Murder In Matera

by Helene Stapinski

  If there was enough work and pay, a good night’s dinner consisted of a round loaf of bread, cut usually by Vita’s father, placed up against his chest, the knife making its way toward him, but stopping just short of a nipple-ectomy. The bread—never enough to go round—was rubbed with a found pepper or maybe some garlic and a quick brush of olive oil. And if they were really lucky that day, a bit of crushed tomato or a few olives.

  It was placed on one big plate in the middle of the small wooden table. There were many mouths to feed. Vita’s siblings, her grandmother and grandfather. Domenico, if he was not off on the masseria. You shared your space, everyone sleeping and eating in that one room. If you weren’t fast, you didn’t get any food. But Vita was smart and quick. She got some. Though never enough to satisfy her. There was an Italian saying that went, “You’ll never be sated with bread and olives.” And it was true. It was never enough for Vita.

  Until she was four years old, Vita slept in a small hammock above her parents’ bed, where her mother could easily reach up and rock her daughter when she cried out in hunger, that black hole in her belly growing deeper and wider with each passing hour. Sometimes she cried out in thirst for water that wasn’t there. Teresina soaked a sponge in wine to quench her thirst, like the Romans had done to Jesus on the cross. But that’s if there was any wine.

  Usually, Teresina just sang her daughter a lullaby, because lullabies were free. The town favorite was “Ninna Nanna,” which never failed to get Vita to sleep, her thirst fading only when she faded.

  Do the ninna, do the nanna

  Your real mother is the Virgin

  Do the ninna, do the nanna

  The wolf ate the little sheep

  Oh, my little sheep

  What did you do

  When you saw yourself in the mouth of the wolf,

  Who ate the skin and who ate the wool?

  Poor little sheep how it screamed.

  Sleep, my sweet friend

  sleep for a long time

  and don’t make me suffer.

  II

  DISCOVERY

  Chapter 9

  THE TRUTH ALWAYS RISES TO THE TOP

  THE PALM TREES ON THE CORSO WERE TALLER, STRETCHING into the powder blue sky. They had grown over the past ten years, just like my children had back in Brooklyn. I couldn’t believe a decade had passed, but here I was, back in Bernalda. It was the fall of 2014. I was here on a solo vacation, a mommy break, I told people. Though it was really a reconnaissance mission: to poke around for a week and see if it was finally time to take another stab at finding the family murder.

  Bicycles had taken over. In many of the other hill towns, like Pisticci, you couldn’t ride a bicycle because of the steep hills. But Bernalda was flat and perfect for biking. In typical Bernaldan boldness, the cyclists rode without helmets in the center of the mile-long Corso, defying the gods and the drivers at every turn. It was a miracle more people weren’t lying dead in the middle of the street.

  Gaggles of local boys, in jeans and gaudy T-shirts with gold swirly American slogans that they didn’t understand, roamed the main drag. Girls pushed baby carriages or moved in giggling groups, trying to get a look at the groups of boys. Old café owners in white aprons swept the still-spotless pavement outside.

  A few more tourists had arrived in Bernalda, since Francis Ford Coppola had opened a luxury hotel, Palazzo Margherita, on the main Corso. Coppola’s family had grown up just a few blocks from Via Cavour, on Via Eraclea.

  The new hotel was an old palace built the very same year Vita had left for America, 1892. It had nine rooms, a private courtyard, a Baroque fountain, and a fragrant garden filled with jasmine, lilac, and rosemary. Its outdoor bar was the new hotspot in town.

  Coppola’s hotel rates were too expensive, especially for a peasant town. At five hundred euros a night, it was more than my immigrant ancestors had made their entire lives. I decided to stay on a farm outside of Pisticci, in an old masseria called San Teodoro Nuovo, on the Metapontan plain. I hadn’t spent much time in the Materan countryside last time around—had only glimpsed it from hilltops and through car windows—and thought it might be a good idea to see what it was like up close, since my ancestors had spent so much time on the farm.

