The Secret of Santa Vittoria Read online

  Bricks drink. They absorbed the wine, they drank it into their open pores, and they turned a deep, rich, dark red, as dark and rich as the wine itself. While the bricks drank, the bricklayers were painting the rest of the wall around the opening with the wine so that when the false wall rose again, the bricks would blend and belong to one another.

  “It’s as I said,” Old Vines said. “The wine will save the wine.”

  They got up from The Rest and were started back up again when Tufa saw the cart along the cart track.

  “What is that?” he said. “Who put that along the road?”

  “A cart,” Bombolini said. “My cart to be exact. I allowed Fabio della Romagna and the Cavalcanti boy to put it there this morning.”

  Tufa’s face was annoyed and finally angry.

  “As a gesture of defiance, you know,” Bombolini said.

  “If that cart makes them late, do you know that it will make them angry?” Tufa said. “Do you know they like to be on time? Do you know they hurt people for things such as that?”

  “It was only a gesture, a small thing,” Bombolini said.

  “So was the answer that the man gave them at Rocca di Camera,” Tufa said.

  “They asked him which direction the enemy was and he said, ‘Why, I thought the enemy was you,’ and for that they shot his wife and they shot his children and they allowed him to live with his joke.”

  “I could go down and move the cart,” Fabio said, but Tufa told him there wasn’t time for that now, and that it was better that no one be near the cart when they came.

  They went up in silence after that. There were some people among the vines on the terraces and a few were working, but a great many of them had fallen asleep in the shade beneath the leaves.

  “We should wake them up,” someone said.

  “No, let them sleep. It will only confirm what they already think of us,” Tufa said, “that we’re a bunch of lazy bastards.”

  When they neared the Fat Gate some of the people came down the track to meet them.

  “How’s the wall? How does it look? Is it all grown up?” they asked.

  Bombolini looked at Tufa and Tufa stared back at him.

  “It still grows. They’re still working on the wall.”

  The people were astonished and frightened by what they heard.

  “But they said…”

  Bombolini shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “They were wrong. The wall still grows.” It made him sad to say that. “I wish we had Mazzola back,” he said to Pietrosanto.

  “I wish we had Copa,” Pietrosanto said. Although they had not done much work in recent years both Copa and Mazzola had once been the very best men in Santa Vittoria with stone and brick.

  “You did what you had to do?” Bombolini said to Pietrosanto.

  “Yes. The problem is solved. The Band is all taken care of.”

  Bombolini put his hands over his ears. “Don’t tell me,” he said. “I don’t want to hear about it.” He looked at Pietrosanto with a new respect, however. “Was it terrible? Did you find it hard to do?”

  “No, it wasn’t hard to do,” Pietrosanto said, and then he stopped very suddenly, almost locked in motion, as if he had come face to face with an invisible barrier.

  “Did you hear it?” he asked. “Do you hear it now? Quiet,” he shouted.

  The people by the Fat Gate and the people around them and they themselves were quiet, and then they heard, all the way down the valley, not just one whistle but many of them, high and thin and reedy, across the valley and up the mountain, as high and clear as the cry of a wild bird.

  They were coming.

  They were moving on the River Road, they were rushing along the Mad River, they were looking for the turn to the cart track that leads to the foot of our mountain, they were taking the turn and coming into the valley.

  Bombolini had run up the Corso Cavour for several hundred feet when he heard the reed whistles, but then he turned around and started back down the street until he found Tufa.

  “Tufa?” he said. “What shall I wear?”

  “Wear what you have on,” Tufa said. “Be yourself.”

  “What should I say to them?”

  “Nothing. Answer what they ask you.”

  “But how do I act? I don’t know how to act.”

  “Like yourself,” Tufa said.

  “But I don’t know how I act.”

  Tufa started up the Corso and Bombolini, since Tufa was walking swiftly, was forced to trot behind him.

  “Tufa?” he called after him. “You know what to say. You know how to act.”

  Tufa continued to move away from him.

  “I want you to be the one to meet him,” Bombolini called to him. “I want you to take command. I’m not enough.”

  Tufa stopped then.

  “I’m not the mayor of Santa Vittoria, you’re the mayor—the Captain of the People. Isn’t that what they call you?”

  Bombolini nodded. Still they could hear the fine sharp notes of the whistles blowing and blowing.

  “The people chose you, Bombolini, not Tufa,” he said. And then he said something remarkable, which Bombolini never forgot and didn’t understand. “You’ll make a much better mayor than I could ever make.”

  He was tired. The running had winded him and he could only walk now and do that slowly.

  “They’re coming, eh, Bombolini?” someone in a doorway said. He didn’t turn to look.

  “Yes, they’re coming.”

  “There’s nowhere to run to now, eh?”

  “No, there’s nowhere to run.”

  “All we can do now is stand here and wait.”

  “It’s all we can do,” Bombolini said.

