Buia a buia. Dark to dark.
Chapter 13
WILD THINGS
VITA LOVED TO HEAR ABOUT THE KILLERS.
With her front teeth missing and her messy hair in dark knots, Vita loved a good story as much as she loved the country. And usually the two went mano nella mano. While they worked in the fields, her mother would tell her incredible legends.
Tales of magic and wolf men and witches, of love and betrayal and the local criminals, the brigands—the folk heroes of Southern Italy. On the best days, Teresina would sing the stories to her daughter, her voice high and nasal and oscillating, rising up like a Middle Eastern call to prayer.
She recited legends of monacelli, succobi, and the local witches—or streghe. Every town had a witch, a woman or a man who could cast spells and remove them, who could cure your headache with a few words and cause your breast milk to flow freely after it had been cursed and stopped up by a jealous neighbor or mischievous dwarf. Vita heard stories of the werewolves who howled from mountaintops every time the moon was full but spent most days walking among the cristiani—civilized people—in town, disguised as regular, respectable men. Though slightly more hairy.
Teresina told Vita about the dragon whose bones were kept in an old church farther north and whose magnificent cave was said to be near Maratea. Vita had never seen it, but she knew all about it because of her mother’s stories. The dragons must have been frightening, Vita thought, but no more awful than everyday life.
The best stories were the ones about the killers, whom she had seen with her own eyes. They were the best stories because she knew they were true.
TERESINA SPENT MOST DAYS AS A GATHERER, GLEANING IN THE fields—picking off the ground the bits and pieces of what was leftover after a harvest, or teaching Vita what wild plants and herbs were safe to eat. This was the thing that Vita loved most, wandering the fields with her mother in search of wild things, the smells of what they found clinging to her hands and fingertips. When she got back to dirty old Bernalda, Vita would hold her tiny fingers up to her nose to remember the smells of the country.
Selvatico, or wild things, included dandelions, sorrel, mint, prickly pears, wild asparagus, forest fennel, rosemary, arugula, nettles, chicory, thistle, radicchio, and lampascion, soft little onions that Teresina would pickle. And mushrooms, though you had to be careful to pick the right ones. The brighter, more colorful designs were practically yelling at you, “Leave me alone! I’m poisonous!”
Teresina also taught her daughter what herbs and roots to pick when she or anyone in the family was sick. When someone was in pain, you picked the red poppies from the side of the road. Sometimes a sick baby died, not from illness, but from an overdose of those poppies. There were no doctors and no pediatricians. Only the richest traveled the 150 miles to the hospital in Naples. The local witch said incantations over deadly insect bites, and laid on hands for almost anything, even snakebites. Some even worked at bloodletting. But you were better off simply praying to one of the dozens of saints and martyrs, whose suffering the Bernaldans identified with and understood. You had to choose the right saint, depending on what ailed you: St. Rocco for plague and pestilence, Santa Lucia for eye and vision problems, San Biagio (St. Blaise) for the throat.
Along with the herbs and mushrooms and found treasures, Vita carried firewood home each day in a giant, four-foot-high bundle atop her tiny head. It was much lighter than the water her mother carried most days in a tall, earthenware jug upon her own head. And much easier to find.
Bernalda had no running water or public fountains. You had to be careful, since water was sometimes muddy and contaminated, and was one of the reasons children died so often.
Men with mules fetched water from the two distant wells and fountains, Fontana Nuova and Pozzo di Torrone, more than a mile away. They traveled back and forth for the townspeople, trading their services for food. But when you had so little food to go around, you searched for your water yourself. Bernalda wouldn’t get its own fountain for another thirty years.
Wine—vino casereccio—was homemade and easier to come by, which was why the children in Italy drank it. There was more of it and it was less likely to be contaminated because the alcohol killed many of the germs. Wine gave the children good color in their faces and made Teresina think Vita and her siblings were healthier than they actually were.
