Seasons in Basilicata (31 page)

Not far from the pottery, we met a young man, a friend of Sebastiano's, who invited us in for a “little coffee,” which we all readily accepted. As the young man flung open his
cantina
doors, we discovered that a full bacchanalian Italian family lunch was in progress. At least four generations were seated all together at a long table spread with salads, pasta, mounds of golden bread, wine bottles everywhere, and two huge casseroles of steaming pork stew, richly spiced with
peperoncini
(of course), anise, and big chunks of the same type of mushrooms Anne and I had been given as a gift earlier that day. So a “little coffee” actually turned out to be wine, stew, bread, fruit, grappa, and then finally the coffee.

The family seemed to enjoy our intrusion, and we certainly relished their hospitality. Then Sebastiano said he'd like to show us one more little delight before we all collapsed into a wine-and grappa-induced stupor.

And so it was that we met yet another friend of his, a man who had been a potter before his recent retirement. After a little prompting from Sebastiano, he asked if we would be interested in seeing his foot-powered potter's wheel, which he kept “in storage” just outside town. Five minutes later we were all standing on a bare patch of land with amazing vistas across the Stigliano hills and even as far as the Mediterranean Sea, way in the distance near Metaponto. Close by stood a junk pile of discarded bricks and beams and old cement blocks. The potter, who bore a striking resemblance to Anthony Quinn in his
Zorba
role, pushed his way into a riot of weeds and straggly bushes and slowly pulled out an ancient and dilapidated four-foot-high contraption built out of wooden planks and metal disks. Daintily for a man of his bulk, he eased himself into
the “seat” (a triangular slab of board) and proceeded to spin a three-foot-wide circular wooden plate with his right foot, which turned a one-foot-wide potter's wheel. And with his hands crafting and sculpting nothing but air, he proceeded to show us how, in the days when he was a local professional potter, he used to create huge jugs, bowls, casserole dishes, and Greek-influenced amphora. The delicacy of his hands and fingers was such that we could almost see these finely shaped objects emerging from the nonexistent clay. Giuliano stood silently (a most unusual occurrence) watching those fingers with a childlike intensity. The potter seemed to forget we were there. His foot moved with a drumlike beat as the wheels turned and his invisible creations emerged in his mind and in his heart.

And, as if in celebration of this moment on this wild hillside with all these amazing vistas, the sun, which had been cloudbound all day, slowly emerged through a tear in the gray, bathing the whole scene in a regal light of amber and gold.

The Basilicatan Way of Death

The funeral earlier in the month had piqued my curiosity about some of the more unusual aspects of what I could refer to only as “the Basilicatan Way of Death.” So, along with my young and faithful interpreter-friend, Gino, I set out to find someone who could enhance my still-neophyte understanding of local mores and customs.

 

“I
T WAS DIFFERENT
from village to village all around here. We were like separate kingdoms then. Fifty years or more ago. The idea of ‘Italy' being one country was still strange. We all spoke different
dialetti.
Sometimes even different parts of a village would speak differently. Sometimes there was an Albanian part or a Saracen
rabatana,
and then it was very difficult to understand anything. So, one place would treat the death of a loved one one way and another place another way. But…”

Giulia Colucci paused and lowered her wrinkled face, foxy lean and wrapped tightly in a dusty black scarf. A little tighter and a little more cloth around the mouth and eyes and you'd have had an Islamic
burqa.
And this was the way our conversation went: Sudden
deluges of recollections and information followed by long reflective silences, sometimes accompanied by moist eyes or even tears as her memories jostled and her brow became more deeply furrowed, and sometimes a gentle chuckle to herself. And, once in a while, her gnarled fingers would reach out to touch mine, followed by a quick squeeze—an indication, I think, that she was surprised and pleased that anyone would take an interest in her, her life, or her memories. Oh, and very rarely, came a sudden outburst of cackling, hoarse laughter as a particularly amusing memory popped into her mind. I could tell she relished the richness of her recollection and was eager to express its often rather risqué humor. But this time her “but” obviously preceded a serious series of thoughts and memories, and Gino and I gave her all the time she needed to put them into words

“In those days it was hard,” she eventually began again. “Very hard. Today is much easier. The women now often refuse to do all the things that were once expected. If they lose a husband they even think about finding another. We didn't do that. It was not the right thing to do. ‘One husband forever into eternity,' the priests would tell us, and we never really thought about it. There was no choice. Everyone watched you to make sure you did everything right. Your mourning, years and years of deep mourning
…lutto…
everything in black—scarf, cardigan, skirt, blouse, stockings, slippers, even black underwear,
intimi.
”