  WHEN THERE WERE ten minutes less than an hour left, since Captain von Prum had estimated it would take them fifty minutes to cross the valley and go up the mountain, he struck the flat of his hand against the sidecar, making a hollow boom, and raised his hand and shouted “Forward,” and the convoy moved out of the shade of the beech tree and onto the River Road. It is difficult to see the track that turns off to Santa Vittoria, since it dips down off the road so suddenly, but Sergeant Traub saw it in time and turned off the road a little faster than he would have liked, steeply down, and at the first turn in the track, far sooner than he had expected it to be, was the cart, and he was forced to apply his brakes so sharply that von Prum was almost thrown out of the sidecar and the truck behind them came close to hitting them.

  Traub got off the seat to examine the cart. “I never saw one like it before,” he said. He spun one of the heavy iron-rimmed wheels. “Oak,” he said. “Like iron. It’s as heavy as a tank.”

  “Can we get around it? Can we lift it off?”

  Traub told the captain no.

  “Can you hit it with one shot?”

  “I can hit anything with one shot if it isn’t shooting back at me,” the sergeant said.

  “I’m sure they’re all looking from the town,” von Prum said. “This will be a lesson.”

  They unhitched the light dual-purpose gun from the back of the truck and they ran it up onto the edge of the River Road to give Traub aiming room. He was careful about it, a little longer than von Prum would have wished, but he made the first shot good. It hit near the heart of the cart and it split the oak grain and a shower of splinters flew out. He hit it again and again after that, until it came apart and looked naked and disgraceful in the sand. They lifted the pieces up then and threw them alongside the track, and it was the death of Bombolini’s Sicilian cart.

  “It’s been a long time,” Traub said. He was proud of his work. “I like the way it jumps when it cuts loose.”

  The road was dusty, and when they had gone perhaps a half mile more across the valley they stopped to clean the dust from their eyes and mouths and to put on glasses. The truck behind them was buried in a cloud of fine white chalk.

  “They should pay for things like that,” Traub said. He motioned back towa
rd the cart. He had liked the feeling of the gun and the smell of oil and the powder and the hot metal under his hands and the feeling of satisfaction he had felt when the shell had entered the oak and split it apart.

  “It’s like with a puppy, sir. You aren’t cruel, but you make them pay for their annoyances.”

  A kind of reasoned ruthlessness, the captain thought. An enlightened ruthlessness. A civilized ruthlessness. He wrote that down later.

  “You want to hit something else?” the captain asked.

  “Yes.”

  Out of all the grays and the dull reds and oranges, out of the sun-bruised brick and stone and plaster, the coloring of stone and smoke and old age that is Santa Vittoria, one piece of color stands out above all the colors of the city, the red-and-blue sign of the Cinzano company on the roof of the Cooperative Wine Cellar.

  “That?” von Prum said. “Do you think you could hit it?”

  The sergeant nodded.

  The first shot went over the top of the sign and landed someplace up on the mountain behind the city. He told us later that he fired this way so that no one would be hurt. By that shot he was able to adjust his fire, and the second shot struck the sign and exploded against it. When it didn’t go down right away, he fired a third shot and the sign started down then, falling off the roof like a goose or a wild swan that has been hit with shot but is unwilling to die at once because of it.

  “I think we’ve made our first impression,” Captain von Prum said.

  They moved slowly after that, to keep down the dust and because the road was not fit for a speed much faster than that of an ox. One of the children who was to blow his reed whistle had come out along the track and was blowing it so that his face had turned red. They stopped and watched him.

  “What’s the matter with him do you think?” The child continued blowing so that at one time it appeared that his eyes would come out of his head.

  “I think he’s crazy,” the sergeant said. “They have these little boys tend the goats all alone and sometimes they go crazy.”

  In another ten minutes they had reached the bottom of the mountain where they saw Fungo, who in truth looks crazy when he smiles, sweeping the sand in front of the entrance to the Roman cellers.

  “Another one,” Sergeant Traub shouted. They had turned and started up through the terraces, the first motor vehicle ever to attempt to come up the mountain, when the captain looked back once more at Fungo and the cellar entrance.

  “A place to examine,” he said, and Traub nodded. “It might make a good place for an air-raid shelter.”

  When they were halfway up the mountain they stopped to allow the engines of their vehicles to cool. Among the vines and beneath the leaves they could see people hiding in the shadows or people sleeping.

  “Now prepare yourself for the Italian pageantry,” Captain von Prum told the sergeant. There would be the mayor of the city in his one black suit stained with wine and manure, and several old men holding flags and with their medals from the other war dangling from their worn shirts, and there would be the members of the Fascist party swearing undying allegiance to those who had come to conquer them, the captain told him. It was ten minutes before five o’clock.

  Just before they started up again Captain von Prum sampled some of the grapes that grew alongside the cart track and they were bitter. Paolo Lapolla had the bad fortune to be near them.

  “What’s the matter with your grapes?” von Prum asked Paolo.

  At first Paolo found it impossible to find his tongue. “They aren’t ripe yet,” he finally said. “You came too soon.”

  It caused the Germans to laugh. “When would you have wished us to come, next year?”

  “Later, later,” Paolo said. “Much later.”

  “Your grapes are bitter. How is your wine?”

