The Secret of Santa Vittoria Read online

  Bombolini nodded his head. “He said you were like the piazza; very large and very empty.”

  He had said the words very loudly, and someone in the piazza laughed. It was Babbaluche.

  “And what is he doing?” von Prum said.

  “He is waiting for you to return his salute, sir.” Vittorini’s arm and even his body were now trembling from the effort of holding the salute.

  “But why should I do that?” von Prum said.

  “Because he is an old soldier, sir.”

  “Oh, is that what he is?”

  Von Prum took several steps away from Bombolini and came to a stop in front of him and came to attention. He lifted his arm and shouted “Heil Hitler.”

  “Long live Italy,” Vittorini said.

  “It is my hope that we can find a way of living here that will be profitable for both of us,” Bombolini said.

  “I will insist on it,” the German said.

  He was back in the sidecar then, and Traub started up the motorcycle. It made a great noise, but it did not start at once. It seemed to strain to release itself, much like a young horse held to a stake, and then it broke loose. As it did the foot pedal on the left side of the cycle struck Bombolini’s leg and it sent him moving backward. Had he fallen at once there would have been nothing funny in it, and it might have even alarmed the people. But he didn’t go down at once. He began to fall and to run backward at the same time, going a little faster at each step, trying to keep his balance but losing it a little more at each step, going backward and down, clutching the air to hold him up. There must have been twenty desperate steps in this way before he was moving at such a speed and was bent over backward so far that in the end nothing could support him and he went down, flatly down, fully down, on his back, so that his legs flew up in the air and hovered there as if he were about to do a backward somersault.

  He was stunned by the fall but not hurt by it, and then he could hear them beginning.

  Please God, Bombolini said to himself, don’t let them do it. Not in front of them.

  But they did do it. It began as a titter and it ran around the piazza but it didn’t remain a titter long. It became a laugh, and because of the way sounds carry in the Piazza of the People, it became a gigantic laugh, a thunderous, booming laugh, that fed on its own noise, laughter creating new laughter until it went beyond anything that had to do with Bombolini lying on his back in the center of the piazza, but must have been a cry at everything they had done and knew they were going to have to do.

  The Germans heard it, although they were already down in the Corso Cavour making their first reconnaissance of the city.

  “I don’t understand these people at times, sir,” Traub said.

  “It’s because in many ways they are like children,” Captain von Prum said, “and so they react like children.”

  “I don’t understand them.”

  Get up, Vittorini was saying. You can’t lie there. The mayor was on his knees looking at the stones he had fallen on.

  “Right here,” he said, aloud. “In this place. On this rock.”

  He got to his feet and he marked one cobblestone with the sole of his shoe. He looked at the people and nodded his head at them, over and over.

  All right, he was saying to himself, you can laugh. Laugh now. One day, right here, on this stone, you will erect a monument to me.

  5 THE SHAME OF SANTA VITTORIA

  THOSE FIRST DAYS of the occupation were good ones for the people of the city. They had set themselves for something bad to happen, and nothing bad had taken place. The weather for the grapes had turned good again, and when this happens things are always good in Santa Vittoria, no matter what else may be happening. But beyond that was the fact that we all were after the same thing. The Germans wanted us to cooperate with them, and we couldn’t find enough ways to do it.

  At the start it had been Captain von Prum’s policy to show a strong, hard hand and then, when the people were properly conditioned, to show them that the rock in his breast was actually a heart and that he was human. He wrote about it. “My plan is to be a benevolent despot up here,” he put in his personal log, “but to be benevolent one must first be the despot.”

  On that first night, for example, a curfew was set for eight o’clock at night. It was too late to warn the bricklayers, and when they came up the mountain at ten o’clock, after finishing the second wine-dark wall, they were jailed for breaking the curfew and they were whipped.

  “I am sorry to have to do this, but these men have broken the rules and must be punished for it,” the captain said.

  “It’s only correct,” Bombolini said. “They have been bad and deserve it.”

  The bricklayers didn’t mind. They were so tired they were numb, and later said they had barely felt the blows. Nothing mattered to them. Some of them slept all through the three days of their confinement and never missed the food they were supposed to be deprived of.

  Padre Polenta was arrested and brought down from the bell tower for using his light at night.

  “And what was your aim?” Captain von Prum asked him. “To guide the bombers in?”

  “I was at God’s work,” Polenta said.

  “One week on bread and water for God’s work,” the captain said.

  “Why not a few strokes of the lash as well,” Bombolini offered. “He might have gotten us all blown up.”

  These weren’t the only ones. Many people were arrested that first week and treated roughly, but it was the fines that bothered the people most. They cleaned up the dung hills in Old Town and they fined people who emptied their night jars in the streets outside their doors. They beat the people who opened their doors after eight o’clock or who showed a light of any kind. At the end of that first week Captain von Prum wrote this letter to his father.

  So far so good. It goes better than we ever hoped or dreamed. I keep my fingers crossed. I try to keep in mind that saying from Clausewitz that you always quote: “The first rule. Never underestimate the nature and the quality of the enemy.”

