The Secret of Santa Vittoria (20 page)

“Do away with them,” Bombolini said.

Pietrosanto found this hard to believe.

“I am tired of standing with my knife in my hand.”

“I don't understand you,” Pietro said.

Bombolini took Pietrosanto by the arm. “Do you have a rifle? You own a rifle, don't you?”

“Shoot them? Is that what you mean? Shoot the sons of bitches?”

“I don't mean to caress them,” the mayor said. “Come.” They both went back up toward the piazza. “Try and look as if we have a plan,” Bombolini said. “It gives the people heart.”

It had stopped raining. It had been a good drenching rain. As Old Vines had feared, the rain had washed all of the dust off the backs of the dark-green bottles, and in the greyness of the light the wetness caused them to sparkle as if the stones of the piazza were strewn with jewels.

“I don't know about shooting,” Pietrosanto was saying but Bombolini didn't hear him. Now that he had ordered the final solution to the problem of The Band it didn't concern him any more. He looked instead at the wine.

“What do you think they would think if they were to come now?” Bombolini said.

“That we were trying to butter them up. That it was a gift for them.”

He was probably right, the mayor thought.

“They'd take it as their due,” Pietro said. “It's the way they are.”

“Yes, that's how they are,” Bombolini agreed.

 

T
HAT EVENING
Bombolini asked Roberto to go and ask the Malatesta to take a look at Tufa. “She'll listen to you,” Bombolini said. “You're not from here, and she thinks you're brave.”

“She doesn't think I'm brave,” Roberto said. “She thinks I'm afraid of pain.”

“Ah, but that's just it.
Because
you're afraid of pain, the way you acted to it makes you a brave man,” he said. “Besides, I think she has an eye for you. She thinks you're handsome.”

“How do you know?”

“I heard her say so once.”

It was a lie, a complete and shameless lie, which Roberto recognized as a lie and treated as one, and yet it made his heart beat faster. Despite himself, the heart beat faster.

He dressed and went into the rain and crossed the Piazza of the People. It was the first time he had seen all the bottles in the piazza. At the wineshop he decided to stop and get some cheese before making the hard climb up to High Town and when he thought of facing the Malatesta he ordered a full bottle of wine as well.

“What's all the wine doing in the piazza?” he asked Rosa Bombolini.

“Do you think I know? Do you think I care? Do you think I give a shit what idiot tricks that boob is up to?”

He determined never to ask her a question again. When he came out it was dark and he felt a little drunk from the wine, but it made the ache in his bone feel better. At the street that runs up into High Town someone whispered his name. It was Fabio.

“I thought you were up in the mountains.” Roberto said.

“I am in the mountains. Five of us. The Petrarch Brigade, formally. The Red Flames, informally.” He named four young boys who were with him, none of whom was over fifteen years of age. “They're young, but they can fight,” Fabio said. “They also are hungry.”

With some of his own money and some of Fabio's, Roberto went back to the wineshop and bought two loaves of bread for the Red Flames.

“Now you do a favor for me,” Roberto said. He made Fabio go with him to face Caterina Malatesta. They walked up the hill in silence for a long way.

“How is she?” Fabio said at last.

“Who?”

“Angela,” Fabio said.

“I don't know. I haven't seen her. That's why I was buying cheese. She doesn't bring us our meals.”

“I suppose you two have a lot of fun together when he isn't around.”

“Angela and me?”

“Yes, Angela and you. A lot of fun together, if you know what I mean.”

“Oh no, nothing like that. Angela isn't like that.”

Fabio made a sound like a mule. “They're
all
like that,” he said. “Don't tell me. I know them from top to bottom. Put a grape basket over their heads and turn them upside down and—”

“Oh, do they say that here, too? We say ‘Put a sack over their heads.'”

Caterina lived in the next to the last house on the mountain. It was a long way.

*   *   *

Neither one of them wanted to knock on the door, but it was Fabio who finally did it, and when she came to the door and opened it they were surprised to see her. She was wearing long slender pants and little slippers and a sweater that revealed the outline of her breasts. None of these things are worn by the women here, even today. She had pulled her hair back and tied it with a scarf the way the peasant women do, and yet it looked nothing like a peasant's. She didn't wish to come and she resisted, but Fabio was persuasive and there is something about Tufa, even to those who had barely known him, that was special. She got a raincoat that looked like the kind of coat army officers wear, and she went with them down the dark winding back lane into Old Town.

She didn't knock at the door of the house, but opened it and went in and put down the medical bag Roberto had carried for her. She took a lamp from the bag and when it was lit she could see Tufa, not lying down any longer but propped up against the wall looking at her the way a wolf looks at someone coming for him from the back of a cave. In the light his teeth were as bright as his eyes, and he looked very sane and very mad at the same moment, like someone who could kill or become a martyr with equal ease.

He frightened Roberto. He had never before seen a man who seemed to burn. Caterina had known him from when she was a girl, but when she saw him she made a sound, a stifled sound of astonishment. She was not able to take her eyes away from him.

“You are hurt,” she said.

“You aren't going to touch me.” Tufa has the finest voice in the city, sweet and yet strong. Sometimes it sounds as if Tufa was whispering through the pipe of an organ.

“You're badly hurt. I can help you. You'd like to die, but your body won't allow you to.”

He said nothing.

“It's the fate of your kind,” she said. “My kind die easily.”

All of this while Caterina kept moving toward him. Somewhere in this book it tells of thunderbolt love, but this was something different. There was an awareness of each other that was so acute and powerful and immediate that it went beyond anything we know as love. It is an understanding of each other so immediate and so total that there is nothing they don't know about one another and they are able to share things with each other at once, even in front of others, that they have never been able to share with anyone before.

