Seasons in Basilicata (45 page)

I looked around. I couldn't tell if any of this was having an impact. Anne was certainly still looking distinctly uncomfortable. So, I decided on a wrap-up, over-the-top fanfare.

“Imagine a huge promotional campaign. Ah, let's say, something like: ‘Basilicata is Beachland—Europe's Finest Retirement Haven! Send us your thousands of cold, miserable old-age pensioners from the North and let them find a new life of luxury (relatively speaking), fresh air, fine beaches and ocean, some of the best food and fruit in Europe right on their doorsteps, and a climate that will let them bask in sunshine and happiness for the rest of their days at a price they can all afford…'”

There was silence except for tabletop tappings and slow slurpings of wine.

“Well,” said the banker, “what about culture? And family ties?”

“Florida had no culture,” I said, maybe a little cruelly, “and that didn't seem to be a problem. And families can come down to visit their retired relatives on the Basilicatan coast via those two fast national highways.”

More silence.

“Or, maybe not,” I concluded a little weakly, as my learning curve seemed to be getting a little limp. “I was just suggesting that if you tried to look at the South's problems in a larger context…”

The banker looked very unconvinced. He opened a shoulder bag he'd used to bring fresh chestnuts to the party, pulled out a neatly folded brochure, and handed it to me. “Perhaps,” he said a little pompously, “you should read this part of a report, just printed, which describes our future. It's in English.” I took the report. Below a fine glossy photograph of Basilicatan scenery, I read yet another masterpiece of utterly obfuscated Italianish:

I read it slowly, aloud, to the group. There was considerable nodding of heads and mumbles of affirmation. Had they understood any of this? Were there secret code words in this nonsense apparent only to the enlightened. Beyond a brief reference to the recent discovery of oil, I could decipher nothing whatsoever from all the gobbledygook. And I sensed that it was not just a bad translation but yet another example of that Italian knack for smothering logic, thought, and action in layers of gushy, romantic, and often incomprehensible rhetoric.

I was reminded of yet another outspoken Norman Douglas tirade about Italian mores, and against Italian bureaucrats, written almost a century ago but apparently still remarkably accurate:

The bank manager obviously thought differently about the contents of the brochure and was beaming. “So,” he said a little too complacently, “as you can see we already have our plans for Basilicata. You have just read them to us.”

Sebastiano, God bless him, smiled at my open-mouthed confusion, saw my need for moral support, and gave it fully. “I think what David is saying is a very good way to look at things. More optimism. Bigger ideas. In the South, we often see things in too narrow a perspective. In my school, for example, I'm trying to…” and off he went, explaining another project for “international understanding” between young students. The wine bottle was passed around again. We were back in more familiar territory now. Everyone respected Sebastiano's enlightened educational ideas, so I was off the hook. Anne was noticeably relieved, and on we went into the night, or actually early morning, with lively conversation flowing as fast as the wines, reflecting Anne Morrow Lindbergh's admiration of the irrepressible Italian spirit for “enjoying each moment to the full, the spontaneity of the now, the vividness of here.” A popular Italian proverb puts it more succinctly: “
stoga o schiatta
” (“relieve yourself or bust,” or, in more delicate terms, “live in the ‘now' without excessive self-restraint”). And Margherita's friends certainly needed no reminder or encouragement to do precisely that.

Eventually, at around two in the morning, Sebastiano decided that it was time we should leave as we had a long drive back to Aliano. So, Anne and I said our farewells to a room full of new friends who looked as though they had no intention of leaving the wines and the chestnuts until dawn rose over Margherita's and Tori's six thousand olive trees and turned all their leaves a shimmering silver pink.

A really fine evening, I thought to myself, as we climbed into bed at around three-thirty
A.M
. and set the alarm clock for a late morning's rise. No point in getting worn out, I thought. No point at all. This is Italy and we need all our strength for the next bout of gastronomic exploration, rhetorical verbosity, and overindulgence.

Va bene.

The Strangeness at Missanello

Anne decided that at least one whole day of doing nothing was needed to recover from the feast at Margherita's and Tori's estate. I knew from past experience that the only way to clear the persistent fuzziness from my head and the torpor from my body was to get out into the fresh air and focus on something other than my debilitating condition.

I decided to take a drive and explore a nearby hill village, a perfect fantasy perched on a butte that, at night, sparkled with lights like an enormous Christmas tree at the narrow end of the Agri valley.

Once again I should have prepared myself by remembering a quotation from Levi's book: “There were women in the village who displayed a tendency to be free and easy, and who were concerned with all that pertained to love, above all the means of obtaining and retaining it. They were like beasts, the spirits of the earth. In a word, they were the witches.”

By this time, I felt familiar, even comfortable, with the presence of local witches although, thanks to the reticence of our bank manager, we had still yet to meet Aliano's Maria. But, on this particular day, things became a little clearer. And weirder…

 

F
OR AN
I
TALIAN
, even a Basilicatan, funeral, it seemed a strangely colorless affair.

