The Secret of Santa Vittoria Read online

  “But she’s very beautiful,” I said, in Italian, and not one of them noticed. She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

  One morning I awoke and found that it was cool in the room, and when I leaned out of bed and looked across the piazza and over the houses to the mountains beyond I could see that they were covered with snow. Sometime in the night, unseen and unheard by us, a great storm, a battle between the heat of the south and the cold of the north, had been waged up there, and now in the morning rivers of white flowed down the mountainside. When Angela came in with the broth I said, “If you go to my window you’ll see something beautiful.”

  She put down the broth and went to the window and crouched down by it and that moment she looked very beautiful to me. I had not noticed that she also was beautiful in the way of simple things.

  “I don’t see anything,” she said.

  “On the mountains. There’s snow this morning.”

  “Ah, the new wind.” She turned back to me. “The new wind has blown summer away. It’s good for the grapes.” She spoke to me in dialect and was not at all surprised that I could answer her back or understand her. “Cool nights now and warm days,” she said. “It brings out the sugar in the grapes.”

  “Aren’t you surprised at my talking?” I asked.

  “We were wondering when you would begin to talk,” she said. “After all, you’ve been here for weeks.”

  “But I talk rather well, don’t you think?”

  She shrugged. “Little babies can speak at two years of age. You’re a man.”

  However, she went downstairs and told them that I was now talking and while there was no surprise about the miracle of my tongue there was interest and even excitement, because now they could do business with me. Bombolini, followed by some other members of the Grand Council, came running up the stairs to my room.

  “They say you talk very well,” he said to me. “Good.” He seized my hand and pumped it violently. He turned to the others. “What did I tell you? What did I say about him?” He shook my hand again so violently that it caused my leg to ache. “This is a very superior person. This is someone very special. We are in the presence of a superior human being.”

  He squeezed my hand and he went downstairs without ever hearing me say a word in dialect or in Italian.

  Of all the people that I could hear downstairs only Fabio did not seem to be impressed by my language.

  “It’s a kind of trick really,” he told people. He told anyone who would listen about an idiot they hired at the Academy to clean chamber pots who had learned German in one month.

  “You see,” Fabio told them, “the ability to learn languages in this way is in some cases actually a sign of idiocy.”

  No one understood what Fabio was trying to tell them, and neither did I then.

  “Why do you keep telling us this?” Bombolini asked him. “You sound as if you have something against the man.”

  “I have nothing against him,” Fabio said. “I only want to correct the record, to put things in the proper perspective. Learning a language this way is no sign of intelligence.”

  “But that’s just it,” Bombolini said. “I expected him to learn the language. You can see he’s brilliant. It sticks out all over him.”

  What despair I caused Fabio in those days, and I should have known it.

  Although the mayor had not stayed to listen to me speak on the first day, nothing could seem to stop him from coming back on the days that followed and I became sorry I had ever opened my mouth in the first place. He came in the afternoons when I was asleep and at night, and he stayed until I fell asleep in his face, asking me questions about how they did things in America, about the government and the setup of the states and the ruling of towns and the conduct of the police and the courts and the making of laws and the collecting of revenues—until I came to dread the sound of his step on the stairs. More than the intrusion and the effort involved was my shame at my ignorance.

  “I don’t know about that,” I would say. “I can’t answer that. I never studied it, I never found out about it.”

  “It’s a wise man who can say I don’t know,’” Bombolini would say. “Good man.”

  I would turn my head toward the wall in embarrassment.

  “It is only the wise ones who know the extent of their knowledge.”

  The few answers I was able to give him he speared the way a beggar spears chunks of meat in his soup. He fished them out before they could get away from him and then he rolled them around in his mouth, savoring them, before finally swallowing them.

  “Brilliant,” he would say. “These are brilliant things you tell me.”

  It came so that I couldn’t bear the sight of Fabio’s face at such times. It was Fabio, however, who was finally able to figure out why Bombolini acted that way toward me. He had already figured out the reason for Bombolini’s amazing success at government that had changed him from a clown to a prince in one night. What Fabio found was that Bombolini was no longer Bombolini at all but someone else who had lived five hundred years before him. When faced with any problem or any decision, Bombolini would not become alarmed by it but would go back to The Prince and The Discourses and have Niccolò Machiavelli provide him with the proper answer. It was from these books and this man that he drew his wisdom and his assurance and his poise and his strength. Bombolini was only a face and a body and a mouth for The Master. All of the answers weren’t in the books, of course, but the important thing was that Bombolini felt they were and, believing that, he had no fear and suffered no qualms.

  But somewhere along the line there were problems that even The Master couldn’t provide answers for, and it was for this reason, and for no love of me, that Bombolini turned out to be such a formidable fighter in my behalf when the affair of Babbaluche the cobbler and Abruzzi the American threatened to tear the Free City of Santa Vittoria apart and bring down its government.

