The Secret of Santa Vittoria Page 16

“You can be,” he said at last, “if you are a fool.”

  Caterina finished dressing the last of the wounds. Most of them were not deep, but several of them were infected and the flesh was ragged around them.

  “You’re not going to get better here,” the Malatesta said. “You’re going to have to get out of this room.”

  “Where are you going to take him?” Tufa’s mother asked. “He can’t go to the hospital.”

  “Some place where he can get better.”

  The mother got up from the box she sat on and began collecting her son’s things.

  “I don’t want him dying in here,” she said. “Besides, you know what I have to feed him?” She tapped the side of an earthen pot. “I have ten or twelve olives. I can’t count. I have one piece of bread and no oil to drip on it.”

  Caterina looked at Tufa. “Do you want to go with me?”

  “Oh, yes. You know that,” he said, and he began to get to his feet. When she helped him she was surprised to find that he was silently crying.

  “The first time,” he said. “The first time ever.”

  He didn’t know why he cried, but he wasn’t ashamed of the tears. Later he was able to figure that he cried because he was giving up the death he had planned for himself and he knew that he was going to have to enter again into the life that had fooled him so terribly and that he had wanted to give up. He went past his mother and out into the Corso Cavour, where Fabio and Roberto were waiting in the rain.

  “You don’t say goodbye to your mother?”

  “No, we don’t do that in this family,” Tufa said. Tufa, although he was weak and sick, led the way up the Corso, which is the way it is in this town. He was forced to lean against the walls and gasp for breath, but he led the way up. Finally he had to lean on Caterina.

  “I apologize for that,” he said.

  “You don’t have to apologize to me,” she said, and it caused both of them to laugh because it was a truth, and when you hear the truth it makes you laugh. They had at the moment recognized the truth between them: because they knew everything about each other, they would never have to apologize to each other and they would never have to or be able to apologize for themselves.

  At the Fountain of the Pissing Turtle, although the rain was falling heavily, Tufa was forced to stop and sit on the wet edge of the fountain.

  “I like this rain. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in a real rain.”

  “You were in Africa?”

  “There and Sicily, yes.” He looked up and allowed the rain to run down his face, and she was able to see how beautiful his eyes were, the thick lashes, the dark brows, the large soft brownness of the eyes themselves. It was said that every woman in Santa Vittoria was jealous of Tufa for his eyes.

  “I can feel the dust of Africa washing off me,” he said.

  It made Caterina laugh, and she could see that it hurt him.

  “Why do you laugh?” he said. His voice was annoyed.

  “Oh, it sounded so dramatic. You must go to a lot of movies.”

  “I never go to movies.”

  He was silent after that. He let the rain wash down his neck, and then he lifted his face to it once more.

  “The other officers in my mess were always laughing at the things I said, and I never knew why.” He looked at her. “You’re like them.”

  He didn’t say it with any anger or any sadness about it, but as a fact. “Not inside, maybe, but like them.” It was, she knew, a matter of class, the education of people who were trained to respond to innocence with scorn or anger because they were terrified of what innocence might see. Although she understood him, there were things she would have to do differently.

  “Do you think we can go?” She was becoming chilled and wet.

  “In a moment.”

  “Then tell me the story of the fountain while we wait.” Tufa looked up at the fountain and smiled, and it was the first time she had seen him smile. She had seen him laugh, but a laugh is something different from a smile.

  “It’s an old story and not a nice one,” Tufa said.

  “I think I can bear it.”

  “It’s very dirty.”

  “You’re apologizing.”

  “No, I’m warning you.” He took her hand. “Here, help me up.” They started to walk across the piazza once again. “I don’t think I’m going to tell you. Don’t you know that that story is told to women who are thirty years old and who no longer are virgins?”

  “I qualify then,” Caterina said. He gripped her arm then, very hard, so hard that it took her by surprise and hurt her.

  “No you don’t,” he said. “I know when you were born.” She was amazed by this.

  “Your father gave my father a cup of wine, a tin cup of wine and some coins, on the day you were born,” Tufa said. “Do you think I would forget that?”

  “Yes.”

  “My father didn’t want them. He was insulted. And when my mother heard my father had turned down the money she made me go up to your house and tell your father that my father was wrong, that there was something wrong with his head and that we wanted the money.”

  “And you were ashamed.”

  “Of course I was ashamed. Everyone laughed. They never heard of such a thing before. So they gave me the cup of wine and put the coins in my pocket and then they put a chicken around my neck for my father.”

  He was silent, and she said nothing. There was no reason to apologize for her father, and both of them knew that.

  “He never forgave my mother and he never forgave me,” Tufa said. “We ate the chicken and he sat there and looked at us and went hungry. Then he went away and never came back. I was eight then. Do you think I would forget?”

  “No.”

  “I was eight and I am thirty-four now, and that makes you twenty-six,” he said.

  “Why did you do that to my arm, grip me like that?”

  “I don’t want any lies. Even little lies. I want no more lies of any kind.”

  “I’ll try not to tell any lies,” Caterina said. “I don’t know if it will be easy or not. I don’t think I ever tried before.”

