The Secret of Santa Vittoria

by Robert Crichton

  “I don’t understand them,” Sergeant Traub said. “I swear to God, sir, I don’t understand these people.”

  “It’s very simple,” Captain von Prum said. “They think they’ve won something. They think they can afford to be pleasant.”

  “They shouldn’t act this way after what happened to them,” Traub said.

  “It is a matter of values,” von Prum said. “They are deficient in values. I’ve come to despise them.”

  Things had been changing in Montefalcone. Many of the units stationed in the city had packed up and pulled back to the higher mountains in the north, where it was said the Germans would attempt to establish a winter line that would be easy to defend and expensive to take. Captain von Prum reported to Colonel Scheer, and the colonel was pleased to see him. He pointed to a report on the top of his desk.

  “They clear you,” Colonel Scheer said. “They vindicate you.”

  “But that’s what I come to see you about,” von Prum said. “I am still convinced the wine is in the city.”

  “Don’t be a fool,” Colonel Scheer said. “The SS says there is no wine, so there is no wine. The gods have spoken, the file is closed, von Prum is exonerated.”

  “But if it’s there, I want to find it,” von Prum said.

  “Why?” The colonel was sarcastic then. “Your honor? Duty? A matter of principle, perhaps. In the name of God, we don’t care about the wine just so we aren’t held responsible for it.”

  “Because,” Captain von Prum said, “if the wine is there they’re laughing at me. Bombolini is laughing at me.”

  Colonel Scheer looked at his junior officer. Such fine points of behavior were beyond his personal experience.

  “And so, as we say where I come from, you have a rat in your throat.”

  “If you wish to put it that way.”

  “And what would you do with the wine if you found it? It’s too late for us to do anything with it, you know. We couldn’t ship it now. We couldn’t steal it if we wanted to.”

  Von Prum’s voice was loud and for the moment he lost the poise which the colonel had admired in him.

  “I’d smash it,” the captain said. “If we couldn’t take it from there I’d break it. I would break every bottle it was in my power to break.”

  Scheer smiled at him then. “Yes, you have a rat in your throat.”

  He got up from his seat and went to the window that looks down into the Piazza Frossimbone, where only a short time before the people of Santa Vittoria had dragged themselves along with their wine on their backs in public display. It was we who had the rats in our throats then.

  “Then,” the colonel said, “what you have to do—and never say that I suggested it—is to take a hostage.” He turned back to the captain. “Have you thought of it?”

  The captain shook his head.

  “More important, can you carry it out?”

  “Yes,” von Prum said.

  Once again Scheer smiled at him. “You’ve changed,” he said. “Yes, you have the rat. Do you know something? I think you’re becoming a proper German.”

  The thing of a hostage, Colonel Scheer told him, was that the people had time to think about what was taking place.

  “You put his life on the conscience of the people. There’s a very simple choice for them. If they tell you what you want to know, the hostage lives. If they don’t, he dies and by their silence they have killed him.”

  There were other fine points to consider. The hostage, the colonel explained, must be put on view, in the public piazza, so that he is never out of their minds. When they go to work they see him and when they come back he is there. With good fortune, at night they can hear him moan or cry out in his sleep.

  “And you would be surprised, Captain, even in Russia, how many little birds want to come and sing things in your ears. Mothers and daughters and lovers. And people he owes money to; they want him to live the most of all, especially in this country.” The colonel was smiling once again. The captain was conscious that his heart was beating swiftly at the prospect of what was ahead.

  “And don’t forget the hostage himself. In Italy he’s usually the first to hop up and get your ear, although he likes to pretend it was someone else all along.”

  Von Prum was openly excited by then, and he asked the colonel for written permission to choose a hostage in Santa Vittoria.

  “My very dear von Knoblesdorf,” Scheer said. “It’s your honor you’re trying to salvage, not mine. At this stage I have butter in my mouth, not a rat.” He pointed about the office where the files were already being packed. “We’re leaving, you know.”

