Seasons in Basilicata (6 page)

But, for all their gentle, patronizing put-downs, I'd have welcomed any one of them there right at that moment to help me out of this rather difficult situation—what with darkness creeping in, chilly breezes filtering through the forests on either side of the road, the prospect of a cold night alone in this unpeopled wilderness, and the possibility of a long, lonely hike in the morning to find help.

I sat in the car, a little forlorn and depressed by my inability to solve my dilemma, even after lifting the hood and looking for loose wires or anything that might explain the DoDo's utter refusal to spring reassuringly to life. And as I sat, I remembered a line from Levi's book: “In this atmosphere permeated by divinity the time passed, while the angels watched over me by night and Giulia's witchcraft by day.” He was describing his perception of Basilicata's mystical nuances and his total reliance upon the local Aliano witch, Giulia Venere, who acted as his housekeeper and general protectress
from the daily vicissitudes of his life as a
confinato
(prisoner), where he floated in a metaphysical soup of unexplainable sensations and strangeness.

 

M
Y OWN STRANGENESS
began half an hour or so later, when dusk was merging into night and the last amber glows of sunset had flickered away over the far western ridges. It certainly wasn't Carlo Levi's Giulia who watched over me on that particular night, but it was definitely a woman, “a woman of the fields,” or what the northerners often referred to disparagingly as a
mezzadra
(sharecropper peasant). Not that peasants (locally referred to as
cafoni
or
braccianti
), in the ancient feudal meaning of the term, exist there anymore. And yet in some ways, for the older, now landowning
contadini
(farmers), things hadn't changed all that much in terms of the rhythms and rigor of their lives. On my mountain journey that day I'd seen them in those little rackety
furgoncini
(small vans), on tractors, in tiny three-wheel Ape trucklets, occasionally on
motorini
or perched atop donkeys invariably overburdened with twin wicker panniers full of field tools or huge bundles of wood.

Maybe I dozed off for a few minutes (there wasn't much else I could think of to do), but I awoke with a jolt to find myself staring into one of the most furrowed faces I'd ever seen, in a region renown for the furrowed countenances of its overworked
terroni.
It appeared to be an old woman. Well, I thought it must be a woman because it was wearing large gold earrings and a gold necklace, sort of gypsy style, and the hand tapping on the window had a remarkable number of rings on it.

“
Buona sera,
” I said sleepily and lowered the window.

The woman nodded and smiled a huge, toothless smile. A large wart on her chin, sprouting thick black hairs, wobbled. Her muddy, purple head scarf wafted in a faint breeze, and she began talking at such a furious pace that I couldn't discern a single word. Doubtless one of the many regional dialects in these parts, I thought, as I watched almost hypnotically as froth and bubbles collected at both corners of her mouth. I explained that I was not Italian, and once I'd
pried myself out of the DoDo, I indicated that the engine wouldn't start. I thought I should add that bit in case she was not familiar with all the complexities of today's internal-combustion engines. Admittedly a rather sexist assumption on my part but…

She kept on talking, chuckling, and chattering, and then opened the hood and began rubbing her hands over bits and pieces—the distributor, the air manifold, the radiator cap—as if seeing an engine for the very first time. I tried to do a body-language charade indicating that I needed another car to tow me to a garage somewhere, but she was still chuckling, touching, and rubbing things. Then she stopped and indicated that I should lower the hood. I started to explain that I didn't think that that was the appropriate thing to do under the circumstances, but she'd have none of it. Lower the hood, her hands indicated, and start the engine.

Oh, this is a treat, I thought. But she seemed pretty adamant, and I had no wish to offend her, so I did as she instructed. I lowered the hood, got back inside the car, turned the ignition switch, and…
Voila!
The engine started! A glorious throaty roar of new life and energy. All the little dials were flickering as they should be, the radio was playing, the engine responding beautifully as I pumped the accelerator. Wonderful. How the heck did she do that? Was it a loose wire on one of the battery terminals? Is that what all the touchy-feely stuff had been about? Yet I didn't remember seeing her hands anywhere near the battery. Anyway she'd done the trick, so perhaps it was time for thanks and maybe a gift of a few euros, if she wouldn't be too insulted.

Except, when I got out of the car, having assured myself that the engine was humming along nicely, there was no one around. Nothing. And no sign that anyone had even been there. Just that chill breeze that frilled out from the raggedy forest by the roadside.

Where had the old woman vanished to? She'd been there, as large as life. (Well, not quite large: She had had the traditional diminutive, stumpy figure of older Basilicatans.) But then she was not there. Maybe she's gone into the trees for something, I thought. I peered into the forest, but it was all very dark and tangled. I called
out, “
Scusi, Signora…dov'è Lei?
” But there was no response. Nothing but a bird chirp or two and that cold night breeze.

 

H
ALF AN HOUR OR SO
later that night I finally arrived in Castelmezzano. It was too dark to see much except a dimly lit street and, thankfully, a charming little
pensione
with a flickering restaurant sign. When I'd settled myself inside, I explained to the owner my odd little experience up in the mountains.