  “Ah, the wine,” Paolo said. “The wine is something else. You must try some of it sometime.”

  “Ah, we will,” von Prum said, “we will.”

  Paolo was frightened by the loudness of their laughter.

  “You speak very good Italian,” Paolo said.

  “So do you,” von Prum said.

  “Yes, I was born right here, Your Excellency,” Paolo said.

  At the Fat Gate and wherever they could see down into the terraces they were fearful about Paolo and what he might say, but Bombolini, when they told him, had no fear. As the Master said, it is sometimes the highest form of wisdom to simulate folly, and at this Paolo was a master, for it is something every Santa Vittorian learns by the time he leaves the breast.

  * * *

  All up the Corso Cavour and up into the Piazza of the People the people were in the doorways and along the edges of the street and around the fringes of the piazza, because it was foolish now, after the destruction of the cart and the blowing down of the sign, to pretend they knew nothing of the Germans’ arrival. They were silent and they were composed, on the advice of Bombolini, who said that they should treat the arrival as they would treat the passing of a hearse; no one would go into the street and run after the hearse, and no one would turn away from it, either. There was even a quiet kind of elation among them, because the tunnel had been seen and the tunnel had been passed.

  Only Fabio seemed to be upset. “Eight of them and an officer, against one thousand of us,” he said. “What has happened to my country?” When the sound of the engines could be heard coming up the Corso Cavour, Fabio left the piazza and went up to High Town and over the wall and into the mountains.

  The Corso is bad for traffic, because it is, as Tufa said, a pipe, but it is good for sound. The noise of the engines thundered up the pipe and roared in the piazza and even the people at the far corners found themselves becoming stiff.

  There were, in the center of the piazza then, only two people: Italo Bombolini, the mayor, and Emilio Vittorini in the dress uniform of his old regiment. And behind them was the Fountain of the Pissing Turtle.

  The motorcycle was the first to come into the piazza. Because of the steepness of the Corso the people could not see it until it had come up onto the lip of the street where for a moment it seemed to waver and hang suspended, half in the piazza and half in the Corso. Then it seemed to catch hold of the cobblestones of the piazza and to explode out into it.

  They must have seen the two men but they didn’t go directly toward them but turned to the right and circled the piazza, roaring along the rim of people, who were pressed back against the walls of the houses, and going all the way around the piazza and back to where the Corso begins. Bombolini and Vittorini kept turning with them so that they would always be facing them, much as the matador does when a bull is on the loose in the arena. Once was not enough for them and they went around the piazza a second time, until the truck and the little cannon had ground up into the piazza and could follow them. They went faster this time, with a great noise of engines and the crying of rubber on the stones. It was impressive. It was terribly impressive. There had been a great many who had denied that any motor vehicle could ever come up the Corso and get into the piazza. At a sign from the officer, the truck pulled to one side of the square and the soldiers leaped from the truck and unhitched the gun and pointed it out across at the people. And when this was done, the motorcycle very sharply turned and only then headed directly toward the two men.

  Vittorini’s wife shouted for him to jump, but everyone knew Vittorini would never move. It seemed to us then that Bombolini would be forced to break and run if the machine was not to hit him, but he too stood in the piazza as if this was the ordained thing to do. Some in the piazza at that moment turned away, but the motorcycle, with a terrible screeching of brakes, came to a stop less than a foot away from the two of them and actually at the edge of Bombolini’s shoe.

  “Welcome to the Free City of Santa Vittoria,” Bombolini shouted above the sound of the engine. “We of this city know that in times of war…”

  It was the last they heard, as Traub raced the engine and the mayor’s voice was
lost beneath it.

  “Pay attention,” Traub shouted. He shut off the engine. Captain von Prum rose in the sidecar.

  “Have sixteen mattresses delivered into this piazza within the next twenty minutes,” von Prum ordered.

  Vittorini now had come to full attention and was beginning the execution of a formal military salute.

  “We know that in time of war—” Bombolini began.

  “Quiet,” Sergeant Traub shouted.

  “Sixteen,” von Prum said to Bombolini. “Did you understand that?”

  Bombolini nodded his head.

  “I want you to know, sir, that we are willing and anxious to cooperate with you as guests of the city, exactly as we would do if we were running an inn.”

  “With no bedbugs,” Traub shouted. “With no lice. With no ticks. With no bugs of any kind.”

  Bombolini continued to talk, but they didn’t hear him. The sergeant had gotten down from the seat of the motorcycle and had gone around and opened the door of the sidecar for the captain.

  “Words flow out of his mouth like piss from that turtle,” Captain von Prum said. They began to walk toward the fountain.

  “Go ahead,” von Prum called to Bombolini. “Keep talking.”

  They walked around the fountain and examined it carefully and came back past Vittorini, and the captain touched the old soldier’s epaulets.

  “Do you know that a museum would give you good money for these?” he said. Vittorini was still at parade salute. Von Prum stopped in front of the mayor.

  “Why did you stop talking?” he asked.

  “I had nothing further to say,” Bombolini said.

  “Do you expect us to believe that?” von Prum said. “Would you like to hear what the sergeant said about you?”