Murder In Matera

by Helene Stapinski

  I raised my glass once more. “To Vita,” I said. And they all repeated, “To Vita,” our crystal glasses cutting through the warm June air.

  For dessert, Virginia made a gorgeous dome-shaped cake soaked in orange juice and covered in cream, paper-thin orange slices, and dark chocolate leaves.

  We ate dried figs—ficchi isechi—which Virginia had made by picking the figs fresh last September, cutting them and placing them in the sun and covering them with a veil to keep the flies away. When they were ready, she would place an oven-baked almond inside each—like a pit—and then put the whole thing back in the oven. Giuseppe said they were so good “they make the angels cry.”

  The meal ended with giant fresh figs the size of baseballs, lovely fat apricots from Giuseppe’s harvest, and finally perastre—the same kind of pears Francesco had stolen more than a century ago.

  I STAYED AT IMMA’S HOUSE THAT NIGHT NOT ONLY BECAUSE I WAS too full to move, but because the two of us were leaving early the next morning on a train for Naples for the last of our research. Imma’s mother had offered to drive us to the station, and I didn’t want her to have to go all the way to Pisticci to fetch me in the morning. And besides, I didn’t want to spend one more night alone with that empty crib, even if it was covered with a sheet.

  We left for Naples right after sunrise, with a big paper bag filled with leftover focaccia and panini made from the cappacuolo and scamorza from last night’s table, two giant bottles of water, and a half dozen of those sweet, small pears. Imma rolled her eyes when her mother handed her the heavy bag. “She thinks we’re going to Madagascar,” Imma joked. Our train ride was only three hours.

  We traveled on the same train line that Vita and her children would have taken. The line from Naples to Potenza was laid down in 1882, and ten years later, just in time for Vita’s voyage, the tracks from Metaponto to Potenza were complete.

  When Vita left for America in 1892, Francesco was buried in the local cemetery and was no longer a threat. But Basilicata still was. By the time Vita left, the entire country was in the grips of a great depression.

  That year, a quarter million Italians emigrated. And it wasn’t even the peak. In 1913, nearly 900,000 left their homeland, each one with a story as sad and as incredible as my great-great-grandmother’s.

  Chapter 37

  GET ON THE TRAIN!

  VALENTE WAS THE FIRST TO GO. HE BOOKED PASSAGE THAT April on the Burgundia, a ten-year-old ship with three masts and one funnel. It picked up its first load in Naples, then stopped in Marseilles for its second, and more than a week later, arrived in New York Harbor.

  He set up a place for them to stay in the town of Giesity. That’s how he spelled it, this Jersey City, this far-off land of riches where a compare—a family friend—lived. (In Jersey City we pronounced it “gumba.”) A whole community of Bernaldans had settled downtown, many who probably knew the Vena-Gallitelli murder story, who knew that Vita was a kept woman. Her reputation, no doubt, preceded her to the New World.

  Grieco, maybe this Filippo Grieco, gave them the money to go, two lire each for the passport, and then two hundred to three hundred lire each for passage, the cost of three or four houses, a huge amount for a peasant family to scrape together.

  Even those with the means to leave sold off all the family jewelry to pay their way. Some were so desperate they traveled as stowaways.

  That following September, five months after fifteen-year-old Valente sailed, Vita left Bernalda with thirteen-year-old Leonardo and Nunzia, who would have just turned seven. Nunzia, with missing front teeth and long, stringy, uncombed dark hair like mine at that age, was excited but a little scared of the voyage ahead.

  It would be quite a journey for a little girl. For all of them, really. They had never been farther than Pisticci, so they had no idea what they were in for.

  I like to think that Grieco gave them a ride to Metaponto and its brand-new train station in his horse and carriage so they didn’t have to walk and drag their baggage to the coast.

  Vita could smell it first, the salt settling in her nostrils. And then, there it was. After living so close to the sea for so long, Vita saw its sandy beaches and waves for the first time in her forty-one years on earth.

