The Secret of Santa Vittoria (50 page)

Captain von Prum promised to obey.

 

T
HE WINE
in the first of the barrels stopped boiling on the fifth day after the grapes had been pressed, and that meant that the harvest festival would be earlier than was usual. The nights were cool and heavy with fog, and the sediment in the barrels began to drift to the bottom and the wine to turn clear and cool.

All of the grapes except the ones that would be used for the traditional wine pressing had already been picked. The hanging grapes, the ones the women pick and save for the long winter when there is no fresh produce were hanging all over the city, from the stairs, over the door tops, bunches and clusters and mounds and bubbles of grapes hanging from every hook and nail on every wall in Santa Vittoria. On the night of the ninth day after the pressing had begun, Old Vines dipped his wine taster into one of the barrels, and the wine he drew out was almost clear.

“Get ready. Prepare yourselves,” Old Vines ordered. “I taste the wine in the morning.”

It is hard to put down what goes on here then. The line at the fountain was fifty women long because everyone wants to wash and even take a bath before the festival. Three men were sent off to get Lorenzo the Magnificent, Lorenzo the Wine Presser and bring him back with them. Three more were sent to San Marco della Rocca to get the band that always plays for us in return for a small barrel of new wine. Others went to get Marotta the Blaster, who would set off the fireworks with his son. It hurt us to have to hire someone from Scarafaggio although it was something to know that Marotta had not been born there and as such was not a true product of the place.

“Get to bed, go to sleep,” all the mothers shouted; but it is almost a law here that no child sleeps the night before the festival. The old ladies, whose job it is, began to get out the straw hats for the oxen and the mules and to go pick flowers that they make into chains to hang around the beasts' necks. Some went down and got vines for a garland for the statue of Santa Maria and grape leaves to dress her in.

The young girls work on their hair and dresses, and the older ones try to make the traditional costumes respectable for one more time. The men do almost nothing. They scrape the mud and the manure from their boots and feet, and get out their black suits, those who own them, and they stand about and talk about the wine, over and over, endlessly, never tiring of it, saying the same things again and again as if they had just been invented.

They talk about whether it will be thin or fat, as black as night or as red as the eye of a pigeon, sharp or round, heavy or light, and whether it will have the true bouquet of the fruit, and most important, whether the wine this year will have the true
frizzantino
—the thing that makes the needles jump on the tongue and causes that stinging dance that all good wine makes in the mouth.

There is no drinking that night, so that the head will be clear, the hand steady, and the mouth purified for the new wine in the morning. Many of the men keep a watch around the fountain all night long in honor of the wine. They torture themselves then about how bad the wine will be in the morning, how rotten it will taste and how it will wound the taste buds on their tongues.

“There's no reason for it to be good. Do you remember the cold rains two weeks ago? What else can you expect. It murdered the grapes.”

It is as if one good word might cause the wine god to make it turn in the night. And it is protection: if you expect nothing at all, how can you be hurt? But also one must be humble before the wine, one must expect only the worst, one must present one's ass to the gods, as they say, and demand that it be kicked.

At two o'clock that morning, at the darkest time of the night, most of the women were up. Some of the animals, already draped in their flowers, decked in vines and wrapped in grape leaves, were wandering through the piazza not knowing what to do with themselves now that there were no more baskets to carry up the mountain. They were like the men.

“Even the krauts wouldn't want to steal this wine,” someone said.

“Well, we can always sell it for vinegar.”

All along the walls of the piazza children were sprawled out on the stones, curled in chilled balls, waiting for the dawn, because they were afraid of missing something in the morning. They knew what they were about, because had they been home warm in their beds they might have missed the first sounds that came roaring up the Corso Cavour.

It began, the day of the festival, in the darkness of the morning at a few minutes past four o'clock.

It didn't begin in the sense that a day usually begins, by degrees, a little at a time; it began all at once. It erupted; the day exploded on us.

A child ran into the Piazza of the People.

“Here they come,” he shouted. “I saw them. They're at the Fat Gate now.”

And right after that we heard them coming up the Corso Cavour as if they were trumpeting through a megaphone. The San Marco Penitentiary Thieves and Guards Brass Band. They must have walked the whole dark night through, good men, reliable men who have never let us down, down the mountain from San Marco della Rocca, out through the prison gates, across the valley and up our mountain until there they were, at the Fat Gate, blowing their lungs and hearts out in the last darkness of night, drowning out the children, overcoming the frightened bleating of the sheep and the tunking of ox bells, the sound of the guns we no longer noticed firing to the south, even outcrying the cocks, who had had their morning stolen from them.

“All Hail Garibaldi” at four o'clock in the morning, “Italy Forever” coming up out of the pipe of the street at ten minutes past four, “The March of the Alpini Brigade” near the top of the Corso, and by the time they got to the piazza and began to march into it, “Garibaldi” once more. There were a thousand people there to shout a welcome to them.

Eight men in all, eight in green-and-gold uniforms, eight good musicians, some of the finest thieves and bravest guards in all of Italy, five thieves and three guards, one piccolo, one trombone, one clarinet, two trumpets, cymbals, one bass drum, who would be supported by our own Capoferro, and the leader, the maestro Stompinetti, the Rock of San Marco, who had spent two years in Cleveland, Ohio, and knew all about it.

Bombolini welcomed them to the city of Santa Vittoria.

“I heard you were mayor and I never could believe it,” Stompinetti said.

“The best we ever had,” Pietro Pietrosanto said.

“Ah, well, I've heard crazier than that,” the Rock said. “So you're the mayor. God bless the mayor, God bless the people, God bless the wine.” He had a great voice, as big as the trombone he blew.

