The Secret of Santa Vittoria (43 page)

“This is what I was talking about,” Otto said to Captain von Prum. “Look at the eyes. Very defiant. Very brave. Filled with honor.”

“And these are often the first to break,” Hans said. “Because when they find they're not really
that
brave they give up entirely.”

“They have no give to them,” Otto said. “Like an earth dam and a big stone one. You can have a leak in the earth dam and still hold back most of the water, but those solid-rock ones, once they go, they collapse.”

Bombolini, almost without his realizing it, had come between them. “I want to volunteer myself in place of the boy,” he said.

They laughed at him.

“You said that they all break. Then break me. What difference does it make?”

“Because he defied us. We want to change the look in his eyes. We don't like him looking at us that way.”

“Besides, why do you want to save him? What, are you sweet on him? Is that it?”

“An old fart like you,” Hans said.

“I want to save his life. He once saved mine.”

“All that you have to do to save his life, Bombolini,” von Prum said. “Is to tell us where the wine is. Say the words and the boy is set free.”

“Wait until we put Sparky on him, and then maybe you'll want to tell us something,” Otto said.

Bombolini looked at Fabio, who had by then been put on the wet wood of the plank. The leather straps were limp from salt and sweat and urine. He had lost weight in the mountains and his ribs pressed against his skin, and because of the darkness of his hair he seemed whiter than ever before and thin and weak and breakable. There was no sign of fear on Fabio's face, and yet it is not wrong to write that Fabio was trembling so that even the straps could not control the twitching of his muscles. There was even, in truth, a look of resigned sadness on the boy's face, that men would have to do such things to other men.

Bombolini's problem was a very simple one. He believed now that under the pain of the torture all men would break. He had no faith at all now that the secret could be held. If he told and spared Fabio the pain and the brutality that were waiting for him, Fabio would not forgive him nor would the people of the town. If he allowed Fabio to endure the pain and then to tell, Fabio could never live with himself again. He wished that Cavalcanti, who was the other one in the room, was on the wooden plank. The Goat, when faced with the wires, would be the one to tell. At least Fabio and himself could be spared, even though the wine would be lost.

“Before you begin,” Fabio said, “I have something to say to you.” They stared at Fabio in complete amazement. “You have no right to do this. This is a crime against people and you will some day pay for it.”

They smiled then. They asked him his name.

“Fabio,” Otto said. “Meet Hans. Hans, Fabio. I am Otto. I will help you tell the truth for once in your life.”

“You have no right to do this to me,” Fabio said.

Bombolini found that he could not stand there, that his heart felt as if it would break, that he was weeping for Fabio's courage and that he was trembling and his body was bathed in sweat.

“The little courageous acts some people feel they must play out,” von Prum said.

They started Fabio much higher up on the magneto scale than they had the others, and it was as terrible as it is possible to imagine it was. Bombolini kept saying aloud, “I want to die. Please let me die before Fabio dies.” But even through this he could see that von Prum was looking at Fabio as he had not looked at the others. Fabio, of all of them, had been able to keep from shouting at first, but then he began to scream, as loud as all of them. It was what Bombolini had feared and resigned himself to, and now was almost grateful to hear.

“I'll tell you, I'll tell, I'll tell, I'll tell,” Fabio screamed. “Just stop it and I will tell you.”

Perhaps he wanted to tell them then. He tried to speak, but he could not make a sound come from his throat when the electricity was stopped, and finally they were forced to undo the top leather strap and help Fabio sit up so that he could try to control his shocked tongue.

“You should have followed the advice of your people,” von Prum said to Bombolini, “an old saying of yours—‘When the situation calls for martyrs, make sure you send martyrs.'”

Fabio was trying to say something, and they gave him water. Von Prum was leaning forward toward Fabio then and he had the look of someone who is about to reach and obtain something he has wanted above all other things in his life. Perhaps it is true that Fabio wanted to tell them. And perhaps it was an error on the part of Otto and Hans that they had begun Fabio so high on the scale of pain that he was unable to talk until he had had the moment he needed to discover himself again, to find that he had taken the pain and that he was still alive, or that he would rather be dead than open his mouth to them.

