The Secret of Santa Vittoria

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  The Beginning of the Beginning

  1. The Beginning

  2. Bombolini

  3. Von Prum

  4. The Wine

  5. The Shame of Santa Vittoria

  6. The Noose Grows Tighter

  7. The Rat in the Throat

  8. The Triumph of Santa Vittoria

  Copyright

  For Judy, who for four years led

  two lives and sometimes three lives, so that

  I might write these lives.

  In the long run, one life means nothing.

  CAPTAIN SEPP VON PRUM

  In the end, nothing is more important than one life.

  ITALO BOMBOLINI

  THE BEGINNING OF THE BEGINNING

  THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT of this book was left outside the door of my hotel room in Montefalcone, in Italy, in May 1962. It arrived in the manner of the classic foundling. Wrapped in coarse brown paper and held together by cheap twine, the bundle literally fell into my life when I opened the door one morning. A note pinned to it read: “In the name of God, do something with this.”

  As with most foundlings, this one was a bastard. The note was not signed, the title page was missing, the manuscript had no professed father. It was not a manuscript at all, but a collection of disorganized notes. I let it lie in a corner of the room for several days, since I resented it as an intruder in my life, but as it also is with most foundlings this one cried out to live, and one night I untied the twine and began to read the notes. They were written in a bad hand in English and Italian and in the dialect of this region, and sometime in the night I realized that it might prove to be my burden to raise another man’s child.

  What to label this book has been the subject of argument. The collector of the notes, whom I now know to be Roberto Abruzzi, calls it a history. One note, perhaps intended to be the title page, reads:

  THE SECRET OF SANTA VITTORIA

  THE DIARY OF A TRUE EVENT

  Some important things have been found to be true. There is a town of Santa Vittoria, and the great central incident around which this story revolves, the secret, is history.

  Some of the people named in the book are alive and still tend vines on the side of the mountain Santa Vittoria clings to. But others have never existed, including some who are pictured in a good light. Much is made about a green light that burns in the Piazza of the People in memory of the martyr Babbaluche, but there is no such flame. And just when one is tempted to doubt there ever was a cobbler named Babbaluche his name is found carved on a wall in the rock quarry where he is said to have given his life.

  The difficulty in finding the truth lies with Santa Vittoria itself. The city, as they call it, is an Italian hill town, one of those clusters of houses which can be seen from any main highway, a huddle of gray and white shapes pressed up against the side of a mountain as if they were sheep fearful of falling off it, which they sometimes do. Some are unreachable except by mule or on foot or by military vehicles, and the towns are as isolated on their mountains as any island in the sea.

  The people have no tradition of outsiders and no procedures for handling them. They are not hostile, but they are suspicious and afraid of them. History has proved that to talk to strangers sooner or later leads to trouble or ends up costing money, and so history has rendered them incapable of telling truths to outsiders. They don’t lie, but they never of their own will provide the truth. There are people in Santa Vittoria who are capable of denying knowledge of the town fountain when it can be heard bubbling behind their backs.

  And if one hopes to reach the people, Italian is the wrong language to use. Italian is the language of Rome and, as such, the tongue for taxes and trouble and misunderstanding. For the native of a hill town, Italy is somewhere beyond him, and Milan can be less understood and more mysterious than America. The walls of his town and the fields around them are his Italy and the main piazza is his Rome. His loyalty is to himself and to his family, and if there is any left over it might extend to his street and even to his section of town. In times of crisis such as Santa Vittoria knew, when everyone’s safety and money are at stake, loyalty might extend itself to take in the entire town. But beyond that there is nothing more. What is Sardinia to Santa Vittoria? Loyalty ends with the last grapevines at the foot of the mountain.

  And Santa Vittoria is grapevines; it is wine. That is all there is. Without the wine, as they say here, even God Himself could not invent a reason for Santa Vittoria. My failure in Santa Vittoria is that I was seen thinning their fat black wine with mineral water, and by that one act I had adulterated the meaning of their lives and diluted the result of their sweat. They never even lied to me after that.

  As for Roberto Abruzzi, I have never seen him, but I have talked with him. He would telephone me at my hotel and then ask me to call him back so as to save money, and we would talk for long periods of time. Abruzzi is an American who cannot go back to the United States, or thinks that he can’t go back, because of something that he did. I am not certain that he is an American. It is possible that he is an Italian who feels that by posing as an American he might find a better market for his notes. The intricacies of the Italian mind, the strategies employed by the poor in hill towns to see themselves through just one day, are not known in this country. But when you read what he writes I think that, like myself, you will believe him.

  In return for food and the use of a house he was asked by the people of Santa Vittoria to tell their story and record for them the great thing the people of that city did there in the summer and the fall of 1943. They asked Abruzzi to write the book because, as an American, he was supposed to know how to do such things.

