The Secret of Santa Vittoria Read online

  They were dressed in their parade uniforms, the only time they had worn them since the cobbler’s execution. The leather on their wide black belts was polished as was the leather of their boots, and the silver buckles which say “Gott mit Uns” shone. They carried their rifles slung over the shoulder, carried bayonets and trench knives in scabbards and wore their metal helmets. Only Vittorini could outshine them. They marched, a parade march, a slow goose step in which they came to almost a complete halt before banging their hobnails down on the cobblestones again. Capoferro picked up their step—brrrrrrm bang, brrrrrmmmm bang—and the piccolo player played a sad lament for the dead. The Germans were impressive. At the church door Vittorini made a salute, and Bombolini welcomed them as guests of honor at the festival.

  “As a representative of the German people and the German nation, we are honored to accept,” Captain von Prum said.

  “Wait until the Resistance gets their hands on this Bombolini,” Stompinetti said. “What kind of an Italian is this. Why didn’t he get down in the piazza and kiss his ass while he was about it?”

  “Wait,” the people around him said. “Just wait. He knows what he’s doing.”

  The Mass was swift. Polenta had never been a believer in the long Mass. It was his belief that if God wanted to come down and bless the grapes and wine He would come down whether we spent an hour on our knees or ten minutes. The Mass was over in fifteen minutes.

  On the way out of Santa Maria they could see the statue resting in the back of a large open cart, hung with clusters of red and white grapes, entwined with vines and dressed with thousands of grape leaves which fluttered in the early morning wind. And which soon, Padre Polenta hoped, would be further dressed with lire and even some dollar bills and bank checks from the Bank of America.

  “The spirit of the harvest,” Bombolini said to von Prum.

  “We honor it,” the German said.

  At the foot of the church steps a large black wooden coffin was placed on two wine barrels.

  “The first of our traditions,” the mayor said. “It holds the corpse of the old year gone by. We destroy the old year and in that way give birth to the new that lies ahead.”

  “Very beautiful,” von Prum said. “Very symbolic.”

  “Would you and your men care to act as honor guard?”

  “We should be honored.”

  It is not an old tradition. The priest who had been here before Polenta had seen the tradition in another city and had borrowed it for ours. From the church door there is a wire and the wire runs from the church, down the steps and through an opening into the coffin. For reasons we no longer are sure of, a white dove is attached to the wire and then sent skidding down into the black box. When the bird goes through the opening it trips another wire, which sets off a bag of explosive powder, which in turn explodes the coffin. The Germans had stationed themselves alongside the box, three soldiers on each side, von Prum and his noncommissioned officers a little in front of it.

  “The old is dead,” Padre Polenta said from the top of the church steps.

  “The new,” the priest called out—and the dove began to skid down the wire, tied to it upside down by his pink feet—“is born.”

  The noise is raspy and sometimes the dove cries out, but it made no sound this year. The explosion, however, was as loud and complete as ever. Pieces of the coffin went straight up into the air and others flew out in all directions into the piazza. The smoke was so dense that from the center of the piazza it became impossible to see the front of Santa Maria. When it did clear we could see the Germans, all nine of them, face down on the piazza stones, mingling with ox turds, and several of them, better trained than the others perhaps, with their rifles already in their hands, kneeling and facing the people. There was a great cheer then, an enormous cheer from the people, because this officially opens the festa.

  Some of the people ran to help the soldiers to their feet, and they tried to brush the manure and the axle grease off their uniforms, but without much success. Bombolini said something to the captain and he smiled and patted him on the back, but nobody was actually able to hear what he said because of the roaring in their ears.

  In the center of the piazza, near the fountain, a platform had been built in the night and on it stood the first of the wine barrels, and by the barrel stood Old Vines. He looked then as he always did, as if he were about to be sentenced to his death and be dropped through the platform floor. Padre Polenta said a prayer and then a young girl, all white in her Communion dress, took a copper pitcher and turned the barrel tap and filled the pitcher with wine, and when it was full she handed it to Old Vines. There was no sound at all in Santa Vittoria then. Even the animals, who exist by the wine as much as we do, seem to know enough to be silent then. He held the pitcher in the air and then he began to pour the new wine into a large crystal wine glass which he then held over his head, the way the priest holds up the chalice before consecrating the sacred Host, and he turned in all four directions.

  “It is vino nero,” Old Vines called out. “Good and black.” There was a roar from the crowd, but not a great one. It was a good sign, but not enough.

  Now he lifts the glass to his lips and the people push forward, because they demand not only to see it but to hear the wine washing around in his mouth and being kissed by his tongue and lips, and then he spits it out and no one moves.

  They knew it was good. He could not hide the look that began to spread out on his red face. The question now was, How good?

  “Frizzantino,” the old man shouted. And then there was the roar, the true roar, almost as great as the one that had greeted Bombolini so many months before.

  “The wine is alive,” he shouted. “It dances.” He took more of the wine. This he swallowed.

  “The needles on the tongue.”

  “Give us, give us,” the people shouted. They reached up for the wine glass but he didn’t give it to them then.