  “Does it work?”

  “Almost every time,” Colonel Scheer said. “Of course it isn’t as simple as it sounds. In case we lose the war, just in case, understand.” He began to smile again. “You might have to justify what you have done.”

  “I understand that, sir. It’s a risk I’m prepared to run.”

  And now Scheer was smiling as broadly as he had all of that morning. “And then there’s always Him up there, eh? You don’t want to forget Him.”

  “I already have.”

  He wished to go right then, but the colonel held him and they talked of the progress of the war although von Prum could barely hear him. That war was another war, which no longer belonged to him; his own was being waged within himself and with some people on a mountain.

  At the door the colonel cautioned him again. “Try and get someone with a good family life,” he said. “You will find that it is especially difficult for children to stand and watch their fathers die before them, all for the sake of a few words.”

  He held him again at the bottom of the steps. “You didn’t say it, Captain.”

  Von Prum came to attention. “Heil Hitler,” he said.

  “Heil Hitler,” Scheer said. “And von Prum?”

  “Yes.”

  “God go with you.”

  The captain could hear the colonel laughing when he was at the motorcycle, and it ceased only when Sergeant Traub started up the engine.

  There was never any doubt in the beginning who the hostage would be. When they reached Santa Vittoria it was dark and the captain found that he was tired, but as they passed the Fountain of the Pissing Turtle he felt revived again and the blood was rushing through his brain. He felt he could see him there, bound to the Pissing Turtle, his fat stomach showing through the front of his shirt, the eyes of the people staring at him, weeping for him and finally, sometime before the dawn, when no one else was about, asking for the captain and whispering to him: “Captain, I have something I want to tell you.”

  He went into his room and he wrote in his log and his journal, and the name of Italo Bombolini figures often in those pages. After he wrote he slept, and during that time something must have happened to his dream. Sometime before sunrise he woke and got up, and then he woke Sergeant Traub.

  “Get up now and go and get me the one called Tufa,” Captain von Prum said. “Get him out of his bed and bring him here.”

  “YOU ALWAYS have wanted to be a martyr,” the captain told Tufa. “I can see it in your eyes. And now I’m going to give you your chance. What do you say to that?”

  “Thank you,” Tufa said.

  They tied him to the tail of the dolphin that swims down one side of the Fountain of the Pissing Turtle soon after the sun was up, to allow the people to see him there on their way to work. There was no need to announce the reason for his being there. As we say here, good is sometimes not noticed when it goes, but evil is always seen when it arrives. At first the people didn’t want to leave the piazza, but it was Tufa who ordered them to go down to the grapes, and in a way the people were gratified, because the harvest was upon them and the pull of the grapes grows very strong.

  “Don’t you worry, Tufa,” they told him. “We’ll come and get you in the evening when it’s dark. We’ll cut you loose.”

  But those who knew Tufa knew he would never allow it. The cost for harming G
ermans had gone up along with all prices in a war. The fee was now twenty-five Italians for every German harmed. Near San Rocco, in a country village, when a farmer slapped the face of an officer his entire family and others in the village were put to death and the farmer was forced to live.

  Bombolini did what could be done. He hid Tufa’s mother so that no one could find her and so that she couldn’t go to von Prum to save her son, and they put Babbaluche’s daughter, who had the thunderbolt for Tufa, where no one would be able to find her. Then he went to see Caterina Malatesta.

  “I don’t believe that I have to worry about you,” Bombolini said.

  “I have only one question. Why was it Carlo? Why not someone else? Why not a Pietrosanto with fifty members in his family?”

  “I don’t believe I have to worry about you,” Bombolini said.

  She nodded.

  “That’s why Carlo Tufa.”