  Life has changed little here since the days when Machiavelli went sourly through the streets of Florence, and yet some things have changed and it was these gaps in the Master’s knowledge that frightened Bombolini. To close them he needed a representative of the New Ways, someone forged in the fire of the New Culture, as Fabio says he put it. And who better than me, a dropper-in from the New World? For the purposes of Italo Bombolini, for his well-being and his assurance, it was essential that I prove to be brilliant and he made certain that I was. As soon as I was able to stand with the aid of a crutch the cobbler had made for me I was invited downstairs to sit in on sessions of the government and after a week I was invited to join the Grand Council as a full member, as a minister without portfolio, to advise on current affairs. I used to wonder what they would think in Benjamin Franklin High School, which I left when I was a junior, if they could see me sitting in the Grand Council as Minister Without Portfolio.

  This was the state of things when Babbaluche came up onto the terrace of the Mansion of the Leaders one night during a meeting of the Grand Council and came into the middle of the meeting and began pointing his finger at me.

  “Look at this son of a bitch,” he said. “Feast your eyes on him.”

  They looked at me and I think I blushed, because I had always felt like a fraud at the meetings in the first place. I felt naked before them.

  “Because of this son of a bitch each one of you stands to go to jail and to lose your vines.”

  It was the loss of the vines that struck fear in their hearts.

  “Do you know who this bastard is? Do you know what he represents?”

  I felt they had discovered that I had been a deserter, and I looked down, which didn’t help my image before the people.

  “This son of a bitch is an enemy of the state.”

  “He seemed like a good man to me,” Giovanni Pietrosanto said. “That’s all that I know.”

  “An enemy of the state.”

  The argument was that, despite the fall of the Mussolini government and the emergence of the Bado
glio government, America was still at war with Italy, and by making me a member of the Grand Council each member was guilty of treason and infamous acts by collaborating with the enemy.

  “You are collaborators,” Babbaluche told them. “Do you know what they do to collaborators?”

  Everyone knew what they did. They took away your home and they impounded your land and they tore up your vines by the roots.

  “And even worse, you are guilty of consorting.”

  No one knew the penalty for consorting, but if that was worse than collaborating, no one needed to know. It would have been understandable for Bombolini to have deserted me then, and I have no doubt that he would have done so if his need for me had not been greater than the risk of being caught consorting. He could have put me in a cart and taken me to Montefalcone and turned me over to the authorities. It would have ended his troubles and even earned him some small favors, but he fought for me. They sent me from the room and I soon fell asleep, so I never heard the debate. The debate raged on during the night, and I understand that it was bitter, because no one has ever volunteered to tell me anything about it. Sometime early in the morning it finally became a question of confidence in the government and its leader. The issue was whether to turn me over and be safe or to keep me and run the risk of losing their vines and even their lives. Who could have trust in a government that had any doubt about which course to take? At dawn Babbaluche rose and began to read from a paper on which he had been writing.

  Resolved, That the people of the glorious Free City of Santa Vittoria, having lost all confidence in the ability of the leader Bombolini any longer to lead …

  They voted after this and no one has ever told me the count, so it must have been close. No one likes to tell me how close they came to putting me in the cart and taking me to Montefalcone. But whatever the count was, Italo Bombolini managed to do what Benito Mussolini failed to manage.

  I have heard that there was not much honor in the victory. All kinds of things were promised in return for all kinds of votes. I have heard, for example, that I was described as a rich young man who might come back someday and in thankfulness endow the city with such things as schools and fire departments. But perhaps that isn’t true; to this day I don’t know. None of it has ever bothered Bombolini, because he had done the one thing all Italians learn to do above all other things: he had endured.

  Why did Babbaluche bring the charge, he who hated the Germans and the Fascists above all the rest of us? It was, as Vittorini later told me, a curse of the nation and a curse of the blood. It is in Babbaluche’s nature to embarrass and destroy governments. The nation is filled with people like him. In this way they find their dignity. It is their only business and their only true passion.

  “They are the flies in the soup of state,” Vittorini told me. “They are not very large but they must be taken out or they will ruin the entire bowl of soup.”

  For show they put me under house arrest and they sent notice of my presence to Montefalcone by way of Fungo, an idiot here, who would make certain to lose the message and lie that he had delivered it to the carabinieri. They took away my membership in the Grand Council and I became an ex-minister without anything.

  There was never a serious challenge to Bombolini after that. I was his low mark but he had survived, and in surviving he strengthened himself. That next day, in a show of strength, he had himself named Captain of the People instead of Mayor, an old and honored title in this region, and after a time even Babbaluche came to call him Captain.

  The Discourses of Italo Bombolini

  Anyone can be great with money.

  With money greatness is not a talent but an obligation.

  The trick is to be great without money.

  —ITALO BOMBOLINI

  Anyone can make an omelet with eggs.

  It takes a great man to make one with none.

