The Secret of Santa Vittoria Page 19
“No one looked at us in the piazza,” Caterina said. “I thought they liked you here.”
“They saw. Under the veils, behind the oxen. They don’t know what to say to us. They don’t know how to speak to us. They don’t know whether to call me signor or don because I’m sleeping with the Malatesta.”
“Do you think they know about last night?”
Tufa looked at her first with astonishment and then with real humor, and he began to laugh as he hadn’t laughed for a long time.
“Do they know? My God, Caterina.” It was the first time he had used her name. “They know how many times.”
“They must think I’m terrible.”
Tufa was serious then. “No, no, they think I’m lucky.”
Pietrosanto seized him by the shoulder. His face was as red as a pot and he was taking big breaths, because Pietro is not young.
“I saw you looking in the piazza. Do you know something? You know something to do?”
Pietro put his hands on his knees and bent over to get his breath and stop his heart from pounding, and Tufa took a long time in answering. “Yes, I have a plan.”
Pietrosanto stood up then. “I knew he would have a plan,” he shouted at Caterina. “He’s smart, do you understand? He has a head. A head. A head.” Pietrosanto isn’t one to hold back when he is excited. He hit himself on the head with the heel of his hand so hard that if he had done it to someone else it would have begun a real fight. He hit Tufa in the head and he would have hit the Malatesta if Tufa hadn’t blocked his hand.
“It’s very complicated,” Tufa said.
“Will it save the wine?”
“If it works it will save the wine.”
Pietrosanto took off his hat, the one with the tall hawk’s feather that marked him as the leader of the army of the Free State of Santa Vittoria, and put it on Tufa’s head, and he took off his red arm band, which read Commander in Chief, and pinned it around Tufa’s arm. Tufa looked at Caterina.
“What can I say?” Caterina said. “You look good in the hat.”
“If it was anything else but the wine, do you understand?” Tufa said. “But it’s the wine. It’s blood here, you know, and it’s my blood as well as theirs.”
“I’ll go and get you the egg,” Caterina said, and started down the lane.
Pietrosanto and Tufa started back toward the Piazza of the People. Tufa’s name ran ahead of him the way they say it happens in Rome when the Pope passes.
Tufa … Tufa … Tufa’s here … Tufa’s back … Tufa … Tufa … Tufa’s in charge … It’s going to be all right, Tufa’s back.
When they reached the piazza, although no one had been able to move before, a path was somehow opened in front of them. Give this credit to Bombolini. He was able to see the piazza as it was, the mess that had been created in the city. The Master would have approved of him. He came forward to meet Tufa. And give credit to Tufa. He could have seized command then with the approval of the people, but he deferred to the mayor, whom he knew only as a clown.
“Will you ask the people to clear the piazza?” Tufa said.
“Tell them to go to their homes and wait. Tell them to get something to eat and to rest and to wait.”
At first it appeared to be a failure, but then a few people got into the right lanes and started down them and as they left the jam began to lessen and soon the lanes going up and down from the piazza were filled to the walls with people and animals and carts. While they waited they heard good news. The water pump had lowered the level so that it revealed the top of the ancient drain, and a boy named Rana, which means frog (because he is shaped like a frog) was sent swimming down the darkness of the pipe with a grappling hook. He found a tree in the drain which must have been there hundreds of years, since there are no trees here anymore, not down in the valley. They pulled it out and the water began to rush down the length of the drain as if a giant toilet had been flushed.
“God has a purpose. God knows. He sent us the frog twenty years ago for just this purpose.” Everyone nodded. There had never been any other use for Rana during all that time except to make jokes of him.
While Rana had been swimming in the drain they had found the old ventilation shafts, and cleaned them of the bones of sheep who had fallen in, and all of the things that had blown in over the centuries, so that the hot African wind which was burning on the side of the mountain began to rush down into the cellars and through the Big Room, and Old Vines could say that they would be ready to lay the wine within an hour.
Tufa’s second order was to take down the wall of the Cooperative Wine Cellar that faced the Fat Wall and the little opening through it that we call the Thin Gate. Some of the men were not sure about the next move.
“Are you sure you want to do this, Tufa?” Bombolini asked. Tufa nodded that he did.
“Take down the wall,” the mayor ordered.
The men were not strong about it at first. They chipped at the bricks and stones with mattocks and hammers and iron bars, and they were delicate because they didn’t like to break down something which had been built with so much effort and cost. But when the first bricks came out they began to throw themselves into the work, because there is always something exciting about destroying something and about tearing something apart.
“The Corso is a pipe, you see?” Tufa said. “As with any pipe, it can take so much water and no more, no matter what the pressure behind it.”
“I see.”
“You thought you could push it through by desire, because you wanted it. But there are laws—laws of nature.”
“I see.”
“Now we have to find a stream that can handle a larger flow.”
“I see.”
“Call out the people now. Leave the carts and leave the animals and bring the people down.”
The wall was down then, and the wine in the cellar could be seen inside, naked, exposed, looking out of place, like a woman caught with no clothes on in a place she has no right to be.
“Ring the bell,” Tufa said.
They looked at one another.
