The Secret of Santa Vittoria

by Robert Crichton

  From The Discourses of Italo Bombolini:

  The duty of the people is to tend to their own affairs.

  The duty of government is to help them do it.

  This is the pasta of politics

  The inspired leader, the true prince, no matter

  how great, can only be sauce upon the pasta.

  —Bombolini

  TWO WEEKS after Italo Bombolini had taken over as mayor of Santa Vittoria, everyone—with the exception of the priest Polenta, who despised him, and the cobbler Babbaluche, who wasn’t prepared to see him as he was—recognized one thing about him. Bombolini was a leader; he was a born leader, he was a natural leader. He was, at times, an inspired leader. He was, in his own words, “sauce upon the pasta.”

  His leadership was so natural and he seized power with such grace that people who only several weeks before could not say his name without first prefacing it with “boob” or “fool” began to realize they had seen these traits of leadership in Bombolini all along.

  “Do you remember the time he kept Giovanetti from killing his wife by talking to him and getting the pick out of his hand? I said to myself right then ‘He may look like a clown, but here is the soul of the leader,’ I said. I can say this much: I was one of the first to recognize it.”

  Everyone had his own way of discovering Bombolini. In the end even Babbaluche was forced to admit that the wine seller possessed certain qualities that were surprising at least.

  “But they won’t last,” the cobbler would say. “He’s running on nerve and luck alone. You watch. Somewhere inside that fat bastard a clown lives, and sooner or later the clown will come out, because a clown is a clown and will always be a clown.”

  There were others, some of the old men who no longer believed in anything on earth except hunger and work and finally death. “He’ll stop running,” they said—there is a saying here: An ass’s trot doesn’t last long—but when Bombolini continued to run even the old men began to turn on Babbaluche.

  “The ass is still running,” one of them shouted at the cobbler. “Maybe this ass is a horse.”

  “An ass is an ass and will always act like an ass,” Babbaluche said. “You wait. You’ll see his long ears soon enough.”

  * * *

  From his first day Bombolini seemed to have a feeling for the correct thing to do. The day after Vittorini had handed him the mayor’s medallion a group of citizens went across the piazza to the Leaders’ Mansion to ask Bombolini to surrender the office and put someone in it who wouldn’t ruin the city.

  “All right, Italo,” they wanted to say to him, in all kindness, “the fun is over now; we’ve all had our good laugh. Now let’s settle down and get ourselves a leader.”

  But they didn’t find Bombolini home that day. They couldn’t find him any place. When they finally went down to the terraces to tend their grapes Bombolini came out of hiding to tend to the town.

  He had the streets swept. He had the fountain repaired and the water-catch cleaned of all its mold and moss and all the old glass and potato peelings that washed around in it cleaned out and thrown away. The third morning, the people woke up and found that all the old slogans in Santa Vittoria had been changed in the night. The one in the Piazza of the People that read

  BELIEVE OBEY FIGHT

  had been changed to

  TRANQUILLITY CALMNESS PATIENCE

  The three great virtues of the Italian people

  A public service

  (Signed) Italo Bombolini, Mayor

  On the old fallen wall of the Chapel of the Bountiful Grapes the old Fascist party slogan “I Don’t Give a Damn” now read

  WE CARE

  In High Town where for years the sign had read

  LIVE DANGEROUSLY

  —D’Annunzio

  Bombolini had added:

  BUT DRIVE CAREFULLY

  —Bombolini

  Although there were no cars in Santa Vittoria then, it gave the people a feeling of belonging with the times.

  As you went down the Corso Mussolini it had been impossible to avoid the sign on the wall of the house where the Corso curves down to the left:

  BETTER TO LIVE ONE DAY AS A LION

  THAN 100 YEARS AS A LAMB

  Today when you go down the Corso you read

  BETTER TO LIVE

  100 YEARS

  —Bombolini, Mayor

  After the third day, the group of men who had wanted Bombolini’s resignation no longer tried to see him, and he began to show himself in the streets.

  It is impossible now to know whether the things the wine seller did came to him from study and thought, or whether they were the reactions of instinct. It doesn’t really matter. The important point is that he did them.

  The trouble with government in this country is that it is composed of the Ins and the Outs. There are blacks and whites, but no grays here. When the Outs get in, they kick all the Ins out, and the new Outs do everything in their power to destroy the programs of the Ins, even when they might help them. It is brutal and sometimes bloody and almost always exciting and usually no good for the town, but that is the way it always has been.

  Bombolini’s genius, for that is what it must be seen as now, was that instead of throwing people out he invited everyone in. He formed the Grand Council of the Free City of Santa Vittoria and in two days every faction that could be counted upon to be fighting one another, every family and every force in the city, had a member in the government. Everyone was an In or had a member of the family who was an In. Membership in the Council was almost evenly divided among Frogs and Turtles and Goats. Half of the members were young, and half of them were old, and every one of the large or powerful families was represented. The real secret was, perhaps, that if not everyone was In because that was not possible, almost no one was Out.