  It seemed like the waves might hurt if you touched them, like jagged white teeth on some giant monster, churning and chomping angrily. Nunzia huddled against her mother in fear. How on earth would she ever be able to get on a ship?

  The sea went on for what seemed like infinity, meeting and matching the cloudless blue Ionian sky in its enormity. So big, so powerful that it scared not only Nunzia, but Vita. It could easily suck them up and spit them out.

  Grieco said goodbye at the station. But Vita decided suddenly that she didn’t want to go after all. She was too frightened, too anxious. What if America wasn’t what they said? What if it was a lie?

  Grieco held her for a moment and kissed her gently and told her there was nothing to worry about, as the locomotive pulled up to the platform. “Just get on the train,” he said. “Get on the train!”

  And so she did. She got on the train, for the long ride to Naples.

  THEY BOARDED THE THIRD-CLASS COMPARTMENT WITH A COUPLE of sacks, one with a bit of bread, maybe some small pears. Vita sat on the hard wooden seat by the window, with Nunzia on her soft lap, Leonardo by her side, and watched Grieco and the world they knew, the lonely landscape of home, slowly fall away.

  The first stop on the train was Ferrandina, where the killing had happened. Vita was happy to see it pass by her window for good. Vaffanculo, Ferrandina, she probably thought. Good riddance.

  Tiny, mumlike yellow wildflowers lined the tracks between the stations. Vita didn’t realize that one day soon she’d miss them. And the sheep in the distance past the town of Baragiano, a pastoral scene she would never see in Jersey City. How could she know that mountains and fig trees and shepherds would be replaced with factories and smokestacks and cops walking the beat?

  The sheer cliff face rose up near Bella-Muro, which meant Beautiful Wall. And it was, this cliff, it was beautiful, as was the stream that flowed at its base, filled with chalky rocks and boulders, a landscape Vita had taken for granted.

  They watched the craggy Lucanian Dolomites rise like giants in the distance, and made their way past bare-faced hills and tall cypress trees. They passed through Eboli, the place where Christ had stopped in Carlo Levi’s book, where civilization ended. But Levi hadn’t even been born yet, much less passed through here and written his masterpiece. In Torricchio, the train snaked through pointed pine-covered mountains and dipped into low, green valleys. They sped through forests where brigands had once hid out and stashed their kidnapping victims. Where treasure was said to be buried.

  After about ten hours, after what seemed like 1,001 stops at every coastal village along the way, Naples appeared in the distance, announced loudly by blue Vesuvio, its top covered in wispy white clouds. Was it smoking? she wondered, fearfully. But its clouded peak was quickly forgotten as she stepped off the train into the city.

  What a circus. It was churning with madness, with toothless beggars begging and train conductors in blue uniforms shouting and carabinieri in capes and mustaches giving orders and the big, shining duomo in the distance and palm trees and the manicured park and the horses and buggies with their drivers in tall hats. It was too much to take in all at once, and Vita feared she would fall into one of those stress-induced states, where everything would go numb and she would cease to function. But she held it together. She squeezed Nunzia’s hand so tight the girl cried out as they marched into the madness, my young great-grandfather Leonardo happily, bravely leading the charge.

  This was their first lesson, a good lesson, to prepare them for the insanity of the New World.

  She and the children asked the conductor which way, which way to the harbor and he pointed. But it wasn’t necessary. Half the train’s passengers scrambled to the same spot, through the grand arches of the train station, und
er its stone balconies and giant clock. Vita was just one of 61,631 Italian immigrants to travel to the United States that year.

  They made their way like a river of bodies day after day through the crowded streets, past tall buildings, five, six, seven stories high, with French-style wrought-iron balconies covered in laundry, shirts and skirts and underwear strung across side streets where the buildings nearly touched one another. So much laundry. So many people. How could so many people live in one place? A half-million people.

