by David Yeadon
But, of course, he did return to the world, and spent much of the rest of his life struggling to deal with “the problem of the south.” But even Levi, for all his fame and adulation, realized the intractability of the national government and its northern bias.
And the same empty rhetoric continues today—elaborate schemes and dreams for the South rarely backed by fiscal investment or the vision to see things through, or truly believe in a new future for this maltreated land. Ever strident in his political beliefs, Levi emphasized the need for “autonomous or self-governing rural communities. This is the only form of government which can solve in our time the problems of the south.”
Anne and I had become close to this man and his ideals. They coincided to some extent with our own tendencies toward a “gentle anarchy” and the way in which we tried to live our own lives. It’s an approach that attempts to encourage self-expression and the widest form of self-(or rather selves) exploration, because I believe we are all far more multifaceted and creative than we ever give ourselves credit for. Even though it may be highly unfashionable in our increasingly homogenized world, I still support the concept of the Renaissance man and celebrate individuals like Levi, whose “multi-self” facets included that of scholar, writer, journalist, publisher, doctor, artist, and politician. And even when Mussolini and his cohorts dispatched Levi to his confino in Aliano, he overcame the angst of his lonely prison at the southern tip of the village in his little hot-cold room, produced a remarkable portfolio of artwork, and wrote his classic tale, which has as much impact today as it did when it was first published in 1945.
SO FINALLY I went down to the edge of the village to explore Levi’s prison.
I had intended to do this as soon as I arrived in Aliano, but the place was being (very slowly) restored and was littered with Keep Out and Danger signs. I guess I could have talked my way in—the workers seemed such an amicable bunch—but something restrained me. Maybe I wasn’t quite ready to stand in the small room overlooking those vast panoramas, which to me were a daily delight, and try to see them through Levi’s eyes as “the bottomless sadness of a desolate countryside.”
I came one lunchtime, after the sacred hour of twelve-thirty, when everything comes to a sonorous halt and silence reigns until at least four o’clock. No one was around. The workers had left for their long lunch and siesta, the gate was open, and despite the profusion of freshly mortared cobblestones and piles of detritus everywhere, I tiptoed to the staircase leading up to the front of the house and edged myself into its shadowy gloom.
It was very quiet. Unnervingly so. There was no breeze spiraling up from the calanchi and no scurryings of cats and dogs. There were just dark, empty rooms—cold despite the hot air outside—and a disarray of broken tiles, torn plaster walls, little mounds of broken pottery, and an ancient fireplace with at least six different-colored layers of paint on its chipped surface. I stopped and picked up a piece of pottery, part of a jug handle. Nothing fancy, just crude red clay. Should I keep it? Was it something that might have been around when Levi lived there? I was tempted. I felt I needed some tangible link with the man, something more than my dog-eared copy of his book. However, like an honorable archaeologist, I placed it back on its dusty little pile. Silly, maybe—no doubt it would be thrown out with all the other piles eventually—but, I thought, the only thing I’m here for is to stand in the room, to experience where he lived. Not to pilfer souvenirs.
And there it was: At the front of the house, with two tiny windows overlooking the vast Pollino panorama. There was nothing in the room beyond more piles of sweepings on the floor and a pencil scrawl with an arrow on the wall, presumably written by one of the workers as an indication of the key room in the house. It read: LEVI.
I’m not sure how long I stood there peering at the view and trying to feel Levi’s presence in that claustrophobic space—maybe only a few minutes—but suddenly I sensed that I was not alone. No, it was not another “dark side” incident, although when I turned and looked at the person standing there—a wizened old man in his lopsided coppola cap, his ragged neck scarf, and a jacket so tattered and frayed it looked like the shaggy hair of some wild animal—it felt like that.
“Buon giorno,” I said.
He grunted and nodded, staring at me out of a pair of dark, deepset eyes edged by flurries of wrinkles and furrows.
“Levi?” he asked.
“Si,” I said. “Levi.”
The old man’s face broke into a grin that set more wrinkles and furrows undulating around his nose and mouth.