  Giovanni Pietrosanto was made Minister of Public Waters, which meant that he was in charge of the fountain and the water tower. Under Giovanni’s direction the spillways were cleared and the pump was put back in working order by Longo, and all the drains on the terraces were cleared and patched, and for the first time in twenty years there was water on the terraces for the grapevines. It isn’t a great deal of water, but it is enough to keep a dry spell from becoming a drought, something that Someone greater than Bombolini had not seen fit to do.

  Under his brother Pietro, the other powerful member of the family, the organization called Minute Men of Santa Vittoria was formed.

  “Why do you want to waste your time on this?” Fabio asked Bombolini.

  The mayor held up his hand. “‘The chief foundations of all states are good laws and good arms.’ I have no say in the matter. The Master says we must have an army.”

  At the start people laughed at the army, but as they drilled in the Piazza of the People after work and the twenty men got better at their drill, the people began to turn out to watch them. Pietrosanto has a voice that can break windows, and the drill was impressive. Every soldier was allowed to wear a red arm band on Sunday and to sport a hawk’s feather in his hat, and soon every young man in Santa Vittoria was hungry for a feather, but the army was held to twenty because that was the number of weapons we had.

  There were others. Commissioner of Sanitation, Master of the Scales, Minister for Bread and Pasta, Minister for Advanced Education, Minister for Affairs of the Aged.

  He closed the second meeting of the Grand Council with these words. “A wise man once said, “The first impression one gets of a new ruler and his brains is from seeing the men he has chosen to have around him.’” He put down his hand. “Men of Santa Vittoria. By these standards I submit that I must be judged a genius.”

  At first they felt that Bombolini was being egotistical, but as they went home and the words rolled around in their heads and they began to see what they meant, they were, of course, flattered. And as Bombolini had told Fabio, if you can’t buy your way by money the next best way is to buy your way with flattery, because as every Italian knows, flat
tery will always get you somewhere.

  There were mistakes. One morning Bombolini decided to please the people by bringing democracy to the water fountain. For several hundred years, for reasons no longer known, several families had had the right to go to the head of the line waiting for water at the fountain and to fill their jugs first. One morning the women found this sign on the fountain.

  In The Eyes of God There Are No Preferred People.

  First Come, First Served.

  Order of Bombolini, Mayor

  The proclamations were now signed with one initial only in the manner of the Caesars. The experiment in democracy went well until Rosa Bombolini came across the piazza with her seven-gallon aluminum jug, modern and progressive, the only one of its kind in Santa Vittoria, and went to the head of the line as was her privilege. Pietro Pietrosanto, as head of the army, was in charge of the new policy that morning.

  “Back,” he told her. “To the end of the line. You know the order.”

  “I know my rights,” she shouted. She pushed against Pietrosanto with her large and powerful chest. “You go tell him this. Tell him that no fat-ass Sicilian ragpicker is going to come up here and rob the rights of any Casamassima.”

  “There is nothing to do,” Bombolini told his general, “but to seize the offender’s water jug.”

  A seven-gallon water jug is a true weapon, especially when it is used unexpectedly. The head of the army went down in the Piazza of the People exactly like a bull struck with a sledge hammer. Pietrosanto might have pressed charges. They might have taken her down the mountain to Montefalcone on the charge of intent to kill, but Pietrosanto’s pride would not bear it and Bombolini was not yet ready for such a challenge to his young regime. The next morning the sign was down and the old ways were restored, and this was the death of pure democracy in Santa Vittoria. That night Bombolini had Fabio copy in his book: “There is nothing more difficult to carry out and more doubtful of success than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who prosper by the old order.” He was training Fabio to become mayor of the city when he would no longer be available.

  This, then, was the way things were going in Santa Vittoria for Italo Bombolini. The people had trust in him, and then as the summer went on the harvest began to look rich and strong. The grapes were plentiful and they were fat; they had the look of healthy animals. When the grapes are good, things in Santa Vittoria are good.

  If the failure of democracy at the fountain was his first error out of all the things that he did, I suppose it can be said that I was his second major error, since it was I who almost brought down his government. I came to Santa Vittoria the same morning that he was forced to take down his sign at the fountain.

  THIS MUCH should be said at once. Although Fabio della Romagna, for a time at least, later came to hate me, if it hadn’t been for Fabio I would have died. The first people to find me in Santa Vittoria that morning assumed that I was dead. One of them felt my legs and when he felt their coldness, since the blood had run out of them hours before, he took my shoes. When they sent news of the body to Bombolini he agreed with the people that it should be taken at once, before the sun was fully up, and buried some place in the rock quarry under the stones. Bombolini’s fear was that the crime, if that was what it was, would be reported to Montefalcone and then the police would come, and the freedom of the city would be endangered. He woke Fabio, and Fabio came down the steps of the Mansion of the Leaders to see about taking me to the rock quarry, and he took one look at me in the grape basket and knew that I was alive.

