The Secret of Santa Vittoria

by Robert Crichton

  If Lorenzo had allowed the German to drop, he would have dropped down into the grapes and the must but Lorenzo held the German in his arms and he danced him. It was ugly to watch the way he did it, making a puppet of a human being and dancing him the way a child will dance a doll.

  “All right, I want to sit now,” the German said. “I want to rest.” But Lorenzo didn’t want him to sit or rest, he wanted him when he let him go to drop in the grapes and to lie in them and not be able to get up. It is hard to get up from the grapes. A short time after the Malatesta came to the door of Constanzia’s house, Lorenzo let him drop and he fell face forward onto the grapes. The German tried to get up, but each time the grapes gave way and shifted beneath him and he fell again and again, until he could no longer make even the effort to rise. The barrel had held wine before and some of it blended with the fresh juice, the must of the grapes, and it stained him, the soft wool of his pants turned the color of wine, and his chest and face were as red as any of the wine in the cellar.

  “Turn him over,” Bombolini called to Lorenzo. “He’ll drown in it.”

  “Let him drown,” people shouted. “Let him drown.”

  Lorenzo reached down and took the German by his belt and turned him over, because even Lorenzo, who doesn’t come from here, knew that we can’t afford to have people drown in our wine. The fireworks began to go off then, and had von Prum been able to open his eyes from his bed of grapes he could have seen the first of the rockets soar up out of Santa Vittoria.

  That should have been the end but the people here are vulgar about such things. They have no sense of the niceties of events. And then, a man of honor is condemned to die many times, just the same as a man without humor.

  There still remained that night, besides the dancing, the climbing of the greased poles. Two tall, thin poles are put up in the piazza and at the top of each is tied a young pig. Two teams are chosen from the young men of the city, and the first to get their man to the top of the pole and steal the pig is named the King of the Festival and his teammates are his court, and they can do almost what they wish for the remainder of the night. It is not easy. Many years no team manages to reach the pig, and the festival is left without a king.

  No one in Santa Vittoria thought that the Germans would accept another honor, this one to compete. But perhaps it was because they thought that by winning they might restore the honor they had lost, or perhaps it was that by competing for the pig they would make it plain that nothing had happened to them.

  At eight o’clock, before supper and the dancing, the teams were chosen. We build a large fire then, before the two poles, and the poles are greased with the fat of freshly killed ox. There are many ways to get up the poles—to fly at them, to fling a young man up in the air against the pole and hope when he catches it, if he catches it, that he can hold onto it and then go up. There are all kinds of ways to fail. It is to the Germans’ credit that when they agreed to compete they did not ask the people here for advice but went about the problem in their own way. They were systematic about it. At eight o’clock, when the contest began, four soldiers formed a square and two soldiers got on top of the four soldiers and then Captain von Prum, using the fountain as his pedestal, since he was the lightest of them, sat on the shoulders of the two soldiers on top. We were horrified when we saw that. They began to inch their way across the piazza from the fountain, past the fire, and it appeared that von Prum already was as high as the pig on top of the pole. But when he was next to the pole it could be seen that several feet, perhaps three or four, still separated him from the pig. Instead of throwing their top man to the pole in the manner we use to gain an extra foot or two, the Germans simply deposited the captain on the pole and, when he was secure on it, stepped out from beneath him. It hurt us, because it made us look like fools. For hundreds of years we have played this game, this sport here, and in minutes the Germans had bettered and mastered the difficult art.

  “My boots,” the captain called, and one after another they threw up his hobnailed boots. With the boots he could climb the rest of the way despite the ox grease on the pole.

  There was still one chance for Santa Vittoria. Each team is supplied with one long bamboo pole with a sandbag on the end of it. It is called “the Ax,” because it is used to “behead” kings. When a member of the opposite team nears the pig a member of the first team is allowed, if he can get high enough up on his own pole, to take one swing with the Ax to preserve the pig. It is an old custom here and a savage one, and we like it.

  The pig was now screaming just above von Prum’s head, as if he knew what fate was in store for him. How Rana the Frog got as high as he did on the second pole as soon as he did was not really known, because every eye, even those of the men who had flung Rana up and against the pole, was on the German who was inching his way upward. The pig was then only an arm’s length away, so we were surprised to hear Rana shout for the Ax and to find him so far up the pole and then to hear him say, “Captain von Prum, sir. Would you turn this way, please, Captain? I have something for you, sir.”

  What was also surprising to all of the people, ourselves who had seen this many times before and the Germans who never had seen it, was how long it seemed to take the Ax to come around and to complete its full arc. It seemed to take forever for the bamboo to swing around and begin on its way, slowly and massively, as if it were a cathedral door closing. And what is surprising was that von Prum did nothing at all about it. Perhaps he never saw it, or perhaps he was the way they say people are before a snake springs to strike them. But he looked at the padded head of the Ax swinging toward him, picking up speed all the while as it came, the way a fly looks at a lizard before it licks him with its tongue, right up to the moment when the sandbag met his protruding head and flipped him off the greased pole, backward, in one such clean movement that it looked rehearsed at first until it was remembered that there were no nets below and until we heard the captain meet the cobblestone of the piazza and even Rosa Bombolini turned away.

