The Secret of Santa Vittoria

by Robert Crichton

  “No, no,” Padre Polenta said. “But it is a terrible thing to do. The choice might be God’s, but the blood is yours.”

  “Pick the name,” Traub said. “In the name of God, pick the name.”

  Capoferro knows what to do in times like these. He should have learned things in the one hundred years he claims to have lived. He rolled the drums again, louder this time, much louder, the old sticks thundering on the rim of the goatskin drum, and then Polenta’s arm went up in the air and suddenly dipped down into the barrel like a kingfish going after a fingerling in the Mad River, and while the old man beat the drum the priest swirled his hand around inside the wood. The people strained forward. There was no proof that some mistake had not been made or some trick played. When death is at hand every possibility becomes possible. And then the arm came back out of the barrel—the bird had caught its fish—and the drumming stopped and the priest held up the paper. The silence was broken by a blast on wild old Capoferro’s horn.

  The priest looked at the paper as if he could not believe what he read on it or make himself say the words, and he passed it to Bombolini, who in turn passed it along to the sergeant. Sergeant Traub looked at it one way and then the other and he checked the pronunciation of the name with Bombolini and after that came to full attention.

  Babbaluche.

  It is strange how in a crowd, a mob even, the people always know where to look. The ones around the cobbler turned toward him first, and then all the others turned and then they began to back away from him as if by being close they might be included in his fate or that death might be catching.

  “No,” Babbaluche cried. “It can’t be me. They don’t want me. You have read it wrong.”

  The sergeant handed the paper to someone in the crowd, and it was passed along, from hand to hand, until the cobbler held it in his hand and read his own name. There was a scream—it was his wife—and then there were the cries of his two daughters, and they fell to the stones; they grabbed the sergeant and pleaded with him, they attacked Padre Polenta and demanded that he intercede with Captain von Prum and with God Himself. After that they were taken out of the piazza by force and put away so no one could find them and they could find no one.

  “Yes. It’s me,” Babbaluche said. “What did I do to deserve this?”

  “We have lost the finest cobbler in all of Santa Vittoria,” Pietrosanto shouted at Sergeant Traub. “You’ve stolen our cobbler from us.”

  “God chose him, I didn’t,” Traub said, but he couldn’t bring himself to look at the little man all alone now in the piazza, reading the scrap of paper on which his doom was written.

  “Why me? I’m only a little man,” he said.

  Padre Polenta went and blessed him. “The ways of God are passing strange,” he said.

  “And so are those of priests,” Babbaluche said.

  They led him then to the Fountain of the Pissing Turtle and they tied him to the dolphin in the place where Tufa had been tied. From Constanzia’s house the captain could see what was taking place in the piazza.

  “Did you have to do it?” Caterina asked him.

  “I had to do it.”

  “Thank God it’s an older man,” she said.

  “He isn’t dead yet. If he chooses to talk, he has life.” He suddenly turned on her. “If you choose to talk he will live. He’s there only because of you.”

  * * *

  It was not a good night for the people of Santa Vittoria. Even though the cobbler was sick he still was going to die and in dying he was doing it for them, because if Babbaluche didn’t go one of them would be called. And now that he was going, the people began to know that they were going to miss him. Babbaluche was the salt here.

  He lived that night on grappa, since he could keep nothing else down.

  “I wouldn’t do that; you’re going to have a terrible hangover,” Traub said to him.

  “Yes, but what a cure I have,” Babbaluche told him. “A little drastic, but complete.”

  Padre Polenta came and asked him if he could bless him, that it couldn’t hurt and might be a form of fire insurance, but the cobbler wouldn’t allow it.

  “If God personally shows me a miracle between tonight and tomorrow morning I’ll let you sprinkle holy water on my head.”

  “But there are hundreds of millions of people. God can’t show each one a miracle. He’d run out of ideas.”

  “Oh you of little faith,” Babbaluche said.

  “You don’t go by the rules,” Traub said. “Why can’t you behave like the other, that Tufa?”

  “Do you mean with honor and dignity?”

  “Like a man of self-respect,” Traub said.

  “I think I’ll try that,” Babbaluche said and he made a stern and proud face and gave up the effort. “No, I think it’s little late to learn.”

  All of those things went around the city and it was hard to feel in the proper way before an execution when the sun came up. The cocks began to crow on the roof tops (since von Prum had taken away all their dunghills) and on the doorsteps, shouting at the morning.

  “I’ll miss that,” Babbaluche said. “I always liked the little bastards. I was envious of them. I used to lie in bed and ask myself why they were so happy to see the day come and I was so sad.” It was the nearest he came to not being Babbaluche.

  “Then I’d say, ‘Well, the sons of bitches have no brains and I’m filled with them, so of course I’m sad—who wouldn’t be?’” And everyone knew the cobbler was all right again.

  They came and got him even before the sun had reached down into the piazza. They took the rope off and asked him if he would like to go down in a cart or on a donkey’s back, but he told them he would rather limp along.

  “I want to beat the drum for you,” Capoferro said.