Unlike others I'd seen, either as an invited participant (one) or as an impromptu spectator (three), this funeral had none of the small-town pomp and priggery that can characterize such affairs. None at all. There was no band with serpentine euphonia that seemed to be squeezing the life out of their neatly uniformed players, or reedy clarinets fingered with adolescent intensity by girls who, you sensed, would much rather be dancing to techno or house in next-to-naked little black dresses at the local disco, the only problem being that, in that part of the country, discos were something of a rarity. (The kids stoically shrugged off this gap in their
cultural coming-of-age as something passé anyhow, although you feel, you know, that deep down they're thinking, “Just wait till I break loose and move to Bologna.”) So, no band. And not much in the way of flowers either. Just a couple of well-past-their-sale-date wreaths and a few small cellophane-wrapped bouquets, which, judging by the flowers that had been squeezed out of their packaging, seemed definitely on the weary side.

The crowd appeared weary too, by the look on their strained faces. And not much of a crowd either, compared with others I'd seen. Usually one expected half the village to turn out, which, while not a large number in the case of the tiny hilltop community of Missanello, would certainly have been more than twelve. Twelve was a definite rarity at a funeral, and an insult to the meager family who were edging ever closer to the small cemetery in clothes that, while not exactly what you might call field garb, were certainly a long way from the dark Armani and Versace rip-offs that seemed to be de rigueur at such events.

I decided to skip this one. Something was definitely not right, and I felt far too conspicuous hovering around such a small and select gathering. So, I explored the village instead, huffing and puffing up near-vertical alleys and interminable sets of steps that twined and shifted direction with all the whimsical arbitrariness of an inebriated snail. Or maybe that was me. My pace certainly had little more alacrity to it than that of a snail and I didn't even have to carry my own house on my back.

Before reaching the tiny piazza by the castle on the summit, I was ready for a restorative pick-me-up, but the only coffee bars I'd noticed were down at the bottom of the hill. But I did see two other things up there. First, the stunning vista across the valley and the surrounding ranges, with Pollino and her cohorts rising high in the afternoon haze—always a beautiful sight and even more so there because of the height of the village and the fact that there was nothing in the foreground to block or reduce the scale of the panorama. As I peered over the parapet by the castle I felt myself to be floating in that warm, sparkling light that filled those valleys in the late afternoons.

The second thing I saw was the cars. Parked in a piazza barely big enough to make a three-point turn were half a dozen cars. Admittedly they were small cars—no fat, faddish Mercedes and the like—but I was flummoxed as to how they'd even got there because every street I'd climbed was either too narrow for cars or consisted primarily of steps.

Most odd, I thought.

And even odder was the intensely whispered debate I overheard when I finally reached the bottom of the hill again and ordered my
caffe Americano
(a watered-down espresso, that's all, but at least for the same price you get a regulation cup–size of brew and not one of those meager, throat-jarring thimblesful of black tar).

The young man behind the counter seemed happy to practice his English. I suggested to him that everyone in the bar seemed very serious, with none of the typical oratorical flourishes of
passatella
or epithet-laced bouts of
scopa
or
briscola
card games.

Then the young man looked serious himself and started whispering something to me about a problem with the funeral.

“You mean the one…the one I saw up the hill?”

He nodded and may even have winked.

“Why? What's the problem?”

He paused. These villages and villagers have their secrets. Strange things happen here for even stranger reasons. In fact sometimes I wondered if secrets were the invisible glue that bound them up in their individuality and created lifelong and clublike bonds of loyalty and pride and a mutual
omertà-
like silence. I imagined he was thinking that no matter how much he wanted to try out his foreign-language skills, sharing village secrets with a stranger who would be gone as soon as his coffee cup was empty might not be advisable in the long run. I sensed his hesitation, so I ordered an anise chaser, in the hope that he might realize I wasn't your typical sup-'n'-run customer and maybe release his inhibitions.

It worked. At least to the extent that I could disentangle his English vocabulary from the local dialect, which was incomprehensible not only to me but doubtless to most outsiders, even if
they lived only a few miles away, in villages you could see across the valley.

But the bits that did filter through the linguistic morass, as I sipped my anise and he cleaned his espresso machine, pretending he really wasn't talking to me at all, were rather revealing. Apparently, if I understood the snippets correctly, the unfortunate middle-aged gentleman whose funeral I'd almost interrupted, had not died of natural causes but rather of a curse, a spell, that had been placed on him by a jealous woman.

“Someone in the village?” I asked, sensing a real gossip scoop here.

He shook his head violently as if to say, You're crazy! We don't allow witches to live in our village. “No, no” he whispered. “One of the peddlers. A woman who visits here and makes—cooks—special medicines for peoples.”

“You mean herbs and things? To cure coughs.”

He chuckled. “No, not coughs. Other things. Things for…love. Things to…change things. And maybe to kill you, too!”

“She killed him?!”

He frantically waved his hands behind the counter in a “for God's sake, keep it quiet” gesture, and edged closer across the bar. “They say she was his…girlfriend. But he didn't want her anymore. There was someone else instead…another little
avventura
” (that typically masculine word for an illicit affair).

“So…”

“So…I don't know. That's what these men are saying.” He indicated the half dozen or so men whispering together by the doorway

“That she poisoned him?”

He gave a splendidly “don't quote me” Italian shrug.

“So, that's why the funeral was so small.”