Murder In Matera

by Helene Stapinski

  “We call these coarse women of Naples vrenzole,” Imma explained, like an anthropologist. “They’re not prostitutes. It’s just the way they dress. The male equivalent are called cuozzi.” She pointed a few out to me. They wore their hair gelled or with their initials shaven into the backs of their heads, their jeans tight and riding low, and their shirts unbuttoned halfway down to their stomachs, silver chains adorning their orange-tanned chests. “Wow,” was all I could muster as they loped past us, chewing gum and talking loudly.

  On the way back to our pensione, I watched the city fly by from the taxi window, my head swimming from Campari and prosecco. Crowds of young people laughing, couples kissing, mopeds whizzing. Our driver, like most of Naples’s drivers, was an older man, with white hair and a quick smile, happy to have two women in the backseat of his cab. Shouting over the loud chatter of the dispatcher on his radio, he made small talk with us, about what we’d seen and where we were headed.

  We hopped out of the cab at our corner. After three or four beats, I felt for my cell phone and realized—with panic—that I had left it on the backseat of the taxi. “My phone!” I shouted to Imma and then promptly took off running after the small white cab, which was at the top of the block, stopping for traffic, its red taillights lit.

  “Fermata! Fermata!” I shouted. “Stop! Stop! Mi telefono! My telephone is in that taxi!” People on the street stopped and looked at the crazy American woman speaking her own incomprehensible dialect.

  I chased the cab several blocks, my flip-flops nearly flying off on the wet, grimy cobblestone streets. I wished I was wearing my sneakers. But it wouldn’t have mattered. The cab was much too fast for me, its lights shrinking street by street. I heaved for breath, sorry I had smoked several Chesterfields that weekend with Imma.

  Finally I stopped and put my hands on my thighs and bent over, gasping for air. I looked up and watched the taxi’s distant taillights disappear around a corner into the chaos of Naples.

  I was slightly dizzy, not just from lack of oxygen, but from the alcohol. I was tipsy, and had no one but myself to blame for my lost phone. Not the ghost of Vita or Miserabila. No zingare. There were no curses. Only bad luck we made for ourselves.

  Imma was waiting for me on the street back near the pensione. She was talking to a police officer, who shrugged and said that aside from calling the phone, he could do nothing. Imma had been calling my number for the past ten minutes. The radio dispatcher was no doubt too loud for the driver to hear the incessant ring.

  It rang and rang. Until, after about fifteen minutes, it didn’t ring anymore. It was powered off. Someone had found it on the seat and had taken it, naturally. What did I expect from Naples?

  But what was a lost phone compared with a lost child? How lucky was I to have only lost a phone?

  I was experiencing perspective. The perspective of the blessed. I lived a blessed life. A charmed life, all because of Vita. I said a small prayer in my head, not to the saints or to Jesus or the Virgin Mary or the gods. But to Vita, to thank her for the life I had.

  UPSTAIRS IN MY ROOM—MY MODERN, COMFORTABLE ROOM WITH ITS balcony and refrigerator and snacks and bottled water—I emailed my husband from my computer. I told him the phone was lost but that I would see him, and Dean and Paulina and my mother, the next day after my nine-hour flight. What was nine hours compared with ten days on a ship, throwing up without a bucket?

  I realized not only that I had perspective, but that my perception of myself and my whole family and world had changed. I thought back on the story of the cave, not the ones here in Matera, or the Crypt of the Original Sin, but the one that Plato had written about. The Allegory of the Cave. I had been so young when I’d first read that. And so wrong.

  The facts and the reality I thought I knew about myself and my family were, like those shadows on Plato’s cave wall, all a substitute for the truth—the reality that I had dug up in Matera. The reality that was Vita and Francesco.

  I had had it all wrong. The murder genes. The card game. The lost son, who had turned out to be a daughter. I wasn’t even the person I thought I was, fighting off that defective DNA all these years. My perception was forever altered.

  For decades I thought I had been outside the cave, one of the lucky ones, but I had been a prisoner—like Francesco—all along, gazing at the shadows of what I perceived to be the truth on the cave wall.

