Seasons in Basilicata

by David Yeadon

  A Sense of Settling In

  A few days later Anne and I were on the terrace whimsically watching the village go about its morning rituals when we heard the fishman’s cry. It was ten A.M. on a Friday, and once again he was right on time, his gruff voice echoing through the streets and rolling across Piazza Roma. The village glowed with warm early sunshine, and the octos were already in their places, by the war memorial and on their preferred benches all the way down Via Roma. There they sat, their trilbies and flat copolla caps carefully set on their invariably bald heads, walking sticks at their sides, and jackets fastened against a cooler-than-usual morning breeze that gusted up from the fossa and the wild calanchi gorges.

  The magnificent outline of the Pollino range was on full display. No haze at all this morning. The air was sparkling and crisp, and all the broken ridges and shattered volcanic cones and the great rounded bulk of Pollino herself—like an enormous ball of rising bread dough—seemed almost close enough for an afternoon stroll.

  We crossed our terrace to the railing, which was lined with the now-familiar pots of herbs, hot peppers, and tomato plants, and peered down onto the piazza to see precisely where the fishman had parked his small, white van today. And there he was, busy with three black widows and a young girl, whose large straw basket he was filling with an amazing array of the sea’s delights. We could see Giuseppina strolling across to take her turn in line. I’d better get down there, I thought. His selection seemed a little on the meager side that particular Friday.

  A couple of old men looked up. No matter how timorously we walked about our terrace, someone always seemed to spot us and to mumble something to all the others, who then looked up as well. Then we’d exchange Buon giornos and brief analyses of the weather and endless friendly waves. This time was no different. “Buon giorno!” we called out, and almost in unison they responded, a couple tipping their hats. And they informed us that it was, indeed, a bella giornata, and we agreed and pointed to the blue sky and at the swifts completing their morning insect-gobbling swoops (very useful, those swifts, keeping our streets free of irritating biters), and then to the fishman, indicating that I’d be coming down to do my Friday-morning fish shopping. And they all smiled, maybe even chuckled a bit at the odd idea of a man buying fish, or buying anything in the way of domestic supplies—very much a woman’s job in that village. They’d even chuckled when, before Anne’s arrival, I emerged from the general store almost on a daily basis with my little plastic bag of eggs and wine and paper towels and, always, my morning fix of those two hundred grams of sweet, succulent, melt-in-the-mouth slices of prosciutto crudo. (Despite Rosa’s advice, I always chose the Parma ham. The other brands just didn’t taste as rich and winey.) But I think it was a well-meaning chuckle. After all, I was a foreigner, and who could explain the follies and foibles of foreigners?

  A very pleasant sensation rippled through me that particular Friday morning. I suddenly realized that I didn’t feel very foreign at all anymore. I sensed that I had adjusted to the daily rituals and rhythms of the village, which now felt, well, like home, I guess. Even my Italian had progressed to the point where I could hold simple conversations and indicate to the grocer and greengrocer the items I needed, and appreciate the various types of bread produced each day by the forno, which opened at around six-thirty with the most salivating aromas wafting in our bedroom window. I had even begun to understand a little of the furious early morning political debates between the younger men at Bar Capriccio, where I usually had a sensually frothy cappuccino topped with a heap of powdered chocolate at around eight o’clock. If it was warm, I’d sit outside for a while on one of the bar’s blue-plastic garden chairs, watching the village wake up and checking off the daily rhythms of activities that were now becoming so seductively familiar.

  I would note the same half dozen or so black widows entering the church for ten minutes of genuflecting at one of the four candle-bedecked shrines; the dogs starting their hour-long paroxysms of barking; the big, blue public bus arriving at seven-thirty and leaving promptly at seven forty-five; the crack and rattle and blast of those mini-tractors barely bigger than a boy’s peddle-power racing car; at least two, sometimes four, mules, all with dual wicker panniers, with their owners sitting cheerfully astride their bowed backs on their way to the small fields and olive groves far below the village, among the calanchi canyons.