  It wasn’t easy for Roberto Abruzzi to begin. No one in Santa Vittoria had written a book and not too many people there had read one, but everyone knew how this book should be written.

  “Put down anything, put down a lot. Long books are better than short ones,” Vittorini, the old soldier and the most cultured man in Santa Vittoria, told him. “Say anything just so you say it beautifully.”

  The priest, Padre Polenta, handed him this note one morning:

  Remember this, Roberto. One’s words must glide across the page like a swan moving across the waters. One must be conscious of the movement without a thought of what is causing it to move.

  It was enough to stop him for a month. His pen, as he told me, was like the ugly orange feet. The people had contracted for a swan and he was going to deliver a swine. But in the end Roberto wrote what he did because he had a stronger reason for doing it than to satisfy the vanity of Santa Vittoria. As he is willing to admit, he has been a thief about it. In order to tell his own story, which he feels is a shameful one but which he knew had to come out of him before it consumed him, he has stolen the far greater story of Santa Vittoria. Roberto Abruzzi was a deserter during the war, but it is his hope that if he can tell about it, some people might be able to understand him and he might some day be allowed to return to the United States, where he was born, and build a new life again. This is the price that he asks the reader to pay in return for the story of Santa Vittoria. It is not a high price to pay.

  Here, then, is the foundling that I agreed to adopt. From that bastard, the ragged bundle of notes of Roberto
Abruzzi, has grown this book.

  Montefalcone, 1962

  New York, 1965

  1 THE BEGINNING

  THE HOUR this story begins is known. The minute is known; the exact moment is recorded. Even the state of the weather is known. To some this might not appear to be remarkable, but when it is considered that there are entire generations in the history of Santa Vittoria about which nothing at all is known, the statement becomes remarkable.

  It was Padre Polenta who recorded the moment. He had been working in his wood-lined room at the top of the bell tower when he first saw the light coming down the River Road from Montefalcone. At times the beam of light would be sharp and clear, and then the bicycle would enter a patch of fog clinging low to the Mad River and the light would become a round wet globe, like a lantern dropped in a lake, or the moon before a snow. The light annoyed the priest. Like many people who don’t sleep at night he felt the night belonged to him. He left the window of the tower and made an entry in his daily record.

  1:21 A.M. The goat Cavalcanti on the prowl again. Tell his mother to keep him home before her boy is found dead

  Beneath this he added, in purple ink and underlined three times:

  The winter fogs have come again. Ha! A new record.

  The priest hated the fogs. He lived in the top of the bell tower because of them. He felt that his lungs were lined with a kind of fungus that absorbed water and he had given up a rich parish in the north of Italy and taken this poor place to escape the wetness of the northern winter.

  “What about fogs?” he had asked. “Do you have fogs? Some of these mountain towns endure fogs.”

  The parish committee had all looked at one another as if the word fog was one they had never heard before.

  “Oh, there are the winter fogs,” one of the committee members finally said. “A few days or a week. I suppose you could go away for a week.”

  “I have a dread of sopping lungs,” Polenta had said.

  The first year was good, but in the second year the winter fogs came up from the valleys and slid down from the high mountains in October and lasted through the winter until April. With the fogs a bitterness had come to the priest, and it grew deeper with the years. With his last money he repaired the ancient campanile in the Piazza of the People and with good dry wood he paneled the room at the top where the lookouts had once stayed. The top of the tower floats above the fog line, and one day years ago the shepherd moved up into the tower and left his flock below.

  After that he came down once a week to say Mass (to celebrate the death of Christ, Babbaluche the cobbler always said) and to give the last rites and to bury the dead, the two sacraments the people claimed Polenta enjoyed dispensing. They forgot his name and he was content to leave it that way. Polenta is a crude corn meal eaten by the peasants in the north. Here it is considered food fit for swine.

  * * *

  When the priest went back to the window for a second time he was surprised to see that the rider had already turned off the River Road and was coming across the cart track that leads to the foot of the mountain and the climb up. There was a moon then, and streamers of moonlit fog shifted in the streets below like bright banners, but they only disgusted the priest. When the rider dipped into the shadow of the mountain, where the road can no longer be seen even from the bell tower, Polenta went back to his work.

  It was strange work for the priest to be doing. No one knew about it here until after he died, and then the people were amazed and felt ashamed of themselves for having despised him all along, which was, after all, how he must have wanted them to feel. He was occupied with restoring the Great Ledger of the Parish of Santa Vittoria, in an effort to re-create some kind of history for the people and the city. There are people who feel Polenta did this out of a love that he was unable to show, but others think that it was only an exercise to keep him from slipping back into peasant ways, the lot of many who move to these mountains. The Ledger itself shows it. The young priests arrive here and for a while the Ledger is filled with entries of births and deaths, and each year the entries become fewer and less informative until finally there are none at all for years on end, and the writing in the book, if there is any, becomes unreadable—the young priest has become an old peasant.