“You have no right,” Fabio said. “What are you doing to me? And you,” Fabio said to von Prum. “You are the worst of them because you know better.”

“Put him down,” Hans shouted. “Put him back down.”

When he was strapped to the table and the little metal teeth sunk into fresh parts of Fabio's body, this time to the penis and the throat, Otto turned to Captain von Prum.

“And do you want to do this by yourself now?”

Von Prum was stunned by the possibility that was offered him. It is the only word for it. He backed away from Fabio and then came toward him again; he was afraid to falter in front of these men. He found that his hand was filled with sweat, sweat cupped in the creases of his hand that was moving very slightly, opening and closing as it had done the time he had talked with Bombolini.

“Yes, I will do it now.”

Now it was von Prum who trembled. He sat in Otto's seat, and his hand trembled on the brass arm of the magneto and in the end, when he finally pushed the metal lever, it was to the lowest of the buttons and he looked once at Fabio thrusting up against the leather straps and he looked away and down at the floor, until finally it was Otto who turned the arm up and up and Fabio began to scream so loudly that he drove von Prum away from his side, and all at once Otto turned the arm back.

“You can't keep it on low that way,” Otto said.

“I did it,” von Prum said. “I did what I had to do.”

The difficulty with pain, for certain purposes, is that in the end it reaches a point at which it defeats itself, where even if it might be felt and understood by the person who is receiving it, the body can no longer respond to it, or the senses either. At one point Otto turned to the captain.

“You wanted to see about the pliers,” he said.

“You might as well learn about the pliers,” Hans said.

They took a fingernail, and Fabio barely moved. They took a toenail, and after that a tooth, and Fabio lay on the board and looked at them.

“You see, after the wires it is nothing,” Otto said. “Only in the mind are the pliers meaningful.”

There is no more sense and no more use in going on about Fabio. The SS men no longer believed in what they were doing.

“Must we treat him?” Otto said.

“I'm entitled to five,” von Prum said.

They advanced then on Cavalcanti with a sense of duty about their work but they had no belief in their minds and it is possible to suppose that their hearts were no longer in their work. Nothing “creative,” as Otto said, would be coming forth.

Had they only stopped then the secret would have been saved, but now there was Cavalcanti the Goat, the one who cared only about stealing a night with some woman who could not resist him. It could be said that because Cavalcanti saw what Fabio could endure, Cavalcanti would be able to do the same, but that would be stealing in turn from Cavalcanti. It was the Goat who more than all of them remained defiant and who suffered the worst for it.

Who is ever to pass judgment on the depth of a man's strength or the source of his courage until the moment has come? It is something we have learned. Who can afford to be disrespectful of people when they don't know what people contain within themselves?

There is no need to say what happened to Cavalcanti, but there is need to mention the meaning of it. It is something the people of this place should always remember.

The truth is this: If only one man among all of the rest will not break, as Fabio and then Cavalcanti did not break, then all of them, all those who so despise men that they believe all men can be broken and all men can be bought,
all
of them have failed and all of them are defeated, because one alone destroys them and one alone can give heart to all other men.

So, no matter whatever else happens here, we have this reason at least to be proud. Man is an animal, but he doesn't have to end as one. Perhaps this is the lesson the German never succeeded in learning.

Hans and Otto got up, and Cavalcanti was taken and thrown along the wall.

“That ends it. Five of them.” They moved with their usual swiftness. They were extremely tidy people, and neat in what they did.

“You understand what it means,” Hans said. “You have to accept it. There is no wine.”

“No, there is no wine here,” Otto said.

“You have to come to accept that, sir.”

“We have never been wrong.”

“We have never failed.”

They had finished their packing and were putting a camouflaged tarpaulin over the equipment in the back of the truck when Caterina Malatesta came down into High Town to attend to the men in the room, and all along the edge of the piazza, from behind the doors and the windows, people groaned at the sight of her. It was she who would do it, the princess Malatesta, the goddess Malatesta, when the soldiers were two minutes away from leaving the piazza in their truck. They stopped when they saw her.

