The Secret of Santa Vittoria (2 page)

There is no passion to the work. Fabio della Romagna, who is the only person from Santa Vittoria to have gone to the university, believes that because the priest was such a stubborn and bitter man, that once he began it he refused to leave it until it was done. This may be true, but on this one night Polenta had made a discovery that amused him and even excited him. He found that if he took a page from the Ledger, one filled with births and deaths and baptisms and marriages, from one century, and then took a page from a hundred years before or a hundred years later, it was impossible to tell which page belonged to which century. This night he had three pages on his work table, one from 1634, one from 1834 and one from 1934.

The same names were on all the pages. The same first names and the same middle names and the same last names. The same people were getting born and getting married and getting buried, and the same children were having their First Communion and receiving their Confirmation, and the same children were dying in the same old trusted ways. The rest of the world might have been changing over those centuries, but it would be impossible to prove it by Santa Vittoria.

The priest was counting the family of Pietrosanto. In 1634 there were listed in the Ledger the names of forty-six members of the Pietrosanto family. Three hundred years later there were thirty-eight Pietrosantos, but this did not include the three who had gone off to war some place and were listed as missing. After all the plagues and the wars and the disease, the fires and landslides and the fights and feuds of three centuries, after the wide-spread honey-coated arms of America, there were five fewer Pietrosantos in the city (Thank God for that much at least, Babbaluche the cobbler would have said), and almost all of them were living in the same houses on the same lanes, finding shade under the same trees that stood then, all of them, the Pietrosantos, as solid and as sturdy, as stubborn and as bullheaded as ever before.

In 1634 this city could count 1,168 souls. Three hundred years later there were thirty-nine fewer. This year the Ledger could show the same number of births but two fewer deaths, a tribute to the miracles of modern science and to the skills of Lorenzo Bara, the town doctor. The motto of Santa Vittoria: “See Doctor Bara and die.” Only nine people had died without his aid in the preceeding ten years.

Facts are facts and they are usually lifeless things, but one fact was beginning to depress the priest. The more he went through those similar names the more it became clear to him that with the exception of the Sicilian boob, Italo Bombolini, he himself was the only person who had come to Santa Vittoria by choice.

One arrives here through the natural passage of the womb. One leaves in a box of wood through the Fat Gate out to the cemetery beyond the walls of the town just above the vineyards on the terraces. In between those times you tend the vines and grow the grapes and make the wine and live the best way you can.

*   *   *

Padre Polenta would insist he didn't sleep. For men who claim not to sleep it is important for them not to be caught asleep, as if it were some kind of honor for them to go around with bags under their eyes. But the truth is that Polenta never heard the rattle of the bicycle being pushed across the cobblestones of the piazza and that the young man who was pushing it had to shout four or five times before the priest heard him and went to the window.

“If it's someone dying,” the priest shouted down, “he can die just as well in the morning.”

“No one is dying, Padre. It's me, Fabio, Fabio della Romagna.”

He didn't go away from the window because the Romagna family was one of the few in which the priest had ever been able to find any merit. They donated a fat wheel of cheese each year to the parish and some years a keg of wine.

“What do you want?”

“I want to ring the bell, Padre. I want to wake up the town.”

“It will be morning in two hours.”

“It's Mussolini, Padre.”

“Who?”

“The Duce.” Fabio shouted very loudly.

“What about the Duce? Do you want me to come down into that fog for the Duce?”

“He's dead, Padre,” Fabio called up. “The Duce is dead.”

The priest went away from the window and looked around the wooden walls of the room. It was strange to him. He lit a tallow candle and wrote in the daily log.

2:25
A.M.
Cavalcanti turns out to be F. della Romagna. I learn that the Duce is dead.

He took the candle and started down the dark steep stone steps that wound down inside the walls of the tower. Fabio met him at the door. He was tired and wet with sweat, but he was happy.

“You should see them in Montefalcone,” the young man said. He described how the people were dancing in the streets and setting fire to portraits of Mussolini and burning Fascist symbols and how the soldiers had deserted their barracks, and the police headquarters had been burned and how even the
carabinieri
had gone to the hills.

“I suppose they'll go after the churches next,” Polenta said. “They usually do.”

Fabio was shocked. “They're going into the churches to pray, Padre,” he said.

“I'm sure.”

“To give thanks for their deliverance, Padre.”

“I'm sure. Go on, go ring your bells.” He allowed Fabio to come into the bell tower, but he wouldn't help him find the bell ropes in the darkness.

“Find them yourself. I'm not going to help you,” the priest said. He wasn't sure how he felt about Mussolini. There was the Lateran Treaty; the Duce had signed it and by that act had done more for the Church than any one other leader of Italy, but the Duce had been a fool and a clown, two traits that the priest despised above all others. Had he been born God, the priest had said, it was the clowns who would occupy the lowest rungs of hell.

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.