The Secret of Santa Vittoria (25 page)

Down they came then, filing down the Corso from the Piazza of the People, the true army of Santa Vittoria in the service of the wine.

“Some of these are babies,” Tufa said.

“When it comes to all-out war,” Vittorini said, “you use the troops you have.” It caused Tufa to laugh.

“I'm supposed to say those things,” he said.

They mixed the old with the young, and the strong with the weak, so they could spell each other and make up for each other's weaknesses. If people were too old or sickly Tufa would take them out of the line.

“A chain is only as strong as its weakest link,” Bombolini would tell them, but they would curse him, to his face anyway. When Caterina came down the line Tufa stopped her. “Let me see your hands.” She held out her hands. They are so long and beautiful. He sent her back up the mountain to get gloves.

When the last of the people had passed, Tufa ran down the line to make a last inspection. The line now ran from the back of the wine cellar to the wall and through it, and down the mountain to the entrance to the Roman cellar. Tufa came back up, placing the people where they would be of the most value. In a place that was steep the taller people were positioned since they could reach up farther and lean down lower. The older people were put on the flat places, where the strain would be the least.

At a few minutes after one o'clock on Tuesday afternoon Carlo Tufa was able to stand on the floor of the valley, one hundred feet from the entrance to the ancient wine cellar, and look back up the mountain, over the terraces, all the way to the city wall and to the Thin Gate, and even a few yards inside it, and see one continuous line of people. And he was able to know that the line continued all of the way beyond that into the heart of the cellar. He ran across the flat sandy stretch in front of the opening.

“Are you ready in there?”

The men inside shouted back that they were hot to go. He ran outside then and back away from the base of the terraces so that Bombolini would be sure to see him and he gave the sign by a motion of his arm.

“Start them going,” he shouted. “Let them go. Pass them on,” he called out, even though he couldn't be heard.

But you could hear the people on the mountain then, shouting and cheering when they saw the sign, very loud in the valley and perhaps all the way to the river and over it in Scarafaggio.

“Pass them on, pass them on,” the people began to shout, and the word flew up the mountain, it shot from mouth to mouth, and it was the start of the rhythm.

The bottles began to flow then, hand to hand, a stream of bottles at first, out of the cellar, down to the gate, through the wall and then down the mountain, a stream at first until they found the rhythm of the flow and then it was a river, a river of wine running down the mountain.

 

T
HE SHOUTING
stopped soon enough, because the day was hot and the work was hard, but the wine kept coming so that three teams of men were finally needed to put down the wine.

It isn't easy to describe how they lay the wine here. It is a simple-looking job, but outsiders never learn to do it well. It is something you grow up knowing how to do, the same as spooning soup into your mouth. No one remembers learning how to use a spoon, it is something that is learned and not taught. It was the same with the wine. The first row of bottles is laid on the ground, and then long strips of wood, just strong enough to support a second row of bottles, are laid on top of the bottom row. The second row is placed in the opposite direction, one row of corks, one row of butts, and this goes on, tier after tier, eighteen and even twenty tiers high. All of the while long thin strips of wood are worked down through the rows of bottles, to the left of the neck of a bottle in one row and to the right of the neck of the bottle below, so that the bottles pull and push against each other and in the end provide the very force that holds them all together. It is very simple and very strong, and it can be put up or taken down as fast as men can put down bottles.

At the beginning the wine-layers were gay also, shouting to each other to move it, move it, slapping the bottles from hand to hand, the rows rising and going back into the dimness of the deep cellar to where Longo's pale lights could barely reach, but they soon ceased. As the wine kept coming they began to feel that they were running just ahead of a flood that in the end would drown them. Some of the men who worked in the cellar that day and night have never put down another bottle of wine, because the memory of it was so painful to them.

In the first hours the enemy was the sun, which sat on the people's backs as if it were a hot iron pressing down on them, but later it became the mountain itself. To keep from falling off it, the people were forced to brace themselves with one leg and step up the steep flank with the other, and more than any other part of the body it was the legs that began to tire and then to sting with fatigue and finally to cramp and knot. Tufa worked out a good plan. At a blast from the horn of Capoferro, every ten minutes, the people passed one more bottle and then stood up and massaged their legs and moved up the mountain to the spot above them. This gave the people a sense of going somewhere and it changed their positions and different muscles were put into use.

After that, the problem was water; and there was a second plan. At two blasts from the horn the wine passers put down the bottles and walked across the terraces to the concrete spillways that run down through the terraces and waited for the water to come. They got five seconds, and the water came down hissing and rushing like a runaway train. Some of the people put their faces in the spillway and caught what their mouths would hold and some caught water in shirts and hats and broken bottles and some climbed into the spillway itself and let the water run over them

After the second hour the bottles began to break. There were tired hands and sweaty hands, and the bottles would slip or swing against a rock and there would be the sound of breaking glass and a groan from someone on the line and then the smell of wine, good and sweet at first, but then sticky and sour as the sun reached it. Then there was blood. Many of the people had no shoes, and although their feet are as tough as ox leather, glass will finally cut through leather, and blood began to run with the wine and the whole length of the line to glitter with glass.

In the late afternoon, when the sun was not so direct and when a cooler breeze began to slip up from the shadows in the valley, the people passing the wine had settled into a true rhythm; they gave into the bottles then, not seeing but only feeling them, swinging to the left and right, slapping the bottles from hand to hand, so that at times it sounded like a regiment of soldiers marching on the mountain.

When the boys came down from the mountain where Tufa had sent them to cut pine branches to use for torches in the coming night he had another plan for them. He sent them into the line because they were fresh and still strong, and the people they replaced were allowed to get out and to crawl under the thick green shade of the grapevines and to rest and even sleep there for a little while. It was only a taste of rest, but it was enough to keep them going.

