The Secret of Santa Vittoria

by Robert Crichton

  He was surprised to see the Malatesta. Everyone had said that she was wasting away, it was what they wished to believe, but in truth she had never looked better to Bombolini. The hot tubs and the good food and the warm bed had not harmed her. He looked at her and when their eyes met he understood her at once. Why should she waste away because of him? Whose victory would that be? Babbaluche would have approved, Bombolini thought.

  “I’m going to do something for you,” von Prum said. “I am going to risk my entire professional future for you. We are not going to be the only Germans here, you understand. Sometime soon there will be a general withdrawal from the south and a stand will be made somewhere along a new line here. At that time there may be thousands of soldiers here. It is possible that a major battle could take place and it is possible that then the wine—oh, don’t make that face, Bombolini; we aren’t children—that the wine will be uncovered. The headquarters of my unit has already withdrawn. Records are in disorder. As commander of Santa Vittoria I am prepared to swear that the wine they find is legitimately your wine, that you have paid your share to the Reich, and the wine must not be touched.”

  Bombolini thought about the proposal, because there was in truth some merit in it.

  “Then you would be the savior of the wine,” he said.

  “Yes, you can look at it that way. I have no interest in the wine. The wine is nothing to me. You know that. But now I would like to help your people. Give me the opportunity to save your wine for you.”

  Bombolini had gotten to his feet. He wanted to leave because he was afraid of doing something ridiculous or even dangerous.

  “I cannot express how much I appreciate your generosity,” he told the captain. “Only an extraordinary man could make such a proposal. It is with a sense of true sadness that I once again must tell you that there is no other wine.”

  There was nothing for them to say after that, and they looked for ways to leave one another.

  “If you were a true host,” Caterina said to Bombolini, “you would hide some wine so he could save it for you.”

  “Do you think a trick like that would work with Captain von Prum?” Bombolini said.

  “Ask the captain,” the Malatesta said, and Bombolini looked at him.

  “No,” Captain von Prum said.

  Even the fear of the arrival of new Germans, possibly thousands of them, could not make itself felt here then. The only real fear left was Tufa. We were afraid of what he would do. If he killed Captain von Prum, even though the captain was dead to us already, the entire city could be made to pay the price for Tufa’s honor. We were very thoughtless. We didn’t think then that the one to pay the price would be someone else.

  The German had called Bombolini for a second conversation, but it was never held. Before the mayor could cross the piazza he was stopped by the ringing of the bells and after that by Capoferro’s drum and then by the people who came out of the houses into the piazza.

  “The time has come,” Capoferro shouted. “The time is now. Old Vines has made the test.”

  Von Prum came out of Constanzia’s house and was forced to fight his way through the people who were running and shouting in the piazza then and getting the carts and animals ready.

  “What’s happening? What’s wrong?” he asked Bombolini.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” the mayor told him.

  “I had wanted to see you about something important,” von Prum said.

  Bombolini gave him what we call the Fungo look, the eyes wide and staring and the mouth open.

  “To hell with that,” Bombolini said. “The harvest is on.”

  THERE IS one moment when it is right to begin to pick the grapes. One day too soon, and the grapes will have been deprived of all the richness that God intended them to receive; a day too late, and a touch of the devil’s rot begins. On the right day the last of all the possible moisture has been taken from the air and the soil and the vines and the leaves and sent to the clusters of swollen fruit. The last bit of the sun has been absorbed by the leaves to warm the juice and cause the sugar to bulge against the skins. And when that balance is reached, which is known by men like Old Vines who have roots in the soil and their soul in the vines, the time has come to pick.

  Nothing else exists for Santa Vittoria after that but the grapes.

  There is no war, there is no other world. God doesn’t exist, except as he lives in the grapes. The man who dies, for example, dies unnoticed and in silence. He goes unburied or, if the time is too long, the funeral is held and the mourners, usually only his immediate family, close the lid and run for the terraces. What tears are shed fall on the grapes and not on the grave. Children go unfed, but they understand they have no right to eat when the harvest is on. He who can move goes down to the terraces and cuts the fat grapes free from the vines and puts them in the baskets, which are carried to the carts and taken up the mountain to the wine presses where the grapes are pressed to death, only to be born in a new and beautiful form just as Christ was. The liquid runs clear and with no taste to it, into the great oak barrels which hold two thousand gallons each and are the pride of the city, since they hold the blood of the civic body. On the third day the liquid begins to storm (the word we use). The process of fermentation has begun and the grapes are struggling to be born again. The wine boils and hisses in the barrels like the waves at sea; the wine is storming. And when the storm is over, in a week or ten days, depending on the quality of the grapes, Old Vines will dip his glass into the barrel and hold it to the sun and at that moment we will know what the entire year has meant, whether we will go hungry in the winter ahead or eat when the rains and snow come.

