The Secret of Santa Vittoria

by Robert Crichton

  Despite the fog he started across the Piazza of the People to his church, Santa Maria of the Burning Oven, to be there in the event of any trouble. He was near the fountain when he heard Fabio call to him.

  “Oh, what a morning this is going to be for Italy, Padre.”

  The bell began to peal and then thunder over Santa Vittoria, swinging free and out of control, the entire tower trembling and then the windows of the houses around the piazza. No one came into the piazza. Fabio ran to Santa Maria.

  “The people,” he called to the priest. “What’s the matter with the people?”

  “You’ve been away at the school too long,” Polenta said. “They don’t believe the bell any longer.”

  The summer before, all the people had run to the Piazza of the People—to help fight the fire, when the bells had begun to ring. When most of the town had collected, torches were lit and they found themselves surrounded by a company of Blackshirts from the barracks at Montefalcone.

  “We shall now proceed to pay our back taxes,” the officer announced. And they went through every pocket and every house in Santa Vittoria until every unburied lira in the city was taken.

  “This is no city to catch fire in,” the priest told Fabio. “Now when the bell rings, everyone gets up and bolts the door. That’s the kind of Christians you have in this town.”

  There is something about the truth that makes itself understood. When the bells ceased ringing, Fabio ran up and down the piazza in front of the houses, telling everyone to come out, that he had good news for them, and gradually lights were lit and finally some of the Pietrosantos, most of whom live along the lanes leading into the piazza, opened their doors; and when they saw it was Fabio running about in the fog they came out.

  There is a thing about Santa Vittoria that must be understood in order to understand this place. Whatever is known in Santa Vittoria is known by everyone in Santa Vittoria as soon as it happens. Some say it is because the walls of the houses are so thin that what is said in the first house is heard in the second and passed through the walls to the third, down through Old Town and up through High Town. Others say it happens because everyone is related to everyone else, that everyone shares the same blood and the same hearts and nerves and so what is experienced by one is felt by the next. Whatever it is, after the Pietrosantos went into the Piazza of the People it was soon thick with the others.

  They put Fabio up on the steps of Santa Maria. Pietro the Bull, the oldest and still the strongest of the Pietrosantos, hung Fabio’s bicycle from the statue of the turtle on the fountain so the beam of his bicycle lamp would shine on the young man. It threw Fabio’s shadow back onto the church façade and when he held up his hand before speaking the hand was twenty feet high on the stones.

  “A great thing has happened today,” Fabio called out. His voice is as thin as his body, but it is clear and it can be heard.

  “A great thing for us. A great thing for Italy.” The people leaned forward to hear Fabio, because good news is not a common commodity in this place.

  “Benito Mussolini, the tyrant, is dead,” he cried.

  There was no sound at all from the people. The face of Fabio showed that he was puzzled. He asked if they heard him and no one answered, but Fabio knew that they had heard.

  “The Duce has been put to death this day,” he called.

  Still the silence, the only sound the water pouring from the fountain.

  “What is that to us?” someone shouted. “What are you trying to tell us?”

  “Why did you get us out of bed?” they called. “Why did you ring the bell?”

  His face was anguished. It is a fine face, long and clean and narrow like the blade of a new ax, the eyes deep and dark like ripe olives, and his hair so dark that it seems blue at times. Fabio’s skin is white and fine, not the color of copper pots like most of the faces here.

  “What does it mean to us?” the first man shouted again. He wanted an answer.

  “It means freedom,” Fabio said, and he looked down.

  The people respect Fabio, but they were annoyed by what he had done. He went down the steps of the church and they cleared a path for him so that he could get his bicycle down from the Fountain of the Pissing Turtle.

  “You’ve been away too long, Fabio,” a man said. “We don’t go to school here, Fabio. We work. We grow grapes, Fabio. You shouldn’t have waked up the people.”

  “Excuse me,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s the books,” a woman told him. “You’ve strained your mind.” Everyone nodded, because it is a known fact here that a few books are all right, like wine, but too much can be bad. Books break down brains.

  It was the cobbler Babbaluche who saved things, although it is usually his role to ruin them.

  “Leave the light there,” he ordered. He has a voice which sounds as if his throat was plated with brass; it is always irritating and it is always heard. He limped, because he is a cripple, to the steps of the church.

  “I’ll tell you what it means to you, you socks filled with shit,” Babbaluche began.

  There is no point in keeping it a secret. The cobbler is a man who is fascinated with excrement. Under the laws of Italy it is not allowed to put down on paper, even on paper that is not to be published, the things Babbaluche calls the people of Santa Vittoria. He compares our nastiness to that of a man who rises in the morning and finds that the shoe he has just put his foot in has been used the night before as a chamber pot. He can say these things because of something that happened to him years ago in front of all the people and which they allowed to happen. Babbaluche was a penance we had to bear.

  “How many of you would like to sink your boot in Copa’s ass?” Babbaluche shouted.

  There was a cheer then. It was an ambition of everyone in the piazza.

  “As of this morning you have that right.”

  He went through the rest of the city leaders, the members in good standing of the local Fascist party who were known as The Band.

