by David Yeadon
And there he stood—at the entrance to his enormous “burner” surrounded by his piles of bricks and pantiles, thousands upon thousands of them—the last living proponent of a tradition that stretched back way before recorded history. And he knew he was getting older. Soon, despite his obvious passion for this hard and exacting work, his trips down that near-vertical hillside would diminish, and he wouldn’t be producing his five hundred tiles a day, and no one would take over at his clay pit or fire up his two-hundred-year-old kiln.
And then people would say, “Whatever happened to those beautiful handmade bricks and those smooth, curved pantiles they used to make around here? What a shame that such traditions are allowed to die out. Something should be done…someone should…”
But something will not be done. And that elusive “someone” does not exist. And so Giuliano’s clay pits and his workbench and his piles of bricks and tiles and his ancient domed kiln—all will disappear into the reedy bamboo clumps. And the tracks down the hill will get washed away and yet another fragment of an ancient heritage will disappear, leaving little else but weeds and vague memories.
And worst of all, Giuliano’s skills, knowledge, respect, and passion will all be lost, too. And houses will be built with cheaper, poorer, salt-oozing bricks, and their mass-produced pantiles will have none of the rainbow range of ochres and golds and bronzes and ambers that make Giuliano’s tiles so beautiful and unique.
And the world will be a poorer place with yet another nail hammered into the coffin of lost skills and traditions.
Just a Bottle of Limonce
Every day in Accettura my understanding of life and ways in southern Italy increased, and one aspect, one vital law of existence, quickly became blatantly obvious: Patience in Italy is vital to self-preservation.
ONE MINOR but memorable occurrence may serve to illustrate this most important of local aphorisms. I only wanted a small bottle of Basilicata’s popular limonce (often called limoncello), a liqueur that possesses a delightfully rich and authentic lemon flavor with a little extra alcoholic kick to help it down. The limonce was not intended for me, although I have been known to partake of the delicious nectar. It was to be a gift to Giuliano for all his kindnesses since my arrival in Accettura, and in particular that wonderful ciambutella breakfast at his brick kiln.
I found a bottle of it on the shelf in the small grocery store on the main street, picked it up, and eased my way down the narrow aisle to the checkout counter by the door. There I found a little logjam of ladies. This was rather odd, because when I first came in, only a couple of minutes previously, I could have sworn the place was empty. But now four elderly women were ahead of me. And that’s when I began to learn that in Italy, patience is not merely a virtue, but a way of life essential to maintaining one’s sanity and survival.
Here, without the slightest exaggeration or authorial embellishment, is how it went.
The first lady, chatting away happily to the other three and in no rush to complete her transaction, decided that one of the items she was purchasing—a large box of Italian Perugia chocolates—needed gift wrapping. She smiled seductively (as only elderly ladies can, conjuring up all their charms) and asked the young man at the checkout if he could possibly help her, as she had no gift paper at home. He smiled back, equally charmingly, and said, “Of course, no problem,” and vanished to find some suitable paper. The chattering continued. Everyone seemed happy to share bits of local news, and only one person on line was getting a little restless: me.
Three minutes or so elapsed before the clerk returned with a sheet of paper smothered in putti (cherubs) and garishly pink roses, which delighted the elderly lady. He then left again to find some scissors, returned, and began to cut the paper carefully and wrap the gift…only to find that he had no tape. Off he went again, and another minute of chatter among the women ensued. Then he returned, still all smiles, and sealed up the gift.
And I’m thinking, Well, thank goodness that’s over. Now maybe we can move ahead. But it was not to be. The lady purchasing the chocolates, alas, did not have enough of the old Italian lira to pay in lira or enough of the new euros (only recently introduced and still a novelty, and a nuisance, for almost everyone). So with remarkably complex calculations, at first on a dollar-store calculator that kept giving the same number in sequences of fives no matter what the input was, the clerk fell back on the time-honored paper-and-pencil method. But obviously he’d never completed basic math at school (not surprising, given that the poor high school kids there had to endure a journey of almost an hour each way every day to a distant school to complete their studies, and inevitably many dropped out or became maestros of truancy capers). The minutes crept by, and I wondered if I really needed this stupid bottle of limonce at all, but the impartial observer in me was becoming intrigued by the growing complexities of this little transaction.
There then ensued a somewhat confused discussion as to whether the young man had handled the conversion correctly, but finally the elderly lady succumbed, smiled that coquettish smile again, and relinquished her confusing lira-euro mix of coins and notes. Lots of grazies and smiles and off she went. Then the next lady in line stepped up only to be stopped by the first one rushing back to explain that she’d forgotten something, which she grabbed from the shelf—a packet of chocolate cookies—and it became another confusion of lira-euros until finally she left for good.
It appeared as if the next lady would follow on quickly, but at the moment of payment she looked at the package—slices of prosciutto that the young checkout clerk had cut for her in the deli section at the far end of the store (the poor guy seemed to be operating a oneman show here)—and realized that it was inadequate for her needs. Another two hundred grams—sixteen slow slices—had to be cut, which required the young man’s leaving the checkout counter and going to the back of the store. We could hear his slicer slicing endlessly, and then finally he returned, smiling, relaxed, mellow as a marshmallow.
