The Secret of Santa Vittoria Page 17

  “Do you see it now?”

  Roberto had to admit that he didn’t see it.

  “Come and eat and maybe it will come to you.” He ladled out the hot browned onions and he poured the bubbling olive oil over bread, and while he did that Roberto told him about Tufa and the Malatesta.

  “You know there’s only one bed in the house, don’t you?” Bombolini said. Roberto shook his head.

  “One bed. Can you imagine it?” he said. “A Malatesta copulating with a Tufa? You don’t know what it means. A revolution, a new world entirely. A Tufa copulating with a Malatesta in the house of Malatesta.”

  “How do you know they are doing it?” Roberto said.

  Once again Bombolini looked at him as if he had not seen him before. “They’re in the same bed, aren’t they?”

  It is an Italian belief that if two people are in the same bed they must be making love to one another, not from desire necessarily, but because man is weak and unable to resist the natural urge. There is no court in Italy that is prepared to believe otherwise.

  Roberto watched the mayor wiping the olive oil from his cheeks and chin and realized only then that he was crying, quietly but steadily, exactly as he had been eating. When the last of the bread and onions had been eaten Bombolini turned to Roberto.

  “Don’t let it alarm you,” Bombolini said. “But, Roberto, tell me this one thing. What am I going to do?”

  “Something will turn up. You watch.”

  “Americans always say that,” Bombolini said.

  “Will you listen to a story from me?” When Bombolini nodded Roberto told him a story he had learned from a soldier who had come from Arkansas.

  One day, Roberto said, a man was hunting for bear and he came to the middle of a great open field and he found that his gun wouldn’t work. There was no tree to climb, no rock to run behind, no cave to crawl into and all at once an enraged bear came out of some distant woods across the open field directly at the hunter. It was a very close call, Roberto said.

  “What do you mean, a close call. What did the hunter do?”

  “He climbed a tree.”

  “But I thought you said there was no tree.”

  “That’s just the point. There had to be, there had to be.”

  Bombolini had listened with respectful silence, and when the story was over he shook his head and made a face.

  “That’s the difference between us, Roberto. You think there has to be an answer. But we know different. A thousand years has taught us differently. That’s just the point. There isn’t always an answer. Your people will learn that some day.”

  The mayor began to shed tears once more, very quiet and with no movement of his face, and Roberto felt he should turn away.

  “Like with your idea about hiding the wine,” Bombolini said. “It seemed like a good idea but it didn’t work.”

  He said it as if it were an accusation and it angered Roberto, as if somehow America was responsible for the wine in the piazza.

  “Of course, if you had put it where I told you…” Roberto said.

  “What do you mean, where you told me?”

  “In the place I told you about,” Roberto said. “It might not work but at least you might have tried.”

  Bombolini did not want to ask him. He was becoming used to the idea that there was nothing that could be done to save the wine. It was comforting to him to admit surrender, and he wasn’t willing to have the idea challenged.

  “Where?” he said, in a voice as thin as the sound of the bell.

  “In the Old Roman wine cellar.”

  Bombolini said nothing. He had an enormous urge to yawn.

  “Down below the terraces,” Roberto said. “At the foot of the mountain. The place with the two wine cellars.”

  “The two wine cellars,” the mayor said.

  “Put the wine in one of them and brick it over.”

  “Put bricks over the opening.” His voice remained as thin as before, but it was a little higher.

  “Yes. So it looks just like the wall. Seal it off,” Roberto said. “Instead of an opening you’ll have a false wall.”

  Bombolini said nothing for a long time—so long that Roberto grew impatient with him.

  “It’s all brick back there. You must remember it.”

  Bombolini nodded but the truth was that he had not been in the cave or seen the wine cellars in many years.

  “That second cellar doesn’t even look as if it belongs in there. The one at the far end. It looks like an afterthought, you know.”

  “Yes,” Bombolini said.

  “As if they built the first cellar and found they didn’t have enough room and had to add a second one.”

  “Yes.”

  “So if you bricked it over it would all look like part of the wall.”

  “Yes.” He looked numb now, although his heart was racing and he was conscious of blood rushing through him, as numb as the old oxen, the eyes large and staring, the body stunned but not moving, waiting for the next blow of the sledge hammer.

  “They’ll find it out,” the mayor said.

  “I suppose so.”

  “They’ll see through it at once.”

  “It’s a chance, that’s all.”

  “They aren’t stupid people.”

  “I suppose there are stupid Germans and smart Germans, just like here,” Roberto said.

  “They want the wine,” Bombolini said. “They’ll do anything to get it.”

  “You want it too,” Roberto said. “I thought you wanted to try anything to save it.”

  Bombolini had been looking at the wall, afraid that if he looked at Roberto his line of reasoning might break down. Now he turned and moved toward him.

  “I’m sorry,” Roberto was saying. “I thought it was worth the try.”

  “Worth the try, Roberto? Worth it?”

  He moved so swiftly toward Roberto that he struck a chair and knocked it over and didn’t seem to notice it.