  I was lucky to be at the mouth of the cave now, the darkness finally passed, squinting into the sunlight.

  Epilogue

  VITA LAY DYING.

  It was a stupid way to go, she must have thought, lying in that bed in Jersey City with a bandage on her head, sixty-four years old, ancient by Basilicata standards. White hair, prolapsed uterus, no teeth from malnutrition and too little dental care. And all that hard Italian bread she’d eaten over the years.

  Vita Gallitelli, like all the women from Italy, would die with her maiden name still intact. It was too hard to change your name legally in Italy, too much bureaucracy and red tape, too much a pain in the ass, so women simply kept their own names. It had nothing to do with feminism or independence, only convenience.

  So here she was, Vita Gallitelli, the life slowly draining from her small, birdlike body. Tragic. Senseless, too, this death. There was an American saying: What goes around comes around. And maybe Vita thought it while she lay there for eleven days, lingering, sleeping and then waking enough to remember it all. Not just this tragedy, but the others, the ones that came before. Soon she’d be dead, just like all those bodies she left behind in Southern Italy.

  You could run, but the past would catch you soon enough and kick you in the ass when you weren’t looking. That wasn’t a saying in America, but maybe it should be.

  If only she hadn’t lost her temper again, she wouldn’t be lying here on the verge of extinction. And all because of her big friggin’ mouth. You’d think after sixty-four years she would have learned her lesson. That big mouth, as big and wide open as a cave.

  Vita could see the scene over and over, unable to go back and sweep it away. She could see the murder back in Italy in her head, though the facts were getting clouded, had been for the past twenty years, as if the sandy African sirocco wind that blew through her Italian town were blowing through her head right now. What she could see more clearly was her own death now, and the faces of her would-be killers, from just the other day.

  It was Mischief Night, 1915, and the boys in the neighborhood had been nasty, swinging their flour-filled socks at each other, at the horses and their carts, at the poor rag man, that poor, pathetic rag man. What kind of holiday was Mischief Night? Just an excuse to be an idiot, that’s all.

  Mischief Night and what they called Halloween here in America were like Carnevale back in Italy—that springtime Bacchanalia when the pagan spirit of the land was resurrected, Christianity forgotten for a few hours, when people dressed up and went wild in the streets, when the streghe, or witches, came out, when the werewolves howled in the woods and really scared the hell out of you. Some people dressed as ghosts in white robes, brandishing sticks and threatening to hit anyone who got in their way. Vita did not miss it one bit. But now she had Mischief Night to contend with.

  This year, Mischief Night was even more awful than usual, since it fell on a Saturday night. They were all out late, even the good kids, the ones who hadn’t dropped out of school.

  To make things even worse, Mischief Night in America always coincided with election week. And in Jersey City, that meant trouble. The boys in the neighborhood would scavenge for wood for weeks beforehand to prepare for their big election night bonfire. They tore down wooden fences, pulled old doors off their hinges from brick row houses, stole people’s chairs from in front of their clapboard homes and brownstone stoops, and swiped the brooms left in hallways. Some kids even went so far as to take the wooden wagons from the horse carts down at the castor oil company stables and throw them on the fire. They would steal Vita’s broom and her chair but had
no idea of the wrath that would follow.

  Election night, they would pile all the wood up and set it ablaze in the center of Bay Street, right around the corner from Vita’s twelve-dollar-a-month apartment on Grove Street, which she shared with her son, Valente, his sweet wife, Maria, and their big brood of kids. The bonfire was twenty feet high, easy, the dark smoke dancing up and meeting the dirty industrial air, which drifted down, down from the nearby coffee factory and cigarette factory and condom factory. All that dirt and ash mingling and making it hard to breathe.

  No one said a word to these boys. They let them steal the chairs and the brooms and the horse carts and set fires and smack each other with their flour-filled socks. Some socks were filled with worse. Horseshit. Or coal. Or rocks. Yeah, rocks, even. Like the brigands used to brandish in the hills of Basilicata, swinging them over their heads during their raids.

  At least no one was throwing eggs. People in Jersey City were too poor still for egg throwing on Mischief Night. Too hungry. A dozen eggs cost a quarter back then, a small fortune.