“What did you actually have to do?” I asked, wanting to understand just how onerous these “black widow” obligations once were (and still were, if the odd habits of some of the Aliano widows were anything to go by). I'd seen some signs of the enduring strangeness and intensity of a death in the family in nearby Cirigliano a while back. I could still feel the shivers of doom and dread that scampered up and down my spine that day in those narrow, shadowy alleys. Echoes of howling and wailing, seemingly ceaseless, had pursued me as I tried to wriggle my way out of the intense maze around the village's ancient defense tower. The sight of twenty or more black-shrouded women raising their skinny, vein-etched arms in unison and releasing their eerie, ear-scratching screams and shrieks of
sorrow into the chill morning air was something I would carry with me to my own grave. And yet, even in the apparent intensity of all that collective emotion, I had seen flickers of ironic, Monty Python–esque humor. One old woman had stopped in mid-scream to kneel and hug a child who kept pulling at her long, black widow's weeds; another had a fit of coughing and couldn't hold her screech, so she stopped, cleared her throat with a gutteral rasp, and spat a great blob of phlegm over the terrace of the room where the dear departed lay and onto the cobbled street below; two other women, obviously exhausted by all their wailing, moved decorously to the end of the terrace and began chatting and smiling together as if they'd just met on the street on the way to the store.

While there had obviously been enormous sorrow and genuine despair in that house, I had begun to see a distinct structure in the public demonstrations of “formal” grief by some of the women, whom I felt had been invited more for their enduring howling and head-clawing abilities than for their close relationship to the deceased.

Giulia eventually began to answer my question. “Well, after the wake,
veglia,
and the funeral, the real mourning began. Years and years of it. The first two or three months were the worst. You had to stay in the house all the time, without any fire or any cooking. The family or your friends were supposed to shop for you and bring you food. You couldn't play the radio or TV, but,” Giulia added with a sly grin, “if you did, you did it very quietly and turned them off if anybody came near your door. And you wore black clothes and a black scarf all the time. Inside the house even. Sometimes it was so like a prison that you began to wonder what was worse. Dying or being left to live like this. My mother used to describe it, the way we had to live, as ‘dust delayed.' You could do nothing except cry in your house—and make sure other people outside could hear you cry—and go to church. For at least one year, sometimes two—depending on what your village said was correct—you became almost invisible. No visiting, no joining in the
feste
and processions, not even a family wedding or baptism—unless you got a special dispensation from the
priest. Even after five years you could still do very little. Wearing the black, all black, was still expected, and no jewelry or anything fancy was allowed, nothing to show that you might have forgotten your dead spouse. And this could go on and on—it often did—for more than ten years. Sometimes until you died.”

When I finally left Giulia a while later, I had developed a new respect for all those aged “black widows” I saw every day bearing their ritualistic burdens of perpetual mourning. This once-obligatory lot in life is described so powerfully by Anne Cornelisen in her book
Torregreca,
in which she likens these women to “human snails as they shrank deeper into the shells of their shawls.” However, it was also a constant reminder to me of the all-encompassing “silent endurance” of today's
terroni,
still bowed and bound by the ancient ways of Basilicata.

Soft Porn and Pasta

Death, love, emotional tirades, scandalous gossip, and infrequent moments of calm all seemed part of the daily collage of existence in these tight-knit, clannish hill villages. But food was undoubtedly the great bonding factor that nurtured and focused family life—that intricate cat's cradle of unspoken links and loyalties requiring obligatory mutual gatherings at least once and usually twice a day, no matter what emotional turmoil or angst serpentined through sibling and parental relationships. Sit, talk, drink, argue, eat, and love were the laws of familial longevity and endurance. And television. Watching television seemed to be another prime requisite of daily life, as we learned on many occasions, most memorably when we'd been invited to dinner at friends of Sebastiano's.

 

“O
OPS, THERE SHE GOES
again! Wow, she's big.
Grossa!
” Antonio, the father, ogled the television screen briefly as he sucked up long strands of
fettuccine
doused in a decadently rich sauce of
porcini,
parmesan, black pepper, and cream.

Televisions are a ubiquitous fact of Italian life. They're always
on—in bars, in restaurants, and invariably in homes, no matter how small or modest. “Oh, it's just noise,” Antonio's wife said, shrugging to display her utter indifference to the oddest mélange of hyper-emotive soaps, game shows, quiz competitions, endlessly talking heads, dubbed American movies bursting with bad language and street gore galore, and a whole menu of
colpo grosso
(soft porn) shows, which seem to generate huge ratings even though no one we met ever admitted to watching them. But then, when she thought no one would notice, her eyes strayed to the screen and between generous mouthfuls of pasta and fat, iron-crusted
crostini
(toast) dipped into a rich mix of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and garlic, she would gaze hypnotically at the oddest images. We found we couldn't resist either, particularly when, as the
secondi
platters of
saltimbocca
and salad were being served by our generous and talented hostess, a cluster of four “ordinary housewives,” apparently selected at random from a raucous audience, stripped off a garment whenever they failed to answer general knowledge trivia questions correctly.