There was a long pause and then a sigh. I got the distinct impression that he was not keen on “the local mysteries,” as he called them, so at least I thought he'd eliminate any mysteriousness in this particular occurrence. But he didn't. In a rather tired voice he explained that some people just had “the touch.” They could put things right, heal things. Usually people, but he'd also heard that it could happen with inanimate things. “Like with your car, I suppose, too.”

“So, that's what you think maybe she had? The touch? She brought the DoDo back to life just by touching the engine!?”

“Who knows?” the
pensione
owner said, obviously wanting the conversation to end. “Things happen around here that are not easy to explain. In places like this you just don't know.”

“Don't know what?”

“Precisely,” he said.

Somewhat dissatisfied with such a nebulous response, I told the story as straightforwardly as I could to the smiling locals gathered around the restaurant bar, with none of the Italian gesticulationtheatrics used normally by locals.

The climax of the car's starting and the woman's vanishing was not greeted with the “wows!” and “amazings!” I had anticipated. In fact, there was just a series of heads nodding sagely and seriously.

“Why are you all nodding?” I asked.

After more silence, one of the men said, “Yes, I know of things like this.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Well, this…healing of things…” he mumbled ambiguously.

“Yes, of course,” I said. “Healing of coughs and headaches and things with potions and philters and tisanes. That still goes on in many places, I suppose. And the power of mystical suggestion—that's a very potent cure sometimes, too. Or even death caused by a curse…. But healing car engines!?”

C
ASTELMEZZANO

There was more silence, until another man gave an elaborate “it happens” shrug and left me just as frustrated as the
pensione
owner had.

“So, none of you is surprised at all?” I asked.

More communal shrugs. A whole bar full of shrugs.

So, I left it. Some things in these wild hills and canyons, I guess, are, as both Levi and Douglas suggested, way beyond rational explanation.

But, as an interesting postscript, I should mention that this bizarre “laying-on of hands” episode provided me with a car that never failed me again.

Of course, I still prefer to think that the old woman just spotted a loose battery wire and fixed it.

Strangeness evolved into utter fantasy the following morning.

I rose from my bed, gave thanks once again to the old woman with the “magic touch,” shuffled across the cool, tiled floor of my room, and flung open the shutters onto a scene out of some exotic fairy tale.

I had been looking for this place all my wandering life. Somewhere, sometime, in dreams, I had been there. I had entered a deep, wild country full of shadowed valleys and gorges whose depth could barely be gauged. I had climbed laboriously up ragged, rock-strewn mountainsides so precipitous that looking down was tantamount to vertigo-suicide. I had been told that way up among strange, jagged peaks with great fangs of twisted strata hundreds of feet high I would find a village so melded with the rock and built of the rock and bent and buckled like the rock that I wouldn't know it was there until I was in it. But it would be there. Waiting…

And, there it was at last, in a region of soaring white and dramatically eroded peaks, their spires and knife-like profiles slicing the clouds into long transluscent ribbons; a region they called the Lucanian Dolomites. Not as extensive as the Alpine Dolomites of northern Italy, but equally dramatic as they rose abruptly, unexpectedly, out of ancient rounded ranges. Houses, interlocked like Lego blocks, appeared nestled against and in the rock, almost like off-
spring in a kangaroo's pouch. They looked so small and vulnerable in this fantasy landscape, and yet they were tough buildings with thick, bulging stone walls and small windows to resist the wind and the cold that certainly froze the place solid in deep winters. A place that was one of the highest communities in Basilicata, set on an impressive three-thousand-two-hundred-foot ridge. Roofs were of solid stone. Where pantiles were used instead of stone, huge rocks were placed along the eaves to hold them down when the gales came shrieking from the canyons that soared up from the huge gorge of the Caperrino River far below.

There were clusters of houses crammed in under the rocks along a narrow ledge that dropped off into a hazy space only the buzzards would call home. The main street—if it can be called a street—was more like a medieval alley, sinewing across the turbulent contours. I walked down this ever-narrowing passage, under the arched fangs of rock. There was a sudden right-angle bend, and then another, each offering new vistas of peaks and canyons and clusters of buildings clinging like limpets to vertical, bare precipices. This is the kind of place, I thought, that only a madman could have fashioned. A marvelous madman though. A madman who could cram one of the most tightly packed communities I'd ever seen, laced with alleys and houses perched on houses perched on houses, into this bizarre wonderworld of topography that surrealists, even the irrepressible Dali, could never have hoped to conceive.

But there were more surprises to come.

“Have you seen Pietrapertosa yet?” the
pensione
owner asked me after breakfast, happy, I imagined, that I had put aside my search for explanations of the region's strange mysteries and was now fully appreciative of his unique village.

“I've heard of it,” I admitted.

“Well, you should. Castelmezzano here is very beautiful, but Pietrapertosa…”

 

F
OLLOWING HIS DIRECTIONS
, I wound my way out of Castelmezzano, after exhausting my supply of color film on its exotic
charms, and began a long, tortuous ascent higher into the Lucanian Dolomites.

He was right. Pietrapertosa, set even more dramatically among the jagged peaks at around four thousand five hundred feet, boasts a record as the highest community in Basilicata. Its name translates as “perforated stone,” and indeed the white fangs and peaks there,
some towering hundreds of feet over the clustered village, were liberally pockmarked with hollows and holes, bared and smoothed by millions of years of erosion and harsh climatic fury.