The Secret of Santa Vittoria (54 page)

“I've had a serious accident,” von Prum said.

“What is your name?”

“Mollendorf,” von Prum said. “Captain Hans Mollendorf.” One of the younger officers wrote down the name. The senior parachute officer pointed at von Prum stretched on the stone floor. He was naked.

“This is the kind of scum who is destroying us,” he said. They left then, and within ten minutes all of them were in the Corso Cavour and going back down the mountain.

We were helpful to the ones that were left. We were glad to help them. The women gave them cups of hot tea made from field herbs and grass, and the men gave them
grappa
to get the blood going again. The small truck was already in one corner of the piazza and some of the men wheeled the motorcycle and the sidecar from the shed out into the piazza. The women tried to make the soldiers' clothes as presentable as possible although it was not an easy job and they were not very successful. All of the uniforms were stained with wine and grease and sweat and manure and blood. We collected their helmets, which had been left all along the cart track up from the vineyards, and their tunics. We found the field packs they wore on their backs and in an old wine basket we piled all of their personal things, a few books in German and razors and old towels. All of them had drunk far too much wine the night before and they were still a little drunk. The sound of firing from the River Road and the valley, although there was nothing to be seen down there, was very loud.

“It wasn't bad here,” Heinsick said.

“It was good here,” Private Zopf said, “considering it was a war.”

One of them took some lire and put them on the top of a wine keg in a corner of the Cooperative Wine Cellar office.

“This is for the wine we drank.”

Traub took money and put it on the barrel.

“This is for the wine we stole.”

It wasn't much money, it was nothing, and yet it was something. They left the office, and the people began to help them carry their things up the Corso Cavour to the Piazza of the People. Captain von Prum was already in the piazza putting things in the back of the truck and in the sidecar of the motorcycle. He moved very slowly; he was in pain and he was confused. He ordered the gray file cabinet taken out of the house, but when they found it difficult to get it into the back of the truck they put it in the piazza again and forgot about it.

“What about this?” Bombolini asked. It was the air-raid siren.

“You can keep that,” Sergeant Traub said.

“Once each year we'll sound it and think back on these days,” Bombolini said.

The captain stood in the piazza and looked across it at the bell tower and at Santa Maria of the Burning Oven, at the People's Palace and at the Fountain of the Pissing Turtle. He seemed to be seeing things as if storing up a last memory of this place and yet not seeing things at all. He walked across to the fountain. It was silent then; the wine was not flowing and the water had not begun.

“Would you like me to start it up?” Bombolini said.

“Do what you want with it,” the captain said. Someone began to pump the bicycle, and the generator began to turn and finally to drive the pump, and the wine began to spout again from the turtle.

“I never asked why it did that,” von Prum said. “Why the turtle does that.”

“I can't tell you that,” Bombolini said. “It's a secret that only the people in Santa Vittoria know.”

“I don't want to know it then,” the captain said.

Some of the soldiers were already in the back of the small truck, crowded among their packs, hunched on the hard wooden seats. Vittorini came up into the piazza then, dressed in the uniform with the sword drawn and the Italian flag suspended from its blade.

It was very quiet in the piazza. We had always dreamed that the day they left would be a day of great celebration. We were happy to see them prepare to go, but the day after the festival is always a sad day. The long summer is over, the harvest is in, all the promises of the year past have been met or have failed and what we call the dead time, the season of the dead, was upon us. Captain von Prum came back from the motorcycle. For a moment we had thought he was getting in it and that it was the time to go, but he had stopped and come back toward Bombolini. The men of the San Marco Brass Band, who had been afraid to go home because of the firing along the roads, put down their instruments.

“You did this to me,” Captain von Prum said to Bombolini.

“Whatever was done was done inside of you,” Bombolini said. “We did nothing here.”

“I came here to treat you with decency and respect and honor, and it's come to this. I made a mistake.”

It was more than Bombolini was willing to hear.

“We have a saying here,” the mayor said, “and you should listen to it. ‘If the dove chooses to fly with the hawk his feathers stay white but his heart turns black.' It was in you all along.”

“I treated you with honor, and you returned it with humiliation.”

“It was in you all along. You struck me with your fist in my face.”

“That was nothing. That was an order.”

“And you turned the handle on the electricity for Fabio. You couldn't keep your hand away from it finally.”

Von Prum was silent then. He looked as if he wasn't hearing what was being said, but he must have heard.

“And you put our cobbler to death. You forget that. What your kind do is to forget.”

The Malatesta was in the doorway and he saw her. There was a moment when we thought that he was going to go to her, but he stayed where he was.

“What you people have to remember, your kind, is that there is no cure for birth.”

Von Prum turned away from him and started toward the motorcycle.

“And there is no cure for death,” Bombolini said, “if you think about it.”

The German had stopped, and perhaps the mayor had touched something in him. He was angry and confused at the same time. Pietrosanto wanted to stop the mayor because men can become dangerous when they are this way. They were looking at one another.

“If you think about that,” Bombolini said once more, “you might think about becoming human beings for a change. Now get out of our city.”

The engines of the truck and the motorcycle had already been started up, and the captain got into the sidecar. We had always thought we would cheer that moment and we made no cheer. The people were in the doorways and all along the Piazza of the People, and just as they had that first day, they stood in their doorways all down the Corso Cavour as if to watch a hearse go by. The truck had already reached the Corso and then dipped over the steep lip and started down. The band began to play then, a song that they play here when the wedding is over and the guests are supposed to drink their last glass of wine and go home. The motorcycle started and just as on the day that it had come it didn't go directly to the Corso but began a tour of the piazza. But von Prum didn't see us this time. His eyes were so set and so cold and so distant from us that it was hard at the time to believe that they would ever close again, even on his death. Vittorini was saluting, but von Prum didn't see it, nor did he hear the band playing for him. Some of the people waved and he didn't see them either. As before, the motorcycle came toward Bombolini and halted.