  “Christ, Roberto,” Bombolini said. “Christ above, Roberto,” he said, and then he did something that is hard to put on paper because it is hard to make sense of. He struck Roberto such a blow in the face that the American fell to his knees and stayed there for a moment before going the rest of the way down to the stones on the floor.

  “We’ll build such a wall that God Himself won’t be able to see it,” he said aloud. He came back to himself then from wherever he had been. There was blood on the stones and for a moment he made a gesture of stopping and helping Roberto, but he turned and started instead for the door.

  “I’m sorry, Roberto, but there’s no time for you.”

  He ran. When he reached the piazza he kept running until he got to the campanile, and when the bell tower door wouldn’t open he pulled on it with such fury that the old iron handle came off in his hands and he was able to work the latch. He felt for the bell cord in the darkness and when he felt the greasy hemp he began to pull on it as hard and as swiftly as he was able. There was the thin and muffled tone.

  “God damn this miserable bell,” he shouted. “God damn me for this miserable bell.”

  But it was strong enough to carry around the edges of the piazza and at least the people there heard it and they lit the olive-oil lamps and the tallow lights and they began to get out of bed, although it was an hour or two before it was time to get up. It was black in the piazza then.

  Bombolini had no watch. “The time?” he shouted at the first people to come into the piazza. “What is the time? Tell me the time.” At last someone came who owned a watch and they crowded around him and he held it up to catch the light of the moon. It was two o’clock in the morning. They watched Bombolini while he counted. He used his fingers for the hours and his fist stood for an entire day. He did it over several times because he wanted to be certain.

  “Thirty-nine hours,” he told them. “The Germans will be here in thirty-nine hours.”

  4 THE WINE

  BEFORE the sun got into Santa Vitt
oria that morning, while all the cocks in the city were crowing as if they were inventing the morning, it was no longer possible to cross the Piazza of the People in a straight line.

  Every person in Santa Vittoria who was able to walk, every man, and every woman and every child was in the piazza. Every cart in Santa Vittoria was in the piazza. Everything that could be pulled or pushed or had wheels was in the piazza. Every animal that could carry a bottle of wine was in the piazza. Every donkey and every mule and every ox in Santa Vittoria was in the piazza.

  When Bombolini and the members of the Grand Council came out of the People’s Palace into the piazza they were forced to nudge the people to get by them and finally to push them out of the way to reach the Fountain of the Pissing Turtle and start their inspection tour down the Corso Cavour.

  Everyone wanted to say something to Bombolini, to touch him, to hit him on the back. A woman took him by the arm. “I want to tell you this, Italo. You are a great man,” she shouted at him, and she kissed him full on the lips while her husband stood there and smiled and approved.

  That is the way it was in the Piazza of the People, all of the way across it. The mayor didn’t want to smile, he wanted to impress on the people the importance of the day and the work that lay ahead of them, but when they shouted at him and blessed him the smile would come and he could not get it to go away from his face. They stepped around the big wicker grape baskets the people had carried into the piazza and past the women with the large-throated water jugs that would receive bottles and over the buckets and tubs and laundry baskets that were spread over the cobblestones. Up on the fountain itself, Pietro Pietrosanto, as head of the army directing traffic in the piazza, was shouting orders.

  “Get all of the people with the shoulder yokes and bring them to the fountain,” he was shouting.

  “Shoulder yokes, shoulder yokes,” the men shouted, and in every corner a push and a shove began as the people with the yokes began their fight to get to the fountain.

  “Will you ever get it organized?” Bombolini shouted to Pietro.

  “I got it organized,” Pietro said. “I know what I’m doing up here.”

  It was hard to see it, the way it is hard for an outsider who sees the harvest here to realize that out of all this chaos was actually a kind of secret and complex order that only those involved in picking the grapes can understand and that in all the pushing and shouting and shoving there was a shape and a form. Already, for example, all the young men and the strong men had been lined in a file, so that when the time came to pick up the bottles and begin carrying them down the mountain to the Roman cellars they would be the first to go because they could do the most.

  “When you’re ready for me down there,” Pietrosanto shouted, “I’ll be ready up here.”

  By the time Bombolini and the men reached the Corso and started down it the young men were clapping their hands in time and shouting “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go…” and the sound followed them down through the street as if a mob were bellowing through a pipe at them. At the Fat Gate they stopped.

  “Now where the hell is Polenta?” Bombolini said. “It’s no good without the priest.”

  They waited for him and before they left they saw him coming down from a side lane into the Corso, his silver cross bobbing up and down over the heads of the people around him as he came, running.

  “I’m sorry. They all want to be blessed on this day,” Padre Polenta said.

  “There’s no time for blessing,” Bombolini said.

  “There is always time for God’s blessing.” When Bombolini saw all the men begin to nod he dropped the matter. The shouting from the piazza drove them on.

  “We could move the whole city today,” Vittorini said.

  “We could move the whole mountain,” one of them said.

  When they trotted around the sharp corner in the Corso just past Babbaluche’s house and shop, Bombolini for one brief moment felt a sensation of chill, the way it happens on an autumn day when a cloud passes over the sun and all at once it is cold. Bombolini said it was as if a cold hand slipped over his heart and squeezed it, very gently and coldly.