  Often, if I worked at my trestle table on the terrace, I would continue to keep an eye on all the other regular rituals—the women chatting at the shop doorways or on van Gogh–styled rattan-seated chairs outside their homes, but never on the street benches. (That was very much a male domain, and rarely did male and female mingle in public, except during the evening family passeggiata. No matter what their age or marital status.)

  As the sun moved higher, the coffee bar at the end of the street overlooking the fossa and the broad Pollino panorama would become an increasingly popular meeting place for belligerent card playing and the exchange of daily gossip that seemed a source of endless intrigue for the octos. Younger men would also stop by in their little battered Fiats and Renaults and those creaking three-wheeler Ape creations that, I was told with great pride by one owner, could get over fifty kilometers to one liter of gas, even on the riotously uphill lanes of the village and the hairpin roads that linked Aliano to the outside world.

  Few people seemed to walk much beyond that bar. A handful might stroll to the pine-shaded overlook a hundred yards farther down, by the dark, severe bust of Carlo Levi. Here they would lean for a while against the railing or peer down at the abrupt vertical drop of the fossa, edged by those strangely eroded pillars of “clay earth,” which you’d think would have been washed away eons ago, but in fact still seemed almost identical to those painted there by Carlo Levi in 1935. And then, after a brief glance at the “old town,” with its densely packed walls perched precariously on towering bluffs, and maybe a hawking spit into the shadowy depths of the fossa, they’d slowly saunter back to the bar and treat themselves to more thimblefuls of caffeine-concentrated espresso washed down with small glasses of grappa, anise, or limonce, or anything else with a bit of a kick to it.

  I needed a kick myself, if I was going to get a decent run at the fishman’s boxes of sardines, fresh anchovies, eels, plaice, mussels, calamari (three different kinds), octopii, and big, pink gamberi (prawns, my favorite, despite their price of fifty euro cents a piece). But then I reminded myself, it’s costing us only forty dollars a day tops to live here. Fifteen dollars a day rent for our splendid apartment with everything included, ten dollars tops for food and drink, ten dollars for the hired car, and another five thrown in for whatever we might need. So, I told myself, go ahead, treat yourselves, just as you did last week.

  I scampered downstairs and strolled out into the sunshine, and that wonderful sense of being a part of all this filled me with a deep joy. I smiled and waved and Buon giorno-ed everyone. I smiled at the church, with its constant chiming of the hour (the deep bell) and quarter hour (the high bell) and its insistent clanging for the two Sunday services at noon and seven o’clock, and even more insistently for its weekday seven-o’clock services. These weekday services were less popular and a constant source of frustration for poor Don Pierino, who told me in his beguiling singsong manner that, “Even after thirty years, I still can’t get them to take these weekday services seriously. Unless there’s some kind of calamity—a bad storm that’s created landslides, or a little earthquake, or if we’ve had a couple more “passings” than usual, or when it’s close to the grape vendemmia or the olive harvest—they just don’t seem to see the significance of non-Sunday services. Of course I always get the same ‘loyal ones’” (his polite reference, no doubt, to his devoted coterie of ever-anxious black widows) “but with the others, particularly the young ones, it’s usually hopeless!”

  He scowled, then looked a little confused by his failure, and finally, as he always did, he gave that enticing leprechaun’s chuckle that made me re
alize that, all in all, things weren’t too bad in Aliano, and certainly no worse than in some of the other outlying hill villages of his diocese, where church attendance had to be engendered by threats of godly vengeance and images of eternal damnation in the searing flames of hell. “I don’t really go much for that kind of thing,” his gentle eyes seemed to say.

  Don Pierino seemed happy with his village and his flock, as later conversations proved. He appeared to accept and enjoy its slow, steady ways—the gradual emptying of the streets after one o’clock, when the shutters came down at the shops for the long lunch and siesta; their rattling back up again around four or five, when the benches filled up once more and the piazza echoed with cup-clinks and endless chats from the coffee bars.