  “Who wants Mazzola?”

  There was a cheer for the ruination of Mazzola. There was nothing political any longer about The Band. They had long ago ceased contributing to the national party or to Rome. They kept Santa Vittoria for themselves and stole from it, not too much at a time, but all of the time.

  The loudest cheer of all was reserved for Francucci. When Copa had taken over the city twenty years before, he had made his one speech.

  “Bread is the staff of life,” he told the people. “Bread is holy. Bread is too sacred to be left in the hands of greedy individuals. No penny of profit shall ever be made by any individual from the exploitation of the people’s bread so long as I am mayor, so help me God.”

  He closed all of the bakeries in Santa Vittoria and opened the Citizen’s Nonprofit Good Bread Association and put his brother-in-law, the mule drover Francucci, in charge. Francucci’s first act was to reduce the amount of wheat that went into a loaf and his second was to raise the price. Within a year after that the families of Copa, Mazzola and Francucci moved out of the wet dark caves they had lived in for one thousand years in Old Town up into the sunlight of High Town, where the gentry, what there is of gentry here, live.

  “I offer you the ass of Francucci,” Babbaluche said. There was a terrible roar from the crowd.

  They would turn the irrigation water for the terraces back on. The Band had turned it off years before, when the people refused to pay for their own water. They would fix the Funny Scale on which all of the grape growers had to weigh their grapes before selling them to Citizen’s Wine Cooperative.

  The people began to get angry. There is a saying here that if you can’t do anything about something, pretend it doesn’t exist. But now that the people could do something about them, the old hurts that had healed began to hurt again. It is impossible to guess what the crowd might have gone on to do had not Francucci chosen that moment to come down from High Town into the piazza.

  “Why were the
bells ringing?” he asked. It is asking a great deal to expect anyone to believe that the baker would have come down then; one would have to know Cosimo Francucci to understand how it could happen.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” he cried. “Take your hands off me.”

  They used the baker like a soccer ball. He went from one end of the piazza to the other, and every player along the way had a penalty shot at him. When he could move no more they called his family to come down and take him away, and when they couldn’t carry him Fabio had to help them carry him back up the steep lane to High Town, more dead than alive. That is the way Fabio is. When he got back down to the piazza the people were starting back to their houses. The bloodletting had had a soothing effect. As the baker’s blood had flowed, the blood pressure of the people had dropped.

  “They shouldn’t do that,” Fabio said.

  “The people are entitled to their blood,” Babbaluche said. “The people have a need for blood. They have a taste for it. Now give them big blood, important blood,” the cobbler said. “Tell them how the Duce died.”

  “They don’t want to hear that,” Fabio said. “They want to go home.”

  “The people always want to hear when the mighty stag is brought to the ground by a pack of common dogs,” Babbaluche said.

  The cobbler was right. Fabio told them how the Fascist Grand Council had gathered in a palace in Rome the night before and how one man, the Count Dino Grandi, rose to his feet and in the face of Mussolini, before the eyes of the Duce, began to read a resolution.

  Resolved: The members of the Grand Council and the people of the glorious nation of Italy, having lost all confidence in the ability of the leader to lead any longer, convinced that he has destroyed the will of the army to fight any longer and the people to resist any longer.…

  The people sat on the wet stones of the piazza and listened to Fabio.

  “Die,” one of them shouted. “How does he die?”

  Fabio told them how at the end the Duce turned to his son-in-law, husband of his own flesh and blood, and said to him, “And you, Ciano. Flesh of my flesh. Even you.”

  “Yes, even me. You have done all that you can do.”

  And how the next afternoon, on the burning hot empty Sunday afternoon in Rome the king had summoned the Duce to the royal palace and met him in the garden and behind the hedges so no one could see them, sang the Duce a song that the soldiers were singing.

  “What have you done to us, Mussolini?

  What have you done with our Alpini?

  I’ll tell you what you’ve done, Mussolini.

  You have murdered our Alpini

  That’s what you have done, Mussolini!”

  “And you? Do you believe it?” the Duce says.

  “All the soldiers are singing it,” the king says.

  “Then there is nothing more to say.”

  “No, there is nothing more to say.”

  He told them how they put the Duce in a long black ambulance and took him through the streets of Rome. The Duce tells the guard that he isn’t sick and the guard says, “But the people of Rome are fickle.”

  And how they took him through the ancient burning city, past all the monuments to the past Caesars, through the arches built for the great men, until they come to the walls of Rome and the Appian Way, the route that all the conquerors have taken to come to Rome. At a crossroads the ambulance stops and the people of the village look inside.

  “An old man is dying,” one of them says.

  Mussolini says one sentence: “The people of Rome have always destroyed their greatest sons.”

  And how after that they drove past the country towns and then into the upland villages, the hills and the mountains growing higher, into the Abruzzi and then up into the snow fields into those mountains where the snow never ends. In the valleys it is night, but the snow fields are still touched by sun, and here he is met by four members of the Alpini who tell him to undress and when he is naked two of them take his arms and two of them take his legs and they lower him into a hole they have cut into the hard ice and they begin shoveling snow into the upright grave until only the great head is not buried.