  It was the Italians who went to him first; not one of the Germans moved from where they stood. Pietrosanto picked up the captain’s head and held it in his lap.

  “You almost had the pig,” he said. They allowed Rana to go to him.

  “It was a fair blow,” Rana said. “You took it like a man.”

  He was not unconscious then, but when they attempted to pick him up and carry him across the piazza to Constanzia’s house he lost consciousness and they put him down by the fountain.

  “He needs water,” Heinsick said. “Put some water on his head.”

  Someone pointed to the fountain.

  “There is no water now. There is only wine.”

  “Put some wine on his head,” Bombolini said.

  They filled a small copper jug with wine from the fountain, foaming and fit for a saint, as Old Vines had said. They propped the captain up by the fountain and began to pour the wine over his head. It ran down through his hair and over his face, and it lay in his grease-stained clothes in puddles.

  “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost,” a woman said while the wine ran.

  “In the name of Santa Vittoria,” Bombolini said, “in the name of the people,” as the cascade of wine-dark liquid continued, “in the name of the holy wine.”

  They took him across the piazza when the wine did him no good and put him on the bed in his room and folded his hands in the same way we do for the dead. When all of them had gone except for the Malatesta and Sergeant Traub in the next room, Bombolini found a card belonging to the captain and wrote these words on it and put it in the captain’s hand:

  A proverb of the country:

  He who steals for others ends up being hanged for himself.

  He went out and closed the door behind him and when he got into the piazza the dancing had already begun. It was some of the wildest dancing we have ever done, but even over the sound of the band and the voices and the leather against the stones Bombolini could
hear the guns sounding in the south. Something very big was underway.

  THE DANCING ENDED at two o’clock in the morning and the Germans came at five. These were, as Pietrosanto said, the real Germans, hard, bearded men who were fighting and running for their lives. The soldiers were men from the Hermann Goering Parachute Division and they came through the Fat Gate and up the Corso Cavour in little half-tracks whose treads crushed the tops of our cobblestones into powder. They never looked at us. They moved through us with the assurance of men who knew that if so much as one shot was fired at them by some Resistance fighter, they would burn the town to the ground. They ran along the top of the Fat Wall and they looked through the windows of the houses that faced the valley and the River Road beyond, and they ran up into the bell tower and studied the countryside from there and on a map, and finally three or four of the highest officers gathered in the Piazza of the People and compared what they had found. We could have told them that this town was no good to fight a war in. It is placed wrong for everything except growing grapes.

  “It’s no good,” one of the officers said, and the others seemed to agree.

  “What’s the name of that place?” one of the Germans asked Vittorini. He pointed down toward Scarafaggio.

  “Scarafaggio,” Vittorini said. “It has a good command of the Montefalcone highway.”

  “Yes, Scarafaggio is the place you want to fight in,” Bombolini said to them.

  “If you’re going to fight,” Pietrosanto said, “Scarafaggio is the place to fight in.”

  All three of them nodded, and the German looked at them as if they were an animal act that sometimes comes to the towns and the cities here. Talking dogs and counting mules and dancing bears.

  “Shut your mouths,” he said. “Who is in command here?” He spoke very good Italian.

  “Do you mean the Italian in command or the German?” Bombolini said.

  “Italian?” the officer said. “Italian?” His rage was so swift and so genuine that Pietrosanto for a moment was certain that he would kill Bombolini on the spot.

  They led the officer across the piazza and they pointed to Constanzia’s house. What happened after that was unfair to Captain von Prum. They found him in bed with Caterina Malatesta, since she had felt too weak to go to her own home and she was also afraid of what childish act he might commit if she left him then. They pulled him out of the bed, his hair mottled with wine and blood, his body dyed in it. He was too stunned and too sick from the fall he had taken the night before to protect himself.

  “This is the shit we leave behind to run things while we fight,” the parachute officer said. We could hear it in the piazza. He slapped Captain von Prum in the face and there was nothing the captain could do but stand in the room and look at the floor. It must have been very painful.

  “Where are the rest of your men?”

  “I don’t know,” von Prum said.

  The officer looked at the other officers with him.

  “He doesn’t know.”

  He seized von Prum by the nose and he pulled his head to the left and right. “He doesn’t know,” he said. “He doesn’t know.” He stepped away and he kicked von Prum in the testicles, and the captain went down to the floor.

  “You make me sick. You disgust me,” he said. “Consider yourself under arrest.”

  He told the captain that when they stabilized the line at San Pierno he was to report to him there for disposition of his case after he had withdrawn his men and equipment from Santa Vittoria. The captain tried to get up from the floor.

  “Stay down,” the officer shouted at him. “Don’t rise. You aren’t permitted to stand with men. What is your name?”

  “I’ve had a serious accident,” von Prum said.