  They let the boys waste that flour in those socks, though. The ones who could afford it. Ten cents a bag. What a waste. Vita would have shaken her head if it didn’t hurt so much now. She could have made some nice Italian bread from that flour, not like the bread back in the old country, mixed with beans, chestnuts, or sawdust or whatever else you could scrape together. Bread like that would have fed her whole family at one time. Though no more. The family had grown too big, its tastes, like the flour, too refined.

  So she said something to those kids. Those neighborhood kids. How could you not? If you’re not gonna say something, I’m gonna say something. How many times had she said that to her husband, to her grown sons, her daughter-in-law? She couldn’t just stand by and watch as they dirtied her street, her precious Grove Street. Not a grove in sight, barely a tree, but her part of pavement and cobblestone was immaculate. No matter how old and bent she was, she swept and washed it down every day with the water, the lovely water that flowed so freely from the American pipes.

  Her failure to just turn around and ignore those boys was a family trait. This search for justice or whatever it was, this always looking for a fight, this temper, this would be passed down to her grandchildren and great-grandchildren and even her great-great-grandchildren, though at this point, she had no way of knowing that, no way of seeing that her pending extinction was not an extinction at all, no, not at all. Just a passing on—of family traits and mannerisms and lessons to the next generation.

  So there she was, on Mischief Night, yelling at those kids. How could she not? A little old lady like her, suddenly standing, no longer sitting on her stolen wooden chair out there in the evening chill. It was a habit, this sitting outside each night and every day, a habit leftover from Southern Italy, from her town of Bernalda, where the women would bring their midget straw and wooden chairs outside each night and sit and sit and watch and wait. Wait for something exciting to happen.

  She and Francesco had made something exciting happen, forty years ago. They had given those big-mouth neighbors something to chat about, all right. A murder and its aftermath in a small town goes a long way, survives a hundred years of gossip. A hundred years or more. They would remember her—that Gallitelli woman and the Vena man and that murder. It’s why this was happening to her now. Why she was dying before her time. Past her prime, maybe. But before her time.

  She would have liked to have gone back home to die. To die with her lover, the one she left behind, the one who told her to go. But it was not to be. She wondered if he knew now that she was suffering. Could he feel it, her life slipping, from three thousand miles away? Probably not. Men weren’t so good at those things. And he was probably dead by now anyway.

  No one would take much notice at all when she died. It wouldn’t even be recorded on the local obituary page. Old Italian ladies didn’t make the obituary pages in 1915. Her death certificate would say, “Myocarditis.” And it’s true. Her heart would give out. She was sixty-four, old for those days. Ancient, really. Especially after all she’d been through.

  She had her work as a weaver, and Rocco to take care of, and the housework, and the farm work, and then, of course, the murder. The murder. That had taken its toll. And that awful ride across the Atlantic. How many people do you know who would survive that? Three million Italians had done it between 1900 and 1915, mostly from the South. Your grandparents maybe, or great-grandparents. But how many women, alone with their kids, had done it? Not as many. No, not as many. But Vita had, and she had survived it, every last bit of it.

  Until now.

  Now Vita lay dying. All because she had yelled at those boys. They didn’t take criticism well, teenage boys. It was part of their nature. She should have known that. She had had three sons of her own after all. At one time, she had had three. Four, really, if you counted Domenico. Though just two remained. She had had a daughter, too, the one that got away. And she wondered now where she was. If she was better off. The last time she had seen her she was just a girl. A tender seven years old. Vita talked to her, to Nunzia, sometimes and told her stories and sang her lullabies and hoped that she could hear her, wherever she was.

  Vita didn’t even mind dying so much when she thought of Nunzia. Maybe Nunzia was dead. And she would see her soon. Nunzia. And Rocco. And Domenico. And the baby Nunzia who had died so young. And Francesco. She would see them all.

  But what a stupid way to die.

  If it had been one or two boys on the Jersey City street, they would have shown the proper respect and apologized to her maybe for stealing her chair and her broom. But this was a crowd and crowds were never good. They were American boys, only one generation removed from Ireland or Poland or wherever their parents had come from, but already they were arrogant. Taller than Vita and much stronger.

