The Secret of Santa Vittoria Read online

  On the fifth day of October the wine began to explode. Not all at once—a bottle now, several a few minutes later, a long pause perhaps, and then a succession of explosions. It was fortunate for us that they began in the early afternoon. The sounds of the explosions came up out of the air shafts and carried across the terraces and up into the streets of Santa Vittoria, as if someone were throwing little hand grenades or little hollow glass bombs, somewhere in the valley.

  Something had gone wrong with the weather. In October it is dry here, hot in the day and cool at night, but on this morning the wind began to come from the southwest, hot and steaming and moist, and it settled down on the streets and lanes of the city and clogged the piazzas as if a wet hot shawl had been dropped on Santa Vittoria. The people sagged with sweat, and the mules looked as if they had been lathered with soap. By afternoon the moist heat had worked its way down into the air shafts and had settled on the valley floor; and when it was hot enough the first of the bottles, for reasons we don’t know, began to explode. We only guess that it was the result of some kind of imbalance in the fermentation process, caused by layers of cool air and layers of hot moist air.

  After the first several bottles exploded, they dropped Rana, our frog, on a line down one of the air shafts, and he told us that the bottles had become beaded with sweat and that some of them, especially the special bottles of spumanti, a bubbly kind of wine that some of the growers experiment with, were boiling inside. Beards of white fungus hung down from the corks like hair on the chin of a goat. Sometimes only the cork would go, and then there would be a hollow pop that could be heard through the wall. When the cork held, however, and the drive of the wine was strong, then the bottle gave, and the sound of the explosion was a sickness and a terror in our hearts.

  When they first heard it in the Piazza of the People, Bombolini felt that he knew what it was. Fabio and the Petrarch Brigade, the four or five young boys who made up the Red Flames, must have decided to fight.

  Sergeant Traub came across the piazza toward them. “What the hell is that?” he asked.

  “From the rock quarry,” Pietrosanto said. “Someone is shooting off blasting caps. Some kid is wasting them down there.”

  The answer satisfied the sergeant then.

  “It was a very good answer,” Babbaluche said. “I didn’t know you could think that fast.” A compliment from the cobbler was a very rare thing.

  “What? Isn’t that what it is?” Pietrosanto asked.

  With the setting of the sun and the cooling of the day the explosions stopped and we felt we were safe, at least until the next day. But when the people came in from the terraces to settle for the night the heat of their bodies was enough to make the heat rise once more and cause the first of the bottles to explode.

  And once again, to most of the people here at least, the only explanation for what took place is that a miracle occurred. On this night, as if stationed there by God, spread out along the floor of the wine cellar just in front of the false wall, were the families of Constanzia Muricatti and Alfredo del Purgatorio, who were preparing for their marriage. The families, using sheets and blankets and the canvas covers from the grape carts, had set up two large strange-looking Oriental tents. In one of them the women were all working and sewing on the bridal gown and their own dresses. In the other tent the men were singing and dancing and drinking. The people were very gay and very loud because everyone was very happy about this marriage. It had long been conceded by the Muricatti family that no one would ever marry their Constanzia, and it had long been conceded by the del Purgatorios that it would be a miracle if Alfredo, who was very small and very shy, would ask a woman to share a bed with him.

  When the bottle exploded behind the false wall, several of the German soldiers turned around from their cards and looked back into the cellar.

  “What’s going on back there?” Corporal Heinsick asked. One of the Good Time Boys winked at him.

  “The celebration has begun,” he said. “They’re popping the corks. There will be some action in here tonight.”

  They sent wine to the soldiers, and a little later, when the music began and the dancing started, we knew we were safe. At the start there was a mandolin and an accordion, and while this worked well as a cover for the sound, Bombolini ordered every musician in the city to play. There were tambourines and one old man with his pipes, there were Capoferro’s drums and, finally, the singing and the dancing and the clapping of hands. If you listened with your ear to the wall you might be able to hear a bottle explode now and then, but this was the only way it could be heard.

  At nine o’clock that night the dancers, who had worked all day in the vineyards, grew tired and the wine was having its effect and the musicians wanted a rest.

  “Play,” Bombolini ordered. “Dance,” he shouted at the men and the women. “Sing,” he told us, “and clap your hands while you do it.”

  “We can’t go on,” Tommaso del Purgatorio complained. “We’ve danced our legs off.”

  “You’ll go on because you have to go on,” the mayor told them. “The whole city is depending on you now.”

  “And look as if you’re having fun,” Pietrosanto said. “Get that long look off your face.”

  At eleven o’clock, when they would normally have been asleep for hours, the dancing still continued. It went in shifts now, fresh dancers every fifteen minutes or so, and when the mandolin player stopped, the tambourines beat a little more loudly, and they pounded Capoferro’s goatskin drum with heavy wooden spoons. At midnight, while taking a walk in the Piazza of the People, Captain von Prum heard the noise of the gaiety and went down the mountain to see what it was. No one knows how long he might have watched us from the entrance to the Big Room.

  “They don’t seem to be having very much fun,” the captain said.