  They are funny about the dead in Italy. They are fascinated with death, but not with the body that death leaves behind it. Sometimes the people are so anxious to get rid of the body that errors are made. Babbaluche, who made coffins when he was not cobbling, has stories about the men and women who came to life at the sound of earth raining down on the roof of what was to be their last home. The fingernails left behind in the soft wood of the boxes, Babbaluche says, are the monuments to these silent struggles.

  Instead of taking me to the quarry, they took me upstairs into the Mansion of the Leaders and put me in a bed. I have no idea of how long I stayed there. Three or four times a day the girl, Angela, came and held my head in her lap and spooned broth and pasta and soft sopping bread into my mouth, and sometimes she poured me a small glass of wine. I had no idea that I ever would get well, nor any hope that I would. I leaned toward death. The bone in my leg had joined together, but it had come together all wrong. I would lie on the bed for hours at a time in darkness and never make a move. When it was light in the piazza, I never knew whether it was because the sun was going down or coming up.

  After some time, a week or two weeks, I began to realize that, with no effort on my part or any consciousness of it, I was beginning to understand all the shouting and calling that I heard from downstairs and from the piazza. The language of my father and mother was returning to me. I had learned it as a small boy, but later, although it was spoken in the house, I had unlearned it. I wouldn’t speak to my family in anything but English and I wouldn’t listen to them unless they spoke to me in what we called American.

  I still dreamed at night about the boy, and the fat man or his daughter would have to come and restrain me while I would cry out and pound against the wall and hide beneath my blanket, which would go wet with sweat. But I knew that somewhere I had decided to try and live when one morning the girl was late coming with the broth and I was first hungry and then anxious and finally angry with her. And when she came, surrounded by all her smells, hot broth and good bread and strong soap and the freshness of herself, I found I was smiling.

  For some reason I was ashamed of myself for smiling, as if I had no right in the world to smile. I wanted to say good morning to her and to talk with her, but I was afraid to begin. During all of this time I had allowed no one to know that I knew the language. I knew it was a dialect and that my parents must have come from some village in this region, but I didn’t even know the name of it. That’s the kind of son I had been to them. It made me ashamed, not telling them about the language. I was deceiving people who had risked themselves to aid me. I had had no bad intentions at the beginning, it was only that I was too tired and too uninterested to want to speak, and also it was a simple form of self-defense. The people would talk in front of me the way they talk in front of idiots and the deaf and small children. Only once did I come close to revealing myself.

  Bombolini and Fabio were in my room with some young men who wanted to look at me. Everyone in Santa Vittoria came to look at me at one time or another. There is very little to do here, and I was an object of curiosity. They felt my clothes, and some of them even rubbed their hands along my back or arms. I used to wonder which one of them had my shoes. I never have found out. Whoever took them will keep them in the family until I am dead, for fifty years perhaps, and when I am gone they will come out into the open with them, probably at my own funeral. That is the way they are here.

  The young men were about to leave, I had bored them, when one of them looked down into the piazza from my window and said, “Oh my God, the Malatestas are back.”

  They all ran to the window and knelt down by it, since it is a low window and looked down into the piazza. The sound of their voices and the way they sucked in their breaths made me interested.

  “It’s the tall one,” one of them said, “the snotty one. What’s her name?”

  None of them could remember at first. They all had a nickname for her, the Colt, Long Legs, the Icicle. Bombolini called her “the hawk.”

  “Caterina,” one of them finally said.

  “Caterina,” everyone said. “Yes. Caterina.”

  She was crossing the Piazza of the People toward the street that leads down from High Town and because she was wearing city shoes on the cobblestones she didn’t walk the way the other women here walk. The women here walk as if they were carrying a burden. It is not unpleasant to watch. They move s
lowly, with a kind of slow graceful power to the walk, and the motion of their bodies is as much side to side as it is forward. Both were graceful, the women of the city and this Caterina Malatesta, but their graces were of different kinds. This is not meant to demean the women of Santa Vittoria, because some of them are very beautiful, but the difference was that between a work horse and a race horse. Each has its use in the world, and its beauty, but one was meant to be used and worked and one was meant to be admired and to be ridden lightly.

  She carried two suitcases and although they appeared to be heavy no one made any effort to help her with them, and she didn’t ask for any. The women waiting in line at the fountain all saw her, but they gave no sign that they had seen her. I know little about clothes, but her clothes were of the kind that even a very ignorant person recognizes as the kind that cost money and are what is called high style.

  “The Germans must be giving them hell in Rome,” Bombolini said.

  “They only come back when they’re in trouble.”

  “They must have put her husband in jail. What was his name?” No one knew.

  “They must have killed him,” someone said, and they all nodded and were silent for a moment.

  “Look at the way she walks. Zip zap zip. Like she’s saying go screw yourself.”

  “She’s a beast. She cuts the balls off men. She’s no good for anything. If you married her you’d have fun in bed and starve to death,” they said about her. There is a saying here: What you can’t have, abuse. And this is what they were doing, but I didn’t know it then.