“A good man. Buon uomo virile,” he said.
I nodded. Damn it, I thought. If only Giuseppe, one of my invaluable village interpreters, were here we could have a decent conversation, and then maybe I’d learn more about the man we’d followed all this way from America and Japan. True, Levi would now be over a hundred years old, if he were still alive, so this man would have been a child, but…who knows?
However, before he ambled off, the old man did say something that I managed to capture on my tape. He didn’t speak for long, which is odd in this village of natural-born orators always gesticulating. “Because they have so many nationalities down here,” Giuseppe had once told me, “so many conquests, they were all once foreigners to one another. So, body talk was very necessary between the races.”
I asked one of Giuseppina’s sons to translate my recording and this is what he thought the old man was saying to me: “Before Doctor Carlo Levi came here as a prisoner, no one cared about us. We were called animals. Pagani peasants, terroni, cafoni. But he looked after us; he cared for my mother when she was very sick. And before he left, he told us, ‘You will never be forgotten again.’ And he was very truthful man, and although we are still poor, we all now own our own land and we can eat and smoke and be with our own families in our own houses. He made us into men, not beasts. He made us proud to be Alianese.”
MAN AT CARLO LEVI hOUSE
This should be part of Levi’s epitaph on the new burial plot they’ve just rebuilt for him up at the cemetery, where his original, simple, headstone reads: Carlo Levi 12.11.1902–4.1.1975.
It should say so much more.
What Was It Really Like?
Although Levi’s book offers a remarkable and, most locals agree, accurate depiction of life in Aliano in the 1930s, I was always curious to learn more.
“SO, YOU REALLY want to know what it was like before the war?” Felicia de Lorenzo had a deep, throaty laugh, and it echoed around her tiny one-room house.
“It would help. I get lots of little bits of information, but I’d like to know how things looked, what it all felt like, what happened on a normal day. And I’d like to hear it from somebody who was actually here, in Aliano, fifty, sixty years ago, and who can still remember the details.”
“Well, I have very good memory. But I don’t always like to think about things in the past. And maybe you won’t like to hear…”
“Just tell me whatever you wish,” I said. “I’d like to get a sense of how things have changed in the village.” I nudged Gino, my young interpreter for the day, and asked him to translate as accurately as he could. I didn’t want to miss anything.
Felicia’s enticing laugh tumbled out again. It somehow combined an irrepressible sense of fun with deeper touches of sadness, melancholy, and maybe even a little anger at the poignancy of her memories. Her eyes were looking right at me, coal black but with diamond-sharp flashes. Although she was well over eighty (she wouldn’t tell me her exact age), I sensed that her faculties were resolutely intact and that, despite all her ironic humor, she saw the world, and me, in a highly focused, no-nonsense way. She had removed her black scarf to reveal a wavy flow of hazel hair flecked with silver strands.
Her face was sun scorched to an earthy bronze, and her skin was wrinkled like old parchment but in such a way that she always seemed to carry a slight smile as if everything around her was a source of gentle, unmalicious amusement. Her eye creases tilted
upward in scimitar-curve laugh lines and crinkled tightly when she grinned, which she did as soon as I used the word change.
“Change!” she half shouted, her wrinkles chasing each other across her face. “What change!? Look at my house! One room. Still one room. Just like it was then, so long ago.”
“But there are no pigs here! Or cows. Or a dozen other family members living here with you.” I thought I’d test her humor tolerance. Some residents refuse even to discuss the days when a single room there served as a repository for an entire extended family, a coterie of farm animals and equipment, and a year’s worth of homemade olive oil, wine, cheese, and pig products. Not to mention the shadowy corner for a bucket toilet, a baking-fire that filled the often chimney-less room with acrid smoke, and a “matrimonial bed” that occupied most of the available space and under which the animals made their flea-and dung-littered home for much of the year.