  On the morning of the day after the wine is tasted, the harvest festival begins. If the wine is good and plentiful, the harvest can be gay and even violent and wild; but if the wine is thin and the harvest is small, the festival can be sad and even bitter.

  In the early days everyone works. Bombolini goes down to the terraces and sweats. Vittorini goes down. This year, for example, Roberto, although his leg pained him, worked with Rosa and Angela and the Casamassima family from dawn until dark and until he thought sometimes he would die. But he liked the work when it was not too painful. There was something satisfying about picking and holding the heavy clumps of ripe fruit, and he liked working by Angela’s side, sweating together in the October sun, walking up the mountain together in the coolness of the evening. Once, next to her in the darkness of the leaves, without thinking about it, he put his hands on her hips and then around her waist and kissed her on the back of the neck, and she didn’t turn or pull away or even move.

  “You shouldn’t do that,” she said.

  “Why not? I wanted to do it.”

  “We don’t do that here. The boy who does that to the girl means he wants to marry her.”

  He had said nothing at the time, but later in the day he told her that maybe he would marry her.

  “No.” She pointed to her bare feet. “Americans don’t marry girls with bare feet. Besides, what would I do there? I only know how to pick grapes.”

  “Do you know how to go to the movies?”

  “Yes.”

  “You could go to the movies. You could sit in the movies all day and play the radio all night.”

  She thought about it. “No, I wouldn’t like that. I like to pick the grapes.”

  “I was joking with you. They do more than that in America. You think about it.”

  “I like to pick the grapes. I like it here.”

  “You think.”

  To make up for the men who had been hurt by the SS, von Prum sent some of the soldiers down to work. Some of them had worked with grapes before and they were good at it. When Roberto saw Corporal Heinsick looking at Angela, watching her bend and straighten up and reach, he found that he wanted to shout at him. But then he went back to work.

  There was excitement on the terraces. No one could remember heavier grapes and fatter grapes and bigger clusters. The baskets were the
heaviest baskets ever and the presses were running behind, working finally by Longo’s light far into the night, despite the threat of planes. All day the rich juice ran from the presses down the spillways into the barrels, a rush of wine filling the barrels more swiftly than they had ever been filled before. The wine was plentiful and if it was good too it could be the finest year in the memory of any person in Santa Vittoria.

  There was excitement, but there was a humor too, since as the new wine began to run, thousands of gallons running from the presses and then a hundred thousand gallons washing down the wooden spillways, the answer to the first part of the secret, whether there was wine or not, was being spilled out in front of the Germans before their very eyes, and they were unable to see it, because they had no eyes for the wine.

  When the harvest was almost over, when the vines were stripped so naked they looked indecent on the terraces, ravaged and even castrated, Bombolini decided on a daring thing. He went across the Piazza of the People and invited Captain von Prum and the soldiers to share in the harvest festival.

  “I don’t know. I understand it’s like some kind of religious orgy. There’s a great deal of drinking, and a kind of frenzy takes over. I don’t think it would be a good idea,” von Prum said.

  “But it’s a joyous frenzy,” Bombolini told him. “There’s no bitterness then. There are no enemies at the harvest festival. Not when the wine is rich.”

  “I’ll give it thought,” the German said.

  “We’ve never had outsiders. It’s in return for your offer about the wine. The people respected that.”

  Von Prum put a finger to his teeth and stared at the ceiling. “The people respected that,” he said.

  “They felt it was generous. We want you, in fact, to be honorary marshal of the festival.”

  “It’s a very great honor,” Caterina said.

  “The greatest we have,” the mayor said.

  “What do you think?” the captain said to Caterina.

  “I don’t see how you can refuse,” she said.

  So Captain von Prum, in his soldiers’ name, accepted the offer to come to the festival.

  “I suppose you will want us in our dress uniforms,” he said.

  “It would honor the people,” Bombolini said. “We’re going to allow you to carry the statue of Santa Maria in the procession. And to press the last of the grapes. To tread on them in the old way, for tradition. The last of the wine.”

  “It’s you who are generous,” von Prum said. “You understand the art of forgiving. It is something I am only learning.”

  Bombolini prepared to go.

  “Some of the traditions are a little strange and I hope you understand that,” the mayor said. “It would dishonor the people if you didn’t go along. We’re very strong on our traditions.”

  Captain von Prum promised to obey.

  THE 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.