The Secret of Santa Vittoria (33 page)

At the first of the hills the first of the people began to fall out of the line of march. The Germans had made some effort to keep order on the way.

“I don't care where it is or what it is,” Sergeant Traub said, “a line of march is a line of march.” But at the hills it was no good. The soldiers stopped prodding the people with their rifles. “I take it back,” the sergeant said. “A line of march is a line of march everywhere but in Italy.”

By midday those who could march had settled into themselves and had developed a rhythm, an almost silent, shuffling cadence, that pulled people along with it, the same way it had been on the day of the passing of the wine. There was the sound and then the smells that chained the people to each other, of sweat and leather and salt against the wicker of the baskets, of urine and oxen and manure and the stale water of the drainage ditch alongside the road, and the sound of the Mad River itself, rushing against the stones and boulders in its bed.

People came down along the road to look at us, the
cafoni
who for shares worked the vegetables and the corn of the landowners' farms along the river bottoms, but they said nothing to us, not one of them, and we said nothing to them. They would never understand.

Sometime in the evening, fourteen hours after we had started in the coolness of the morning, the first of us started up the steep side road that leads to the Constantine Gate and then Montefalcone itself.

This was the cruelest part, the last long hill before the end and, after that, the people who met us. The word had gone down the river that the people of Santa Vittoria were surrendering their own wine and bringing it in on their backs. The streets of Montefalcone were lined with people and they were making a great noise, and for a moment we thought they were cheering us in. How simple we must have been. Why should we have thought they would do such a thing?

The first one was a butcher. He broke away from the sidewalk along the main Corso and out in front of us, his apron spattered with blood, and he was holding the skull of a goat in his hands, and he was screaming. “Tell me these are lying.” He put his bloody hands to his eyes. “Tell me I'm not seeing what I see.”

“Don't look at him,” Tufa said.

“Tell me, just tell me. I will believe you,” he screamed at us. “Because I cannot believe what I see.” He shoved the goat's head into Tufa's face and tried to pull the wine off his back. “No son of Italy could be doing what I see you people doing. Tell me you are Greeks.”

And this was the beginning. It is too painful to tell the rest. They spat on us, on our heads and in our faces, they grabbed our hair and lifted up our heads so that our faces, looking down at the stones, could be seen by everyone. The priests in the streets turned away from us and one of them encouraged a boy to urinate on our heads from a terrace of the rectory. An Italian soldier in the pay of the Germans aimed his rifle at our heads.

A woman who appeared to be a respectable woman broke through the line of German soldiers, who now were needed to protect us from our own people, and she ran to Tufa, who was in the lead, and she seized him by his private parts.

“Did you see?” she screamed to them. She held out her arms and then turned her palms downward. “Nothing,” she cried out. “I swear to you,
nothing.
” She ran along the line of people. “I felt nothing. No eggs,” the woman shouted. “They have no eggs.”

We have never lived it down. Even later, when they learned why we had done what we did we were not excused. “I don't care,” they would say. “Only bastards could do it.” When people from here go to Montefalcone they don't tell where they are from.

“Santa Vittoria?” they would say in Montefalcone. “Oh yes, that's the place where the men have no eggs. It's been proven.”

In the end, to add to the shame, it was the Germans who saved us and they despised us for having to do it. Captain von Prum had sent a soldier ahead, so that when we came into the Piazza Frossimbone (where none of us can bear to walk) on our way with the wine to the railroad yards in back of the city, Colonel Scheer was on the terrace of his headquarters with other officers of his command. We marched in front of them with our wine, now
their
wine, in the same manner that Fabio tells us the slaves were marched in front of Caesar when the armies came back from their wars.

“I salute you,” Colonel Scheer called to Captain von Prum. “We all salute you.”

The people of Santa Vittoria, bent with their loads and with their shame, filed by the German officers.

“I don't know how you have done this,” the colonel called to the captain. He sent a young officer down to pinch one of our people to see if it was real.

The officer pinched Guido Pietrosanto's face. “Yes, they're real people,” he said.

When Captain von Prum passed in front of the steps on which Scheer stood, the colonel stopped him. “Unless I am mistaken you are soon to be Major Sepp von Prum. How does that sound?”

Captain von Prum told him that it sounded very pleasant.

“And about the other thing”—Colonel Scheer tapped the region of his chest where a medal would go—“I haven't forgotten. I don't go back on my word.”

It was one of the few times that we ever saw the captain openly smile.

*   *   *

The journey back was even worse because many of the people had planned to spend the night in Montefalcone and rest before turning home. But that was now impossible, and we began to pray for darkness both for the coolness it would bring and the cover of secrecy it might provide.

The long march back is remembered now as the time when Captain von Prum first met Caterina Malatesta. The captain had promised that he would use his truck and his scarce gasoline to help carry the women and the children back to the foot of the mountain, and he was true to his word. The Malatesta, against Tufa's wishes, had helped carry wine and because she wasn't used to such work her feet had become a mass of blisters so that even without shoes she was no longer able to walk.

“I'm going to have to go with the German,” she said to Tufa. “Don't be angry with me. I don't want to leave you.”

“I can't carry you; its all right,” Tufa said. But when the truck came back down the River Road he didn't feel that way. The back of the truck was filled with women, and when it stopped the officer motioned for Caterina to get in front with himself and Sergeant Traub.

“Get in the back,” Tufa said. When the German again motioned to the seat beside him, Caterina looked at Tufa and then climbed into the front of the truck.

“Go the next time,” Tufa said. Caterina pulled away from him and sat down next to the officer. Tufa looked into the cab at them. “I
asked
you,” he said to the Malatesta, and the truck pulled away.