But water was ever sought after, for cleaning and cooking, not just drinking. It was so much better than cleaning with sand mixed with ashes from the fire. The sea was nearby, though its water was off-limits. Because the government taxed the salt, it guarded the coastline and forbid people from taking salt water. Only those with a doctor’s note, signed by the mayor, could retrieve seawater for medical reasons. (Never mind that most towns didn’t have a doctor.)
The sea, rich with fish and shellfish, was so close, but yet so far for the natives of Bernalda. It wasn’t worth getting hassled by the police, captured by pirates, or bit by a malarial mosquito.
In Basilicata, mothers told their daughters stories to teach them morality lessons, just like mine had. Being promiscuous would always end in disaster. There were plenty of local stories about that, about the teen who was loose and had a baby with two hearts, or the girl who had slept with so many men she was now the town whore.
Aside from breastfeeding, birth control didn’t exist. Sex was one of the only pleasures you could wring out of a life of miseria. Though no one talked about this, of course. Sex was forbidden until marriage and even then, you weren’t supposed to enjoy it much.
Younger kids heard stories of marawall, the monster who came and got you if you were bad or if you stayed out too long on the streets during “the hot hour”—around three thirty—and didn’t listen to your mama to come inside already.
But Vita’s favorite stories were the ones about the brigands, the outlaws and killers who roamed the countryside. Sometimes, on their most exciting days gleaning, Vita and Teresina would see a brigand, high on his horse, with a pointed hat. They trotted by sometimes on the road where she and her mother stopped to pick up snails after it rained, to make the dish o vavalic’ po pulej—snails with mint. The brigands were fierce and launched attacks on the landowners with their weapon of choice—socks filled with rocks, which they twirled above their heads as they galloped on their horses onto an estate. The guns came out later, when the padroni resisted and refused to turn over their money and crops.
But the brigands were always polite and bowed deeply from atop their horses when they encountered a peasant family, sometimes even removing their hats. Vita couldn’t understand why the military police killed the brigands and impaled their heads on sticks, which she glimpsed now and again in the countryside. Teresina usually shielded Vita’s eyes, though sometimes she was too late.
It was done to scare them, the poor country folk, the cafoni, so that they wouldn’t give shelter to the brigands—the Robin Hoods of Southern Italy, who stole from the rich but didn’t really give much back to the poor, except a hope that they, too, could triumph over the padroni.
Brigands kidnapped only rich people, the pezzi grossi (or big shots), never the poor ones, since they could never provide a ransom. But somedays Vita wished they would kidnap her. And keep her. She would miss her parents, it was true, but it would be worth it. The romance. The intrigue. She would brandish the knife. If only she could grow a little taller.
BY THE TIME VITA WAS FULL GROWN, OLD ENOUGH TO START WORKING the masseria, old enough to pull weeds and help clean for the padrone’s wife, Garibaldi’s Risorgimento and his redshirts were proving to be a disappointment. The north of Italy was building railroads and funneling money into work projects and the military, but the South hardly ever saw tracks laid or any improvements. In fact, day-to-day life was even harder. A new grist tax was put in place, forcing the peasants to pay for simply grinding their own wheat at the local mill.
The communal lands, given over to the poor, sat fallow because the peasants didn’t hav
e the money to properly farm them. They had to buy their own fertilizer, seeds, and other equipment. And land was often broken into too small a parcel—handkerchiefs, they were called—to even support the family.
The sharecropping families, those who paid the padroni to work their own soil, had it just as bad. The padroni were usually so wealthy they didn’t care if the land was profitable to those working it, and when the farm failed, sometimes after a single bad harvest, a new poor family just came along and took the old family’s place.
Much of the land became infertile and depleted, without proper irrigation and crop rotation. So even those who were given land wound up selling it back to the large landowners for a small profit.
With the communal lands gone, gleaning scraps of food and collecting firewood became nearly impossible.