  I chose San Teodoro because it looked like the Garden of Eden on its website, and in real life it looked even more so. I arrived between olive and grape harvesting time, driving past pomegranate trees, stretches of kiwi and strawberries, cornfields, red prickly pears, and row after row of twisted grapevines and mournful olive trees. I kept all the windows to my rental car wide open and let the fragrant air wash over me.

  The farm was incredibly lush, with palm trees and flowering cactus and tall pine and olives and figs, the air sweet from its lemon and orange groves. I had forgotten how beautiful it was down here; when you first arrived, how striking it could be. I had known, through memory, but seeing the landscape again was like being Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, stepping out of the black and white of reminiscence and into the colorful reality that was Basilicata.

  It was October and I was the only guest at the farm/bed and breakfast. The days were warm and gentle, what the Italians called Ottobrate—their version of Indian summer.

  A tight-knit group of farmers helped till the red soil of San Teodoro, which still produced fruit, vegetables, olive oil, grapes, wheat, jam, and honey—much of which was served in the dining room on the premises, in the old stable, across from my room.

  The soil here was called precoce and was rich in iron, which helped crops grow at twice the rate as on other farms in the area. Pisticci’s soil was more clay based and its fields broken up by the calanchi, which quickly eroded in the rain. Bernalda’s land was better and flatter and more fertile than Pisticci’s, though not as good as Metaponto’s.

  In the eighth century BC, just after Homer’s Odyssey was written, the Greeks began arriving and colonized the area in what became known as Magna Graecia. They came because the land was so fertile.

  The Roman poet Horace, who had been born in Basilicata in the first century BC, wrote of “the rich wealth of the countryside’s beauties,” of long, sloping valleys, safe woodland groves, golden fields, green sprays of vine, dark figs, and flowing honey.

  Some believed the founder of Metapontum was Epeius, the soldier who built the Trojan horse. So entrenched was the Greek culture here that one of the most popular surnames was Grieco. And still, millennia later, many of the Griecos were well-off and owned much of the land.

  Being in the middle of the countryside here for the first time gave me a new perspective. It was so gorgeous and lush that it occurred to me that maybe Vita loved it amid the citrus and pines, the grapes and olives. Life in the country seemed so much better than life in Bernalda.

  Of course, I wasn’t harvesting crops, slaughtering animals, and pressing olives beneath a giant stone wheel.

  A RUSTED CHAIN STRETCHED ACROSS THE ENTRYWAY. NO GUARDS. No visitors. Just a few small lizards darting back and forth. I hopped the chain and made my way down the path past the fluffy white and pink oleander bushes, which were planted everywhere in the area because they were so easy to maintain. They didn’t need a lot of water or love, but they looked bright and cheerful and smelled like giant bouquets of bubble gum. But the oleander was deadly poisonous. Local legend was that when foreign troops invaded, they sometimes used the oleander branches to cook their meat over the fire—accidentally poisoning themselves.

  Even the plants were lethal weapons here.

  Ten years ago, I had become so obsessed with finding Vita’s story that I hadn’t been able to enjoy the beauty of Basilicata. This time, instead of going to the archives and the cemetery, I visited all the tourist spots, and even stopped to smell the deadly flowers.

  Past the oleander, at the end of the path, I found what I was looking for: the pillars. The area’s most famous ruins were the fifteen Doric columns in Metaponto, left over from a grand temple to Hera, Zeus’s wife. It was known as T
avole Palatine, and had been built in the sixth century BC. Some locals believed it had been built on the site of Pythagoras’s home, to pay tribute to him after his death. Though no one was paying tribute these days.

  For people who live in Basilicata, visiting the Greek ruins is like a New Yorker visiting the Statue of Liberty. It just wasn’t done. She was there, all the time, staring at you from the harbor, but you just appreciated her from afar.

  Over at the deserted archeological park in Metaponto was a temple to Athena, a sanctuary dedicated to Apollo and a rounded amphitheater. In Metaponto and nearby Marina di Pisticci—and even in Bernalda—streets were named after the Greek and Roman gods and goddesses: Via Atena, and Hera, Neptune, and Hercules. And one named Ulisses, the Roman name for Odysseus, who had traveled in nearby waters in The Odyssey.