“The bell doesn’t play so well.” One of them said to Tufa. “Something happened to the bell.”
“It’s a very complicated story,” Bombolini said.
They rang the bell, what there was of it to ring, and they sent boys running through the streets and lanes, and the people came out of their houses and gathered first in the Piazza of the People and then in a long file down the Corso Cavour right to the door and the broken wall of the Cooperative Wine Cellar. Some of them had managed to sleep for a few minutes and to eat, and they rubbed the sleep out of their eyes and the bread from their beards and lips.
As they came down, then, Tufa and Pietrosanto and the soldiers and Bombolini began to make a line of them beginning at the open wall and running down across the open area where the grapes are pressed at harvest and down to the Thin Gate and through the wall and then down the steep track that the goats take down the mountain.
“It’s going to take courage,” Tufa said to the women. “It’s going to take all your guts.”
“We have guts,” a woman answered him.
“When it comes to the wine we have guts,” another said.
“I’m going to ask more of you than I ask of soldiers,” Tufa told them.
“I would hope so,” someone said. There is no respect for soldiers up here.
Down they came then, filing down the Corso from the Piazza of the People, the true army of Santa Vittoria in the service of the wine.
“Some of these are babies,” Tufa said.
“When it comes to all-out war,” Vittorini said, “you use the troops you have.” It caused Tufa to laugh.
“I’m supposed to say those things,” he said.
They mixed the old with the young, and the strong with the weak, so they could spell each other and make up for each other’s weaknesses. If people were too old or sickly Tufa would take them out of the line.
“A chain i
s only as strong as its weakest link,” Bombolini would tell them, but they would curse him, to his face anyway. When Caterina came down the line Tufa stopped her. “Let me see your hands.” She held out her hands. They are so long and beautiful. He sent her back up the mountain to get gloves.
When the last of the people had passed, Tufa ran down the line to make a last inspection. The line now ran from the back of the wine cellar to the wall and through it, and down the mountain to the entrance to the Roman cellar. Tufa came back up, placing the people where they would be of the most value. In a place that was steep the taller people were positioned since they could reach up farther and lean down lower. The older people were put on the flat places, where the strain would be the least.
At a few minutes after one o’clock on Tuesday afternoon Carlo Tufa was able to stand on the floor of the valley, one hundred feet from the entrance to the ancient wine cellar, and look back up the mountain, over the terraces, all the way to the city wall and to the Thin Gate, and even a few yards inside it, and see one continuous line of people. And he was able to know that the line continued all of the way beyond that into the heart of the cellar. He ran across the flat sandy stretch in front of the opening.
“Are you ready in there?”
The men inside shouted back that they were hot to go. He ran outside then and back away from the base of the terraces so that Bombolini would be sure to see him and he gave the sign by a motion of his arm.
“Start them going,” he shouted. “Let them go. Pass them on,” he called out, even though he couldn’t be heard.
But you could hear the people on the mountain then, shouting and cheering when they saw the sign, very loud in the valley and perhaps all the way to the river and over it in Scarafaggio.
“Pass them on, pass them on,” the people began to shout, and the word flew up the mountain, it shot from mouth to mouth, and it was the start of the rhythm.
The bottles began to flow then, hand to hand, a stream of bottles at first, out of the cellar, down to the gate, through the wall and then down the mountain, a stream at first until they found the rhythm of the flow and then it was a river, a river of wine running down the mountain.
THE SHOUTING stopped soon enough, because the day was hot and the work was hard, but the wine kept coming so that three teams of men were finally needed to put down the wine.
It isn’t easy to describe how they lay the wine here. It is a simple-looking job, but outsiders never learn to do it well. It is something you grow up knowing how to do, the same as spooning soup into your mouth. No one remembers learning how to use a spoon, it is something that is learned and not taught. It was the same with the wine. The first row of bottles is laid on the ground, and then long strips of wood, just strong enough to support a second row of bottles, are laid on top of the bottom row. The second row is placed in the opposite direction, one row of corks, one row of butts, and this goes on, tier after tier, eighteen and even twenty tiers high. All of the while long thin strips of wood are worked down through the rows of bottles, to the left of the neck of a bottle in one row and to the right of the neck of the bottle below, so that the bottles pull and push against each other and in the end provide the very force that holds them all together. It is very simple and very strong, and it can be put up or taken down as fast as men can put down bottles.
At the beginning the wine-layers were gay also, shouting to each other to move it, move it, slapping the bottles from hand to hand, the rows rising and going back into the dimness of the deep cellar to where Longo’s pale lights could barely reach, but they soon ceased. As the wine kept coming they began to feel that they were running just ahead of a flood that in the end would drown them. Some of the men who worked in the cellar that day and night have never put down another bottle of wine, because the memory of it was so painful to them.
In the first hours the enemy was the sun, which sat on the people’s backs as if it were a hot iron pressing down on them, but later it became the mountain itself. To keep from falling off it, the people were forced to brace themselves with one leg and step up the steep flank with the other, and more than any other part of the body it was the legs that began to tire and then to sting with fatigue and finally to cramp and knot. Tufa worked out a good plan. At a blast from the horn of Capoferro, every ten minutes, the people passed one more bottle and then stood up and massaged their legs and moved up the mountain to the spot above them. This gave the people a sense of going somewhere and it changed their positions and different muscles were put into use.