  At the end of the piazza they came upon the last of the rows of wine. “What the hell is all this?” Tufa said.

  “The Germans are coming.” She could feel his body stiffen and then relax once more. “They were trying to hide the wine.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The mayor here, what’s his name? The fat man. Bombolini. Italo Bombolini. He used to run the wineshop.”

  “I refuse to believe that that fat bastard is the mayor here,” Tufa said.

  “Does that telling lies apply to yourself as well? Because he is the mayor. The Captain of the People they call him.”

  “O God! O Maria!” Tufa said, and both of them were laughing again. He looked at the bottles glistening in the rain.

  “No, I believe you,” he said. “This is the work of some kind of idiot.”

  They went up the long bill and it was midnight when they reached the door to the Malatesta house and Tufa stopped to regain his breath before going inside it.

  “I never thought I would go inside here again,” Tufa said. “I never thought I would go inside of my own choice.”

  He hesitated at the door.

  “I never ate chicken again. I have never had a piece of chicken in my mouth from that day,” he said, but then he went through the door.

  It was cold inside and dark and when Caterina managed to light the little lamp that was fed by ox fat she found that Tufa was trembling from cold and wet and from exhaustion. The lamp light made the room seem warmer, but he could not control his shaking.

  “Take off your cothes and get into that bed,” Caterina said. “My bed.”

  “I’m not used to taking orders,” he said. He made no move of any kind.

  “Do you want me to turn away?”

  “Of course.” He sounded annoyed. “Of course.”

  She waited until she heard him
get into the bed before turning around. Next to the bed was a small porcelain stove that had been brought to Santa Vittoria by some Malatesta from some foreign place when there was money. There was no fuel for the fire, but she burned the stump of a broom and it gave good light, and for a while it heated the room. She found a bottle of anisette and the liquor warmed them both, but there was not enough of it to sustain them and he wanted to talk to her.

  “I’ll borrow a bottle,” she said. When she returned he was asleep, but he awoke at once when she came back through the door. She had a bottle of good vermouth and she uncorked it and handed it to him.

  “The bottle is all wet,” Tufa said. “Oh, you went back down?” He shook his head. “They would have hung you from the fountain by your heels if they had caught you.”

  The story Tufa had to tell is not an uncommon one in Italy, although it is possible that Tufa would tell it with greater hurt than most of the others, since Tufa has more pride than most. The story is the same, over and over, only the facts are different and the names and the places.

  He had wanted to be a good soldier and a good Italian. He had wanted to act with courage, he had wanted to keep his integrity and live with honor. It wasn’t a great deal to ask of a state, to be able to serve it and to live and even die for it like a man. But they wouldn’t allow that, although Tufa wasn’t prepared to admit it. He lied to himself about the failures in Albania and the disasters in Greece. He continued to encourage his men to die for a cause they couldn’t believe in, but which he could not make himself admit was not worth dying for. Through his example, young men, for him alone as a man, stood and fought and were maimed or killed for it. And then one night, in North Africa, near Bengasi, some of the men, his own men, shot him in the back.

  “I’m sorry,” the one who did the shooting said. “We have to do this to save ourselves.”

  Even then he wasn’t willing to admit everything to himself. When he rejoined his regiment in Sicily the soldiers were frightened by the officer who was so brave that he would kill them to prove it. During the first attack his men deserted.

  “We stay,” Tufa had shouted at them. “The others run. We stay. We stand like men, we go down like men.”

  But they ran. They ran at him and past him, and he lifted his rifle as he had been forced to do before, and they kept running, and for the first time he lowered the rifle and knew that they were right and he was wrong and that to shoot them would be to murder them. That night he himself ran, across Sicily in the night, to the Straits of Messina, where he used the rifle to force a fisherman to take him to the mainland, and he had run in the night like some wounded animal trying to make his way back to his den to lick his wounds in secrecy and darkness or to die.

  When he was through the fire had gone out and the house was cold again and it was Caterina who was shivering.

  “I’m going to have to come to bed. I hope you will allow this,” Caterina said. It was a matter of courtesy only.

  “There is no choice, is there?”

  She took off her clothes and came to the bed, and neither of them said anything after that. Tufa had begun trembling once more, from the cold and his tiredness and from the story he had told. The heat of her body warmed him and calmed him and the trembling lessened, and after a time he slept. It wasn’t sleep but a gaining of rest, because when he really slept he would not be easy to wake again. After a short time he awoke and they made love to each other. There was no surprise about it and no surprise about each other, they were exactly what they had expected of each other. When they had finished they lay back on the bed and looked at the darkness of the ceiling.

  “I know everything about you,” Caterina said, “except one thing. I don’t know your first name.”

  “Perhaps we should keep it that way. You know what they say here: ‘Love, but make sure to keep a wall between you.’”

  “No, I want to know it. I feel I am entitled to that.”

  “I don’t like my name. Carlo,” he said.

  She tried it several different ways. “It doesn’t suit you.”

  “It’s German. It comes from Karl. I’ve come to despise it.”

  They could hear the rain running down from the roof tiles and the filled gutters, splashing down into the shutters outside the windows and onto the cobblestones of the street.