“Sometimes we make it six,” Otto said. “In very special cases.”

“We have Scarafaggio,” Hans said but they watched her moving, unaware of them, unseeing even.

“It wouldn't take much time,” Otto said. “The table is on top.”

But von Prum had come across the piazza toward them. “Not this one,” the captain told them, and they looked at him with some surprise and a little annoyance, because they had been deprived of a pleasure.

“Oh. Oh, I see,” Otto said. He studied the Malatesta. “I don't blame you,” he said. “You have nice taste.”

They got into the truck and started up the engine.

“So, you are vindicated then,” Hans said. “You were right all along. The SS will vouch that there is no wine.”

“Yes, I am vindicated,” von Prum said. He watched the truck turn into the Corso, then he started back toward the Piazza of the People and there was no sense of triumph or even of belief in him. The smell of the room was very bad, and Caterina Malatesta was already at work, treating Fabio. Von Prum stood behind her for several minutes.

“I'm sorry about what happened here,” he said. “These things occur on occasion. We are at war, and war has never been pretty to be in.”

She said nothing and she gave no indication that she had heard him speak, and again he was silent.

“I saved you from something,” he finally said to her. “I expect you to remember that. It wasn't an easy thing to do.”

When she didn't answer he turned to leave; the smells were now too strong for him and he felt tired. Before he left, however, Cavalcanti motioned to him. It was a wild and thoughtless thing to do, but who can find it in his heart to condemn Cavalcanti for it? Perhaps, as Babbaluche said, his brains had been cooked in his head. His voice was low and the words came with difficulty, so Captain von Prum was forced to bend near Cavalcanti to hear him.

“I know where the wine is,” Cavalcanti said. He smiled at the German through his distorted lips.

“You lie,” von Prum said. Cavalcanti shook his head and continued to smile.

“You know I know where the wine is,” he said.

“There is no wine,” von Prum shouted, and because he couldn't stand the sight of the face that was smiling at him, he kicked Cavalcanti's face with his boot.

“You waited all morning to do that,” Cavalcanti said.

“There is no wine,” von Prum shouted. But he turned and ran.

“For that he dies,” Copa said. “For that one thing, of all the rest, he dies.”

“No, no, no,” Fabio said. “You don't understand how we do things. For that he must live.”

 

I
T WILL BE
difficult for someone who is not from here to understand that despite what had taken place the mood of the people was forgiving. The hand of death had rested on the city and then it had been taken away. But more than that, it was because the harvest was closing upon us and it was a good harvest, a rich harvest fat with promise, and the harvest, of course, is life here. There isn't the luxury of time to hate during harvest.

Something happens here then, and there is no power strong enough to hold it back. When the wind is right and coming up the terraces you can smell it. The first of the grapes, the fattest of them, will have fallen on the ground and the soil will be rich with the smell of their ripeness, and the ripeness, like messengers telling of things to come, fills the lanes and the piazzas of the city.

It becomes a time of demand here; there is no choice left about it if we wish to live. The grapes demand attention, and they demand to be picked; the wine demands to be made, and the people are helpless before it because their blood has been bred over the centuries to heed it. The donkeys know it and the oxen. If the vines could make a sound—and Old Vines says that they do and that he can hear them—we could hear them groaning under the weight of their pregnancy, demanding to give birth to the future wine they carry on their limbs. So it wasn't that the people forgave the Germans, because we have never done that, but that, because of the harvest, no one cared any longer. When the grapes call nothing else is heard. We cared only for that moment when Old Vines, listening to the vines, testing the grapes by mouth, looking at the sun and sky, talking with the gods of the grapes that he talked to, would announce that the hour had come, that the time was ripe, that Polenta should go down to the terraces and sprinkle cool holy water on the plump warm clusters and that God should keep His Good Eye on all of us while the harvest got underway.