  “What is your name?”

  “Mollendorf,” von Prum said. “Captain Hans Mollendorf.” One of the younger officers wrote down the name. The senior parachute officer pointed at von Prum stretched on the stone floor. He was naked.

  “This is the kind of scum who is destroying us,” he said. They left then, and within ten minutes all of them were in the Corso Cavour and going back down the mountain.

  We were helpful to the ones that were left. We were glad to help them. The women gave them cups of hot tea made from field herbs and grass, and the men gave them grappa to get the blood going again. The small truck was already in one corner of the piazza and some of the men wheeled the motorcycle and the sidecar from the shed out into the piazza. The women tried to make the soldiers’ clothes as presentable as possible although it was not an easy job and they were not very successful. All of the uniforms were stained with wine and grease and sweat and manure and blood. We collected their helmets, which had been left all along the cart track up from the vineyards, and their tunics. We found the field packs they wore on their backs and in an old wine basket we piled all of their personal things, a few books in German and razors and old towels. All of them had drunk far too much wine the night before and they were still a little drunk. The sound of firing from the River Road and the valley, although there was nothing to be seen down there, was very loud.

  “It wasn’t bad here,” Heinsick said.

  “It was good here,” Private Zopf said, “considering it was a war.”

  One of them took some lire and put them on the top of a wine keg in a corner of the Cooperative Wine Cellar office.

  “This is for the wine we drank.”

  Traub took money and put it on the barrel.

  “This is for the wine we stole.”

  It wasn’t much money, it was nothing, and yet it was something. They left the office, and the people began to help them carry their things up the Corso Cavour to the Piazza of the People. Captain von Prum was already in the piazza putting things in the back of the truck and in the sidecar of the motorcycle. He moved very slowly; he was in pain and he was confused. He ordered the gray file cabinet taken out of the house, but when they found it difficult to get it into the back of the truck they put it in the piazza again and forgot about it.

  “What about this?” Bombolini asked. It was the air-raid siren.

  “You can keep that,” Sergeant Traub said.

  “Once each year we’ll sound it and think back on these days,” Bombolini said.

  The captain stood in the piazza and looked across it at the bell tower and at Santa Maria of the Burning Oven, at the People’s Palace and at the Fountain of the Pissing Turtle. He seemed to be seeing things as if storing up a last memory of this place and yet not seeing things at all. He walked across to the fountain. It was silent then; the wine was not flowing and the water had not begun.

  “Would you like me to start it up?” Bombolini said.

  “Do what you want with it,” the captain said. Someone began to pump the bicycle, and the generator began to turn and finally to drive the pump, and the wine began to spout again from the turtle.

  “I never asked why it did that,” von Prum said. “Why the turtle does that.”

  “I can’t tell you that,” Bombolini said. “It’s a secret that only the people in Santa Vittoria know.”

  “I don’t want to know it then,” the captain said.

  Some of the soldiers were already in the back of the small truck, crowded among their packs, hunched on the hard wooden seats. Vittorini came up into the piazza then, dressed in the uniform with the sword drawn and the Italian flag suspended from its blade.

  It was very quiet in the piazza. We had always dreamed that the day they left would be a day of great celebration. We were happy to see them prepare to go, but the day after the festival is always a sad day. The long summer is over, the harvest is in, all the promises of the year past have been met or have failed and what we call the dead time, the season of the dead, was upon us. Captain von Prum came back from the motorcycle. For a moment we had thought he was getting in it and that it was the time to go, but he had stopped and come back toward Bombolini. The men of the San Marco Brass Band, who had been afraid to go home becaus
e of the firing along the roads, put down their instruments.

  “You did this to me,” Captain von Prum said to Bombolini.

  “Whatever was done was done inside of you,” Bombolini said. “We did nothing here.”

  “I came here to treat you with decency and respect and honor, and it’s come to this. I made a mistake.”

  It was more than Bombolini was willing to hear.

  “We have a saying here,” the mayor said, “and you should listen to it. ‘If the dove chooses to fly with the hawk his feathers stay white but his heart turns black.’ It was in you all along.”

  “I treated you with honor, and you returned it with humiliation.”

  “It was in you all along. You struck me with your fist in my face.”

  “That was nothing. That was an order.”

  “And you turned the handle on the electricity for Fabio. You couldn’t keep your hand away from it finally.”

  Von Prum was silent then. He looked as if he wasn’t hearing what was being said, but he must have heard.

  “And you put our cobbler to death. You forget that. What your kind do is to forget.”

  The Malatesta was in the doorway and he saw her. There was a moment when we thought that he was going to go to her, but he stayed where he was.

  “What you people have to remember, your kind, is that there is no cure for birth.”

  Von Prum turned away from him and started toward the motorcycle.

  “And there is no cure for death,” Bombolini said, “if you think about it.”

  The German had stopped, and perhaps the mayor had touched something in him. He was angry and confused at the same time. Pietrosanto wanted to stop the mayor because men can become dangerous when they are this way. They were looking at one another.