  Around six in the evening the tractors came clattering home from the fields, along with the weary mules, and the evening passeggiata would begin around seven (nothing quite so formal and lengthy as the ones I’d enjoyed in Matera and Sapri, but a pleasant enough village-type communal stroll). Of course the old men usually enjoyed sitting more than strolling, and the young men studiously gave the impression of ignoring the primped and frilled young women, and drivers stopped in the middle of the street to greet passersby or talk to other drivers, and the swifts arrived again in their cloudlike swoopings to clear the air of mosquitoes. Then, as dinnertime approached, there came a slow quieting of the whole place, with just a few grappa-drinkers propping up the bars, and night settling over the village as the moon moved slowly over the campanile of the church.

  VIEW FROM OUR ALIANO TERRACE

  “SO, THE SAME, is it, Signor David?” It was my turn with the fishman. “Your gamberi? Like last week? Maybe also you try some of my big calamari? And these little anchovies? Very, very good. Very fresh. Sweet, too. You can cook in olive oil with cilantro and garlic. So gooood!”

  I usually took his advice and always ended up with far more than I needed. “But what the heck,” my indulgent chef-self invariably insisted. “He only comes once a week.”

  We’d overspent at the Thursday street market too. But there again, that only rolled into town every two weeks. And when you’re living in such an isolated place you’ve got to make sure you’re fully stocked up. I mean, who knows? You might decide to throw an impromptu party for your newfound friends here to thank them for all their many and oh-so-appreciated kindnesses. Or if that freezer of ours in the top half of the refrigerator could ever be made to work, I’d really cook up a storm and produce a week’s worth of dinners in one go, and save myself a lot of time for more writing and sketching.

  And that was another thing: my cooking. When it got around that not only did I cook our food but that I actually enjoyed cooking, even to the point of discussing recipes with the local ladies—well, that was a bit too much for some of the elderly male benchwarmers to digest. But eventually they seemed to accept this quirk of mine, write it off as another foreign fetish, and continue to greet me (occasionally with sympathetic glances at Anne for having to put up with such a bizarre husband) as if I’d been a long-time resident of this remote and enticing place.

  Which is precisely the feeling I had on that lovely spring morning as I strolled back to our aerie overlooking the piazza, parcels of fish and seafood all neatly wrapped, thinking that maybe we’d try the fishman’s recipe with those fresh anchovies for our dinner that evening.

  Maybe I’ll Stay an Americano

  But feeling like a long-term resident didn’t necessarily mean that everyone else in the village shared my sentiment. I learned this a couple of weeks after our arrival.

  “SOMETIMES,” as my mother used to tell me, “things are best just left alone.”

  Now this is my Yorkshire mother speaking. Born and raised in the land of the famous pudding, the coalfields (at least before the Thatcher wipeout of the mines), the steel mills, the Yorkshire Dales, and the home of England’s finest beers—Samuel Smith’s and Tetley’s. And of course, source of the Yorkshire dialect, so indecipherable to outsiders that only a few of its meaty aphorisms are understood—most notably “weer theer’s muck, theer’s brass,” and the typically dismissive phrase that pretty well sums up a Yorkshireman’s view of the rest of the world: “neether nowt n’ summat,” or, put in the Queen’s vernacular, “not particularly memorable.”

  Yorkshire, England, is where I was born. And despite the fact that I’ve spent well over half my life far outside its borders, primarily in and around New York but on occasion just about everywhere else in the world, I still regard myself very much as a Yorkshireman—born and bred and proud of it “until I’m good an’ dead an’ six foot under,” as an uncle of mine used to say with irritating regularity.

  So, as you might understand, it came as some surprise when I realized that my Aliano neighbors had failed to grasp the geographical niceties of my origins and often referred to me, both overtly and covertly, as “il Americano.” And it wasn’t as though nobody had shown curiosity about my place of birth. Usually the second or third question from anybody I met, after asking my opinion on the weather or confirming that I was, indeed, well and happy and enjoying myself in Aliano, was, “And where are you from?” And I would gladly explain about Yorkshire, England—where it was in relation to London and how the weather there was far inferior to the balmy blue skies of Basilicata and how the wines (Yorkshire doesn’t produce many) were not even a patch on Basilicata’s magnificent Aglianico del Vulture vintages. And then I would smile, hoping I’d been sufficiently complimentary. And they would nod and smile and invariably end the brief interrogation with a satisfied, “Bene, bene. Americano. Bene.”