  She yelled, yelled at them in Italian to stop making such a mess of the street, her street, and to stop badgering the poor people. Give her back her chair. And her broom. That old witchy broom. But they laughed at her. And before she knew it, before Vita could see what was coming, that little bastard took one of the socks from his friend and hit her smack in the head with it. He thought he was being funny, probably. The little bastard. Or maybe he thought it was one of the flour-filled socks or the one with the horse manure in it. But it wasn’t.

  It was the one with the rocks.

  So that was how it happened. How she wound up on this damn deathbed of hers. Tough little Vita Gallitelli, hit in the head with a sock full of rocks on Mischief Night, 1915, on the streets of Jersey City.

  When she hit the pavement on Grove, crumpled into a large pile of clothing—her long dress, underskirts, corset, apron, stockings, and high buttoned shoes—no one even noticed at first, since she was so small and made so little noise, just the slightest muffle. But someone, her sons, or one of her grandkids upstairs in their second-story apartment above the grocery store, must have noticed Nonna lying there. The family came running.

  Then everyone in the neighborhood was there, in a circle: the guys drinking at Chiefy Green’s tavern; the bookie, Jake the Jew, who operated out of the deli downstairs; Venutolo, the Italian grocer on Bay, where everybody bought their vegetables and pasta. The word went up and out through the neighborhood, so even people as far away as Jimmy the Greek’s corner store on First Street came by, Conti’s barbershop on Henderson, and Louie’s Meat Market. They were all there to see what happened to Vita.

  But who knew it was so bad, that smack in the head? Vita got up eventually, groggily—“Va ben, va ben,” she would say, waving one hand and holding her head with the other—and went straight up to bed. But she never woke up again, not completely anyway. She would linger, and dream and think. Think about her sins. The priest would be called from Holy Rosary parish to give last rites. Not that she needed them. She had gotten last rites back in Italy years ago on the day she was born.

  VITA DIDN’T DIE FOR ANOTHER WEEK AND A HALF. VITA’S SON, Leona
rdo, who lived right around the corner on Bay Street, read her the paper that week as she lay dying. He tried to elicit some sign of life from his mother, tried to make her laugh, even. He and his brother, Val, could read. She had made sure. And they were now successful barbers. Not criminals. Leonardo, whose hands were soft like his mother’s and always manicured, shaved the heads of the local politicians, even the mayor, in his own shop right across from city hall. Imagine that. The mayor. They would never believe it back in Basilicata.

  Leonardo took the afternoon off to visit his dying mother. He read aloud about the dockworker in Hoboken who got hit with a hog’s head, which fell thirty feet from a ship and broke the poor guy’s neck. What a way to go. Poor bastard. And the little five-year-old boy who was hit by a trolley on Grove Street, not far from Vita’s door. So sad. And the sensational story, BOY KILLED BY POISON APPLE. A strychnine-laced apple. They found him dead on his steps, the partially eaten apple next to his body, his dog dead, too, at his side.

  A bunch of Italians from Hoboken were poisoned that week as well, but none of them died. It seems they bought poison mushrooms from some peddler in Fort Lee and all got sick. So Vita was not alone in her miseria. No. Not at all.

  So much life. So many stories:

  BLAZE IN BUTCHER SHOP.

  POLICEMAN FALLS FROM STOOP.

  WOMAN SLIPS AND FALLS DOWN COAL CHUTE.

  YOUTH TOSSED BY ANGRY BULL.

  HORSE BITES OFF DRIVER’S FINGER.

  CHARGE MILKMAN WAS OBSTREPEROUS.

  It was business as usual in Jersey City: Five hundred phony names were found on the poll lists for the upcoming election. The suffragettes were out marching. A clergyman said a man in his Bayonne parish was offered two dollars for his vote.

  To brighten things up, Leonardo moved to the movie listings. He would tell her that nine movie theater owners were arrested that week for opening their doors on Sunday. At the Orpheum they were showing a movie called A Mother’s Confession. It was as if the theater owner were taunting poor Vita to come clean for the sins she had committed long ago. Over at the Strand, they were playing a movie called The Bludgeon.