  I had not intended to work with the mayor here, but he is so available and so willing to please and carry out our requests that I find it useful. He is a clown and, as I think I wrote you before, these people have an affinity for clowns. But he also seems to get things done. I’ll try not to underestimate him. I try to remind myself that even clowns can possess a kind of cunning and even widsom, although I must admit that in this case it is hard to see.

  He wrote that he had been stern and that he had twisted the screw tight and that now he was going to release the pressure a little—“If things go right the people will be grateful for small treats,” he wrote.

  It was one of the captain’s beliefs that decency not backed by superior force was merely a symptom of weakness. “The weak have to be decent, while the strong can choose to be decent. This coming week I will choose to be decent.”

  He had taken over the Palace of the People that first day, but it was too large and gloomy for his needs, and Bombolini had persuaded him to cross the Piazza of the People and move into the home of Constanzia Pietrosanto, which was small but well built and clean and airy and light.

  Constanzia wept and cried, and she shouted at her brothers and sisters. “Why me? Why did he have to go out of his way to send the German to me?”

  “Quiet,” they told her. “Bombolini has a reason. It’s for the cause, for the wine.”

  And then one morning, at the end of the week, she was delivered an envelope by Corporal Heinsick and in it was fifty lire, and they came every week after that. Under the rules of war the German had no need to pay, but he chose to pay.

  The rest of the soldiers were quartered in the office of the Cooperative Wine Cellar, all except Sergeant Traub, who had a room with the captain in Constanzia’s house. He might have put them in private homes, but he didn’t want his men to go soft or to face the temptation of corruption, and he paid the city of Santa Vittoria for the use of the wine cellar office. Ea
ch week he gave Italo Bombolini fifty lire, and it was the only source of income in the entire city.

  “You see?” Sergeant Traub would say to Bombolini. “He’s firm but he’s fair. You watch. You have a friend here, whether you know it or not. Just so you cooperate.”

  It was always that word.

  “I think I’m winning them over,” the captain wrote to his fiancée Christina Mollendorf. “Each day a little more I earn their cooperation.”

  He didn’t know then, and he never did know, that Bombolini’s policy, which he had actually written down, was named Creative Cooperation. We didn’t just go along, we tried to do the German one better. We didn’t grudgingly do what was asked, we did it eagerly and willingly.

  There was a great deal of smiling going on in Santa Vittoria those first weeks. We smiled at the soldiers, and although they were supposed to be firm, they began to respond and smile back. There was a great deal of saying “Good morning” and “Good evening.” We learned the name of the captain and used it. “Good morning, Captain von Prum,” “How are you today, Captain von Prum.” When he walked down the Corso Cavour they said his name so often, von Prum, von Prum, that it sounded as if someone was filling a barrel with apples.

  And then we had the Good Time Boys. These were groups of younger men whose job it was to drink with the German soldiers and to play cards with them and smile at them. They met in the soldiers’ quarters, in the wine cellar office, and it was a convenient place. They were next to the source of wine and, as Babbaluche said, what better place for rabbits than the edge of the rabbit garden.

  The people would say, “Are they in it? Have they gone over the fence?” And the Good Time Boys would tell them, “They’re looking. They’re nibbling.”

  They would look at the wine and rub their jaws, but they never took any of it. The Good Time Boys went in shifts. Some dropped around in the morning to share an eye opener of grappa and some in the middle of the morning for a little pick-me-up of vermouth and some to bring wine for lunch and an after-nap refresher, and in the evening the serious drinking began with the card playing. The result was that the Germans and the Italians became friends, and the Germans were drunk a good deal of the time and some of them drunk all of the time. They would fall on their blankets at night and smile at us with those cowlike drunk blue eyes of theirs.

  There is a saying in this country and it must be true. “No one knows his own servants as badly as the master.” Captain von Prum saw none of it. Tufa put it this way: “Until his own life is at stake an officer can never know what is going on with his own men.”

  Von Prum’s mind was on other matters. He was exuberant about the way the first phase of the Bloodless Victory was proceeding. It was going beyond his highest hopes. It was so successful that he finally felt he must speak to the Italian mayor, and he summoned Bombolini to his office on the evening of his eighth day in Santa Vittoria.

  “You are so cooperative with us. Why?” von Prum said. “There must be a reason.” He had intended to shock the mayor.

  “The obvious one,” Bombolini told him. “It is selfish, I suppose. If we help you we hope that maybe you won’t hurt us. We hope that you might even help us.”

  There was nothing for the captain to say except that it was a very realistic way of looking at things, and very mature.

  “We don’t see this as our war,” the mayor said. “It doesn’t matter to us who wins or loses, all we stand to do is get hurt by it.”

  “But you’re Italians.”

  “What does that mean to us?” Bombolini said. “All we want to do is act in the way that’s going to cause us the least harm in the end.”

  The proposition, which was always at the back of Captain von Prum’s mind, was going to be easier to propose than he had hoped.

  “So you’re willing to work with us even though we are Germans,” he said.