  “No, no,” I would reply, “Not Americano. Inglese.”

  And they would nod and smile again, but as I turned to leave after a polite Buon giorno, Buona sera, Va bene, Ciao, or Arrivederci—depending on the hour and the individual and the mood—I would invariably hear a quietly whispered “Americano” as I walked away, and see them nodding knowingly to anyone else who happened to be around in a “he can’t fool me” kind of way.

  So I gave up. If they wanted to call me an Americano, I thought, then so be it. And I guess, in many ways, I was, after all those years we’d lived in New York and all those tens of thousands of miles backroading together around one of the world’s most scenic and mesmerizing nations and writing books and endless articles on America’s hidden delights.

  “You know, David, it’s possibly a good idea to stay an American anyway,” Giacomo (a bar friend) suggested to me over a cappuccino as I told him about this little local misconception.

  “Really?” I said. “And why’s that? What’s wrong with trying to tell them about Yorkshire?”

  “Well,” Giacomo said hesitantly (he invariably spoke hesitantly, as if his evolution from questing adolescence to mature middle-age was incomplete), “First, it may be a little confusing to them. They might think Yorkshire is your country, and as they’ve never heard of it and can tell you’re speaking English, they find it easier to think of you as an American. After all, America’s virtually our second home. Almost every Italian family has someone who lives in America. It’s been that way since the late 1800s. And that’s what they call people who return from living abroad, even if they didn’t live in America! So, in a way, they’re seeing you as part of our extended family, eh? And that’s nice, no?”

  I nodded, remembering Don Pierino’s remarks that there were more Alianese in the Bronx than there ever had been in Aliano itself.

  “Okay,” I said. “That’s fine. It doesn’t really matter anyway.”

  “And then…” Obviously Giacomo hadn’t finished. “Scusi, but maybe I should tell you something else.” He seemed almost embarrassed.

  “About what?”

  “Well, you see, during the war…”

  “Which one?”

  “The last one.”

  “Ah,” I said. “You mean the fact that the English were fighting the Italians?”

  “No, no, not that.”

  “Because th
e Americans were there, too, you know. Britain and America were allies.”

  “No, no. Of course. I know that. Let me explain.”

  “Sorry, I just thought…”

  “No, that’s okay. Everyone understands about that…ah, difficult time. No, it’s something else. And it may not be true. Who knows these things? Everything gets so exaggerated.”

  “So, tell me.”

  “Well, it seems there were some stories about our prisoners. Italian soldiers in North Africa. Many were caught by the British and sent away in ships to England.”

  “Yes. I’d heard that. But I thought we treated them well. Not like the German camps. Or the Japanese.”

  “…and to Scotland. Yes. Like you say, most were treated very well. Hardly prisoners at all, really. They often helped out on the local farms. And even got paid, too. Because so many of the young Scottish men were away at the war. Some even decided to stay there after the war. Married nice Scottish girls and settled down. They said Scotland was very beautiful except for maybe…”

  “The weather.”

  “Except for the weather and…” Again, that hesitancy.

  “And what?”

  “Well, except for the Scottish men. The older ‘whisky men,’ they called them. They were quite wild, I think. Always fighting…and things.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yes. I think so. Because y’see, some of our men, the prisoners, after the war, did not come back. Could not be found.”

  “You mean they’d escaped?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “So, what happened to them?”

  “Well…” said Giacomo very slowly. “We…they…the people around here think that maybe they were…well, you know Italian men, even prisoners, they have…a way with the ladies, you know. And they say Scotland is very wild. And the Scots men getting very drunk a lot…well, maybe, you know…some of the ladies felt a little lonely and also sorry for the prisoners and maybe they were having…” And then came one of those exquisite Italian gestures that suggested so eloquently and passionately what a less-cultured individual, a Yorkshireman like me, for example, might bluntly describe as “having hot times in the highland heather.” They would refer to such an occurrence more delicately as a piccola avventura (a little affair).