The Secret of Santa Vittoria Page 27

  And so the German had to tell them about the records of the wholesalers and the records of the Cinzano people and the one million or more bottles of wine, and as he talked they looked at one another and their mouths fell open and they said, in low bewildered voices, “No, oh no, it couldn’t be … there is something wrong … wrong … wrong…” When he was through one of them said that no people in the world could be that rich; and they all nodded and were silent.

  * * *

  It is a pride of many men who make it a habit to tell the truth that because they possess this virtue they are qualified to know when another man is telling a lie.

  In von Prum’s case, it was a belief that if you watch a man’s lips as he talks and if you seal your eyes on his eyes, the man who is lying must falter and stammer and then turn away, because truth and honesty when confronted with the lie must overcome in the end. He should have known that a good lie is always better than the truth, because a lie has been tailored to look like the truth, but the truth is just its clumsy self. If you look at an Italian in the mouth when he is telling the truth he might stammer, but never when he is telling a good lie. The Master himself has said: Never tell the truth when a lie will do as well.

  And so they convinced him. He already believed them, when Pietrosanto apologized for saying what he had and then asked the question, “But if we had a million bottles—if, mind you, Mother of God, if—where in the name of God would we put them? How do you hide one million bottles of wine?”

  The captain went to his room and he immediately wrote this letter.

  I say this much with no fear of contradiction.

  For reasons that I am now unable to understand I am forced to conclude that you have been falsely informed and that any further investigation by you can only bear this out.

  On the following I stake my professional reputation, my personal reputation, my good name and that of my family which, as you know, is considerable.

  Upon my word of honor: There is no other wine in the city of Santa Vittoria except that which the people have been authorized to keep.

  The letter was sent to Montefalcone that evening and an answer was returned that night.

  Dear von Prum:

  Upon receipt of your letter I myself am forced to conclude that I have been misinformed and that a further investigation by our office can only bear this out.

  Sleep well this night at least.

  Scheer

  Before going to bed he answered Klaus’s letter as well as he could. There was, he said, nothing to tell a young German going mad except not to do it; that madness was often a simple display of weakness and that character would prove to be stronger than the mind if only the person had the courage to try it.

  After that he read Colonel Scheer’s letter to Sergeant Traub, and it was so ridiculous to the sergeant that he was forced to gasp and then to laugh aloud.

  “There’s no wine,” the sergeant said. “There’s no place to hide it, and if they did hide it they couldn’t keep a secret. You have to know them sir. They’ll tell you everything there is to tell about and anything there is to talk about.”

  6 THE NOOSE GROWS TIGHTER

  IT MIGHT BE THOUGHT that the question of the missing wine would have separated the Germans from the Italians and made them suspicious of each other, but that wasn’t the way it happened. It became as important to the Germans as it was to us that there be no other wine.

  We discussed it with each other; for days thereafter it was the only thing we talked about, and we went over it and over it again the way a person does who is injured in a ridiculous way, trying to make some sense out of something that is senseless. For a time we talked about where they thought we could have hidden it.

  “The logical place,” Bombolini actually said, “would be the old Roman wine cellar. It’s the only place big enough. But the wine isn’t there.”

  After that, the talk advanced to the question of why someone would want to say that we had hidden the wine; and finally an answer came forth. It was decided that some of the wholesalers and some of the Cinzano people had altered their figures so that after the war they could file some kind of claim with either the Italian or the German government for confiscated wine which, of course, had never existed. It sounded so sensible that many of the people here began to believe it. And then we stopped talking about it entirely, because there is a belief here that if you dwell on one subject too long it can be harmful to the brain, and that just like a pool of water, the brain must be refreshed with new thoughts or it will become polluted and turn sour.

  Something was happening with the war, but it didn’t concern us. Electricity was coming back to Santa Vittoria for several hours a day, probably because the Germans in Montefalcone had the power plant going again for their own needs and didn’t know how to shut us off, and Vittorini’s radio began to play now and then. But the River Road was now filled with traffic going south all night long, and we could hear the trucks in the convoys slamming into one another when they hit in the darkness. One afternoon before dusk we saw a regiment of Italian soldiers moving at a swift march down the road going south.

  “It won’t be much longer now,” Babbaluche said. “The Italians are in it.”

  From time to time, when the wind was just right we heard from far away the booming rolling sounds of heavy guns. It interested the people, because if the Americans and the English came it meant that we were safe. But still there no longer was any real fear for the secret, because the feeling was strong that we had been tested and found not lacking, and that if any slip was to occur it would have happened long before this. We had learned to live with our secret.