  “We don’t care who you are,” Bombolini said. “Look at it this way, sir. We don’t love you and we don’t ask you to love us. This is like a game and you hold all the trump cards and so we have to play our hand so at least we lose as little as possible.”

  The German told the mayor once again that it was very realistic of him.

  “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours,” Bombolini said. “Something for you, something for me. You lend me your mule, I’ll lend you my ox.”

  All of these things are in the captain’s notes. He liked the one about the mule and the ox. “Use this one,” he wrote down.

  “Self-interest is their motivation,” he wrote. “Appeal to their sense of self-preservation. They love themselves more than their country.”

  * * *

  It wasn’t the only time they talked. Each time they met, the German pushed the conversation one or two steps nearer to the proposition.

  “So you would be willing to cooperate with the German if it meant preserving yourself?”

  “The first duty of every Italian is to preserve himself,” Bombolini said. “What good does it do me or my country if I get killed? Right?”

  “Very mature way of thinking,” von Prum said.

  “They are marvelous in their way,” von Prum wrote to his father. “They are disgusting, of course, and yet at the same time there is a realism about them that can’t be denied. This afternoon the clown, this Bombolini, had a proposition for me. He would cooperate with me in anything—his word, anything—if I would let him in on it first, so that he could at least offer his views on how it might be done so that it would work and yet cost them as little as possible. He becomes riper by the hour. I have prepared a little test for him to test the quality of his sincerity.”

  The test was to make an inventory of Santa Vittoria; to count all the houses and all the people, to list all machinery, to count all tools, and to report the number of bottles of wine in the Cooperative Wine Cellar.

  “The wine?” Bombolini said. “Why the wine?”

  “Yes, the wine. It’s a property,” the German said. “What makes you surprised about that? It’s what you make your living on.”

  “Yes, but the wine … you see, the wine here…” Bombolini said, and then didn’t go on.

  “You wanted to cooperate,” von Prum said. “You came to me.”

  Bombolini shrugged his shoulders. “There’s a lot of wine,” he said. “We don’t count so well.”

  “Then we can count the wine. You count the other things.”

  “No. Oh, no,” Bombolini said swiftly. “We’ll count the wine. It wouldn’t do for the people to see you counting it. It makes the people nervous.”

  * * *

  That night the captain put in his log: “He has the bait and he is running with it. Traub says that he will lie and lie and lie. I don’t know. I suspect Traub is right, but we can only see. The counting begins tonight.”

  “How many are you going to tell him?” Old Vines asked Bombolini.

  “How many bottles are there?”

  “Three hundred and seventeen thousand,” the cellar master said.

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure,” the mayor said.

  “Tell him two hundred thousand,” Pietrosanto suggested. “He’ll never know.”

  Everyone agreed that Pietrosanto was right.

  It was very strange. At first everyone had been concerned with saving the wine in the Roman cellar and had already given the wine in the Rabbit Garden away. But as the days went by and the Germans didn’t go down the mountain and look into the cellar, they began to hope that they could get away with saving half of the Rabbit Garden too. Bombolini was a little wiser than the rest of them. He went to the captain’s headquarters the next night.

  “Three hundred and two thousand bottles,” Bombolini told him.

  The German smiled at him. “Your counting isn’t very accurate,” the captain said. “The right number is three hundred and seventeen thousand bottles. We counted them last night.”

  Bombolini pretended to be greatly embarrassed. “I warned you that we don’t count so
well.”

  “Isn’t it odd that the number would be too few and not too many?” Captain von Prum said. But they both smiled at one another and Bombolini knew he had done the correct thing. It was only natural that he would lie. It was expected of him; it was in truth, he knew, required of him. Everyone is fearful and suspicious of the too-honest man. He had lied, but just a little bit. For the most part he had told the truth.

  When Bombolini had gone, the captain called his sergeant in.

  “He’s a liar like all of them, but he’s just a little one. I couldn’t expect it any other way. He has to protect his people, too, you know.”

  “I don’t know, sir,” Sergeant Traub said. “You know what they say, never trust the wop.”

  “That can limit you, you know. You can become so suspicious of people that you can do nothing with them in the end. Fifteen thousand out of three hundred thousand bottles is about right, Sergeant. I’d do the same myself, I think.”

  So he wrote that night in his log, it is dated: “He can be trusted to work with us. I will have to stand on that. He passed the test.”

  AFTER THAT the relations between the two men, the German commander and the Italian mayor, changed very swiftly. They lent each other the ox and the mule and they scratched each other’s back, and what was good for one they attempted to make good for the other.

  And the attitude of the people changed. At first they were afraid to look at the Germans for fear the Germans could read the thoughts in their heads. Most of the people were fearful that they wouldn’t be able to keep the secret, that in some way their tongues would slip and the terrible words would be said. But as the days and then the weeks passed and the secret held, it became a habit. If the secret had been held by one person alone it might have been hard to keep, but the fact that all of the city shared it made it somehow bearable and even simple to hold. There was such a total combined silence about the wine that some people began to forget that it had ever existed. Some of them developed such confidence in themselves that at times they came close to arrogance.

  “How do you like our wine?” Pietrosanto asked Corporal Heinsick.