The Secret of Santa Vittoria

by Robert Crichton

  “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.

  “One rule, Fabio. One law that must be respe
cted. Never grow old where you once have been great.”

  There was a second cheer, and this one was very loud. Bombolini turned around on the steps and came back down into the piazza.

  “I had better take a look,” he told Fabio. He began to walk toward the lane that leads to the wall. “Just a peek,” he said. “A last look and then I’ll be gone.” He was moving very fast and almost broke into a run. “Remember what I said, Roberto.” He was running by then. “I’ll be leaving myself.”

  Fabio and Roberto watched him go.

  “He’ll never leave,” Fabio said. “You’ll be gone, but Bombolini will be here.” The two of them began to walk toward the wall. “You’re the lucky one, Roberto. You’ll be gone, and he’ll grow old.”

  The next time they saw him he was on top of the wall, and the people were silent. The motorcycle had reached the foot of the mountain and it had come to a stop forty or fifty yards from the entrance to the Roman cellar. There had always been a belief here that the Germans knew, that the last great joke would be the Germans’ joke, and that their last act, while we cheered their departure from the wall, would be to destroy the cellar with the wine.

  It is the belief now that Captain von Prum stopped at the foot of the mountain to choose whether to turn left and go south toward the advancing armies or to go north toward his Fatherland and the punishment that awaited him there. He turned north and he went toward the dark open mouth of the cave and then passed it and turned onto the goat trail that crosses that part of the valley.

  Still no one cheered then, because he still could be seen. Partings to be correct must be perfect. There can be no speck of the departed left in any least part of the eye. All must be gone.

  When they crossed the valley they turned up into the higher mountains beyond Santa Vittoria. We could still see them, not the men or the motorcycle itself, but the high white plume of chalk that rose up behind them, a towering flag above the vineyards that marked the movement of the enemy through the grapes on the other mountain as surely as the wake of a ship in the sea. And then even that was gone.

  * * *

  We heard the soldiers coming before we saw them. They were hidden by the low hills that mask the River Road. They took the turn that leads down onto the cart track, where the splinters of Bombolini’s cart were still scattered on the sand, and came into our view, a long column of soldiers in battle dress led by two bagpipers wearing kilts. We watched them cross the valley and start up the mountain and when they came into the piazza they paid no attention to our cheers. They were hot and tired and thirsty.

  “Royal Sutherland Highlanders,” their leader said. Even Roberto found it hard to understand what he said. The soldiers had crowded around the Fountain of the Pissing Turtle and they looked at it but it was dry. There was no wine and there was no water.

  “Have you anything to drink?” the officer asked.

  “He wants to know if we have anything to drink,” Roberto told Bombolini. The mayor turned to the people in the piazza.

  “Do we have anything to drink?” he shouted to them. The people began to smile at each other and then to laugh. “He wants to know if we have anything to drink,” Bombolini shouted to them.

  “Do we have anything to drink?”

  There was such an outburst then, of shouts and laughter, that the soldiers became worried about us. They didn’t know what to do about us. They had never seen anything like this before. Bombolini turned to Roberto and although they were only a few feet apart he shouted to them.

  “Tell them this, Roberto,” the mayor shouted. “Tell them God yes, we have something to drink.”

  The Santa Vittoria of this novel is a real place, but none of the characters described or mentioned in the novel are real, and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  THE SECRET OF SANTA VITTORIA. Copyright © 2013 by Robert Crichton.

  All rights reserved.

  For information, address Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  eISBN 9781466851085

  First eBook edition: July 2013