  Vita and her children walked the two and a half miles to the harbor, past Garibaldi Square, now with the big statue of the hero in his caped uniform, leaning on his sword. They made their way past the curved square known as the Four Palaces, whose buildings were held up by giant men made of stone. Vita had never seen anything like them. They looked so real she expected them to break free and come down and speak to her, to point the way to the port. Most spectacular of all, though, was the newly built, 22 million lire Galleria Umberto I, the long glass and metal-ribbed wonder, with its huge dome and four offshoots, the whole building shaped like a giant cross. It ran 160 yards from Naples’s main street—the Toledo—all the way to city hall. Massive angels, wings spread, floated just below the glass ceiling, five stories high. How did they not fall and come crashing down on their heads? How they floated up there, like real angels!

  And just when Vita thought she could never glimpse anything more wonderful than that, they arrived at the port, the beauty so intense it caught her breath. Too beautiful to describe really, with the blue island of Capri floating like a big slipper in the distance, and the green island of Ischia, and the great rocky castle at the water’s edge. At sunset, the islands turned purple and the houses at the foot of the mountains blazed orange in the dying light. It was so gorgeous, tough little Vita nearly cried.

  Italy had been cruel to her and her family. To everyone she had ever known. But this, this was the cruelest of all, seeing the most beautiful scene ever before leaving it for good. See Naples and die, went the saying. And now she understood it.

  Italy was like a lover who was so gorgeous, he could mistreat you whenever he liked. But a woman could take only so much. Vita would leave and not look back.

  And now there was a new lover, America, more beautiful and much kinder. At least that’s what she’d heard.

  Though Vita had no idea what to expect, exciting things were happening in America that year. Not all of them good. Labor strikes had broken out that summer, including the Homestead Strike among Pennsylvania’s steelworkers, in which ten men were killed. In Wyoming, farmers were going up against the big ranchers in the Johnson County War. And in Oklahoma, a hundred men—mostly Italian immigrants—would die in a mine explosion. When some black men tried to help rescue the survivors, they were threatened with rifles.

  But in Vita’s future home state of New Jersey, John Philip Sousa’s band was making its debut with its patriotic marches. The first American-made car was taken out for a test drive. And the Pledge of Allegiance, written over the summer by a Baptist minister, was published for the first time and would be recited by millions of schoolchildren in a few weeks, that following Columbus Day, words that no one had memorized just yet. They were like the words to a new prayer that the immigrants wanted badly to believe were true.

  . . . One nation,

  Indivisible,

  With liberty and justice

  For all

  Vita and her children spent one final night in Naples, sleeping on the cobblestones like most of the other emigrants set to leave the next day. The shipping companies wouldn’t provide boardinghouses for emigrants until 1901, and then not because they cared about them, but because the hordes were spreading disease. The twelve companies were required to board the emigrants one day prior to shipping. If the ship was delayed, they had to house them until they sailed, and give them a forty-cent stipend for the day for food and drink.

  But not yet. Not in 1892. Bed was the cobblestone street, just like in Bernalda each summer. Vita didn’t mind.

  A canteen near the harbor served food: soup, boiled meat, potatoes, bread, even beer for twenty-five cents each, though the prices varied depending on how rich you looked and how good you were at negotiating. But Vita was saving her money for America. She fed the children the scraps of bread that she had brought along in her bag on the train ride, and they drank the fresh water sprouting from the local fountains. So many fountains. So much fresh water for the taking.

  Vita slept on top of their bags all night, with her daughter tucked under her arm for safekeeping. It was a fitful sleep. When Nunzia awoke, Vita lulled her back to sleep with the song her own mother used to sing to her when she was little, “Ninna Nanna.”

  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.

  Vita watched her daughter gently close her eyes but stayed up most of the night herself. She was worried they would miss their morning call at Molo dell’Immacolatella Vecchia, the slip from which their ship, the Neustria, was sailing.