  One evening what Captain von Prum had feared took place. The people had come up from the terraces, which is what saved most of them, when some planes came over the city and dropped some bombs. Most of them landed down in the terraces and damaged some vines, although not many, and several of them dropped among the houses in Old Town. We never knew who bombed us, the Germans or the English or the Italians or the Americans. Two or three old people were killed by the bombs and seven or eight other people were badly hurt. Since the hospital in Montefalcone had been taken over by the German army for their own wounded being sent up from the south, there was no room for our people and Tufa turned the Palace of the People into an emergency hospital and put it under Caterina Malatesta’s direction. It was not very nice there. She worked with the help of Bombolini, who could not bear to look at the wounded, and Roberto Abruzzi and Angela Bombolini. There were no drugs to help relieve the pain and no medicines to stop infection, and it was not satisfactory work.

  “You will have to go to the German and make him get us supplies in Montefalcone,” Caterina told the mayor.

  “I don’t think he wants to do that,” Bombolini said.

  “You tell him that as commander of the city he is responsible for the health and welfare of the people in it under the articles of the Geneva convention of war.”

  “I couldn’t tell him all that.”

  “Tell him that if he doesn’t do it he will be held accountable as a war criminal when this is over,” the Malatesta said.

  “You should tell him this. You’re the one he will listen to,” Bombolini said. “Haven’t you seen the way he looks at you?”

  “I will never go across the piazza to beg anything from any German,” Caterina said.

  The captain went that same day to Montefalcone, and he returned with most of the things that were needed. After that he came every day to help in the hospital. He was capable and quick, and he had no fear of blood, unlike Roberto and Bombolini. Tufa had never come back after the first day, because he couldn’t stand the sight and sound of the pain and the cries of the people.

  During the time that he worked in the Palace of the People the captain did his work and took his orders, and the two of them, von Prum and the Malatesta, almost never exchanged a word that didn’t have to do with the people they were treating. There was no outward sign at all th
at the captain was slipping into love. But he began to write about her in his log and then in his letters to Christina Mollendorf, which is a certain sign that a man is falling in love.

  “There are things to admire about her, but at what a price. She is what you would call a New Woman, the liberated woman we were all talking about before the war broke out. Thank the Lord that era is over and gone with. God spare me from the liberated women and God be praised for the likes of you. You may commence blushing now.”

  Another time he wrote about Caterina’s darkness, the deep olive color of her skin and the darkness of her hair, the blackness of her eyebrows, beneath which the eyes were so dark that they couldn’t be said to possess any color at all.

  “We don’t raise people such as this. It is interesting and at the same moment repelling. One feels that this darkness doesn’t stop at the surface but extends all the way into the spirit or the soul, whatever you call it.

  “I suppose, however, I am hopelessly smitten with the idea that all real women are fair and blond and soft and white—with a soul or spirit or whatever you call it to match. If you think that’s a good description of yourself, Christina, you may commence blushing again.”

  The letters that came back to him began to be filled with pictures. In several of them, the later ones, she had unpinned her hair and it flowed down over her white shoulders like a field of ripe grain flooding down the side of a snow-covered hill.

  It was the night after the bombing that the Roman cellar was turned into the air-raid shelter for the city of Santa Vittoria. At first the idea had been that in the event of a raid the people would be roused from bed by the air-raid siren and would take a blanket and start down the mountain, but for two reasons it was plain this wouldn’t work. If the raid was a true raid the people would be dead before they ever reached their shelter; and if it wasn’t, the journey down, the lack of sleep, the trip back up the mountain with the grapes growing fatter and needing more work and the harvest looming upon us, would kill the people just as surely as a real air raid. It was decided that the people would take down bedding and a few things to heat food in and the city of Santa Vittoria would be moved into the Roman cellar at night, within breathing distance of their wine.

  The afternoon before the move Bombolini went down with Sergeant Traub and Corporal Heinsick and Captain von Prum.

  “It’s a remarkable place,” the captain said. “It could take direct blows from any airplane in the world and everyone would be safe. Why is it so large?”

  “It is said that it was the collection point for all of the wine in all of the region,” Bombolini said. “It all belonged to one man. I think it was Julius Caesar. Yes, that’s who it was.”

  “The large room is here, and then there is the wine cellar that goes back off it,” the captain said. “It’s a very peculiar shape. I wonder what was the need of all that wall along there?”

  Bombolini said that he didn’t know.

  The people started down that evening, after working all that day. They carried mattresses and straw mats and blankets and anything that anyone could lie on. It was a mass migration of lice and bedbugs probably not equalled in this part of the world before. They took down jugs of water and bread and bottles of wine and pots of cooked cold beans and baskets of onions and jugs of oil to pour on the beans and the bread. Longo started up the lights again, and this was a good thing to happen. By those pale dimming lights the false wall looked more natural than ever before.

  At first the people who camped along by the false wall were afraid to talk loudly, as if the vibration of their voices might cause a brick to pop loose. They were even afraid to look at the wall. But that passed. As the cellar become crowded with pots and pans and kettles and chamber pots and bedclothes and people, the old Roman wine cellar ceased to be a wine cellar at all and became solely an air-raid shelter, run like some monstrous underground inn from the Dark Ages.

