The Secret of Santa Vittoria Page 36

  Before midnight, since the curfew had ceased to be observed and the people, ever since the SS had come, no longer went down to the Roman shelter to hide from the planes, they met before Vittorini’s house in the Corso Cavour and started down to Babbaluche’s house to ask the cobbler if he would be good enough to agree to win the lottery of death and die the next day for the people of Santa Vittoria.

  They stood outside his door for a long time before daring to knock on it.

  “I think that Vittorini should knock,” Pietro Pietrosanto said. “He is the most respectable of us and an occasion like this calls for respect.”

  Vittorini would not knock or be the first to go inside.

  “Roberto is the only one who hasn’t done something to make him be hated,” Bombolini said. “Perhaps you would like to be the first?”

  Roberto did not feel that a stranger should be the one to ask a man to surrender his life for a cause that wasn’t his own. In the end, of course, it was the Captain of the People who had to knock and when the door opened had to be the first to go inside. Such is the price of leadership.

  Babbaluche was smart. Some think he was wise, also, and some feel he was never wise. But all agree that Babbaluche was smart—as smart as some of the cocks here who always know when you are coming to get them and manage to die of old age on the roof tops before they see the inside of a pot. The moment the door opened he knew why they had come.

  “You’ve come to tell me something,” the cobbler said. “I only hope it’s good news.”

  Bombolini made the error of looking down at his shoes at that moment, and as if the movement were a magnet drawing the others with it, every other head went down. When it came time to look up again—because it would be required to look at the cobbler when posing the final question—the mayor found that he could not bring his head up. So there was a long silence that roared in the dark, dirty little room.

  “There is going to be a lottery tomorrow,” the mayor managed to mumble.

  “And you want me to serve on the committee.”

  “Even more than that,” Pietro Pietrosanto said.

  “That sounds flattering,” Babbaluche said. And the silence was as deep as before. They could hear Babbaluche’s wife breathing in the next room and the stomach of his ass, St. Joseph, whom he kept with him in the house, rumbling.

  “It’s a strange lottery, eh?” Babbaluche said. His voice was hard and cold and keen. “All the losers are winners and the winner is the loser.”

  The silence again.

  “The big loser,” the cobbler said.

  “I know what you want,” Babbaluche said after that. If the door to the house had opened then, Roberto says, every one of them would have backed out of the cobbler’s house and into the Corso and not come back. “You want me to pick the name, because I’m the one who has no other reason to protect anyone, I hate them all.”

  “Something like that,” Roberto said.

  “Or is it the other way around?” Babbaluche said. “There’s no reason to protect the cobbler, because they all hate him?”

  No one could take his eyes away from the pieces of leather scattered all over the floor. They tried to make shapes and read things in the coils and scraps of leather on the stone floor. If for no other reason than for the words he said next, forgetting all the other things he did for them, the people of the city would have to honor Bombolini.

  “Babba,” he said, “we have chosen you because we think that you can do it best.”

  You must someday hear a peacock scream at the dawn to hear the sounds that came from the cobbler’s throat. And the screams of defiance and wild joy and bitterness came, not once, but over and over again, until Roberto, for one, was fearful that he himself would begin to scream with the cobbler. It was the finest joke of all his life.

  “It would be an act for all of Italy,” Vittorini said, and the peacock screamed again. His wife and children were at the door of the room and he motioned them away.

  “Where was all of Italy, where were all of you when they were doing this to me?” he shouted at them. He tapped his crippled legs.

  He had been the first of all to be mutilated by the Fascists. A few Blackshirts from Montefalcone had come into the Piazza of the People and had seized him and in view of the people of the city they had broken his legs one after the other, and when he wouldn’t salute the Duce they had made him eat a live toad. Since then Babbaluche had been a shame for Santa Vittoria to carry on its bent back.

  “Let’s go,” Pietro Pietrosanto said.

  “Let’s go,” Angelo Pietrosanto said. “We’ve made a mistake.”

  But the cobbler wouldn’t let them go that easily. He was no longer able to eat anything, he lived on the acid in his stomach for breakfast and had the bile for lunch, he said, but this was too rich and fine a meal not to have taste for him.

  “Tell me,” Babbaluche said, “give me five good reasons why I should die for all of you?”

  They tried to say things about love of country and of neighbor and brother, and the words were so much sawdust in their mouths. How is it possible to tell a man who has purged himself of love that in the end he should die for it? It was all food and sunrise for the peacock, and when he was silent they were silent.

  “Let’s go,” Pietro Pietrosanto said. They began to back away and make the motions of leaving then.

  “Sometimes the only decent thing a man can do is to die,” Roberto said. He wanted to tell the cobbler that he knew, that he had tried it once. He knew that if he closed his eyes he would see the burning boy and the white ball bouncing. Perhaps there was something in the voice itself that made itself heard to the cobbler.

  “Now you are saying something,” Babbaluche said. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves, leaving it to an outsider to say something? You may be smart, or you may have said it because you are a fool,” he said to Roberto. “I don’t know about you. But you have said something.”

  “We know that you are going to die soon, Signor Babbaluche,” Roberto said. “We know that and you know it as well. That is why we came to you.”