After that, the problem was water; and there was a second plan. At two blasts from the horn the wine passers put down the bottles and walked across the terraces to the concrete spillways that run down through the terraces and waited for the water to come. They got five seconds, and the water came down hissing and rushing like a runaway train. Some of the people put their faces in the spillway and caught what their mouths would hold and some caught water in shirts and hats and broken bottles and some climbed into the spillway itself and let the water run over them
After the second hour the bottles began to break. There were tired hands and sweaty hands, and the bottles would slip or swing against a rock and there would be the sound of breaking glass and a groan from someone on the line and then the smell of wine, good and sweet at first, but then sticky and sour as the sun reached it. Then there was blood. Many of the people had no shoes, and although their feet are as tough as ox leather, glass will finally cut through leather, and blood began to run with the wine and the whole length of the line to glitter with glass.
In the late afternoon, when the sun was not so direct and when a cooler breeze began to slip up from the shadows in the valley, the people passing the wine had settled into a true rhythm; they gave into the bottles then, not seeing but only feeling them, swinging to the left and right, slapping the bottles from hand to hand, so that at times it sounded like a regiment of soldiers marching on the mountain.
When the boys came down from the mountain where Tufa had sent them to cut pine branches to use for torches in the coming night he had another plan for them. He sent them into the line because they were fresh and still strong, and the people they replaced were allowed to get out and to crawl under the thick green shade of the grapevines and to rest and even sleep there for a little while. It was only a taste of rest, but it was enough to keep them going.
The men were mixed with the women and there was something personal in the passing of the bottles, in the rhythm of it, in the swaying of the bodies, in the smell of each other and in the touching of their hands. Fabio, for instance, found himself next to a woman he had hardly ever noticed before, and as they worked he began to appreciate a kind of stubborn beauty about her in the calm, passive set of her face and the smooth solid strength of her arms and the sureness of her touch and the way her solid full breasts rose and fell with each passing of the wine. Up above him in the line, he could see Angela working and it didn’t bother him. She was a girl and this was a woman.
“What are you looking at?” the woman finally said to him.
“You,” he said. It was the kind of thing that a week before would have caused him to turn scarlet and sent him running down the mountain.
“Well, keep your eyes and your hands where they belong,” the woman said.
“I will make an effort, but it will be hard,” Fabio said, and he smiled at her. Fabio, he told himself, you are becoming a goat.
Up the line, beyond Angela, he could see Caterina, and he decided that when the chance offered itself, he would work next to her. She was surrounded by women. She was the only one who wore gloves and in spite of the rough clothes she wore, ones designed for hunting or riding, it was easy to see that the Malatesta stood out from all the other women. The other women were black with sweat, but Caterina didn’t sweat, there was only dampness on her brow and beads of wetness on her upper lip.
“Even when they work the rich don’t sweat like the poor,” a woman said and it was true.
From time to time Tufa came down the line to encourage the people on it and to change positions and to keep the bottles flowing, and when he did he took her place for a few minutes and allowed her to crawl under the vines.
“Why don’t you sweat?” he said to her. “It would be good for you.”
“Malatestas don’t sweat,” she said. “They must have forgotten how. They gave it up a long time ago.”
“The dream of every Italian is some day not to sweat,” someone said.
“And who will grow the grapes?”
“We’ll hire people to do that,” the cobbler told them. “We’ll hire Germans to do it. They like to work,” Babbaluche had said.
One time when he had to go on, Tufa found Caterina asleep under a vine. He kissed her then, in front of others.
“You have to get up,” he said. “But I am proud of you.” Later, Tufa realized that it was the first compliment he had ever given to a woman, because the men don’t learn to do that here. The sun at the time had been partly hidden by the tall mountain to the northwest of here and then swiftly, in a matter of moments, it went behind them completely and the mountainside and then the city itself was thrown in shadow. There was a sigh then all along the line, mixed with the slap, slap, slap, slap of the glass against flesh, because at once it was cooler and also because many had promised themselves that if they could last until the sun went down they could make it through the evening and perhaps the night.
* * *
In the beginning of the night it was better. The cool winds had come and after that the fog. It clung to the dew on the grape leaves, and it moistened the ground and cooled the rocks, and it softened the skin that the sun and the wind of the day had dried and cracked. But the fog got thicker and there was new trouble on the line. When someone fell out it was hard for the replacement to find where the chain had been broken.
“Here … Over here … Down … here…” the people would call, but at night and in the fog voices are strange and distances are obscured. People stepped on the glass and fell on the stones, and the bottles began to break again. At ten o’clock Tufa made a mistake. There had been no food, and a tiredness was beginning to settle on the line like some disease that paralyzes the muscles so there is only numbness left. To bolster the spirits he decided to allow every other person on the line to open the bottle he was passing and to share it with the person next in line. Because they were so starved, the wine made many of the people drunk, and the bottles began to break even worse than before.