  With Odysseus in mind, I headed over to the beach. It hadn’t changed much since my last visit, and probably not a hell of a whole lot since Spartacus’s time here, either. The sea was tranquil and turquoise, the sand powdery and soft. Again, there were no tourists. Which was fine with me. I had the whole stretch of beach and Ionian Sea to myself.

  I ate a solitary picnic of soppressata, mortadella, runny burrata cheese, triangles of tangy provolone, and some local peasant bread, all wrapped in a dish towel, the waves quietly lapping against the shore—the only sound for miles.

  I looked out into the Ionian Sea and thought of Odysseus, sailing from spot to spot over ten years during his odyssey. Ten years. How could ten years have passed since I had been here last? It seemed only months ago I had been chasing the kids on this same stretch of sand. They were eleven and fifteen now, in middle and high school. My job raising them was nearly done. Most of the time, they didn’t want me around so much, which made me waver between deep despair and incredible relief. It was like I had finally been reissued the driver’s license to my life, but I wasn’t sure what direction to drive.

  Though my children didn’t seem to be exhibiting any antisocial traits, I was still slightly nervous that they might take a wrong turn. It was every mother’s nightmare that you’d wind up with a bad egg, no matter how much you loved or cared for them. And with my family’s track record, it wasn’t such a crazy nightmare to have.

  But I would be gone only a week. They wouldn’t turn to a life of crime in such a short period of time. I would just enjoy myself and learn what it was like to be me again—without them by my side.

  In the distance I saw a small wooden building amid some palm trees, like an oasis. Maybe it was a new restaurant. I pulled my shorts over my bathing suit, covered my picnic and left it on the sand, then headed toward the bent palms.

  As I got closer, I saw a young guy and an older man sitting at a table next to the rounded lido building, which had a thatched roof and porthole windows. “Ciao!” I yelled, waving. I walked up and introduced myself and said I was from New York doing research on my family. We shook hands.

  “My name is Leonardo,” the young man said. “Leo to my friends.” He had dark curly hair and was dressed in a blue linen oxford and ripped faded jeans. His eyes were sad and his smile was guarded and more of a smirk, like the one we had in my family. “This is my place,” he said, waving his arm, “Riva dei Ginepri.” Thatched roof umbrellas hovered over small square restaurant tables, two white-cushioned wicker couches, and a few brown beanbag chairs, all part of a Hamptons-like lido with a bar, restaurant, and rented beach chairs. The place was empty, the season just ended.

  Leo explained that ginepri meant juniper and showed me that the area behind the beach was filled with juniper trees studded with tiny berries—which were typically used to make gin. Legend was that centuries ago, right on this spot, Saracen pirates had invaded, but were conquered by the wily locals who had hidden behind the juniper trees and then launched a surprise attack. These days, it was a trendy summer spot for the few tourists who wandered past, the place where Sofia Coppola had had her pre-wedding cocktail party.

  I told Leo my own story, about Vita Gallitelli and Francesco Vena killing someone and about the name Grieco. He opened his eyes wide and exclaimed, with a full-on bright smile this time, “My family is Grieco! That is my family story!”

  I had been waiting to hear this sentence for a decade. And I actually took a step back in the soft sand. I looked at him through narrowed eyes and laughed. “Really?” I didn’t believe him. Though I wanted to. Was this guy for real?

  “My grandmother on the Grieco side used to tell us a story about a family murder involving a Gallitelli woman and a Vena man,” he said, excitedly, talking with his hands. “I don’t know any of the details. It’s been years since I heard it. But I will ask my mother,” he promised.

  “Maybe we’re related,” I said, laughing and shrugging.

  “You look very Greek,” he said to me. “Grieco. Even the design on your bathing suit is Greek.” I looked down at the turquoise blue wave motif cresting across my chest.

  “Oh yeah, I guess I never noticed that before,” I said, smiling, my hand across my breasts.