Even back in the thirties, when conditions throughout Italy were marginal at best, Carlo Levi was shocked by what he found in Basilicata and most particularly in Aliano:
In these dark holes…I saw a few pieces of miserable furniture, beds, and some ragged clothes hanging up to dry. On the floor lay dogs, sheep, goats and pigs. Most families have just one room to live in and there they sleep all together; men, women, children and animals…in the dust and heat, amid the flies. I have never in all my life seen such a picture of poverty.
Fortunately Felicia laughed at my remarks. I felt relieved. Maybe I could now delve a little deeper without offending her. She had been around ten or so when Carlo Levi was confinato here. I told Gino that’s where I’d like her to start.
“I’ve just read in Carlo Levi’s book what the living conditions were like in the thirties.”
“Ah, Carlo Levi. Yes. The good doctor…”
“Do you remember him?”
“Not very much. I was young.” (She still had no intention of revealing her precise age.) “But my mother thought he was very good man. He helped many peoples, she said. And she told me he once painted me and my sister…a proper portrait.”
“Did you ever see the painting?”
“Oh, no. My mother said he kept all his paintings locked away. People called him a real artist, and he wanted to have a big show of his paintings after…”
“After he was freed from here?”
“Yes, I suppose so. After the…sadness.”
I’d heard many euphemisms for the war and the domination of Mussolini and his fascist fanatics. But “sadness” was a new one.
“So you don’t remember meeting him?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I said ‘hello.’ He was always walking about. He lived down the hill in the big house.”
“Yes. I’ve been there. It must have been a fine house then.”
“Oh, yes. Once it was the best in our village. I think his life was not so bad. He had windows and a view. A beautiful view.”
“And you?”
Another thwack of laughter made her body shake. “Me? Well, I think we had one window in our one room. A window looking into the street and the house across. That’s all. And we had all the things Doctor Levi described in his book: diseases like typhoid, too many people, animals, fleas, and far too little food. Always too little food.”
“So, what did you eat?”
She gave me a long quizzical look before replying. “Listen to me. I will tell you the things you want to know, but you must remember one thing: Looking back now, life then seems to be very bad, but when I was little, everybody lived the same way, ate the same things—bread with a little olive oil, maybe a little cheese, some pasta, bits of meat one time a week. It was not much, but we didn’t know different. My mother used to say we didn’t know how lucky we were because we had things like bread every day and her tomato sauce for spreading, and if you had pigs, you always had some salami or sausage. She told us there were many times when she was young that she and her family had lived arrangiandosi; (getting by) only on insalata di campo—wild greens of radicchio, ginestrella, rapa, asparagi, selvatici, and many other things from the fields, and onions and garlic and soups made out of moldy bread…”
I kept quiet. She seemed to be lost in silence for a while, wrapped in her own reverie. Finally she resumed: “And people said things. Bad things. They say we lived like animals. In caves. No toilets. No sewers. No water. You had to walk right to the bottom of the village to the fountain and carry buckets and pots back on your head. They said we didn’t wash. Everything was covered with flies and fleas. There was malaria, typhoid, and strange fevers. People dying, all the time. Particularly the children. Every day someone seemed to die on our street….”
“So, what they said was correct?”
Felicia paused again. Obviously not all her memories were bad ones. Despite appalling conditions by today’s standards, life there had continued and had contained its own precious pleasures, laughter, jokes, pranks, even love and romance, amid all the ceaseless crowding of people, swaddled babies rocking in small rope hammocks hung from the ceiling, the constant crush of animals, and an almost total lack of any kind of personal space or privacy.
“Yes, I suppose it is. And even today we still have many of the same problems: poor housing for lots of people, poor weather and crop prices, young people leaving so no one to work the fields, higher and higher costs for things, for everything. And corruption—even here in this small village. And of course, taxes, always more taxes! Ah, la vita è così [that’s life]. But…well, I like to remember the good things, too.”
“Can you tell me some?”