  But they ran on. There is going to be trouble here, Bombolini said to himself, but he didn’t hear himself. They went through the Fat Gate and started down the track that goes through the terraces to the foot of the mountain. They were walking fast, and then they were running down.

  “Pietrosanto will be starting now,” one of them said. The sun came up then, all at once, and it touched the walls around the city and then the roof tiles, and it glittered off the red-and-blue sign on top of the Cooperative Wine Cellar so that the sign was like a sun itself.

  “You’re certain you know how to do it, Padre?” Bombolini said. “It won’t take long, I hope.”

  “It’s in here, right here,” the priest said. He tapped the book he held in his hand along with the cross. “All the rules of God.”

  After such a rain it should have been cool, but the wind had shifted and was coming from the south. The door to furnace of Africa that we thought had been closed for the year was open again. By afternoon the fresh snow on the high mountains would have melted and the slopes would be running with fresh water and the fountain in the piazza would be spurting ice-cold water. But down here the mud would harden and then cake, and by late afternoon the caking would explode into dust.

  “A very fine day for the grapes,” one of them said. Heat after rain is said to cause sugar to form and turn fat in the grapes. No one mentioned the other thing, that it would be a bad day for people. The sun already had a hot look to it, flat and hard and white, like a plate hung in the sky, and no cloud anywhere to soften it along the way. After that they went in silence until they reached the opening in the mountain that leads into the Big Room and the two cellars built into the back wall of the room. None of them would enter it then until the priest had gone in first.

  “Hurry up, Padre, please,” Bombolini said. “Run in there and sanctify the place.”

  “God’s work will not be hurried,” Polenta said, and he opened the black book and licked a forefinger and started through from page one.

  “The index, Padre,” Babbaluche said. “Can’t you study the index. Look under ‘D’ for ‘Devils.’”

  The priest didn’t look up. He went on the way he was going. The first men were already starting down the mountain with their loads of wine before he was halfway through the book.

  “Can’t you make up a prayer, Padre?” Vittorini said, in a gentle voice.

  “I think that God would like that,” someone said. They nodded.

  “Something new and fresh for a change,” Bombolini said.

  “Something from the heart, not from a book.”

  “Yes,” Bombolini said. “God would like that. If I were God I know that I would.”

  “There is a right way to cast out spirits and there is a wrong way,” Padre Polenta said. “It’s all in the book, and God goes by the book.”

  The first of the men had put down their wine on the sandy flat outside the entrance to the cellars and started back up the mountain when Polenta found what he was looking for.

  “Exorcise,” the priest said. He looked up at them. “Not under ‘devil.’ Not under ‘ghosts,’ not under ‘spirits.’ Under ‘exorcise.’”

  Polenta waved his finger at him, and the mayor leaped forward to seize the book.

  “Don’t lose your place, Padre, in the name of God,” he said.

  It wasn’t easy even after that. The priest read to himself for a long time and then announced that he needed water. There was no water and they offered him wine, but since the book said water it must be water. It was fortunate that it had rained the night before and the drainage ditch alongside the cart track to the road was filled with muddy water. They got the water in Vittorini’s leather hat and the cock feathers were limp with water and clogged with clay. Bombolini handed the hat to the priest.

  “Now go in there and start
blessing, Padre,” he said.

  Polenta went inside the entrance and several of the braver men went with him, staying behind the cross and the aspergillum and the priest while he flayed and scourged whatever evil spirits were hiding in the darkness of the Big Room. When he started further in, back toward the two wine cellars built into the back wall and dug far into the mountain, even Bombolini lagged behind, and so the priest was all alone when he stepped down into the first of the cellars and fell head first into the water. When he came up again and shouted for help no one went to his aid at once, because it was felt that the battle between evil and good must have been joined there and that good was losing to evil, as sometimes happens. Finally Bombolini and Vittorini crossed the room and found the priest standing waist-deep in the water and they led him out onto the dry sandy floor of the Big Room.

  The ice-cold hand had slipped over Bombolini’s heart once more and his heart, or perhaps his soul, which he felt was associated with his heart, was as cold as the priest’s skin.

  “It’s all over now,” one of them said. “There’s nothing left to be done.”

  The cellars were flooded with four feet of water. Men began to come into the Big Room, although no one would go to the cellars. Some of them had been afraid even to stand by the entrance, for fear that the spirits, chased out of the cave by the holy water and the cross, might somehow fly down into them.

  Five people at least now claim to be the one who first suggested what to do. “Get Longo,” someone said. “If anyone can do anything now it is Longo.”

  When you write a history and look back you see there are many points and times when everything might have changed if it had not been for some one act. If Fabio had not gone to Montefalcone that evening, if Gambo’s bike had not been available because Gambo had been hit by a rock and Gambo had not shared a room with a woman like Gabriele and Fabio had not been pretty enough to please her, and if Tommaso Casamassima had not made his speech about brave men and good wine—Longo belongs to one of these moments.