The men were mixed with the women and there was something personal in the passing of the bottles, in the rhythm of it, in the swaying of the bodies, in the smell of each other and in the touching of their hands. Fabio, for instance, found himself next to a woman he had hardly ever noticed before, and as they worked he began to appreciate a kind of stubborn beauty about her in the calm, passive set of her face and the smooth solid strength of her arms and the sureness of her touch and the way her solid full breasts rose and fell with each passing of the wine. Up above him in the line, he could see Angela working and it didn't bother him. She was a girl and this was a woman.

“What are you looking at?” the woman finally said to him.

“You,” he said. It was the kind of thing that a week before would have caused him to turn scarlet and sent him running down the mountain.

“Well, keep your eyes and your hands where they belong,” the woman said.

“I will make an effort, but it will be hard,” Fabio said, and he smiled at her. Fabio, he told himself, you are becoming a goat.

Up the line, beyond Angela, he could see Caterina, and he decided that when the chance offered itself, he would work next to her. She was surrounded by women. She was the only one who wore gloves and in spite of the rough clothes she wore, ones designed for hunting or riding, it was easy to see that the Malatesta stood out from all the other women. The other women were black with sweat, but Caterina didn't sweat, there was only dampness on her brow and beads of wetness on her upper lip.

“Even when they work the rich don't sweat like the poor,” a woman said and it was true.

From time to time Tufa came down the line to encourage the people on it and to change positions and to keep the bottles flowing, and when he did he took her place for a few minutes and allowed her to crawl under the vines.

“Why don't you sweat?” he said to her. “It would be good for you.”

“Malatestas don't sweat,” she said. “They must have forgotten how. They gave it up a long time ago.”

“The dream of every Italian is some day not to sweat,” someone said.

“And who will grow the grapes?”

“We'll hire people to do that,” the cobbler told them. “We'll hire Germans to do it. They like to work,” Babbaluche had said.

One time when he had to go on, Tufa found Caterina asleep under a vine. He kissed her then, in front of others.

“You have to get up,” he said. “But I am proud of you.” Later, Tufa realized that it was the first compliment he had ever given to a woman, because the men don't learn to do that here. The sun at the time had been partly hidden by the tall mountain to the northwest of here and then swiftly, in a matter of moments, it went behind them completely and the mountainside and then the city itself was thrown in shadow. There was a sigh then all along the line, mixed with the
slap, slap, slap, slap
of the glass against flesh, because at once it was cooler and also because many had promised themselves that if they could last until the sun went down they could make it through the evening and perhaps the night.

*   *   *

In the beginning of the night it was better. The cool winds had come and after that the fog. It clung to the dew on the grape leaves, and it moistened the ground and cooled the rocks, and it softened the skin that the sun and the wind of the day had dried and cracked. But the fog got thicker and there was new trouble on the line. When someone fell out it was hard for the replacement to find where the chain had been broken.

“Here … Over here … Down … here…” the people would call, but at night and in the fog voices are strange and distances are obscured. People stepped on the glass and fell on the stones, and the bottles began to break again. At ten o'clock Tufa made a mistake. There had been no food, and a tiredness was beginning to settle on the line like some disease that paralyzes the muscles so there is only numbness left. To bolster the spirits he decided to allow every other person on the line to open the bottle he was passing and to share it with the person next in line. Because they were so starved, the wine made many of the people drunk, and the bottles began to break even worse than before.

The night gave us protection from the eyes on the road and although the idea of morning was desired by the people it frightened them as well. But what frightened the people most of all was the knowledge that as hard as they had gone—and each hour they were going slower and slower—the Cooperative Wine Cellar on the mountain was still more than half full.

Some time after ten that night, when the wine was moving badly, Tufa decided that the time had come to risk the use of light. The pine boughs that had been cut that night were bound with wire and dipped into barrels of ox fat and lengths of rope were dipped in the same barrels and they were lit and passed down the mountain, one every fifty feet or so. It was dangerous. Beneath the fog the light of the flaming torches was magnified and the line glowed like some flaming arrow pointing down from the city to the ancient cellar below. It was dangerous, but it gave the people heart again. The people here are afraid of the night. Many of the men were afraid to step off the line and go into the vineyards to relieve themselves, and the women also worked in fear and pain both. The lights gave them courage.

And it was these lights which drew Roberto down to the wine-passing line. He had recovered from the blow and gone to bed, and when he awoke he went out of the Palace of the People and, not finding Bombolini, took a walk in the piazza to clear his head. He had thought the city was asleep until he saw the lights. He went down the Corso to witness what his words had begun.

“What happened to you?” Bombolini said.

“You know what happened to me,” Roberto said.

“Oh, yes,” the mayor said. It seemed to have taken place weeks before. “It was excitement. I know you understand. A blow of admiration. A blow of love. I am Sicilian, you understand.”

“Being Sicilian must be a very strange thing,” Roberto said. “It provides an excuse for everything.”

He watched the wine going down the mountain and he knew what was taking place, and then he went back up to the Cooperative Wine Cellar. He could see that almost half or perhaps even more than half of the wine was gone by then and he could also see that the people on the line were working by instinct, at the level of the lowest animals, like blind mules grinding grain at harvest.

“It's good that you are almost done,” Roberto said. “The people can't go on much longer.”

“What do you mean, done? There's still half of the wine to go,” the mayor said.

“But you wouldn't take it all. You have to leave some of it for them.”

“We don't leave a drop for the bastards,” a man shouted to Roberto from the line. “Don't give away
our
wine, friend.”