There seemed to be no hope, not from Garibaldi, not even from the brigands. By 1870 most of them were dead, the rest in prison or in exile, headed to America. Some said their treasures were buried deep in the Montepiano and Gallipoli woods. But no one ever found any of that treasure. All that was left of the brigands, really, were their stories.
It seemed that all Vita ever had were the stories.
Chapter 14
IN THE MOUTH OF THE WOLF
ROME LOOKED LIKE IT HAD BEEN SEIZED BY A MILITARY junta. Most streets were eerily calm but others were crowded with officers dressed in their finest regalia, with tall caps, and gold braids, pins, and medals on neatly pressed uniforms. Large groups of very stern-looking men in camouflage and black berets marched in formation. Huge Italian flags waved atop buildings. Jets soared overhead, spewing green, white, and red exhaust. I half-expected to see Benito Mussolini pouting, with his arms crossed, on one of the government balconies.
“What’s going on?” I asked my cabdriver, a woman named Katia, one of the few female cabbies in the city.
“It’s a holiday!” she said, twisting her bleached-blond head around. “The celebration of the republic.”
“Ahhhh,” I said. Italy’s version of Fourth of July.
I checked my bags at the train station, bought my new ticket south at a vending machine, and went off into the deserted streets to meet a new friend for lunch. Her name was Rosa Parisi, an anthropologist who had written a study of Bernalda years ago. I had read her book and emailed her this past spring.
Over spaghetti and baby clams, we discussed my destination. I hoped Rosa could shed some light on my quest. I didn’t want this visit to be a string of dead ends and blind alleys. With some guidance from people like Rosa, maybe I could find what I was searching for.
She had written a book about Bernalda’s class system when working in the Mezzogiorno and knew the town’s entire history and its inner workings. She had worked closely with Professor Tataranno and knew where many of the ghosts of the past resided.
The original inhabitants of the area, she explained, were part of the Oenetri tribe, which had settled before the ancient Greeks, during the Iron Age as early as the eleventh century BC. The name Oenetri meant “the people from the land of vines.” Lovers and growers of wine.
The original town where Bernalda now stands was named Camarda. In the beginning, it was just a series of village groupings made up of the Oenetri and other native peoples who banded together against the Greeks, who were the annoying newcomers, the yuppies of their day. In the third century BC, the Romans invaded the area and continued to invade, often pushing the Greeks and natives into the nearby hill towns. Camarda was always on the side of the Romans.
The Barbarians invaded after the Romans left, until Frederick II took charge of the South in the thirteenth century. He was its first modern ruler, a man of reason and reform, lover of both science and literature, tolerant of Jews and Muslims. But after Frederick’s death, civil war followed and eventually Charles of Anjou, from France, took over. The Florentine banks backed Charles and so he repaid them using the area’s resources, and gave them power to tax the peasants heavily.
Charles’s reign caused the Southerners to grow a deep hatred of all public institutions—a hatred that was still ingrained now after all those years, Rosa said. No one in the South trusted the government and it seemed they never would. Especially after the Spanish invaded.
The Aragonese proved to be the worst, levying even higher taxes because of their rich tastes. King Alfonso II, the oldest son of Ferdinand and Isabella, decided to give a gift to his secretary of state, Bernardino de Bernaudo. Looted gold or jewels weren’t enough. So Alfonso gave him Camarda—which Bernaudo renamed Bernalda, after himself.
Bernaudo built the ginger-colored castle and Chiesa Madre on the edge of town. Sucking up to their new feudal lord, the townspeople moved everything closer to the new church and changed their patron saint from St. Donato to San Bernardino. The statue of San Bernardino of Siena, a new, trendy saint at the time, was placed inside the mother church, the church of St. Donato. It was all for show, that name change, to garner favor with the aristocracy in the hopes of making life a little better, a little worth living.
The saint switch was probably one of the reasons for Bernalda’s town nickname. Each town had one. And the Bernaldans had no shortage of nicknames. People in the neighboring towns called them pagliacciunn. Fakers. Superficial. Two-faced posers.