  There is no passion to the work. Fabio della Romagna, who is the only person from Santa Vittoria to have gone to the university, believes that because the priest was such a stubborn and bitter man, that once he began it he refused to leave it until it was done. This may be true, but on this one night Polenta had made a discovery that amused him and even excited him. He found that if he took a page from the Ledger, one filled with births and deaths and baptisms and marriages, from one century, and then took a page from a hundred years before or a hundred years later, it was impossible to tell which page belonged to which century. This night he had three pages on his work table, one from 1634, one from 1834 and one from 1934.

  The same names were on all the pages. The same first names and the same middle names and the same last names. The same people were getting born and getting married and getting buried, and the same children were having their First Communion and receiving their Confirmation, and the same children were dying in the same old trusted ways. The rest of the world might have been changing over those centuries, but it would be impossible to prove it by Santa Vittoria.

  The priest was counting the family of Pietrosanto. In 1634 there were listed in the Ledger the names of forty-six members of the Pietrosanto family. Three hundred years later there were thirty-eight Pietrosantos, but this did not include the three who had gone off to war some place and were listed as missing. After all the plagues and the wars and the disease, the fires and landslides and the fights and feuds of three centuries, after the wide-spread honey-coated arms of America, there were five fewer Pietrosantos in the city (Thank God for that much at least, Babbaluche the cobbler would have said), and almost all of them were living in the same houses on the same lanes, finding shade under the same trees that stood then, all of them, the Pietrosantos, as solid and as sturdy, as stubborn and as bullheaded as ever before.

  In 1634 this city could count 1,168 souls. Three hundred years later there were thirty-nine fewer. This year the Ledger could show the same number of births but two fewer deaths, a tribute to the miracles of modern science and to the skills of Lorenzo Bara, the town doctor. The motto of Santa Vittoria: “See Doctor Bara and die.” Only nine people had died without his aid in the preceeding ten years.

  Facts are facts and they are usually lifeless things, but one fact was beginning to depress the priest. The more he went through those similar names the more it became clear to him that with the exception of the Sicilian boob, Italo Bombolini, he himself was the only person who had come to Santa Vittoria by choice.

  One arrives here through the natural passage of the womb. One leaves in a box of wood through the Fat Gate out to the cemetery beyond the walls of the town just above the vineyards on the terraces. In between those times you tend the vines and grow the grapes and make the wine and live the best way you can.

  * * *

  Padre Polenta would insist he didn’t sleep. For men who claim not to sleep it is important for them not to be caught asleep, as if it were some kind of honor for them to go around with bags under their eyes. But the truth is that Polenta never heard the rattle of the bicycle being pushed across the cobblestones of the piazza and that the young man who was pushing it had to shout four or five times before the priest heard him and went to the window.

  “If it’s someone dying,” the priest shouted down, “he can die just as well in the morning.”

  “No one is dying, Padre. It’s me, Fabio, Fabio della Romagna.”

  He didn’t go away from the window because the Romagna family was one of the few in which the priest had ever been able to find any merit. They donated a fat wheel of cheese each year to the parish and some years a keg of wine.

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to r
ing the bell, Padre. I want to wake up the town.”

  “It will be morning in two hours.”

  “It’s Mussolini, Padre.”

  “Who?”

  “The Duce.” Fabio shouted very loudly.

  “What about the Duce? Do you want me to come down into that fog for the Duce?”

  “He’s dead, Padre,” Fabio called up. “The Duce is dead.”

  The priest went away from the window and looked around the wooden walls of the room. It was strange to him. He lit a tallow candle and wrote in the daily log.

  2:25 A.M. Cavalcanti turns out to be F. della Romagna. I learn that the Duce is dead.

  He took the candle and started down the dark steep stone steps that wound down inside the walls of the tower. Fabio met him at the door. He was tired and wet with sweat, but he was happy.

  “You should see them in Montefalcone,” the young man said. He described how the people were dancing in the streets and setting fire to portraits of Mussolini and burning Fascist symbols and how the soldiers had deserted their barracks, and the police headquarters had been burned and how even the carabinieri had gone to the hills.

  “I suppose they’ll go after the churches next,” Polenta said. “They usually do.”

  Fabio was shocked. “They’re going into the churches to pray, Padre,” he said.

  “I’m sure.”

  “To give thanks for their deliverance, Padre.”

  “I’m sure. Go on, go ring your bells.” He allowed Fabio to come into the bell tower, but he wouldn’t help him find the bell ropes in the darkness.

  “Find them yourself. I’m not going to help you,” the priest said. He wasn’t sure how he felt about Mussolini. There was the Lateran Treaty; the Duce had signed it and by that act had done more for the Church than any one other leader of Italy, but the Duce had been a fool and a clown, two traits that the priest despised above all others. Had he been born God, the priest had said, it was the clowns who would occupy the lowest rungs of hell.