Polenta came out of the bell tower and with him were some of the older men of the town, dressed in their black suits and holding a canvas canopy over the priest's head to shield the silver chalice which was filled with the Eucharistic wafers. Everyone takes Communion on the festival morning, even if their souls are as spotted as their suits and as stained as the men who work the wine press. In a few minutes he would hold the Mass of the Grapes.

The people prepared to file into Santa Maria, when there was a command in German from Constanzia's house, and then a second, and finally the German soldiers began to file out into the piazza, lined up in rows of two. On a command from Captain von Prum they began to march in the direction of the church.

They were dressed in their parade uniforms, the only time they had worn them since the cobbler's execution. The leather on their wide black belts was polished as was the leather of their boots, and the silver buckles which say
“Gott mit Uns”
shone. They carried their rifles slung over the shoulder, carried bayonets and trench knives in scabbards and wore their metal helmets. Only Vittorini could outshine them. They marched, a parade march, a slow goose step in which they came to almost a complete halt before banging their hobnails down on the cobblestones again. Capoferro picked up their step—
brrrrrrm bang, brrrrrmmmm bang
—and the piccolo player played a sad lament for the dead. The Germans were impressive. At the church door Vittorini made a salute, and Bombolini welcomed them as guests of honor at the festival.

“As a representative of the German people and the German nation, we are honored to accept,” Captain von Prum said.

“Wait until the Resistance gets their hands on this Bombolini,” Stompinetti said. “What kind of an Italian is this. Why didn't he get down in the piazza and kiss his ass while he was about it?”

“Wait,” the people around him said. “Just wait. He knows what he's doing.”

The Mass was swift. Polenta had never been a believer in the long Mass. It was his belief that if God wanted to come down and bless the grapes and wine He would come down whether we spent an hour on our knees or ten minutes. The Mass was over in fifteen minutes.

On the way out of Santa Maria they could see the statue resting in the back of a large open cart, hung with clusters of red and white grapes, entwined with vines and dressed with thousands of grape leaves which fluttered in the early morning wind. And which soon, Padre Polenta hoped, would be further dressed with lire and even some dollar bills and bank checks from the Bank of America.

“The spirit of the harvest,” Bombolini said to von Prum.

“We honor it,” the German said.

At the foot of the church steps a large black wooden coffin was placed on two wine barrels.

“The first of our traditions,” the mayor said. “It holds the corpse of the old year gone by. We destroy the old year and in that way give birth to the new that lies ahead.”

“Very beautiful,” von Prum said. “Very symbolic.”

“Would you and your men care to act as honor guard?”

“We should be honored.”

It is not an old tradition. The priest who had been here before Polenta had seen the tradition in another city and had borrowed it for ours. From the church door there is a wire and the wire runs from the church, down the steps and through an opening into the coffin. For reasons we no longer are sure of, a white dove is attached to the wire and then sent skidding down into the black box. When the bird goes through the opening it trips another wire, which sets off a bag of explosive powder, which in turn explodes the coffin. The Germans had stationed themselves alongside the box, three soldiers on each side, von Prum and his noncommissioned officers a little in front of it.

“The old is dead,” Padre Polenta said from the top of the church steps.

“The new,” the priest called out—and the dove began to skid down the wire, tied to it upside down by his pink feet—“is born.”

The noise is raspy and sometimes the dove cries out, but it made no sound this year. The explosion, however, was as loud and complete as ever. Pieces of the coffin went straight up into the air and others flew out in all directions into the piazza. The smoke was so dense that from the center of the piazza it became impossible to see the front of Santa Maria. When it did clear we could see the Germans, all nine of them, face down on the piazza stones, mingling with ox turds, and several of them, better trained than the others perhaps, with their rifles already in their hands, kneeling and facing the people. There was a great cheer then, an enormous cheer from the people, because this officially opens the
festa.

Some of the people ran to help the soldiers to their feet, and they tried to brush the manure and the axle grease off their uniforms, but without much success. Bombolini said something to the captain and he smiled and patted him on the back, but nobody was actually able to hear what he said because of the roaring in their ears.

In the center of the piazza, near the fountain, a platform had been built in the night and on it stood the first of the wine barrels, and by the barrel stood Old Vines. He looked then as he always did, as if he were about to be sentenced to his death and be dropped through the platform floor. Padre Polenta said a prayer and then a young girl, all white in her Communion dress, took a copper pitcher and turned the barrel tap and filled the pitcher with wine, and when it was full she handed it to Old Vines. There was no sound at all in Santa Vittoria then. Even the animals, who exist by the wine as much as we do, seem to know enough to be silent then. He held the pitcher in the air and then he began to pour the new wine into a large crystal wine glass which he then held over his head, the way the priest holds up the chalice before consecrating the sacred Host, and he turned in all four directions.

“It is
vino nero,
” Old Vines called out. “Good and black.” There was a roar from the crowd, but not a great one. It was a good sign, but not enough.

Now he lifts the glass to his lips and the people push forward, because they demand not only to see it but to hear the wine washing around in his mouth and being kissed by his tongue and lips, and then he spits it out and no one moves.

They knew it was good. He could not hide the look that began to spread out on his red face. The question now was, How good?

“Frizzantino,”
the old man shouted. And then there was the roar, the true roar, almost as great as the one that had greeted Bombolini so many months before.

“The wine is alive,” he shouted. “It dances.” He took more of the wine. This he swallowed.

“The needles on the tongue.”

“Give us, give us,” the people shouted. They reached up for the wine glass but he didn't give it to them then.

“It's as fresh as the air,” he shouted. “It tastes like the sun in the sky.” He had never spoken this way of the wine before. He told them that the wine was fat but at the same time light, that it was fruity and yet not sweet, and that the bouquet was strong enough to drown the brain.

“It is a good wine,” he said. The first of the desirable categories.

“It is a great wine.” The cheering grew louder. They waited for the third category that is almost never awarded.