  The Neustria had room for only eighteen first-class passengers, since hardly anyone fancy ever took her to America. It had been built a decade earlier by the French Fabre Line with a total of 1,100 third-class berths, a workhorse of a ship, meant to accommodate poor emigrants like Vita. It was caught between two eras, with a single black funnel for its steam engine and two masts for sails. The bow was a straight line cutting the ocean, the stern a graceful curve. The Neustria would disappear somewhere in the Atlantic in 1908, going down with its crew and its human cargo, but for now it was seaworthy.

  VITA AND HER CHILDREN WENT TO THE AGENT’S OFFICE FOR THE shipping company early the next morning to pay the balance of their fare. Vita gave their names, ages, jobs, country of origin, marital status (widow, said Vita), the address where they last lived in Basilicata, the address of where they were headed in America, the names of those waiting for them, the name and address of a relative left behind, the amount of money they were carrying, and whether they had been to America before. No one asked any questions about your past, your mental state, or your morals. The officials on this side of the Atlantic were anxious to be rid of Vita and her kind.

  In order to embark, each traveler had to endure certain trials, most within the confines of the harbor compound, or capitaneria.

  Vita and her children and what little baggage they had were loaded onto a small steam launch and taken across the harbor to the fumigation station, where they and everything they owned were deloused. Their bags, clothes, and any inanimate belongings were steamed at a high temperature, killing any bugs they might have met on the streets of Naples or that took the long ride with them from Metaponto.

  They were then separated by sex, and made to strip and wash with a strong mix of soap and kerosene. If bugs were found, they were shaved of all hair—head, pubic, chest, and face—if there was any hair to be shaved. Both Italian and American officials did a final inspection to make sure all the bugs were gone and then issued certificates attesting to the fact.

  At this point, no one was allowed to return to the streets of Naples. Vita and her children were transferred to the clean part of the capitaneria, to the medical center, where they formed two lines.

  Doctors on one line checked heads and skin for scabies (infectious mites also known as the seven-year itch), seborrhea (a white scaly rash), eczema, ringworm, and favus, a widespread honeycombed scalp fungus. The doctor on the second line turned up eyelids for trachoma, the leading cause for being turned back. Trachoma, incredibly widespread at the time, was a highly contagious bacterial eye infection that could cause blindness if not treated.

  Doctors prodded and poked any strange-looking parts of the emigrants’ bodies for disease
. Rejects were whisked from the capitaneria.

  Rumor had it that the inspection ordeal on the other end—at newly opened Ellis Island—was much worse, and much more stringent, so much so that part of Vita dreaded landing in America, for fear she would be sent back home.

  Those not eliminated from the line were vaccinated for smallpox at the expense of the shipping company. Passengers proudly bore a large scar marking each of their upper arms, the sign they had been admitted into the elite ranks of the emigranti.

  If all went well in Naples—and even if it didn’t, since bribes were common—documents were checked before boarding. Most emigrants didn’t have passports, but rather a work book showing their employment history with a blurry seal. Vita nervously handed hers over. But she was waved through and permitted up the gangway, where there was one final check: one last trachoma and favus inspection. Healthy people had been known to stand in for the diseased, have their card stamped, and then pass it on to the sick person. But there were no substitutions with this final check right before boarding,

  And last, but not least, this is the place where weapons—mostly knives—were taken from all those passengers who were carrying them. Vita argued that her knife was only used to cut pears and other fruit for the children but she finally relented and handed it over.

  Chapter 38

  COUNT YOUR NIGHTS BY STARS, NOT SHADOWS

  THE NEUSTRIA SLOWLY PULLED AWAY FROM THE PIER AND into the harbor. The red port buildings, Castel Nuovo, and the glass dome of the Galleria grew miniature in minutes, but the wind and the smell of the sea, the salt air, grew stronger. As the ship gained speed and passed the long black jetty, Vesuvio rose up, getting bigger and closer. Seagulls circled as they passed buoy after buoy, the red lighthouse, other ships riding at anchor.

  Most of the passengers shoved their way to the upper deck to watch their country shrink in the distance. And so Vita went with her son and daughter to say a final goodbye to Italy’s beautiful face. A final vaffanculo.