Seasons in Basilicata (22 page)

“Yes, I suppose it is. And even today we still have many of the same problems: poor housing for lots of people, poor weather and crop prices, young people leaving so no one to work the fields, higher and higher costs for things, for everything. And corruption—even here in this small village. And of course, taxes, always more taxes! Ah,
la vita è così
[that's life]. But…well, I like to remember the good things, too.”

“Can you tell me some?”

More silence and ruminating. Then suddenly Felicia's face brightened, and the laugh lines around her eyes crinkled again. “Well, I remember me, my sister Gina, and my two brothers all cuddling together in bed with our mother when it was cold. And she was always warm. So warm, like a big thick blanket. It was so cozy and safe. We never wanted to get out of bed. Oh, and the baby lambs: When they came in the spring we used to play with them and take them for walks with bits of string around their necks. And playing in the street, too. All of us young ones, with mothers sitting outside in the shade watching us and chatting and laughing. The whole street was like one big room for us all. In the warm times everyone was outside. We only went inside for eating and sleeping. Sometimes only sleeping. And the pizza bread! Not like today, with all kinds of stuff piled on it. This was just leftover pieces of dough our baker cooked with a bit of tomato sauce spread over it and maybe a few gratings of cheese. And we ate it warm, rubbed with garlic and hot peppers…and, oh, it was so good. One of the best tastes. And my mother's
orecchiette,
little pieces of pasta dough she pressed with her thumb into tiny cup shapes that she filled with hot tomato sauce—her special
conserva di pomodoro
—and our own olive oil, a lovely bright green color. That was so, so very good.”

“Sounds delicious,” I said. And I knew it was. We'd made the
same dish a few times in our apartment, and we'd learned, over and over again, how little it takes to create a fine, filling meal without meat or any fancy accompaniments…except maybe a little parmesan cheese and some of that palate-scorching Alianese hot
peperoncini
sauce to add piquancy and a definitive palate-punch.

“Oh yes, it was, it was,” she said. And then slowly and with many pauses, she continued to describe the small, happier details of her early life, emphasizing the bonds of affection and love among family members, their endurance in the face of regular onslaughts of misfortune—the shared sorrow of a child's passing or the death of a grandparent—but also their deep belief that a far better life awaited them in the hereafter. She told me of the joy of gift-giving at Christmas and other festivals: not store-bought gifts—there was rarely any money for such luxuries, she emphasized—but small items they all secretly crafted themselves, like stuffed balls of cloth with silly painted faces, small stick figures carved out of bits of old olive branches, bonnets made with shards of old cloth, cut and stitched with colored threads and ribbons. And a special favorite of Felicia's: fragments of a broken mirror she'd once found, which she pressed into balls of moist red clay and decorated around with small colored stones she'd picked up along one of the village paths and then left to bake rock-hard in the scorching summer sun. “Everybody loved those,” she said, her eyes watering a little. “So simple to make but so pretty. They were all over our home. And I gave them to all my friends. I still have one…” She looked around her one-room house but couldn't seem to remember where it was. “…somewhere.”

 

T
HERE WAS SO
much more to learn about Felicia's life: her schooling, her work, her romances and marriage, her life as a wife, mother, and grandmother.

“Please come back,” she told me. “You make me remember some nice things. Oh, and things really are a little better today,” she said with one of her warm smiles. “You have to learn to live, you know, with what you have around you. Otherwise you'll never
be happy. It may not be much compared…to other people, but my mother used to tell us all, ‘Happy thoughts make happy people.'”

When I left her tiny home, promising to see her again, I carried her simple reminder with me, deciding that our world desperately needed all the Felicias it could find.

Two Hundred Dollars in Thirteen Uneasy Steps

Despite Felicia's optimism, some things in the South still seem to be entrenched in ancient and obscure rituals. Particularly things bureaucratic—anything that involved endless paperwork or protracted “power-pyramid” procedures. Like obtaining cash—a simple operation nowadays, in most places with ATMs and the like. But when it came to items like traveler's checks, one had to be prepared for a laborious multistep fandango of farce and occasional fury.

 

I
WAS OUT
of cash once again, and at the one bank in Stigliano that seemed to be open, the cash machine was broken. Or something like that: There was a long notice taped to the front of it and covering the slot where you put your card in, so I guessed it was broken. But why all the verbiage? Well, I reminded myself, this is Italy, and loquaciousness is the name of the game here…except inside the bank itself, where the staff spoke in terse,
monosyllabic phrases and made you feel like customers were the last thing they wanted inside their elaborately baroqued bastion.

F
ELICIA

And that was Step One: getting inside. I thought I'd stepped into some kind of revolving door, but once I was in the glass cylinder, the sliding door closed quickly behind me and I found myself being stared at like a goldfish in a bowl by video cameras and a very officious, overuniformed young man, who, scowling furiously, looked me up and down—presumably to discern where I had hidden my Uzi automatic. (I certainly was left in no doubt where his was.) Then he nodded and pressed some hidden button. The inner glass door whizzed open, and I left the cylinder and entered the bank itself.

Step Two: Another uniform, demanding (I think) precisely what I wanted in his bank. I waved my traveler's checks in his face. He took them from me, looked at them scrupulously, held them up to the light, and appeared very suspicious. “They're American Express,” I said, assuming the revered name would transform his attitude into one of fawning subjugation. Unfortunately, it seemed to have just the opposite effect. He handed them back to me with two fingertips, holding them like a fish that had been out of the ocean for far too long. He pointed to a cubicle. I looked longingly at the counter, but I guessed I had to visit the cubicle first.