  “Ask them,” Babbaluche said. “They’re in charge of all the killing here.”

  They allowed the old man to beat his drum.

  The Germans were in their parade uniforms. Although it was already warm and soon would be hot, they wore their tunics and steel helmets. At a few minutes after five the procession marched out of the Piazza of the People, the soldiers going ahead, Babbaluche limping along behind them, followed by Bombolini, Vittorini in his uniform, and Capoferro behind them tapping on his goatskin drum.

  The way to the rock quarry is down the Corso Cavour and through the Fat Gate and out above the terraces along a saddle of rocky land and cross the saddle to the quarry, where good marble used to be found.

  No one planned what happened, but if there is ever another execution here we will do it this way. The people had lined themselves up all the way down the Corso, and as Babbaluche started down they reached out to touch him and say goodbye, to catch his eye or say something for a last time, and he smiled at them and waved back.

  When they came through the Fat Gate and started across the saddle, they could see Rana and his deaf-mute father digging the grave that the cobbler would lie in that same day. That part we would do differently. Even for a Babbaluche it must be a strange feeling to see the earth come flying out of a hole and know that in a few hours the same earth will be lying on your face and in your mouth and you will be in there all alone, in the dark wet clay, while all of the rest will be out in the sun at work and making a living.

  If one must be shot, the quarry is a good place for it. The stone is in the shape of a horseshoe and they were able to tie the cobbler to the stake they had put up for Tufa and step back from it, and there was room in the pit for all the people to watch and still be safe. Capoferro ceased his drumming and the only sound then was of the last people filing into the rock pit and the crunching of the Germans’ hobnailed boots on the loose shale. Sergeant Traub asked if he wanted a blindfold.

  “I’m entitled to all the sun I can get,” the cobbler told him. “It warms me and I’m going to need it.”

  The sergeant stepped forward then and read something to him in German, some official form that turned Babbaluche into some kind of c
riminal and provided an excuse for the execution. When it had been read he took out a card and read from that in Italian.

  “You are here provided one last chance to preserve your life. Answer one question only in return for it. Where is the wine?”

  Some felt that they would hear the peacock’s cry again, but Babbaluche made no sound. He began to smile at Traub and he could not stop the smile, and some of the people began to smile also, until the whole city was smiling.

  “You have the right to say something,” Traub said. He looked at his watch.

  “It’s all right,” Babbaluche said. “You’ll be back in time for your breakfast.”

  He looked out at us because he wanted to say something we might remember, but it must not be easy to think of words that might account for fifty years of life. The soldiers had come to attention in a practice run, and they had leveled their rifles at the cobbler and he began to smile once more.

  “Why do you laugh?” Traub said. “This is a serious business.”

  “The rifles,” Babbaluche said. “Those six little black eyes looking for my heart.” He looked out at us. “They know,” he said, “I don’t have one.”

  Traub looked at his watch again.

  “Take the cork clapper off the bell,” Babbaluche said. “Give the poor bastards in Scarafaggio back their sound.”

  None of us recalls Traub giving any verbal order to fire, but the shots were fired and the sound was enormous in that quarry, and then the cobbler was leaning forward against the ropes of the stake. It was done. The smoke rose from the ends of the rifles and we were very silent. It was the silence of many and it was in its manner as enormous as the firing had been and so the sergeant ordered his men to reload at once and they formed a close rank and they turned and started out of the rock pit as fast as they could march without seeming to run from us.

  “Long live Babbaluche,” Bombolini shouted.

  “Long live Babbaluche,” the people of the city shouted. The sound shouted back at us from the high stone walls and that too was enormous.

  We carried the body out of the rock pit and back up the goat path to the burying ground, the young men holding the body aloft and not bothering about the blood because there wasn’t much and the cobbler weighed no more than a child. Capoferro beat the drum, Pa pa boom. Pa pa boom, and some goats ran alongside the body. An old woman who watched an ox for her living came over to the column.

  “Killed somebody, eh?”

  Someone answered her.

  “It probably served him right,” she said.

  At the burying ground some young men got into the hole and they lowered Babbaluche down into it and put him down in the coat he had been wearing, still stuffed with old rags to make him look fat. There was no coffin, since Babbaluche himself was the coffinmaker; but he wouldn’t have minded. “What a waste of good wood,” he used to say. “Well, this idiotic nation is poorer by one box today.”

  Babbaluche’s wife and children were there, but they had done their crying and now they were silent.

  “How did he go?” the wife asked.

  “Fine,” Bombolini said. “He went just like Babbaluche.”

  One of the daughters put some grape leaves down into the grave, and the other put the cobbler’s eyeglasses in with him. “Just in case,” she said.

  They turned away then and went back out of the ground and through the piles of stones we have put there to make some kind of decent entrance, and when they turned there, Bombolini and the family and a few others, since most of the people had already gone down to the vineyards, Captain von Prum was there. His face was flushed and it was clear that he had been running, since his breathing was hard and his words came in gasps.

  “I tried to stop it,” the captain said. “I ran all the way.”

  They only looked at him, and some of them looked away.