  “You dishonor Italy,” the Duce says. They are simple men but one of them was equal to the job.

  “No, we honor the dead of twenty years by doing what we do.”

  So in the manner of the Alpini, Fabio tells them, the Duce has died, frozen to death in foreign snow.

  When he was through with the story some of the women were crying, not for the Duce, but for the men of Santa Vittoria who were sent to the Alpini. They left one morning in May 1941, twenty-three young men, marching down the mountain, singing and shouting all the way to the Montefalcone road, the feathers on those silly hats bending with the breeze, the people standing on the Fat Wall waving and waving until the last of them could be seen no more. Not one of them was ever seen or heard from again.

  We know now that this isn’t the way the Duce died, but we always tell it this way because we like his death this way and it is more fitting to us.

  THERE WAS no way to keep the people in the piazza after that, because the sun had come up. It had not yet reached down into the piazza itself, but the people could see it touching the tiles on the roofs of the houses and nothing could hold them after that.

  “No one works today,” Babbaluche shouted. “A day of holiday.”

  “A day of celebration,” Bombolini called. But the people didn’t listen to either of them.

  The sun drives the people here. It is an instinct that has been bred into them. Even when they can’t see the sun or it can’t be seen, in the darkest lanes in Old Town, when the sun comes up the people get up. It drives them out of the houses and it drives them down to the terraces to tend the vines.

  “Tell them, Fabio,” the cobbler said.

  “This is a great day for Italy,” Fabio said. “No one should work today.”

  They poured out of the piazza and down the streets to get their tools, deaf to anything now but the needs of the grapes, and in a few minutes there were only five or six of them left in the Piazza of the People. These men went across the piazza from the church and sat around the edge of the Fountain of the Pissing Turtle, while Fabio climbed up and took down his bicycle.

  “For twenty years I dreamed of this day,” Babbaluche said, “and now look at it.” He swept his hand around the empty piazza. “This is the kind of people you have in this place, Fabio. Don’t ever allow yourself to forget it.”

  They sat and listened to the water until the priest passed in front of them on his way to the bell tower.

  “There will be a Low Mass for the dead,” he said to Fabio.

  “For one of the heroes of the Church,” Babbaluche said.

  “The dead will be respected,” the priest said.

  “And when do you think the Vatican will get around to the living?” the cobbler said.

  It was an old game that the two of them played, and neither of them heard the other any longer. But it bothered Fabio.

  “To think that I, Ugo Babbaluche, outlived that bastard Mussolini,” the cobbler said. “It’s something. I’m alive and that bastard’s dead.”

  “It calls for a drink,” Bombolini said, and all of them, at once, as if someone had set off a silent alarm, stood up and began to follow the wine seller across the piazza to his wineshop. He was unlocking the folding iron gate over the front door, when his wife looked out of the window above the door.

  “See that they pay,” she said to him. “See that you make them pay.” He was embarrassed.

  “She lacks a sense of history,” he said.

  It was damp and chilly in the shop, but the warm air from the piazza and the warmth from the wine soon warmed them.

  “What do you think is going to happen?” one of them asked.

  “Nothing,” Pietrosanto said. “Why should anything happen?”

  It is the feeling here. No matter what takes place in Rome or happens in the worl
d, for a few days or a few weeks things might be a little different, but they always return to the way they were before.

  “The Germans will come,” Fabio said.

  He had put his head down on one of the tables because he was tired. He was suddenly embarrassed to be the center of the men’s group. He had never spoken much with the men before, and now he was one of them.

  “No they won’t,” one of them said. “Why would they want to come here?”

  “If Italy gets out of the war,” Fabio said, “the Germans aren’t going to leave Italy for the Americans and the English.”

  “No,” Pietrosanto said. “There’s nothing here for them.”

  “There’s nothing here for us,” Bombolini said.

  Fabio could only shrug his shoulders. He couldn’t push too far, but still he told them about the tanks and armored cars he had seen coming into Montefalcone.

  “Montefalcone is Montefalcone and Santa Vittoria is Santa Vittoria,” the cobbler said. “One is a jewel and one is a shit house.”

  They drank to this.

  “Only a man born in Santa Vittoria can ever learn how to make a living out of it,” one said. “What would the Germans do here?”

  They drank to this as well.

  The wife of Bombolini came down the back stairs and into the wineshop and she looked at their glasses of vermouth and anisette and she stared at their eyes.

  “Did they pay?”

  “They paid,” Bombolini said.

  “Let’s see the money.” She went to the drawer in the table by the big wine barrel. There was nothing in it.

  “This is a historic day,” Bombolini said. “You don’t ask for money on a day like this and you don’t accept it.”

  They nodded their heads at Rosa Bombolini. They were afraid of her. She has the toughest tongue in the city and no shyness about putting it to use. She studied them.

  “What a bunch of patriots.” She began taking the glasses from them moving them toward the door. “Take your patriotism out into the piazza where it belongs.” When they were in the sunlight at the door she said, “That’s the trouble with this country. The whole place is filled with penniless patriots.”