  The soldiers were decent about Tufa. They didn’t believe there was wine, and they recognized Tufa as one of their own kind. They gave him cigarettes from Spain and oranges from Portugal. They set up a canvas roof from a stall in the daytime to shield him from the sun. There is something strange about looking at a young man in good health who you know will be dead the next day. You watch him because you watch yourself. But there was nothing to be seen in Tufa. He gave no sign of being worried or even of anything unusual taking place. One thing alone bothered him and it was Caterina.

  “Where is she?” he asked Bombolini. “Why doesn’t she come to see me?”

  The mayor had no answer for him.

  “Have you ever seen this done before?” Tufa asked Sergeant Traub

  “Oh yes, in Russia, in Poland. It’s effective. They don’t let you die, you know. There is always someone who wants to save you. It’s very hard to become a martyr these days.”

  They fed him good soup and he ate it all, and one of the soldiers gave Tufa a chocolate bar that had been sent to him from home.

  “I don’t envy you,” the soldier said.

  “I don’t envy the one who picked me,” Tufa said.

  “I mean to say, there’s no wine, is there?”

  “No, there’s no wine.”

  “Then how can anyone save you?”

  “It would be difficult to do.”

  “I don’t envy you.”

  Toward evening, when the people were coming up from the terraces, all the soldiers were on duty, and they made a ring around Tufa and had their weapons at the ready. They allowed only Bombolini to come close to him. They talked about death and it didn’t bother Tufa.

  “We have a saying here,” Bombolini told the soldiers. “‘Good wine and brave men don’t last long.’”

  “I don’t know about your men,” Heinsick said, “but your wine did all right.”

  Tufa laughed the loudest of them all. But behind the laughter, for those who could see it, was a worry about Caterina and a sadness. It was all that he asked and it was the one thing that was denied him. In late afternoon Padre Polenta came across the piazza, the cooling wind of the afternoon sending the skirt of his cassock flying up behind him, so that he seemed to be running even though he was moving very slowly.

  “There is nothing in the book about such a situation,” the priest said, “but if you will kneel and pray with me now something will come to me.”

  “We could always pray for the souls of those who are doing this to me,” Tufa said. “We could forgive them.”

  “Oh no,” Padre Polenta said. “That would be too much. There’s a limit to mercy, you know.”

  After the prayers the soldiers stepped away from Tufa and the priest, to allow him to make his last confession, and in a few minutes they had finished.

  “I don’t know if I should give you Extreme Unction now or wait until the morning,” Polenta said.

  “You had better wait until the morning. There is no telling what hell I might raise tonight,” Tufa said. The priest was reluctant to go and he finally came back to Tufa.

  “It’s a touchy matter, but in your confession you didn’t repent for your life with the Malatesta woman,” he said.

  Tufa considered this for a moment. “I don’t wish to repent for that,” he said, and it became Polenta’s turn to consider.

  “It’s not a mortal sin,” he said finally. “Nothing mortal there. But I want you to understand this, it will mean a few hundred years’ penance in Purgatory.”

  “Then that’s a price I will have to pay,” Tufa said. “You might tell her sometime that she was worth it,” he said to Bombolini.

  During the whole of that day it was possible at almost any time to see the figure of Captain von Prum through the windows of Constanzia’s house. He would work over his letters and his logs for several minutes at a time, and then he would be drawn once more to the window with the same fascination that they say some men have when they watch a scaffold being erected for them. They even come to take pride in the work, it is said, pride that all this is being done for them.

  “I am amazed at my ability to do this thing,” he wrote in his log. “There is no other word that will describe it: I amaze myself.”

  Sometime in the early night one of the soldiers asked the captain if it might be possible for the hostage to spend his last night in bed and not on the stones of the piazza. The captain refused.

  “It is in the night that the hearts crack,” Colonel Scheer had said. “It’s in the night that they begin to believe he really will die the next morning.”

  He had said one other thing which the captain was beginning to see was true. If once you begin with a hostage you must stay with the hostage or the people will know that you are not prepared to go to the end, to commit the ultimate act, and then your usefulness to your work and to yourself will have come to an end.