  “They’re tired now, but they’ll get a second wind, you’ll see,” Bombolini said. Pietrosanto and some of the others went around the back of one of the tents and gave out new orders.

  “Get a smile on your faces,” the people were told. “Get some spring into your steps. Start having fun, and don’t you dare forget it,” Pietrosanto warned them.

  “Now, you see,” Bombolini said. “Now they’re perking up. They can go all night.”

  And they did.

  The dance, Bombolini explained to von Prum in the morning, was a tradition in Santa Vittoria. It might go on for days, he said, through night and through day, until the bride and the groom were exhausted and were too tired to be embarrassed in each other’s presence any longer. When the moment was reached they were put to bed together, where they often slept for a day or two at a time, but when they finally woke they were strangers no longer.

  “It’s not beautiful, perhaps,” Bombolini said, “but it is very effective.”

  “What happens to your work? You can’t dance all night and all day and do your work.”

  “What does it matter about the work if it helps to create a beautiful marriage?” Bombolini said.

  “The Italian mind,” von Prum said. “You jump from realism to romanticism in the middle of one sentence.”

  “Oh, it’s realistic,” Bombolini said. “It keeps up our population. It grows future grape growers.” And the German was forced to admit that there was a hard peasant wisdom behind it all.

  And then began some of the hardest days and nights ever spent by the people of Santa Vittoria. As long as the city sat stewing in the heat wave, the party would have to continue, all the time, dancing at eight o’clock in the morning, singing and dancing in the heat of the day, people coming down hot from the terraces to take their places at the drums or in the singing, wine flowing until people were sick of wine, and throats raw from singing and faces frozen from smiling.

  “One more night of joy and I shall go mad,” Angela Bombolini said. Her thighs and legs cried out in pain from the continual dancing, and she was no different from all of the rest.

  On the fourth day of the wedding celebrat
ion, because they were forced to do it, the people began to take chances with the bottles. They would sit by the instruments and not move for fear of raising the heat, and when a bottle would go, but only then, they would all get to their feet and hit the tambourines and begin to sing and shout in a tired and mournful way and to shuffle about in the sand.

  “The gaiety has died down, the laughter has cooled,” von Prum remarked.

  “It’s coming to that time now,” Bombolini told him. “The bed time. We begin with the lullabies, the siren songs, you see. Soon they will sleep.”

  But it wasn’t to be for another two days. The mandolin player wore pruning gloves and he hit the strings with his knuckles. Several members of the del Purgatorio family had already had fights with Muricattis. The sound of the tambourine grew more painful than the crashing of glass behind the walls. If there had been a vote then, it is possible that the people might have surrendered the wine, anything to stop the wedding party.

  One night we thought we heard the bombers coming and we were pleased because the sound of the engines and the roar of the explosions would drown the sound of the bottles. Then we felt the first of the wind coming into the mouth of the Big Room, and after that we heard the rain and the thunderclaps and saw the flashes of lightning. And then came a hard, cool wind with a hard, cold rain.

  The bottles didn’t stop right then. If anything, for the next hours it was worse than ever before, and we feared that all the effort was in vain, that there couldn’t be a bottle left to save; but we also knew that the heat was gone, that the autumn was back with us and that in the morning the party would have ended. So we danced then with some wild last source of energy called from the very bottom urge of desperation, beating the tambourines until they split and strumming the mandolin strings until they broke and striking Capoferro’s drum until the goatskin burst.

  In the morning we held the wedding of Constanzia Muricatti to Alfredo del Purgatorio. We shivered in the cold in the Piazza of the People, pleased by our goose-pimples, our backs turned to the cold wind that was blowing over Santa Vittoria, the city washed bright and shining by the cold hard rain, and it was the most popular wedding ever held in our city.

  They had earned their right to bliss, and it was a wedding that we would never allow to fail. Because this was truly a marriage made in heaven and ordained by God Himself.

  “They are very sweet,” Captain von Prum said, “and very tired.”

  “Very tired.”

  “Now you have no music? A week of music and just when they’re married the music ends. It’s just the opposite with us.”

  “Now is the time to sleep and to sleep and to sleep. There’s no more need for music. The party is over, you see.”

  THE CITY still slept when the Germans came, two cars of them, four Germans and four Italians in each car. The cars were unable to make it all of the way up the mountain and they were parked at The Rest and the men proceeded up the rest of the way on foot. The Germans walked ahead and the Italians trailed along behind them. The Germans were all officers and looked as if they ate a great deal of meat. The Italians were all civilians, dressed in little thin dark suits stained with wine and pasta and they looked as if they lived on field greens and pebbles. Word had gone up the Corso Cavour to Captain von Prum, and by the time they arrived at the Fat Gate the captain had already gotten dressed and gone down the steep street to meet them. Colonel Scheer made no response to his greeting.

  “They say the wine is here,” the colonel said. He pointed to the Italians.

  “With all respect, sir, they can say what they wish, but I am forced to stand on my statement,” Captain von Prum said.

  “It cost them a lot of teeth to say that and to stand by it,” Colonel Scheer said, and he went across to one of the Italians and he forced open the man’s mouth. His gums were torn and his teeth were gone. “We took them out one by one and he stayed with his story. I’m inclined to believe a man like that.”