  “We are probably cousins,” he said, spreading his arms out. I thought for a minute he might hug me, but we had just met, and I was wearing a bathing suit after all. So I didn’t lean in. I didn’t want to give Leo the wrong impression, that I was a puttana like Vita.

  But I took his number and his email address and told him that we would meet again before I left for America. “It’s just a matter of time before you find your story,” he said. “In Basilicata, there’s a saying that goes, ‘La verità viene sempre a galla.’ The truth always rises to the top.”

  Chapter 10

  TAKE A COFFEE

  NIGHT FELL AND BERNALDA CAME ALIVE. IT WAS AS IF THE town were full of vampires, who only came out after dark. Mopeds, bicycles, and Vespas sped past, young women and men laughed and moved in unison like schools of fish down the street. The cafés were packed. Passeggiata was in full swing.

  In the chic outdoor bar in front of Coppola’s hotel, handsome white-jacketed waiters took my order while I waited for Leo. The tall palm trees, nearly as high as the streetlights, cast shadows onto the Corso and the thick crowds promenading past. Leo was late.

  I ordered a glass of the local Aglianico del Vulture, the rich red wine from grapes grown in the volcanic soil near Mount Vulture to the north. I took a sip and tried to look as laid-back as everyone else in town. But until Leo showed up, I couldn’t really relax.

  Finally, more than a half hour late, he appeared with a friend beside him. I wanted to skip the formalities, forget the drinks, and just find out what Leo had learned from his mother. I had hoped he would bring her along with him tonight.

  Instead he brought this tall, skinny, birdlike man around my age with thick glasses and a baseball cap covering a receding hairline. “This is Francesco,” said Leo. We shook hands and I smiled. But Francesco looked pained and uncomfortable. I abruptly turned to Leo and asked if he had spoken to his mother.

  “Yes,” he said, sighing. “But my mother does not remember any of the details of the murder story.” I groaned but I wasn’t surprised. Just another dead end. I hadn’t really expected much. I decided then that if I did return to do more research, I would have no expectations, that I would try to be much more Zen than I had been last time around. I needed to try to calm down and not force the facts, but let them come to me—if they existed. Try to enjoy the scenery, the food, the wine, the company. I needed to be more patient. More Italian.

  “I think my friend Francesco can help you,” Leo said. “He is a local lawyer and is doing his own family research right now.” Francesco smiled his difficult smile and looked embarrassed, or maybe angry, I couldn’t tell. Either way, he looked like he really didn’t want to be here. Leo explained that Francesco knew the workings of the local legal system and was a history buff. He didn’t know my story, but he might be able to help me find it.

  Francesco didn’t speak any English but was married to a Croatian woman named Natasa, who spoke perfect E
nglish. After we finished our drinks, we walked over to their home, the big palazzo at the end of the Corso near the town’s St. Rocco statue, the one with the dog licking his master’s plague sores. The palazzo reminded me of that Sicilian mansion from The Godfather Part II, where Don Ciccio is gutted like a fish.

  Past the mansion’s own grove of seven palm trees, Francesco shyly invited me and Leo inside to see the antique murals, ceiling frescoes, and wrought-iron balconies. I had passed this place dozens of times ten years ago and had often wondered who lived in it. That mystery was solved. Francesco and Natasa also owned a small hotel on the other side of town, named Giardino Giamperduto, a former cheese-making factory—a caseificio—which Francesco’s family had owned for decades.

  After the house tour they took me on a tour of the hotel. The cheese factory was now a garden oasis inside a scrappy neighborhood, with 11 rooms, a swimming pool, a café, a giant chessboard, and a view of the Basento Valley farms, from which you could see olive groves and the old mule paths.

  Francesco, who seemed to be warming up, explained to me himself that he was doing his own research into the Fascist history of his family. He suggested, in proper Italian, that I visit Potenza, the capital of the region, on my next trip. If there had been a murder trial, it probably would have taken place in Potenza, he explained. “In fact,” he said, “I will be in Potenza in a few weeks doing my own research. I would be happy to look for your murder when I am there.”

  “That’s too much to ask,” I said. “I’m sure I’ll be back soon to do my own research and you can point me in the right direction.”