“Did you see the eyes on that one,” Sergeant Traub said. “He's one to watch.”

“Find out his name and find out what he does,” the captain said.

They rode in silence for miles until finally von Prum put on the little running light inside the cab of the truck and was able to see the woman beside him. She had worn the clothes of a peasant woman, but the effort to pass as a peasant had been in vain. There are women who are so beautiful by nature that they do not know what to do to make themselves less beautiful. The roughness of the cloth only served to exaggerate the fineness of the lines of her face.

“I haven't seen you before,” the captain said.

“Oh, yes. Many times,” Caterina said.

“No,” he said.

Just that, she thought. No. The perfect Germanness of it, blunt and uncharming. The fact that he was correct did not concern her.

“I assure you of one thing,” von Prum said, “had I seen you I would not have forgotten you. Thus, I haven't seen you.”

She shrugged her shoulders. How German of him and how Italian of me, Caterina thought. To her annoyance she realized that she had been speaking to him in Italian and not in the dialect. It had been a tactical error on her part caused by tiredness. But also to her annoyance she found that she liked to talk in good Italian, clean and clear, and that she found she was enjoying sitting next to someone who was so clean and who smelled so clean.

“You aren't like the others here,” he said.

“These are my people,” Caterina said.

“No, you aren't like them. Any more than I am like them.”

She shrugged her shoulders once again.

“We're strangers here, you and I,” the German said. Even his breath seemed clean and almost sweet. She knew that hers was heavy with the wild scallions they had found along the river.

“You're more like me and I'm more like you than you are like those women in the back,” Captain von Prum said. Several times the truck had been forced to stop suddenly to avoid pot holes in the road, and when it did it sent the women in the back sliding forward and they groaned aloud and even sobbed in fear.

“Do you hear that?” the German said. “You don't groan. Our kind don't do that.
They
do that.”

“They aren't really groaning,” the Malatesta said. “It's only a way of expressing themselves.”

“Of course it is,” he said. It angered her that she had made another error.

When they could see the mountain and they neared the foot of it, von Prum touched Caterina on the arm. “Now I'm going to tell you something,” he said. “One is that you are extraordinarily beautiful; but you know that, and it is merely a formality to get out of the way. The other is that some time this winter, when it has been raining for days and everything is rotten with wetness and you have had no fuel for days and nothing to eat for weeks on end and your body is chilled so that you become afraid to touch anything, on that day you will look down on my house in the piazza and see the smoke coming from the fireplace and you'll think of the brightness of the rooms and the beds with sheets and the hot water in tubs and warm, clean clothes and someone to cook for you the way you deserve, and at that moment you'll want to be there.”

They had stopped then and she pulled away from him.

“Not because of me, not at first at least. But because that will be where you belong,” von Prum said. “It's the only way that people like yourself can live. Life owes that to people like yourself. The oxen can survive, but not the race horses of the world.”

When she got out of the truck he opened the map compartment and handed her a pair of gray woolen socks.

“You'll need these to get up the mountain,” he said. “It's all right. You can bring them when you come.”

When the truck had gone and the Malatesta and the other women had started up the dark track they turned on her.

“What did he say to you,” one of them demanded.

“The German would talk to
you,
” another said. “You Malatestas are all alike.”

It didn't bother her. She had long ceased to feel or to take personally the feelings of hatred some of the people held for her because of crimes committed against them by members of her family whom she never had known. The socks felt good and warm on her feet. She was angry with herself that she had nothing to say to him when he had finished saying what he had said. They stopped at The Rest, and most of the women forgot their anger with her, because they wanted to know what the German had said. She told them that he had said that he liked it in Santa Vittoria, and he hoped that they liked him in return.

“Don't listen to him,” a woman said from the darkness. “No matter what he says all he wants to do is get into your pants.”

She could hear the others agreeing with her.

“They're all the same,
all
of them.”

“It doesn't matter, wop or kraut, all they're good for is the same thing.”

They started up again after that, and Caterina found herself wondering if it really was that simple. This thing that she and Tufa had found in each other, was it in the end as simple as that? This attraction she felt for the German, against her will, was it only that? She was sorry she had accepted the ride. The thing of being beautiful, how safe the others were behind those broad brown masks. Maybe this was part of their wisdom. But a beautiful woman will have people tear at her, not for her but for themselves, and because she is what she is she can't escape it. Beauty very rarely brings wisdom, the Malatesta knew, and very often danger.

 

A
FTER THE WINE
had been taken, the days continued good. Each day the grapes grew fatter. Old Vines told us that he could hear them growing in the warm nights, fattening in their skins, pushing out against their sides. The wine had been taken and even if the false wall was noticed, which no longer seemed likely to us, there would be no reason to be concerned about it. Why should anyone be looking for something, we asked each other, when nothing was missing? Santa Vittoria could be said to be confident of itself. Italy might be falling apart, but that was Italy's problem.

One of the strange things was the growing friendship between Captain von Prum and Italo Bombolini. It is said that every German has a desire to sweep his neighbor's dirty steps, and in this sense von Prum was no exception. He began by remaking the mayor. He saw to it that the mayor shaved each day and that his hair was cut and kept trimmed. In September, on Bombolini's forty-eighth birthday, the German sent his measurements to Montefalcone and a few weeks later a suit came back purchased with von Prum's money.

“If you are going to share the leadership of the city,” von Prum said, “then I want you to be worthy of me.”

The captain was then at work on the first draft of “Bloodless Victory,” and it was then that the two of them began to discuss the ways of the people here and the reasons for things.

“Now tell me, in your own words,” the captain would say. “Exactly why were you willing to cooperate with us?”