  “It’s as fresh as the air,” he shouted. “It tastes like the sun in the sky.” He had never spoken this way of the wine before. He told them that the wine was fat but at the same time light, that it was fruity and yet not sweet, and that the bouquet was strong enough to drown the brain.

  “It is a good wine,” he said. The first of the desirable categories.

  “It is a great wine.” The cheering grew louder. They waited for the third category that is almost never awarded.

  “It is a wine too good for men to drink,” Old Vines told them. He was holding the glass up to the gods that only he recognized.

  “We have grown a wine fit for the saints.”

  No one cheered then; it was a moment for reverence, it had gone beyond cheering.

  As we do, the oldest of each family comes forward with a pitcher and the pitcher is filled at the barrel and the wine is taken back to the family and sipped and tasted and then drunk by all, from the oldest down to the youngest. When all the families had tried the wine the San Marco Brass Band broke into some gay song from the mountains to the south of here, and the time for reverence was past, and the uproar began in the piazza.

  “Now comes a real treat,” Bombolini shouted into von Prum’s ear. “No outsiders have ever done this before. You are going to be allowed to help carry the statue of Santa Maria.”

  Teams of men carry the statue and it is considered an honor to be chosen. There are eight men to a team and each year three teams are chosen. With Polenta in the lead, the statue is carried around the Piazza of the People and then down the Corso Cavour through the Fat Gate and across the terraces. As he goes the priest blesses the doorways and the windows and on the terraces he blesses the last of the grapes of this harvest and the roots of the vines for the harvest to come.

  It is not a heavy statue, but the distance is long, and when the day is hot it can prove to be work fit only for the strong. To many, carrying the statue is a kind of penance. It was as if they were saying to God, “I sweat for you, You sweat for me.” It is also one of the ug
liest statues in all of Italy and possibly the world. It was made of wax and cheap paint and plaster a hundred years ago in Montefalcone, and when a team of men left here to get it, on the way back they stopped in a roadside inn for some wine and left the statue out in the sun and the rain and it melted and turned black. When the people saw it they were horrified.

  “No, no,” the men who had carried it said. “It was a miracle. This must be the way Santa Maria really looked, all black and roasted. It was God’s wish.”

  To this very day the city is divided between those who think Santa Maria’s melting was a miracle and those who think the melting was a simple case of drunkenness, stupidity, lying and criminal neglect. The two groups are called the Miracles and the Melters.

  It was also hollow, whether by design or by deceit has never been known.

  The first team carried the statue all the way down the Corso Cavour, and the people came out and pinned lire to the statue, and those who had no money left food in her arms and put things in the cart that came along behind.

  At the Fat Gate a second team took over the statue and it went down to the terraces. Most of the men were older men, some as old as sixty, but they held the statue high and went down the mountain and through the grapes at a good pace. Young girls were picking the last of the grapes and the German soldiers, getting into the spirit of things, helped them fill the baskets.

  “You had better take it easy,” Pietrosanto warned them. “You’re going to be next with the statue.”

  “If those old men can carry it, we can carry it,” Heinsick told him.

  “They know how to do it. It’s harder than it looks,” Bombolini said. “They’ve done this for years.”

  “With one hand,” one of the soldiers said. “One hand.”

  “I don’t know,” Pietrosanto said. Heinsick called Zopf over and told him to roll up his shirt sleeve. He had an arm the thickness of a man’s leg. “One of your Bavarian oxes,” the corporal said proudly. Heinsick himself was built like a bull.

  In the center of the terraces the statue was set down on the cart to rest and the men and women and the soldiers walked across through the vineyards for the blessing of the vines. When the prayers were done and they came back, Bombolini asked Captain von Prum if his men were ready to accept the honor of carrying the statue.

  “We have been looking forward to it,” von Prum said, and the people applauded.

  They lifted it up easily and put it on their shoulders and they started back up through the terraces at a good pace. It is traditional after the prayers for the people to sing their way back up to the town and the band plays, following along behind, because the sacred time is over and the wine waits in the piazza and the pressing of the last grapes will begin, and the greased-pole climb still lies ahead.

  The Germans were good about it at first. The people here can’t keep step, but the soldiers never lost a beat. Sergeant Traub counted the cadence even though he was one of the men under the statue.

  “One two three four, one two three four”—in German, loud and clear and strong.

  “You had better save your breath,” Bombolini warned him, but the sergeant smiled and kept on shouting. It went very well then for at least a hundred steps, but after that Traub ceased to count and then the steps slowed a little and the band, to keep in time, had to play a little slower and the people had to sing a little slower, so after fifty more paces they ceased playing “Garibaldi” and began to play the “Lament for Sardinia,” a sad slow song about some thieves who starved to death in the mountains there. Soon some of the people, even older men, impatient to get up to the piazza, began to go past the men carrying the statue and the men carrying it began to fall back.

  “What’s the matter with you?” von Prum called to them. “Keep it moving. Pick up the step.”

  For a short time after that, through a strong show of effort, they were able to pick up the step and Traub began to count again, in a small voice. But then it seemed to be too much for them once more and the step slowed and finally, still a long way from the Fat Gate, it ceased to be what could be called a step or a march at all but became a kind of clump, the way a tired man on a steep mountain puts down his feet, one after the other, with great deliberation.