Step Three: An empty, very small, very tidy cubicle—so tidy, in fact, it looked as if no one had ever worked in it—but definitely empty. I peered back at the uniform and he nodded serenely. Apparently this was where I was supposed to be. So I stood and stood and then thought, there's one chair in here, so I might as well use it. And just as I was lowering myself onto its cushioned seat, in walked an elderly man immaculately dressed as only elderly Italian men can dress. He stopped abruptly and looked at me in amazement. “
Ah, mi scusi,
” I said, and immediately stood back up. Obviously it was his chair. “
Prego,
” he said very slowly and disdainfully, and brushed the chair's seat carefully before sitting down and extending an elegantly manicured hand.

I gave him the traveler's checks. “Two, please. I'd like to cash two hundred-dollar checks, please.”

Just like the Uzi-wielding security guard, he gave the checks a very detailed analysis. I felt sorry for American Express. They'd gone to so much trouble to make their checks look utterly foolproof and forge-proof, with little holograms and watermarks and all kinds of fancy colors and shiny bits, and yet this fellow obviously thought that I might be trying to pull a fast one on him. He examined them as meticulously as Berenson would have his beloved Renaissance artworks for the slightest sign of artifice or forgery.

Eventually he seemed satisfied, so I pulled out my pen and started to countersign them.

“No, no, no!”

Apparently I was not supposed to countersign yet. He seemed most upset, again. I was obviously making his day very difficult. He pulled a long form out of a drawer and said in petulant English, “Fill, please.”

I looked at the form. It was worse than an IRS tax sheet, and of course all in Italian.

“I don't read Italian,” I said.

He'd obviously had this problem before, and I gathered he hadn't enjoyed the experience. He sighed resignedly and then with an extended manicured index finger, led me from line to line.

“Last name here. First name here,” etc. I think I had to fill in at least twenty different items of information, some of them so personal that at one point I almost rebelled. “Why do you possibly want to know my mother's birth date?”

“Please, fill in,” he said in an utterly weary voice. I couldn't remember the year, so I invented it.

He checked my responses, again with that suspicious grimace, and finally dragged out a large, red stamp and stamped each of the four copies.

Again I prepared to sign the checks.

I could have sworn he was chuckling with glee behind that stoic, bureaucratic façade when he made it clear that I had now graduated to…

Step Four: I had to sign them somewhere else. At the counter.
And the queue was long, except it wasn't really a queue at all but rather a typical Italian huddle of first-off-the-line-wins contenders. My reluctance to involve myself in queue-jumping meant that it was fifteen minutes before I reached the counter to find…

Step Five: My counter clerk rapidly disappearing out of his seat. I looked at the other clerks, but they were either involved with customers or taking one of those gesticulate-and-shout breaks that no one interrupted or would ever dream of interrupting.

Six minutes, and still no clerk. Then I saw my elegant form-man passing by. I gave him one of those “what the heck is going on here?” gestures. (I was being very Italian—spread arms, open palms, open mouth, and raised eyebrows.) He completely ignored me.

Finally the clerk returned with no explanation or apology—in fact, he looked at me as if
I'd
kept
him
waiting. I showed him the two hundred-dollar traveler's checks and said, “I sign, right?”

He nodded wearily, but at least I was finally able to sign.

He studied the countersignature and then my signature on the form, and then he peered at my original signature. Perhaps in my haste and frustration at the whole process, I had penned a signature that was not identical to the original, but I was fed up. “Look, I've been here for almost forty minutes,” I said. “Will you please just give me the money?”

He obviously didn't understand the words, but he got the meaning. It didn't work. Hence the final eight steps.

Step Six: Clerk goes off to have someone else verify the signature. (Guess who? Of course. The man with the manicure.)

Step Seven: Clerk returns but seems to have lost the latest dollar/euro rate sheet. Goes off again.

Step Eight: Laborious calculations on a dollar-store calculator that appeared to keep giving him different answers each time.

Step Nine: Clerk finally decides that three consecutive and identical figures must be right. Fills in yet another form with the figures. Opens up cash drawer.

Step Ten: Clerk counts out cash. Interrupted by phone call. One
of those very verbose calls. Loses count with talking. Stops counting and just talks.

Step Eleven: Clerk puts phone down. (It was obviously a woman. He looked quite starry-eyed.) Starts the recount.

Step Twelve: Clerk pushes money out under grill. At last! I don't even bother to check the cash. I just turn and walk away (run, actually).

Step Thirteen: Clerk calls me back and points to yet one more piece of paper, my receipt. I look at him very intensely, and I trust that he has no doubt whatsoever as to where I am willing him to shove that final little bit of paper.

But wait. There weren't thirteen steps; there were actually fourteen. I forgot to mention the power cut (somewhere between steps six and nine). Admittedly a very brief one. Less than ten seconds. But enough to cast the whole bank into a cavelike gloom before the lights turned back on automatically. Unfortunately, the computers did not. Maybe they hadn't heard of surge protectors or backup batteries in Italy. So there the computers sat, dozens of identical gray-plastic boxes, utterly impotent, with their little blank screens as black as the mood that had suddenly descended on tellers and customers alike. And it was obvious that this was a regular occurrence. Far too regular, by the look on everyone's faces. But the exasperating thing was that nobody seemed to know what to do next except throw their arms up in frustration and start lighting cigarettes. Apparently a computer blackout negated all the No Smoking signs pinned to the walls. At least for the staff. I noticed the Uzi-toting guard stride to a young male customer in line, who was just about to flick his Bic and light a rather wrinkled cigarette he'd pulled from behind his ear, and order him to desist. The young man pointed out that the tellers were all puffing away like burgeoning Bogarts, but his appeal sort of faded away as he noticed the guard's itchy trigger finger.