Rosa said the Bernaldans didn’t mind their nickname and were actually proud of it. They believed their town to be prettier and their countryside more fertile than any of their neighbors’.
The Bernaldans also believed they were all equal, that there were no social strata, though they were sadly mistaken, said Rosa. The noble families from centuries past were much more well-off than the families of the serfs who had toiled farming their lands. The Bernaldans were simply in denial. The class system was alive and well in their town.
I didn’t know at the time, as I ate my spaghetti and sipped my wine, that all of this feudal history was another clue to the murder, staring me right in the face, like those faces on the cave wall in Matera. But like the cave stories, I couldn’t quite see it yet, couldn’t make it out.
I told Rosa about the bits and pieces I had gleaned about Vita and Francesco. I said that they were lowly farmers, and that Vita, a weaver, was maybe a concubine as well.
“Maybe she and her husband killed the landowner,” Rosa suggested. I shrugged my Italian shrug.
“Maybe,” I said. “But in my family they always said that Grieco helped Vita come to the United States.”
“Well, I’m eager to find out the rest of your story,” she said.
“So am I,” I said laughing.
Rosa wished me luck: “In bocca al lupo,” an Italian saying that translates as “In the mouth of the wolf.” I wasn’t sure if it was the equivalent of telling someone to break a leg, or if it referred to the mother wolf carrying her cub in her mouth in safety. Or maybe day-to-day life was so bad in Southern Italy years ago that getting eaten by a wolf was considered an improvement. Good luck. May you be eaten by a wolf.
BACK AT THE STATION I RECLAIMED MY BAGS, THEN TOOK THE MINI-ELEVATOR up to the main floor to the tracks. In the elevator, two young women, one with an infant in a BabyBjörn, asked me in Italian where the hospital was. I tried to tell her and her friend I had no idea. I explained that we were in a train station and as far as I knew, there were no hospitals here.
We all got off the elevator and I wished them luck. “In bocca al lupo!” I said, laughing, then walked to the newsstand to buy a bottle of water for the seven-hour train ride. But when I went to pay for it, I couldn’t seem to find my wallet.
I squatted down to get a better look inside my bag and dug and dug like a woodland animal searching for some long-buried nut. But the small beige wallet was gone. And I knew exactly where it was: with the woman with the baby. Her friend had unzipped my backpack while she was distracting me with her questions, had taken it out and had zipped it right back up without me even noticing. I spun around to see if she was anywhere in sight. But of course she wasn’t.
“My wallet was stolen,” I told him, in English. I was too panicked to remember the words in Italian. He shook his head and repeated over and over, “Zingare, zingare, zingare”—gypsies.
I had been swindled by gypsies, my New York sensibilities not strong enough to protect me in Rome.
I shoved my belongings back into my bag and tried to think but felt the panic slowly radiate from my head, my face, which I knew was bright red, down through my chest, and shoot out my arms and legs. My stomach lurched. Everything—except my train ticket and passport—was in that wallet. All my money, my credit cards, my cash card, my driver’s license, without which I could not rent a car. That mule I dreamed of riding last night might not be a weird nightmare after all.
I tried to think clearly, then ran over to the station entrance to what looked like a golf cart with two cops lounging inside. They were both wearing sunglasses and were lazily watching the crowds stream past. In my most frantic voice, I shouted, “My wallet was just stolen,” gesturing wildly with my hands, pulling at my hair while I stood there. They looked at me coolly, shrugged, and told me to go to the police station and file a report. I had fifteen minutes until my train left. That was impossible, wasn’t it? I had no time to file a police report or to search for the woman with the baby.
But maybe this was another sign. Vita trying to stop me from heading south. Or the curse of Miserabila. I pictured her in her small stone house in Bernalda, laughing and sticking pins in a doll that looked just like me.
Murder In Matera Page 9