  “Close it up, pick it up,” von Prum said. “You’re disgracing yourselves.”

  It didn’t work this time, however. The pace remained the same.

  “I told you you shouldn’t have picked the grapes,” Pietrosanto said. “You were supposed to take it to the Fat Gate but I think that we should relieve you now.”

  The captain wouldn’t consider it.

  “It’s these uniforms, sir,” Corporal Heinsick said. “They’re strangling us.”

  Heinsick’s face was the color of our wine, vino nero, red, a deep, rich red, almost purple, almost black in the deepness of its redness. All their faces were red and sweat was streaming down them, salt in their eyes and on their lips and in their mouths, which was hard to get rid of because the men were gasping and sucking so hard for air.

  “My heart is going to explode,” Goettke suddenly shouted.

  “Quiet,” von Prum said.

  “If the wops can do it, we can do it,” Heinsick said. No one answered him.

  “The first man to drop out receives a summary court martial,” von Prum said, in a low voice that only his men were meant to hear.

  It is a true thing that if the desire to live were enough, no man, for example, would ever drown. But there comes a time when the body can no longer do even what it deeply desires. The Germans’ legs were quivering and it was only a matter of a few more steps before at least one of the sixteen legs would quiver too much and go under, which is what happened. The result was the same as missing a stroke with the oar of a boat. For one moment they stopped and teetered, they started to go back and held themselves and they ran forward a step or two, and there was a second at least when they came within a foot of the edge of the cart track and plunging down into the terraces with Santa Maria on their backs.

  “The sacred statue,” Bombolini shouted. “In the name of God, hold it.”

  The old women began to cry out. They shouted to the Mother of God to reach down and save Santa Maria, for Santa Maria to save herself, and in the end the Germans held, although the veins were sticking out on their foreheads and their eyes were bulging.

  “Who did it?” von Prum shouted.

  “Me, sir,” Goettke said. “I can’t go on.”

  “Get out then,” the captain said, and he pulled the soldier away and took his place beneath the statue.

  “It’s not so heavy,” the captain said. “What’s wrong with you men? I know what it is, too much wine drinking.”

  He was a tonic to them, for five steps. A man with a leg such as Captain von Prum possessed should never allow himself to get under a statue. Since his legs were not even, at every second step the statue would shift slightly and rest on his shoulder and it was as if an iron bar were pressing down on him, all the way from the shoulder to the bad leg, and trying to press him into the hard white clay.

  “You are doing fine,” Bombolini shouted in his ear. “Only four hundred more steps to go.”

  At those words Captain von Prum, for at least the second time in Santa Vittoria, looked into the face of failure. If they could cover one hundred more steps it would be something more than a triumph. But it would be a man who was not honest with himself, the kind of man who when someone spits in his face denies that he has been insulted, who would deny that the Germans did not go down without a great fight.

  “All right,” von Prum shouted at them. “We are going to go up. At three, we step off again. One, two, three, step,” he called out. “Step.… Step.… Step.”

  One of the soldiers, each time the captain called out Step, answered, “I die, I die, I die.”

  “Only three hundred and fifty more, Captain,” Bombolini told him.

  No one could say why they stopped. It is said that in a war no one can sa
y why an attack stops. Each soldier has his own reason and his own limit, but all at once the attack stops. It was that way with the burden of Santa Vittoria.

  “Step,” the captain called out, and no one took a step. They stood where they were, and the statue shook with the effort simply to keep it from falling.

  Six young men then—it was important to Bombolini that there were six and not eight—eased the poles off the Germans’ shoulders and not one of them made a protest, not even Captain von Prum, and they slung the statue on their shoulders and started up toward the Fat Gate at a fast pace and even managed to break into a trot. Stompinetti saw them coming, and he broke into a Neapolitan quick step, and they went the rest of the way up to the Fat Gate as if they were going home for their soup.

  The Germans fell where they had stood. They sprawled out in the white dust of the cart track and stared up at the sky, unable to move, or curled up in the dust to stop the shaking of their muscles. They were still that way when Lorenzo the Magnificent, the one who was to press our grapes in the old way, came up the mountain with the men who had gone to get him.

  Lorenzo is mad, by his own admission he is mad, but he is also, as his name says, magnificent. There is no man in the world who does not recognize that Lorenzo is something very special and is not afraid of him or impressed by him. He is like a steel coil, all of him, his body and his mind drawn so fine and hard, pressed always so close to the breaking point, that if he ever breaks, pieces of himself will fly all over Italy.

  “What’s the matter with these bastards lying in the dust?” Lorenzo said.

  “Quiet. They’re Germans,” one of the men with him said.

  “I can see that. All I asked was why they were lying in the dust like pigs.”

  He went on, because he was late; but not one of them said anything in return or even looked at him when he talked.

  “They look as if the Resistance got to them,” one of the men with Lorenzo said.

  “They look like Fabio and Cavalcanti after the SS got through with them,” del Purgatorio said. “They look as if they have been tortured.”