  “I wanted to stop it. I made up my mind it was wrong.”

  They started to walk past him then.

  “I ran all the way. I ran as hard as I could go. I have a bad leg, too, you understand.”

  Bombolini alone of them stayed behind with von Prum. In the background he could hear the priest praying.

  “Asperges me, Domine, hyssop.…” He had sneaked back into the burying ground and was sprinkling holy water on the cobbler’s face.

  “Do you know Machiavelli?” Bombolini asked.

  “Yes. We’ve talked about that.”

  “Do you know what he said? He said—and pay attention—‘It is well that when the act accuses you, the result excuses you.’”

  He began to go up toward the city again, and the German came along behind him. Bombolini wanted to tell him another one, that to an unjust government a martyr is more dangerous than a rebel, but then he decided the German would have to find that out for himself. When they came into the Corso the bell began to ring. They had not changed the clapper, but someone was beating the side of the bell with a metal hammer and it occurred to Bombolini how clear and pure the tone was, and he knew that Babbaluche was right, as Babbaluche had been all morning.

  8 THE TRIUMPH OF SANTA VITTORIA

  AFTER THAT the whole spirit changed. We were the way that Babbaluche had been with Sergeant Traub the morning of his death; there was nothing left that they could do to us. Even if they found the wine, we knew and they understood that we would kill them. It was possible that if they found the wine they would say nothing about it at all.

  We no longer saw them or heard them. They lived among us, but they were no longer a part of us. The soldiers spent all of their time in the wine cellar, playing cards among themselves and drinking wine. They were drunk most of the time. A few of the Good Time Boys went down to see them, but these were men who had lost a lot of money and needed to win it back again or face ruin, and so they were allowed to go. The Germans spent all of their time drinking and trying to apologize with their eyes.

  It didn’t matter. There was nothing they could apologize for. We might have hated them, but, for the time at least, Babbaluche had put an end to that. To hate the Germans would have ruined the joke of his death.

  “Oh, it’s all right,” people would say to the soldiers, the few times people talked to them. “He was only the best cobbler we ever had here. But it doesn’t matter. Believe us. It is just as he said. It doesn’t matter.”

  We wouldn’t allow them to apologize and that is a terrible thing to do to people.

  Besides, there were the grapes, and the harvest was upon us.

  We almost never saw von Prum after that, and we never saw Caterina at all. She alone of all the Santa Vittorians still suffered from the occupation. She was a prisoner in the house because he loved her, she was all that he had left and because he had vowed that if she left him the last thing that he would do was to see that Tufa died for it, and she knew that this was the one person he was still capable of killing.

  We know a little of what he did. There are notes and letters that he wrote, even to his dead brother Klaus, which he never sent. He was attempting through himself and through writing and reading and through his love for Caterina to remake himself. He began to strip himself before her, layer by layer, which is a very dangerous thing for any man to do. He wrote this in his log:

  I must look deeply into the chaos of my soul and plumb its depths so that the riddle of my existence will be revealed to me.

  No one in Santa Vittoria could ever write a line like that. Fabio, perhaps, before he experienced his torture, but never after that. Caterina gave him some help by telling him one thing her husband, who had admired the Germans, had told her.

  “The difference between the Italians and the Germans,” he had said, “is that when the Italians do something bad they know they are doing something bad, but when the Germans do something bad they are able to convince themselves they have done something good. And that is why they are so much more effective than we are.”

  “I did some bad things,” von Prum said. “See? I know that. But everything I did was f
or the country.”

  “What you forget,” Caterina told him, “is that every place is someone’s country.”

  “Someday, when this is all over, I’ll come back here and I’ll do something for the people here. I’ll build them a new fountain, I’ll help them build a school. Do you think they would like that?”

  “Oh yes,” Caterina said. “Come back and build them a school.” And she was right about that. It’s the way we are. We’ll take a school from anyone just so they don’t try to teach in it.

  His plans for returning here some day and doing good works for us occupied his time. There are more notes on that as well. In the course of this he must have scoured his soul and bleached it a bit, because his sense of well-being began to return.

  “I have looked into the chaos, I have plumbed the depths,” he wrote later. “I have dropped a bucket into the inner well of myself and it begins to come up with clear water. The riddle of my existence is this: That although I have made errors and I admit to them, at the same time I am forced to conclude that, like it or not, in the end I am dedicated to the good life.”

  After that, he began to go out a bit, a few short walks in the piazza, and he smiled at the women at the fountain and was pleased to find that the smiles were sometimes returned.

  “I think they understand,” he told Caterina. “These are good people. They know that at the bottom of it all I am only a soldier and that sometimes a soldier is forced to do things that aren’t nice but which duty demands be done.”

  He was happier with himself after that. He felt secure in himself once more. He had done his best, and he was content with most of it. If some people had been harmed, he hadn’t wished it to go that way. He was at ease except for the one thing that always came back to haunt him. He was secure enough one afternoon, a day or perhaps two days before the harvest began, to ask Bombolini to come to see him.

  “Don’t go,” everyone told the mayor. “It dishonors us.” But he went.