised that he would use his truck and his scarce gasoline to help carry the women and the children back to the foot of the mountain, and he was true to his word. The Malatesta, against Tufa’s wishes, had helped carry wine and because she wasn’t used to such work her feet had become a mass of blisters so that even without shoes she was no longer able to walk.

  “I’m going to have to go with the German,” she said to Tufa. “Don’t be angry with me. I don’t want to leave you.”

  “I can’t carry you; its all right,” Tufa said. But when the truck came back down the River Road he didn’t feel that way. The back of the truck was filled with women, and when it stopped the officer motioned for Caterina to get in front with himself and Sergeant Traub.

  “Get in the back,” Tufa said. When the German again motioned to the seat beside him, Caterina looked at Tufa and then climbed into the front of the truck.


  “Go the next time,” Tufa said. Caterina pulled away from him and sat down next to the officer. Tufa looked into the cab at them. “I asked you,” he said to the Malatesta, and the truck pulled away.

  “Did you see the eyes on that one,” Sergeant Traub said. “He’s one to watch.”

  “Find out his name and find out what he does,” the captain said.

  They rode in silence for miles until finally von Prum put on the little running light inside the cab of the truck and was able to see the woman beside him. She had worn the clothes of a peasant woman, but the effort to pass as a peasant had been in vain. There are women who are so beautiful by nature that they do not know what to do to make themselves less beautiful. The roughness of the cloth only served to exaggerate the fineness of the lines of her face.

  “I haven’t seen you before,” the captain said.

  “Oh, yes. Many times,” Caterina said.

  “No,” he said.

  Just that, she thought. No. The perfect Germanness of it, blunt and uncharming. The fact that he was correct did not concern her.

  “I assure you of one thing,” von Prum said, “had I seen you I would not have forgotten you. Thus, I haven’t seen you.”

  She shrugged her shoulders. How German of him and how Italian of me, Caterina thought. To her annoyance she realized that she had been speaking to him in Italian and not in the dialect. It had been a tactical error on her part caused by tiredness. But also to her annoyance she found that she liked to talk in good Italian, clean and clear, and that she found she was enjoying sitting next to someone who was so clean and who smelled so clean.

  “You aren’t like the others here,” he said.

  “These are my people,” Caterina said.

  “No, you aren’t like them. Any more than I am like them.”

  She shrugged her shoulders once again.

  “We’re strangers here, you and I,” the German said. Even his breath seemed clean and almost sweet. She knew that hers was heavy with the wild scallions they had found along the river.