“If I came back here some day after the war is over, what would your people do to me?” Sergeant Traub said.

“Nothing. They would do nothing to you,” Bombolini said. The sergeant smiled the smile that deformed his face so badly.

“So they could forgive us then?”

“They could forgive you,” the mayor said.

“Just so you pay for your own wine,” Pietrosanto said.

“Like other people,” Bombolini said.

It startled them when von Prum spoke. His lips barely moved. There was no expression of any kind in his voice or in his face. The eyes had not changed.

“Is there more wine or not?”

Bombolini smiled at him.

“Is there more wine or not?”

They all were smiling at the captain then, but we don't know whether he saw the smiles.

“Is there?”

Traub started the engine again and very slowly this time he moved past Italo Bombolini and Vittorini, who still stood with his salute unanswered. Traub touched the edge of his helmet, but it wasn't what Vittorini wanted. We could see the captain's lips moving. He must have been asking the question again, but it was not possible to hear the words over the sound of the engine.

They started down the Corso Cavour, and the people were smiling at the Germans, the women and even the children. In the piazza they could only see the Germans' backs, and then they were gone.

At the Fat Gate one of the things that are fated to take place here happened. It was done by the younger men, whose warm blood leads them into errors of taste. They lack the proper sense of things that a man like Bombolini, whose blood has cooled, has learned. They stopped the motorcycle at the gate, and before Traub could start it up again they handed the captain a wicker basket in which was packed twelve bottles of Santa Vittoria's best wine. On top of the fresh straw around the bottles was a card written in Fabio's finest hand:

Take this wine as well.

Don't thank us for it.

We won't miss it.

There are one million—

1,000,000—

one million more bottles where these came from.

The people of Santa Vittoria

“Where?” Traub said.

“That we can't tell you,” Fabio said.

“We don't want it. We don't even want to see it. We just want to know
where.
” Fabio shook his head at them. He was very gentle about it.

“No, no. That will be your torture. Don't you see?”

Traub nodded.

“That will be the hot wires in your brain,” Cavalcanti said, and Traub continued to nod. Fabio turned directly to von Prum then.

“Ten years from now, if you are alive, you will wake up in the night and you will start going over the city again, house by house and street by street, trying to pick up the church and look under it, and it will begin to drive you mad. Where did you fail? you will ask yourself. How did they fool you? And you will know only one thing for certain.”

Fabio paused to be sure that von Prum was hearing him.

“What?” Traub said. “Certain of what?”

“That we are laughing at you. That we were laughing at you when you came and we always laughed at you and that we will always laugh at you.”

When they heard the engine begin again, the people ran to the Fat Wall from the Piazza of the People because they wanted to see every movement of the leaving. When the motorcycle went through the gate and could be seen again there was a little cheer from the people on the wall. It was the first noise they had allowed themselves. There was the beginning of a feeling of joy, but as long as the Germans were still on the mountain no one would allow himself to go beyond that.

“Something can still happen,” they told each other. “You watch. Something will still go wrong.”

They tortured themselves with it and they tortured each other, because there is a sweetness in torture when you feel that it can't harm you.

Of all the people on the wall only Bombolini wasn't happy. People saw it and it puzzled them.

“What's the matter, Italo? Why are you sad? Why are you looking that way?” they asked him, but he couldn't tell them, and they turned away to watch the progress of the motorcycle winding its way down the cart track through the terraces. He left the wall and went back up the lane past the church into the Piazza of the People where he was alone, pleased that he was all alone, until Fabio came up from the Fat Gate into the piazza.

“So you told them of the wine,” Bombolini said. He shook his head.

“But not where it was,” Fabio said. “That's the true torture.”

Bombolini continued to shake his head. “It lacks perfection, Fabio. But it doesn't matter, Fabio. Nothing matters now.” He began to walk across the piazza to the Palace of the People.

“Where are you going?” Fabio said. “The people want you on the wall. Your place is on the wall.”

They could hear a louder cheer than before, and Fabio guessed that the motorcycle had reached The Rest and was halfway down the mountain. Soon it would dip under the mountain's shadow and be lost to the people on the wall.

“I'm going away, Fabio. I'm leaving.”

Fabio was astonished.

“This was my great moment. It's all over for me now.” The mayor held up his hand. “‘In time of trouble men of talent are called for, but in times of ease the rich and those with powerful relations are desired.' You see? There's no place for me here.”

Fabio didn't know what to say to him.

“You'll miss my wedding,” he finally said.

Bombolini shrugged. “I don't want an ending that lacks perfection,” the mayor said. “The curtain is down, and it's time for the actors to get off the stage.”

They had passed the fountain when Roberto, who had been with Fabio at the Fat Gate, came into the piazza and started as they had for the Peoples' Palace. The people on the wall were silent and the Germans had either stopped or were in the shadow.

“This is a great day for you, Roberto,” Bombolini said.

“Yes,” Roberto said, but his face was as long as Bombolini's.

“You'll be leaving us, Roberto.”

“I suppose so.”

“The sooner the better, Roberto.”

“I guess so.”

“Never stay in a place where you don't belong.”

Roberto nodded.

“To live in a place where you don't belong is to live in hell,” the mayor said. He started up the palace steps, but he stopped when they heard a very loud cheer from the top of the wall. The motorcycle, Fabio figured, must have come back into view again near the bottom of the mountain. The mayor turned to Fabio.