  There was nothing for the captain to say.

  “So I decided I had better come and see for myself.” Scheer turned to the youngest and most intelligent-looking of the Italians. “Show the captain the papers, the documents,” he said.

  At first the young man was shy with Captain von Prum, but as the papers began to tell the story of the wine he found courage in them and he grew excited by what the papers revealed. There were receipts from the cellars of wine wholesalers for years past listing the amount of wine received and stored and shipped. There were warehouse receipts showing bottle deliveries in the north of Italy, there were bills of lading and transportation orders and there were the books of the Cinzano people showing how many bottles had been received each year and how many stored and how many shipped and to where and how many sold. In every case they told the same story. In some years the amount of wine ran as low as 800,000 bottles but in good years it ran to a million bottles, and even more. Because of the war, since deliveries had not been made the season before, it was safe to assume, the Italian said, that well over a million bottles, perhaps 1,500,000 bottles, could be found in Santa Vittoria. Von Prum studied the papers as carefully as possible for some kind of weakness in them or at least an explanation, and finally he faced Colonel Scheer.

  “There can be only one explanation,” he said. “The papers are a fraud.”

  The Italian, who had grown arrogant now, answered for the colonel. “In order for these papers to be a fraud it would take hundreds of people to be involved in the deception. It would take people in the wineries, in the warehouses, in the railroads, in the Cinzano company.” They stopped the Italian at that point. It was apparent that he might have gone on for a long time. He was very convincing.

  “Now they want to see the wine you have,” Scheer said; and they started up the Corso to the lane that turns off into the Cooperative Wine Cellar. Bombolini had been warned, and when they turned into the lane von Prum saw him and told him to come along in case questions would need to be answered. In the darkness of the cellar none of them could see the wine well at first, but when they could see the bottles the Italians began to smile at one another. Bombolini tried to catch their eyes and shake his head. As Italians perhaps they would rise to the moment against the Germans, but he knew it was hopeless. The sad little clerks were what are called Fascists for the Family, men who felt for their jobs a love no greater than their fear of hunger.

  “It is what you would expect,” one of them said. Bombolini felt an urge to get out of the cellar then and begin to run, but he stayed where he was.

  “There are two ways to put down wine,” one of them began. “Ah, well, we will show you.”

  They knew their wine and how to handle it, and they began to put down the bottles in the tight way, and when they had finished several rows it was as clear as if someone had painted a picture of it, a picture of before and an after, that the cellar had been made to handle ten times the amount of wine that it now held.

  “Do I need to go on, sir?” one of the Italians said.

  “No, there is no more need to go on,” Colonel Scheer said, and he turned to Captain von Prum. “The question being then, Captain, what happened to the rest of the wine? Where is it? What have they done with it? How did they fool you?”

  He turned to the young officers who were with him. “Get me a wop,” he said. “From the town.”

  “There’s one right here,” a lieutenant said.

  “The mayor,” von Prum said.

  “Who could be better than the mayor?” the colonel said. “Come over here.”

  Bombolini was afraid and he tried not to show it. To his surprise, however, he found that he was not afraid for himself or what was about to happen to him, but only afraid that he might reveal something even against his wishes.

  “We are not a cruel people,” the colonel was saying to him. He tried to listen to the words, but since he knew he would not be answering the questions he found it hard to listen. He was more interested in preparing himself for what was going
to happen.

  “So if you are honest and generous with us you will find that we are honest and generous with you. Now, then. Where is the wine?”

  Bombolini held out both of his hands, palms upward. His eyes were as wide open as his mouth.

  “This is our wine.”

  Scheer raised his dark hard fist and struck the mayor in the mouth. “Where is the wine?”

  When Bombolini held out his hands again the colonel hit his face once more, as hard as the first time, breaking his nose and breaking one tooth loose from the bridge of his mouth and causing him to fall on the stone floor of the wine cellar. The first blow had caused a lump the size of a pigeon’s egg to form below Bombolini’s eye, and the colonel touched it with the sandy tip of his boot.

  “Now if you want to lose your eyesight to protect something that will be found out in the next few hours, I will oblige you with my boot,” the colonel said. He turned on von Prum. “Don’t turn away,” he said. “Is this too crude for someone with such fine blood as yours?”

  “It isn’t that,” the captain said. “It’s the failure of what I wanted to do here. We wanted to rule without violence.”

  “Well your rule has been shit,” Colonel Scheer said. “What do you think of that? Do you think this is ineffective?” He slammed his hard fist into the palm of his other hand. “You would be surprised how well it works.”

  “It wasn’t the way I wanted to do it.”

  Scheer was angered by the statement. “You may think you’re different, but you’re one of us,” the colonel said. “You are a German. Don’t you ever forget how many fists have been used on how many faces by men who haven’t been afraid to use them to make fine people like yourself. We fought for that, and I am not ashamed of it. Those who can use the fist have a right to use the fist, they have a responsibility to use the fist if the fist can help the Fatherland. Who do you think you are?”