They have
always
known each other, at once. Some people feel that this is proof that people must have lived before, people such as this are playing out again a love affair from some other age. Except for one thing: There is no love; it goes beyond love. They exist totally for one another, and nothing else exists. The attraction supplants all else, and yet there is no love, not even any tenderness, only the attraction and the understanding of one another. They are like vacuums, and when they meet the crack is formed and they rush into each other, each into the other, the souls are sharing one another, the way the wind rushes into the wine cellar when the door is swung ajar.

When she touched him he stiffened. She didn't move her hand for a moment, but then she began to take off the officer's jacket he wore to examine the wounds in his chest and upper arms that he had received the week before from an exploding grenade.

“They told me you were a good man,” she said. Roberto brought her the medical bag. “How can you be a Fascist and a good man at the same time?”

For a long time Tufa said nothing, but it didn't seem to bother her. She was willing to wait. She dressed several of the wounds.

“You can be,” he said at last, “if you are a fool.”

Caterina finished dressing the last of the wounds. Most of them were not deep, but several of them were infected and the flesh was ragged around them.

“You're not going to get better here,” the Malatesta said. “You're going to have to get out of this room.”

“Where are you going to take him?” Tufa's mother asked. “He can't go to the hospital.”

“Some place where he can get better.”

The mother got up from the box she sat on and began collecting her son's things.

“I don't want him dying in here,” she said. “Besides, you know what I have to feed him?” She tapped the side of an earthen pot. “I have ten or twelve olives. I can't count. I have one piece of bread and no oil to drip on it.”

Caterina looked at Tufa. “Do you want to go with me?”

“Oh, yes. You know that,” he said, and he began to get to his feet. When she helped him she was surprised to find that he was silently crying.

“The first time,” he said. “The first time ever.”

He didn't know why he cried, but he wasn't ashamed of the tears. Later he was able to figure that he cried because he was giving up the death he had planned for himself and he knew that he was going to have to enter again into the life that had fooled him so terribly and that he had wanted to give up. He went past his mother and out into the Corso Cavour, where Fabio and Roberto were waiting in the rain.

“You don't say goodbye to your mother?”

“No, we don't do that in this family,” Tufa said. Tufa, although he was weak and sick, led the way up the Corso, which is the way it is in this town. He was forced to lean against the walls and gasp for breath, but he led the way up. Finally he had to lean on Caterina.

“I apologize for that,” he said.

“You don't have to apologize to me,” she said, and it caused both of them to laugh because it was a truth, and when you hear the truth it makes you laugh. They had at the moment recognized the truth between them: because they knew everything about each other, they would never have to apologize to each other and they would never have to or be able to apologize for themselves.

At the Fountain of the Pissing Turtle, although the rain was falling heavily, Tufa was forced to stop and sit on the wet edge of the fountain.

“I like this rain. It's been a long time since I've been in a real rain.”

“You were in Africa?”

“There and Sicily, yes.” He looked up and allowed the rain to run down his face, and she was able to see how beautiful his eyes were, the thick lashes, the dark brows, the large soft brownness of the eyes themselves. It was said that every woman in Santa Vittoria was jealous of Tufa for his eyes.

“I can feel the dust of Africa washing off me,” he said.

It made Caterina laugh, and she could see that it hurt him.

“Why do you laugh?” he said. His voice was annoyed.

“Oh, it sounded so dramatic. You must go to a lot of movies.”

“I never go to movies.”

He was silent after that. He let the rain wash down his neck, and then he lifted his face to it once more.

“The other officers in my mess were always laughing at the things I said, and I never knew why.” He looked at her. “You're like them.”

He didn't say it with any anger or any sadness about it, but as a fact. “Not inside, maybe, but like them.” It was, she knew, a matter of class, the education of people who were trained to respond to innocence with scorn or anger because they were terrified of what innocence might see. Although she understood him, there were things she would have to do differently.

“Do you think we can go?” She was becoming chilled and wet.

“In a moment.”

“Then tell me the story of the fountain while we wait.” Tufa looked up at the fountain and smiled, and it was the first time she had seen him smile. She had seen him laugh, but a laugh is something different from a smile.

“It's an old story and not a nice one,” Tufa said.

“I think I can bear it.”

“It's very dirty.”

“You're apologizing.”

“No, I'm warning you.” He took her hand. “Here, help me up.” They started to walk across the piazza once again. “I don't think I'm going to tell you. Don't you know that that story is told to women who are thirty years old and who no longer are virgins?”

“I qualify then,” Caterina said. He gripped her arm then, very hard, so hard that it took her by surprise and hurt her.

“No you don't,” he said. “I know when you were born.” She was amazed by this.

“Your father gave my father a cup of wine, a tin cup of wine and some coins, on the day you were born,” Tufa said. “Do you think I would forget that?”

“Yes.”

“My father didn't want them. He was insulted. And when my mother heard my father had turned down the money she made me go up to your house and tell your father that my father was wrong, that there was something wrong with his head and that we wanted the money.”

“And you were ashamed.”

“Of course I was ashamed. Everyone laughed. They never heard of such a thing before. So they gave me the cup of wine and put the coins in my pocket and then they put a chicken around my neck for my father.”

He was silent, and she said nothing. There was no reason to apologize for her father, and both of them knew that.

“He never forgave my mother and he never forgave me,” Tufa said. “We ate the chicken and he sat there and looked at us and went hungry. Then he went away and never came back. I was eight then. Do you think I would forget?”

“No.”

“I was eight and I am thirty-four now, and that makes you twenty-six,” he said.

“Why did you do that to my arm, grip me like that?”

“I don't want any lies. Even little lies. I want no more lies of any kind.”