  Other things helped. Captain von Prum did not come down to the cellar but stayed in his room and worked on “Bloodless Victory.” Von Prum was given to questions and curiosity. His soldiers were given to drink. We set them up in a running card game well away from the wall, and in such a way that their backs were almost always toward it. The Good Time Boys would come down with the vermouth and the grappa and the game would begin, tre setti from sundown until far into the night. Such precautions were not a waste of time. It was just this arrangement that saved us from ruin the first time.

  It must have begun early in the evening, because the lights were still on. By agreement the lights would be on until nine o’clock and after that the soldiers and the card players had agreed to play by lantern light so the working people could sleep. Even inside the tunnel we could hear the planes this night. There were more than usual and they were bombing somewhere in the area. It is our belief that they had no interest in Santa Vittoria but were going after the River Road and some of the bridges over the Mad River. There was a moon and the bridges would stand out over the white waters of the river.

  We heard the bombs begin by the river and then we heard them start coming across the valley floor, giant strides of bombs, coming in our direction. There was no fear for ourselves, although there was fear for the people in the Palace of the People and there was fear for the grapes on the terraces.

  Several of the German soldiers stopped playing and went outside and came back again when the bombs came closer.

  “These are the big ones,” one of the Germans called to us. “The big bastards. Americans.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Roberto said. “B-24s.” It was his only slip in all his time in Santa Vittoria. They didn’t hear him.

  After that they came louder and louder, and their force was stronger. We could feel the explosions then, through our feet, and dust began to fall from the arches above. The cellar was rumbling from the pressure of the explosions, and there was a shaking of things and even the mountain seemed to shake.

  And then everyone seemed to see it at once, everyone was looking at it, everyone except the card players, all of us incapable of any movement, the way people are supposed to be before a poisonous snake—frozen, frightened, unable to take one’s eyes away from it. The bombs were dropping on the side of the mountain and as they exploded, as if the shock were coming down through the rock veins of the mountain, the false wall began to swell and to puff out, and the bricks actually bulged and then all at once to sink back into place again until the next bomb landed on the mountain.

  The false wall billowed out and sank back again, each time the bricks barely holding, as smoothly and almost as regularly as the swells at sea.

  Then there was one great explosion, the heaviest of them all, and this time the bricks swelled out so far from the rest of the wall that it seemed impossible that we didn’t hear the sound that we dreaded more than any in the world then, the snap, the first dry sound of the first brick popping, springing out from its framework in the wall.

  The next explosion was a little less than that and the one after that far less, and we waited and waited until finally there were no more sounds at all and they were gone and it was over.

  “It’s all over,” one of the Germans called to us. “They won’t come again tonight.”

  The sigh from the people was like a wind that comes a night just before the rains begin. The next morning all of the people of Santa Vittoria went to Mass.

  “And what is this?” von Prum asked.

  “Deliverance Day,” Bombolini said. “Every Santa Vittorian gives thanks to God for protecting the fruits of the harvest.”

  “I thought you weren’t a religious man,” the German said.

  “I have become one today,” Bombolini said.

  They found that morning that the mortar that had held the bricks in place had shivered itself apart. If one man, an unknowing German, had leaned against the wall, the entire structure would have come down on top of him and the treasure been exposed. Later in the morning some of the men took a cartload of bricks out
through the Fat Gate and into a field where one of the ventilators was located and they dropped the bricks down the shaft on the inside of the false wall. After that they took out enough of the bricks to allow three or four men to step inside the cellar, and then they put the bricks back and rebuilt the wall from the inside, twice as thick as before, except for one little section they crawled back through.

  We learned something else that day. The bricklayers came back up from the field with the empty cart. The bricks were gone.

  “What did you do with the bricks?” Private Zopf said.

  “Fixed something,” one of the men said.

  “That’s good,” the guard said. “It’s always good to fix something.”

  They weren’t really interested in what we did. They really only cared about themselves. They didn’t really see us as people at all. As Babbaluche once put it, when the Italian looks into the mirror he sees the pimple on his nose, but when the German looks in the mirror he sees those blue eyes and tries to look through them into his soul.

  * * *

  It was this same Zopf, one day before the wine began to explode, who came closest to exposing the wine. He had been drinking in a corner of the cellar and smoking his pipe. On the way back across the cellar to the card game he stopped and tapped the bowl of his pipe against the brick. When the tapping failed to dislodge the tobacco he took a few steps more and tapped the wall again. He tapped once and he went back and tapped again.

  Hard tap—tap. Hollow tap—poonk. Tap, poonk, tap, poonk.

  “Do you know something?” he said. “You could play a tune on this wall.”

  They got him very drunk that night. They played a game where the winner was to be treated with drinks and they made certain to lose. When Zopf woke up the next morning he had no memory of the wall and the pipe at all and only a vow, which he broke that night, never to mix grappa and wine again. There was one positive result of the Zopf affair, however. It was decided the morning after that if any soldier, or all of them, discovered the false wall, he or they would have to die, even if it meant the deaths of fifty or a hundred of us, since without the wine we were as good as dead in any case.