More silence and ruminating. Then suddenly Felicia’s face brightened, and the laugh lines around her eyes crinkled again. “Well, I remember me, my sister Gina, and my two brothers all cuddling together in bed with our mother when it was cold. And she was always warm. So warm, like a big thick blanket. It was so cozy and safe. We never wanted to get out of bed. Oh, and the baby lambs: When they came in the spring we used to play with them and take them for walks with bits of string around their necks. And playing in the street, too. All of us young ones, with mothers sitting outside in the shade watching us and chatting and laughing. The whole street was like one big room for us all. In the warm times everyone was outside. We only went inside for eating and sleeping. Sometimes only sleeping. And the pizza bread! Not like today, with all kinds of stuff piled on it. This was just leftover pieces of dough our baker cooked with a bit of tomato sauce spread over it and maybe a few gratings of cheese. And we ate it warm, rubbed with garlic and hot peppers…and, oh, it was so good. One of the best tastes. And my mother’s orecchiette, little pieces of pasta dough she pressed with her thumb into tiny cup shapes that she filled with hot tomato sauce—her special conserva di pomodoro—and our own olive oil, a lovely bright green color. That was so, so very good.”
“Sounds delicious,” I said. And I knew it was. We’d made the same dish a few times in our apartment, and we’d learned, over and over again, how little it takes to create a fine, filling meal without meat or any fancy accompaniments…except maybe a little parmesan cheese and some of that palate-scorching Alianese hot peperoncini sauce to add piquancy and a definitive palate-punch.
“Oh yes, it was, it was,” she said. And then slowly and with many pauses, she continued to describe the small, happier details of her early life, emphasizing the bonds of affection and love among family members, their endurance in the face of regular onslaughts of misfortune—the shared sorrow of a child’s passing or the death of a grandparent—but also their deep belief that a far better life awaited them in the hereafter. She told me of the joy of gift-giving at Christmas and other festivals: not store-bought gifts—there was rarely any money for such luxuries, she emphasized—but small items they all secretly crafted themselves, like stuffed balls of cloth with silly painted faces, small stick figures carved out of bits of old olive branches, bonnets made with shards of old cloth, cut and stitched with colored threads and ribbons. And a special favorite of Felic
ia’s: fragments of a broken mirror she’d once found, which she pressed into balls of moist red clay and decorated around with small colored stones she’d picked up along one of the village paths and then left to bake rock-hard in the scorching summer sun. “Everybody loved those,” she said, her eyes watering a little. “So simple to make but so pretty. They were all over our home. And I gave them to all my friends. I still have one…” She looked around her one-room house but couldn’t seem to remember where it was. “…somewhere.”
THERE WAS SO much more to learn about Felicia’s life: her schooling, her work, her romances and marriage, her life as a wife, mother, and grandmother.
“Please come back,” she told me. “You make me remember some nice things. Oh, and things really are a little better today,” she said with one of her warm smiles. “You have to learn to live, you know, with what you have around you. Otherwise you’ll never be happy. It may not be much compared…to other people, but my mother used to tell us all, ‘Happy thoughts make happy people.’”
When I left her tiny home, promising to see her again, I carried her simple reminder with me, deciding that our world desperately needed all the Felicias it could find.
Two Hundred Dollars in Thirteen Uneasy Steps
Despite Felicia’s optimism, some things in the South still seem to be entrenched in ancient and obscure rituals. Particularly things bureaucratic—anything that involved endless paperwork or protracted “power-pyramid” procedures. Like obtaining cash—a simple operation nowadays, in most places with ATMs and the like. But when it came to items like traveler’s checks, one had to be prepared for a laborious multistep fandango of farce and occasional fury.
I WAS OUT of cash once again, and at the one bank in Stigliano that seemed to be open, the cash machine was broken. Or something like that: There was a long notice taped to the front of it and covering the slot where you put your card in, so I guessed it was broken. But why all the verbiage? Well, I reminded myself, this is Italy, and loquaciousness is the name of the game here…except inside the bank itself, where the staff spoke in terse, monosyllabic phrases and made you feel like customers were the last thing they wanted inside their elaborately baroqued bastion.