Anne and I had no idea what kind of questions had been asked, but they must have been awfully difficult because the failure rate was remarkably high. Skirts, blouses, shoes, stockings, and ultimately bras and slips were shed with unseemly enthusiasm and regularity as the quiz master chortled and two fine, young specimens of scantily clad Italian womanhood feigned mock surprise and giggling embarrassment.

The closer the contestants came to utter nudity, and began some kind of cavorting dance with one another, the more the dinner guests tried to pretend to be indifferent to the proceedings. In fact, two of Antonio's married sons, sitting across the table from us, never once turned to look at the screen. We were beginning to admire their stoicism when we realized that their eyes seemed to be glued to a point immediately above our left shoulders. We turned and, lo, there in the large mirror hanging on the wall behind us, was a perfect reflection of the TV picture in all its promiscuous glory.

Not surprisingly the conversation was a little stilted until the show ended. Then an almost audible sigh echoed around the table
(disappointment, relief, frustration, envy, or maybe all of the above?) and someone brought up the subject of Mona Pozzi.

Anne and I had never heard of her, but she was obviously the focus of familiar heated debate. Antonio's wife kindly filled me in on the details, as voices around the table rose and tempers flared. Miss Pozzi, who, in 1994, died at the very young age of thirty-three from a liver ailment, had for years been Italy's reigning porn star. For many people she had also been a focus in the debate over that national dichotomy in male attitudes toward women—the eternal battle between lust and love, carnality and concerted worship, whore queens and Madonnas, torrid love slaves and the ultimate figure of reverence in Italy, the matronly matriarch of the family, the eternal and adored (especially by spoiled sons) mother figure.

Over grappa and fresh fruit (tiny, gorgeously sweet
mandarini
being the highlight of the night), opinions raged.

“She was a true individual. She knew who she wanted to be,” Antonio said.

The rest of the family offered alternative interpretations and comments on Pozzi's significance:

“A harlot! Nothing but a vulgar, money-hungry harlot.”

“She would have made a fine politician.”

“Didn't she run for office once?”

“She was so polite. Her manner was almost old-fashioned.”

“Everyone loved her—Fellini, Dino Ricci, DiCrescenzo…”

“Did you ever see her movies? Filthy! Obscene!”

“She came from a good Catholic family. Her father was a respected nuclear scientist.”

“Michelangelo would have loved to paint her.”

“I liked her TV ads, for those cookies with the chocolate middle. Very respectable and nice.”

“She confessed in the end and was blessed by the Church.”

“She asked for no fuss at her funeral. She wanted her ashes to be scattered on the ocean. Very simple, very pure.”

“But she had those horrible sex-talk telephone lines.”

“Yes, but she gave all the proceeds to cancer research.”

And so on. All the schizophrenia of Italian sex versus love: Madonna and beloved Mother versus lusty maiden and licentious vamp. It was almost an anticlimax when, as the grappa continued its rounds, another show started. This time it was tantalizing vignettes of nice ladies doing rather daring and naughty things in woods and up dark alleys in Naples, or somewhere equally gritty. All eyes slid surreptitiously back to the TV screen while the conversation reverted to polite, friendly, no-brainer chitchat, hopping happily from cliché to platitude and back again, all about absolutely nothing at all at just another one of those typical, everyday, Basilicatan family gatherings.

Craco—An Experience in Natural Magic

The enticements of mystery and magic are woven so naturally into Basilicatan lifeways and perceptions that they also become part of typical, everyday events, and no one really pays them much heed. Except those who experience them directly. Like me. But not Anne. She preferred to bask in what she called “the normal, everyday life of Aliano” and found my “dark side” excursions a little too macabre, if not verging on maniacal. Fortunately, after more than thirty years of marriage we had learned to celebrate our different interests in a laissez-faire manner, buoyed by mutual, if occasionally quizzical, affection. Although, in this particular instance, I did wonder if Anne's reticence might have a been wiser, and certainly safer, life-maintenance policy.

 

A
ND IN ADDITION TO
heeding Anne's warnings about my dabblings in the region's strange and mysterious heritage, I should have read Levi's text even more carefully. I had marked the one-line passage on “dual natures” in my much-marked copy of his book, but I must have been so distracted or intrigued by the idea of Aliano's
population possessing protean, shape-shifting abilities that I skipped over the context of one of Levi's brief and surprising statements.