  The thought both frightened and excited him.

  At times he found comfort in a line that Nietzsche wrote and which he quoted in his notes and log several times that day, that in the long haul of history one life was worth nothing.

  It was this line that Bombolini had once chosen to answer. “Then that’s the difference between us,” Bombolini had said. “To us nothing is worth one life.”

  “We shall see,” von Prum had said.

  Because he was a gracious man and was anxious to show that there was nothing beyond duty in this death, he allowed Bombolini at ten o’clock to pay a last visit to the hostage. Tufa was interested in only one thing.

  “Where is she? Why hasn’t she come?”

  Bombolini could say nothing to him. He had gone to see her and she had refused to see him. So they stood in silence, and there was only the sound of the soldiers moving about in the darkness and of the water from the fountain.

  “I never told her the story,” Tufa suddenly said. He motioned with his head at the fountain above them. “Sometime when I’m gone I want you to tell her the story and tell her that I asked you to tell it to her.”

  “I’ll tell her, Carlo.” He wanted to go because he felt that he was about to cry and he didn’t wish to embarrass Tufa with his tears. Before he went he kissed Tufa on one cheek and then the other.

  “Goodbye, Tufa.”

  Tufa was smiling at him. “It’s not goodbye,” he said. “I have a whole half of a day ahead of me.”

  It is not easy even now for us to believe that the city slept that night. But Bombolini went home and slept, and they put a straw pallet down on the cobblestones and Tufa slept, and the people looking from the windows around the piazza began to go to sleep because the people had worked hard that day and they know that even when death is in the house life goes on and that beyond Tufa there were the grapes, brimming with life, to be considered as well the next day. The soldiers who were seated around Tufa had had their wine and they too were tired. The water pouring from the turtle was as steady and gentle as the wind that whispered in every part of the piazza, and it lulled them. Across the piazza the captain was awake and, although he had gotten ready to go to bed, he
got up again and, for a reason he could not explain, dressed himself again. His intuition was good, because at the time that he was dressing, Caterina Malatesta was coming down from High Town.

  She carried her shoes in her hand so she would make no noise, and she stayed in the shadows of the houses. There was a thin moon that night and there was light on one side of the piazza, but the far side was buried in shadow. The old women and old men who stay at the windows because for them to sleep is to die, must have seen her moving along in the darkness, but they said nothing. Whatever happens doesn’t belong to them any more; they only watch and wait.

  When Caterina was opposite the piazza from the fountain she stopped and attempted to see Tufa, but it was too dark for that. There was no movement of any kind then, only the water, and the usual night sounds, a child crying out for its mother, the heavy breathing of oxen up the side lanes and the deep-throated tunk of their bells as they shifted their positions.

  The door to Constanzia’s house was in shadow, so even the old people didn’t see her then. At the door she put on her shoes—they were shoes from the city, with heels, and not made for here—and when she was ready she scratched on the wood of the door with her fingernails.

  In the manner of such things, although the captain had not heard the sound before, he knew at once what it meant. He was pleased that Traub was not in the outer room, where he often slept, but was in the piazza guarding the hostage. Before he went to let her in, he straightened up the room and lit a second tallow candle which he put before a mirror so that it gave off a warm good light and then he went to the door.

  He realized that ever since he had first heard the word “hostage” in Montefalcone, without ever admitting it he had been preparing for this moment. But even so, when he did open the door to her, he was unprepared for her beauty. In the books and stories it says, that men are made breathless by the great beauty of a woman, and in this case it was as the books say. Her beauty was a force in the room that he felt; he was overpowered by it. She had spent that day in the classic way of great beauties, in warm baths, in oils, she had washed her hair and brushed it so often that the light reflected from it and she had dressed in the kind of dress no other woman has ever worn here because no other woman would know how to buy one or how to wear one, or would ever have the money to own one.