  —A saying of Santa Vittoria

  THOSE MONTHS, the summer in Santa Vittoria, were good. There was hunger in Italy but there was no hunger here. There were shortages in everything but there was no true hunger. There was still good wine to trade and sell. Most of the wine here is vermouth, which is a blend of wines and aromatic herbs, and the vermouth we make is good. It is not boasting to say this or lying to say it. This is a history and it is a simple and recognized fact that the wine made in Santa Vittoria is one of the best in the world.

  The vermouth is aged for a year or even two years, depending on the amount of sugar in the grapes and the amount of acid, on the time of month the grapes were picked, the position of the moon during the harvest and the whisperings of the gods of the grape into the ears of Old Vines, who alone here can hear them. Usually most of this wine is sold to the Cinzano family, who sell it all over the world, but because of the war the wine was still in Santa Vittoria. When we needed food three or four carts were loaded with wine from the Cooperative Wine Cellar and sent to Montefalcone, where there was always a market for our wine. The carts would come back up the mountain the next day filled with flour for bread and pasta, with bags of onions and salt and peppers, green peppers and red peppers, with tins of sardines and mackerel from Sicily, with balls of cheese and wheels of cheese, whole carts filled with artichokes, sometimes boxes of cherries and baskets of fruit from the north, dry pork sausage, salami, black olives and green olives, cheap black wine in big wicker baskets, since our own wine is too good to drink every day—one basket of ours for three of theirs—baskets of beans and lentils, and tins and jugs of olive oil to splash on our bread. When the carts came back up the mountain you would not know there was a war on in Italy.

  But something was happening in Italy. The feeling could even be felt up on the mountain. There had been a time when two or three trucks in a morning was considered to be traffic on the Montefalcone road, but now the sound of trucks and half-tracks and even tanks could be heard from the River Road all day long and far into the night.

  “You should see what’s happening in Montefalcone,” the men who went to get the food would tell the others. “There are more tanks in there than there are people. There are more Germans than our own people.”

  We felt it, but it didn’t concern us. There was food and the weather was good and the grapes were fattening on the vines like pregnant women. The people in Santa Vittoria looked up at the sky as a source of danger, for the signs of a sudden heavy rain or even a hail storm, more than they looked down at the road to Montefalcone.

  If the Italian nation was in danger of coming apart, the city of Santa Vittoria had never felt closer together. And for this, Italo Bombolini must take all of the credit. He had embarked the city on a program for greatness. Beside his bed in the Leaders’ Mansion he had hung this sign:

  Nothing causes a prince to be so much esteemed as great enterprises and giving proof of prowess.

  It keeps the people’s minds uncertain and astonished and it keeps them occupied in watching their result.

  The mayor’s problem, as he put it, was how to conduct great enterprises in a city where people trail oxen with a broom and pan in hopes of getting a free surprise.

  How do you uncover greatness in a city so poor that a man will provoke another man into an argument just so that his donkey can be eating the other man’s grass while they argue?

  How do you give proof of prowess in a place where a man was observed to stand all of one morning waiting for a pear on a private tree to be blown off by a wind and dropped into the street, thereby becoming public property?

  How do you accomplish anything at all when the city treasury is so bare that the addition of one coin to the vault would double the contents?

  Bombolini began by changing the names of all of the streets. There were public hearings, there were contests among the children and the young and the old of the town, there were votes and re-votes, speeches and arguments, until the city was in a state of civic uproar and excitement.

  In the end the Piazza Mussolini became the Piazza Matteotti, named for the first famo
us victim of the Fascist regime. It was a very popular decision. We were surprised to find after the war that five hundred other Italian towns had done the same thing.

  The Corso Mussolini became the Corso Cavour, because it sounded good and every town must have something named after Cavour.

  Then came the whole rest of the Risorgimento. There is never any problem naming anything as long as the names of the Risorgimento are recalled. Streets were named for Mazzini, for Garibaldi, for the Redshirts. One street was even named for Vittorio Emmanuele, and when no one was sure exactly which number was the good Vittorio the number was left off and now stands for any Vittorio Emmanuele you may desire.

  The Street of D’Annunzio the Poet posed a problem, since no one, not even Fabio, knew of another poet to match D’Annunzio.

  “What is the greatest book in Italy?” Bombolini asked Fabio.

  “I Promessi Sposi,” Fabio said.

  “Are you sure of that? I have never heard of it.”

  “There is no question about it.”

  “Who wrote it then?” Bombolini said, and Fabio turned scarlet. The name escaped him and to save him further embarrassment the street was named Street of the Author of I Promessi Sposi, although the people still called it Goat Alley, as they always had done.

  The effort was a great success. It had cost nothing, but had brought the people closer together. Perhaps the only saddened person was Bombolini himself. When the last of the streets and piazzas and lanes was named and there were no more left, Fabio found Bombolini sitting in the darkness of the large room in the Leaders’ Mansion, which that morning had been renamed the Palace of the People.

  “The people have entertained the vice of ingratitude,” he told Fabio. I was coming down the stairs on my crutches.

  “Never trust the people about anything,” he shouted to me. “They’ll show you the fangs of forgetfulness.”