  “But why didn’t you say that when you came?” the cobbler said to the others. His wife had lit a lamp in the next room, and so there was light in the outer room where we stood. We could hear the woman and her two daughters moaning and crying.

  “And that’s just it,” Babbaluche said to them. “I want to die on my own terms. I want to die my own way. I don’t want to give them the satisfaction of killing me.”

  Roberto didn’t know what to say because his mind doesn’t work in the right ways for this place, but Bombolini knew what to say after that.

  “But that is just it, Babba,” he said. His voice was triumphant now. “When they kill you, you cheat them. You rob them of what they think they are getting. They demand a life and we give them a corpse.”

  And the cobbler began to smile, differently than before. Even though it hurt him, he began to laugh, from the stomach and not from the throat the way he had done before.

  “You make fools of them,” Bombolini said. “At the moment of your death you’re laughing in their faces.”

  Now everyone was excited. It was the ancient thing here, something for nothing all over, this time turned inside out.

  “You make them do what God would do next week, and they must pay for it,” Vittorini said. Babbaluche told them to keep God out of this.

  “Will you tell them? Will you make sure, before they go, that they know?”

  “No,” Bombolini said. “Absolutely not. They must carry the shame and guilt of Babbaluche the cobbler around in their minds and in their hearts and rotting their souls until the day comes for them to die.”

  The cobbler actually tried a little leap in the air. “Italo,” he shouted, “you are marvelous. You are so clever.” He looked at Roberto. “You are honest, you see, but Italo is clever, and that is always better.”

  Then he was sad. As bright as he had been, the light had gone from him, and
they could all read at once that death was indeed already sitting inside his body, waiting.

  “But they’ll know,” he said. “They’ll take one look at me and know.”

  But Bombolini had thought of that. “We’re going to paint your face so you look fresh and healthy. We’ll put walnuts in your cheeks to make them bulge. We’ll stuff things under your shirt to make you look fat. Your voice is still good.”

  The cobbler was brightening again. It was amazing to see the way he could come back from the front door of death.

  “Italo,” he said. “We should have been friends. We could have done terrible things together.”

  Bombolini shrugged. “I was a clown and you didn’t like clowns.”

  “But I should have seen through your mask.”

  “Yes, but I was a clever clown and so I wore a clever mask.”

  They made the plans for the morning, which was by then not too far away. As few as possible should know, so that when the name was picked from the wine barrel it would come as a surprise and a shock to the people. They decided at first that every name in the barrel should read “Babbaluche,” but realized that would be a dangerous thing to do in case any German put his hand into the barrel. It was decided to put all the names into the barrel and to have Padre Polenta hold Babbaluche’s name in the sleeve of his cassock.

  “But would the priest do such a thing?” Roberto asked. They looked at him as if he were Fungo.

  “Have you ever known a priest to lose at cards?” Babbaluche said.

  They were going to take his wife and daughters away that night, but Babbaluche was against it.

  “They should be in the piazza to faint and fall down and cry,” he said. “No one can act the way they will act. Then take them away and have three other people take their place. The Germans will never notice.”

  The others left then, to start making a list of all the names and to set up the wine barrel in the Piazza of the People and to send someone down to paint the cobbler’s face.

  “Oh, I look forward to this,” Babbaluche said. “My last trick on life, my death.” The two men smiled at each other.

  “Do you know what is even better?” Bombolini said. “Do you know what will happen over this? You will become a martyr. You will become a hero of Italy. The story will go all over Italy—the little cobbler who died for the secret of the wine.”

  It caused Babbaluche to laugh.

  “Oh, if only I could be here to see it.”

  “You can’t have it both ways, Babba,” Bombolini said.

  “It’s the one problem of being a martyr. You never know for certain if they put you in the book.”

  “We’ll put up a plaque to you, Babba: ‘Santa Vittoria. The city where Babbaluche the Cobbler surrendered his life for his people.’”

  The mayor was quite excited then. “Perhaps we won’t have to make this a shrine for bakers after all. People might come here to see the home of the heroic cobbler.”

  “You might make it a shrine for cobblers. That would be better yet. Put a statue up with a halo on my head.”

  Bombolini shook his head, however. He had meant it seriously. “Cobblers don’t make enough money,” he said.

  They sat for a time enjoying the wonderful joke. There were many things they might do with it. The cobbler couldn’t take wine, but he could hold grappa down and he got a bottle and they shared it, drinking for a time in silence. Because they had both had nothing to eat for a long time they got a little drunk very easily.

  “You know,” Babbaluche said, “I am going to die tomorrow. In the joke I forget that sometimes. It’s strange. I keep thinking of the trick and forgetting that I’m not going to see how it comes out. That I’m going to die.” He looked around the room. “Think. This is the end of it. All of those years of work and pain and sickness, all the hopes I had as a young man, and this—this—this is the end. Nothing more. Can you imagine it? That I came all those miles and all those years for this? That my mother starved those years to bring me to this? Isn’t that strange?”

  After that, Babbaluche said something that was truly strange for him, and many people wonder if he really ever said it.