At this point I was about to stomp and shout and pour the bottle of limonce over somebody’s head.
Two more ladies to go. One waited smilingly as the store clerk added up her half dozen items. When he turned to ask her for the money, she gave one of those “Oh, money! Ah, yes of course! You need money” looks and began to fumble through her handbag and pockets, looking for cash. (I mean, you’d think she might have realized that money was usually required to complete these little daily transactions.)
Finally she left. The last lady in line, getting a little impatient herself now, had only two items, and she would have got out of there in thirty seconds or less except…suddenly through the door, followed by a retinue of half a dozen beaming and doting ladies, burst a young village wife who apparently had just returned from the hospital in Potenza and had brought with her her newborn baby girl for the approval and adoration of whoever happened to be in the store.
Twenty minutes later I dragged myself from the store clutching my bottle of limonce and wondering the repercussions such a sequence of events would have had in an American store. Manic madness and mayhem, no doubt.
In Italy, patience, as I said, is vital to self-preservation.
CHAPTER 4
A Home in Aliano
Maybe I’d been reading a little too much of the renowned physicist Stephen Wolfram’s work. Actually reading is the wrong word; it’s more like a mind-bending, thought-contorting plod through hundreds of tight-knit, tight-print, self-published pages. Not something I would normally do, but in Basilicata reading had once again become a key evening pastime. Anyway, after a decade of writing his seminal work, A New Kind of Science, Wolfram claimed to have demolished and reassembled all science and mathematics into a universal operating system based upon “cellular automata” algorithms. No, I didn’t understand it either, until he suggested that free will was the result of something called “computational irreductibility,” which in layman’s terms means that “the only way to know what systems will do is just to turn them
on, let them run,” and then try to make sense of their unexpected and certainly unpredictable patterns and outcomes. At least, I think that’s what he means.
All of which, I guess, is just another way of saying that when faced with a particular dilemma or challenge, it’s not a bad idea to try letting the solution emerge all by itself by—once again—just “letting go.” It had worked admirably for me in Accettura, so that’s precisely what I did when I made a second visit to Aliano looking for a place for Anne and me to put down roots when she finally arrived from Japan. I was getting increasingly impatient and missing her far too much.
The first time I ventured there, prior to my brief hotel residency in Accettura, I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to find, only to find that I had found nothing at all. My needs may have been a little too specific, and my Italian in those days (and these days, too) was so god-awful nonsensical that it embarrassed and confused my listeners even more than it did me. Of course matters were made worse when I found myself gabbing away in Spanish, of all things. I was por favor-ing, and asking for café con laiche rather than cappuccino, and saying gracias when I meant grazie, and the odd thing was that I never realized I knew that much Spanish to begin with. It had been twelve years since my last visit to Spain, when I was in my “one country behind” tendency and speaking pretty fluent Swahili, and I don’t remember picking up much of the local vernacular at all.
So it was a discouraging state of affairs when I settled in Accettura, convinced that my visits to Aliano would continue to be just that, a series of visits.
But on a beautiful afternoon (sparkling blue sky, benign rather than burn-your-bum-off sunshine, and cool perfumed breezes) I decided that as much as I loved Accettura, I’d take another roller-coaster ride to Aliano and try again.
HIS NAME WAS Aldo. I don’t think I’d ever met an Italian Aldo before, or since, but he was a charming, slightly nerdy-looking youth who happened to be behind the counter at the second of the three coffee bars on Aliano’s corso, the Via Roma. His helpful, ingratiating smile made me warm to him immediately, and as he was preparing my cappuccino, I let it drop that I liked Aliano very much and wished I could live there for a while. I didn’t expect anything really, particularly after it became clear that his claim to speak a “little” English was utterly without foundation. He spoke none at all. But, when you’re in serendipitous mode, you don’t think about such things. You just dive in and “let the systems run” in true Wolfram manner.
Something in his understanding of what I expressed in flowery body language obviously touched a nerve, and his face lit up even more brightly than when I’d first walked in. He abruptly paused in mid–cappuccino-frothing. The machine obviously didn’t like such erratic treatment and began spitting and wheezing like an asthmatic harridan. (If you’ve never seen one of these, watch out.) “Live? Here? In Aliano? You?” At least I think that’s what he said.
“Yes. I would like.”
Aldo’s grin widened, and he was about to pick up the phone behind the counter when I tactfully suggested, by more expressive body language, that I thought his ancient espresso machine was about to explode. “Ah,” he said. “Grazie,” and completed the ritual of cappuccino-making, put the cup down on his side of the counter, and then picked up the phone again. I hadn’t the heart to remind him that the coffee was really meant for me because he had gone into a paroxysm of dialing and slamming down the phone and redialing until…
“Ah, Don Pierino. Aldo. Si, si. Per favore…” And the rest became one of those amazing steeplechase-paced Italian monologues that always seem to suggest the speaker is a fully accredited master of the Australian “circular breathing” technique. If you’ve ever seen an aboriginal playing the didgeridoo for minutes on end without a pause and without any noticeable intake of breath, then you know the technique. Oh, and gestures galore, of course. They seemed to come with the territory there.