  “We have no wall between us,” Caterina said.

  “Maybe that is bad. Maybe that will destroy us.”

  “Why do you bring that up?”

  He said that he didn’t know. He said that he had lost faith and was no longer sure. “They say something else you should know, ‘Love as if one day you will hate.’ Maybe they’re right.”

  “Why are they so mean and hard?” Caterina said.

  “Because life is mean and hard. That’s my trouble, do you see. I only learned that when I was thirty-four years old. The oldest child you will ever meet.”

  The shutters began to slap against the stone walls of the house. The rain began to come hard against the window pane. The wind was changing, Tufa said, and that meant the rain would pass.

  “I think I’m also entitled to hear the story of the fountain now,” Caterina said. She wanted to end this concern with themselves, it was too much for one day, but it didn’t matter, because Tufa had surrendered himself to sleep at last. She lay beside him, fearful of moving but not able to sleep.

  “Tufa? Carlo?”

  She knew he wouldn’t answer, but she wanted to talk to him. She had been watching his face and she found that looking at it moved her. She found she wanted to touch it, but she was afraid to.

  “You’re going to make me be in love again,” she said.

  The idea frightened her, because falling in love is dangerous. She thought of the Germans’ coming. What was meaningless the day before was suddenly full of meaning. They had been nothing then and were everything now. They could take her, they could take Tufa, they could end what had already begun. In the end, however, she slept and like Tufa surrendered herself so completely to sleep that she didn’t hear the soft thin pounding of the bell or peoples’ steps on the cobblestones or the slamming of the doors, or even the shouts of those who were beginning to fill up the piazza down the hill below them, or the thumping of the carts going down the hill into the piazza.

  ROBERTO had left them, Malatesta and Tufa, in the Piazza of the People and had gone to the People’s Palace and to bed. He had slept for perhaps an hour or more, when Bombolini woke him. “God has come to me again,” he said. “I want you to hear the new message.”

  Roberto was reluctant to move or even to lie there and listen to the story.

  “Would you like some onions? I have some onions,” Bombolini said. “Please.”

  Roberto got up then because it frightened him to hear Bombolini beg him, and together they went downstairs. There was a pot of onions simmering in olive oil over the small fire the mayor had built.

  “God clearly is trying to tell me something and I am too stupid to understand it,” Bombolini said. “The answer is in here. I feel it in here and I can’t get it out—like a rabbit in the back of a hole.” And he told this story about the famous family named Doria:

  They were famous sailors from Genoa, but at the time of the story they had very little money. One day the king announced he would honor them with a visit for dinner to their house.

  “Turn down the offer. Find some excuse,” the brothers of Andrea said. “We have no silverware, we have no decent plate, no dishes worthy of a king. We will be ashamed.”

  But Andrea told the king to come and then he went to a rich neighbor and borrowed all of his gold and silverware, and as proof that he would return it he left his oldest son as a hostage. If the plates were not returned the rich man could do as he pleased with the boy, even kill him.

  The king arrived and he was impressed with the meal and with the service and with the gold and silver plates and platters and with the marvelous view of the sea and the harbor.

  “You’ve
done well for yourselves,” he said. “You know how to live in the royal way.”

  “Our house is small because as seamen we prefer to live lightly so that we can move swiftly,” Andrea said. “Sometimes, for example, when we are about to sail, we don’t bother with the plate. We simply throw it off the terrace and into the sea.”

  And he flung a solid-gold goblet over the side of the terrace and down into the sea far below. The king’s mouth was open.

  “You can throw them over your head or you can drop them like this.” He dropped a heavy silver tray into the sea. “I like to throw them myself.” He threw a gold fork over his head and off the terrace.

  “Like this?” the king said. And he flung a gold plate.

  “Like that, yes. It’s very handy,” Andrea said, and he dropped a silver pitcher into the sea.

  Even for a king it is not an everyday occasion to cast a fortune into the sea. They threw the plates and they threw the bowls and the knives and the forks, and when there was nothing left to throw at all the king turned to the Dorias and said: “Great men. You are great men, capable of the great act. I salute you.”

  He made them dukes on the spot. They are dukes to this day. They have been rich from then on.

  * * *

  “It’s in there, Roberto,” Bombolini said. “The answer, the solution, it’s hiding in there.”

  “It was a high price to pay to impress the king,” Roberto said. “What happened to the boy?”

  “What do you mean what happened to the boy?” Bombolini said. “He went home to his father.”

  “But the treasure. All of the treasure was gone in the sea.”

  Bombolini looked at Roberto as if he had never really seen him before. “The gold and silver was in the fish nets they had stretched all along the bottom of the sea the day before. They only lost a silver cream pitcher.”

  “Ah, the fish nets.” If the answer was in the story it lay somewhere in the fish nets, Roberto realized.

  “Of course, the fish nets. You don’t think they would throw the gold off the terrace without fish nets down below?”

  He realized one other thing. That although he spoke the language he would never understand the mind of these people. Any peasant would know there was a fish net down below, and the point of the story was not how to fool a king as much as what a clever way to use a fish net.