  He said that he was afraid, not of death, but of not being remembered. And then he told about the thing that had impressed him most in his life. He had once been able to go to Venice, and when he was there he saw a bridge on which there hung a blue light. An innocent man had been hanged from the bridge and ever after that time the people who lived by the bridge, for hundreds of years, had kept the light lit in his memory and his honor and in payment for their mistake.

  “I want you to put a light, a green light, in the Piazza of the People for the mistake of my life,” Babbaluche said. “I want this under it:

  So That All Should Learn

  In memory of the cobbler Babbaluche

  He lived his life wrong but had the

  good fortune to die his death right.

  What a waste of a life!

  Bombolini tried to argue with him, but he was not to be changed.

  “Now get out of here,” Babbaluche said. “I’m tired and sick and a little drunk, and I have a great deal of acting to do tomorrow. When will Angela come to make up my face?”

  “Just before dawn. The lottery is at dawn.”

  “Two or three hours of sleep. It’s a funny thing to need sleep in order to die. But, of course, I have to die right.”

  Bombolini went to kiss the cobbler on both cheeks, but Babbaluche pushed him away.

  “None of that. Just because I’m going to die doesn’t mean I have to put up with that.”

  “Well, anyway, Babbaluche, you’re a brave man and, even if you don’t know it, a good one.”

  “Bullshit,” the cobbler said. “Those are my last words. Now, go. I have to be fresh for my death.”

  Bombolini couldn’t bring himself to smile at a joke like that. At the doorway he held the handle for a moment and then turned back to Babbaluche. He was very serious.

  “Babbaluche?”

  “What is it?”

  “Make me one promise,” the mayor said. “Promise me not to die on us tonight.”

  The cobbler was shocked and his face showed it.

  “What? And spoil a good joke?”

  Bombolini could hear him laughing even when he reached the top of the Corso. Although it was still dark, he could see that the wine barrel was already standing there.

  AN HOUR BEFORE the sun came up Rosa Bombolini went down to Babbaluche’s house and woke him from his drunken sleep.

  “I thought Angela was coming,” the cobbler complained. “At least I could have that on my last day.”

  “You get me,” Rosa said.

  She rouged his sunken yellow cheeks and darkened his eyebrows and brushed his hair. She used wax from the top of wine kegs to pad out his cheeks and old sweaters under his shirt to hide the bones of his chest and back. When he looked at himself in the mirror he was pleased. He looked something like what he must have looked years before.

  “You know, I wasn’t a bad-looking son of a bitch,” Babbaluche said. “It’s fortunate for you you didn’t know me then.”

  “I knew you,” Rosa Bombolini said. “You weren’t so much.”

  He looked at her with admiration.

  “If it weren’t for you, Rosa Bombolini, I would lose all faith in life,” Babbaluche said.

  “You still have one day to do it in,” she said.

  “Anyone else would have said, ‘That’s right, Babba, you were a pretty gay dog. How you used to strut. Why I can remember you strutting around the piazza on Sunday afternoon during the passeggiata like God’s gift to women.’ But not you. That would be asking too much with still a whole day to go.” He shook his head. “I can still learn things.”

  “You’re like the rest. You’re like Bombolini. I don’t care if you’re going to die tomorrow or ten years from now. Why should I have to lie for you?”

  “All right, put down the mirror,” Babbaluche sa
id. “I’m not so much. I begin to have an idea of what hell must be like, and it frightens me.”

  He had to lean on her in order to get up to the piazza, and when they arrived almost all of Santa Vittoria was already there, even though it still was dark. All eyes were on the wine barrel. Sergeant Traub was going through the names and he was satisfied that the names of most of the eligible men were in the barrel. He hadn’t expected that Bombolini would put in his own, but they didn’t want Bombolini dead either.

  Padre Polenta came across the piazza and he made the sign of the cross over the people as he came. There was no man who could feel secure. His death was in the barrel. If the Germans found out what was taking place, a true lottery of death would take place. A young man began to stir the names with a long stick.

  “It’s out of our hands now,” a woman said. “The angel of death is sorting out the names.”

  They watched the wine-dark barrel as if the man who was to die would come out of it, and not his name alone. They watched it and never took their eyes away from it, and as they watched it grew lighter and lighter, and the moment could not be delayed much longer. When the sun touched the highest tiles and began to slide down the dark wall and turn them bright yellow, Capoferro began to beat a slow march on his drum, a long roll followed by several short taps. Then finally Padre Polenta began a prayer and all the people knelt on the cobblestones and prayed for themselves and then for their brothers and fathers and husbands, and finally for the man who was about to die.

  Captain von Prum had decided it would be wiser if he wasn’t present, and at five o’clock in the morning Sergeant Traub came out of Constanzia’s house and began to work his way through the kneeling crowd. The people leaped away from him as if his touch might be the one that signaled their doom.

  “Let’s get this over with,” he said to the priest.

  “This is a terrible thing to ask a priest to do,” Polenta said.

  “I didn’t ask you to do it. I’m only a soldier. I carry out orders. I have nothing to do with this at all. My hands are clean.” He turned to the priest. “Do you want me to leave it to someone else?”