My coffee was getting colder and certainly not getting to me, while the conversation was getting faster and more enthusiastic, right to the final “Grazie, grazie, Don Pierino.” Aldo hung up the phone and then turned to face me with a grin that would have lit up the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.
“Bene. We go. To Don Pierino. Our priest. Very nice man.”
And with that he came around the counter, took off his apron, led me out of the door (my coffee obviously now completely forgotten), and locked up the bar. Locked it! Unheard of in Italy. You don’t lock up bars during opening hours. But he didn’t give it a second thought. Outside, he led me at a strapping pace uphill from the piazza to a building around the corner from the church that was oddly painted (mud brown and moldy lemon), institutional-looking, and plastered in manifesti funebri (Italy’s ubiquitous elaborate, black-bordered funeral notices). He rang the intercom, and we were immediately buzzed in. We climbed steep stairs to a tiny office packed with books, papers, Bibles, and hundreds of religious tracts.
And there he sat, the closest thing to a sparkling-eyed, ironic-smiling, leprechaun-faced Irish-Italian priest I’d ever seen. And, as with Aldo, I liked him immediately, especially when he told me in a fair shot of coherent English how much he’d enjoyed his two trips to New York, including to one Bronx neighborhood—he couldn’t remember exactly which one—that contained “more Alianese than Aliano.”
Don Pierino (Little Peter) Dilenge had been Aliano’s priest for more than thirty years. Little did I know when I met him just how much this man would become involved in my life and experiences there. But for the moment, after a few hesitant “Italianish” pleasantries, it was down to business.
“Aldo say you want life in Aliano.”
“Yes, very much,” I responded enthusiastically, thinking, well, this is certainly far better than my first visit here.
“For how long?”
“Oh, maybe three, maybe four months, or even longer.”
He smiled and tapped his fingers along the side of his mouth. “What kind of place you like?”
“Oh, anything really. But a view would be very nice.” (Fat chance, I thought, in this cheek-by-jowl little village.) “And not too big. With some furniture and a little kitchen. Very simple, okay?”
More tapping along the side of his mouth and then action. The good don out-Aldoed Aldo in the speed and precision of his movements. Phone in his ear. Numbers rattled off. Silence. Then not. Then another one of those Italian monologues with a few pauses for responses from the other end. And it was all over.
“Bene. I think very nice place. Fifty euro a day” (then about fifty dollars).
“Ah, wow! No, thank you, fifty euro is a little too much for me.”
“What you say? You say fifty euro?”
“No, you said fifty euro.”
“No, no, no! I say fifteen. One and five.” And to reinforce this he wrote the figures on a pad of paper and turned it around for me to look at. “See? One and five. Is all right?”
“Sounds very good. Can I see the place today?”
“Of course. Immediate. Aldo take you. I come five minutes.”
And Aldo did precisely that, leading me with his irrepressible grin back to the main piazza, Piazza Roma. And then he waved, left me, and hurried down the street to reopen the bar, with a brief reminder in Italian that I wait for Don Pierino.
“Okay,” I shouted back a little uncertainly.
DON PIERINO
But which house was it? They all looked rather fortresslike, except for one three stories up that had a broad flower-filled terrace overlooking the piazza, the town, and, I imagined, the whole of the soaring Pollino Mountain range to the south. “Yeah, right. You should be so lucky,” my little defeatist demon muttered. “Prepare yourself for a black basement cave with no natural light and no…”
“Ah, Signore David.” The voice came from behind me. I turned, and there was Don Pierino, with his leprechaun grin and sparkling eyes, knocking at the door to the very place I’d been looking at.
The defeatist demon was still no
t convinced. “Well, of course you’ll never get the terrace. The owner will have that. You’ll be stuck in the back somewhere with no views.”
A plump, elderly lady dressed in ritual black and bowing politely to the priest opened the door and greeted us with a smile as sweet as my grandmother’s (on my mother’s side—my father’s mother was not known for her smiles, although, being staunchly Irish, she could produce an exemplary colcannon lamb stew that made up for her rather morose attitude toward life).
My demon was vanquished. I loved her at first glance and even more when I approached her to shake her hand and smelled the enticing aroma of warm olive oil, parmesan, and garlic wafting around her.
She led us both inside and up the steep tiled steps. We came to the first landing. “Please let her keep going,” I wished. And, God bless her, she did. She kept on going up another two flights to what I calculated was the third floor, the floor with the terrace.
She opened the door and let us into the apartment, which was neatly furnished with huge cupboards of family china and glasses, a TV and stereo, books, even a guitar (at last, maybe I’d be able to revive my once enthusiastic involvement in folksinging), a large fireplace, and a pleasant, bright little kitchen with a gas stove, fridge, and double sink. There was a sparkling-white tile bathroom too, and a large bedroom with a double bed and enormous pieces of that ultra-rococo carved-wood furniture that Italians seemed to love, teeming with curlicues and floral flourishes and even a couple of cherubs at the headboard below a stately crocheted portrait of the Madonna in a richly gilded baroque frame.