Seasons in Basilicata

by David Yeadon

  No matter how much we pluck its bounty for our salads, pastas, and pesto, our basil plant seems to surge back almost overnight. It will offer itself abundantly and consistently well into December—so we have been assured—when the first frosts bite. And even then, we hear, it will fight back, throwing out hosts of tiny new leaves as if to say, “Take everything I have and keep my memory alive in your sauces and dinners until I reawaken in the spring.”

  So, I know what’s for lunch now. Hot, steaming tagliatelle dribbled with Giuseppina’s homemade olive oil, black pepper, and parmesan, and tossed with torn basil leaves and thick segments of vine-fresh tomatoes purchased yesterday from Edenfruit, our favorite (only) greengrocer in the village, just below our terrace. And maybe a little sparkling wine. Why not! The day is shot anyway already, with all this delicious hedonism. Possibly that Malvasia made by Giuliano’s cousin, which I’ve been saving for something special. A day like today, for example. A day that flows on, leading my eyes and senses on a slow journey over rooftops and chimneys to the fortresslike battlements of the church tower and the patterned granite and marble stones of the piazza, and then outward, across the cliffs and precipices at the edge of the village to the hazy enormities of the mountain and ridge landscape beyond.

  TIME PASSES SLOWLY and easily. I doze, read in snippets, and pause to see what new nuances of color and form present themselves. I watch the sun, with its constantly changing play of light and shade, make its slow arc over the village, shaping the now-familiar daily rituals, silences, and siestas of its people. It entices birds to sing and then to cease singing in the stunning heat of the afternoon, and then to revive their choruses and swoopings over the rooftops as it begins to sink and lose its fire.

  Shadows lengthen and change color. As the Impressionists—particularly Manet, Monet, Bonnard, and of course my beloved van Gogh—knew well enough, shadows are rarely if ever gray, even on the dullest of days. There are subtle violets and deep olives in their dun tones. And on days like this, the shadows almost sparkle with color—mauves, dark scarlets, rich ochres and bronzes, and deep, majestically glowing purples. You don’t always notice them at first, particularly as the buildings and landscapes are still vibrant with luscious deepening hues and brilliant-shafted highlights of reflected late afternoon amber. But if you focus your eyes on the shadows, looking away occasionally to increase the contrast, the range and intensity of their colors are as vivid and rich as those of the sun-bathed flanks of the buildings and the hills all around.

  But the real beauty, the real magic, comes during that half-hour period when shadow and light, mystery and majesty, begin their enticing mingling into dusk: a marriage of half shades and haziness when the edges of things begin to soften and merge, and a world, recently crisp and stridently full of hard-edged forms reinforced by blocks and barricades of shadow, now becomes a far gentler, soft-focus place. A unity of graduated tones, from the deepest of blues to the lightest of lemons. The day is now passing into the nuptials of night (now there’s a phrase you don’t dream up every day), but it does so with such grace and subtlety that I barely notice the changes. Until it’s almost dark, and a chill swish of night air closes in like a curtain. When Anne finally returns from Accettura the last band of scarlet is dimming to a dark bronze across the Pollino range and flecking the fleecy feathers of high cirrus clouds.

  I hear our car (yes, it’s still that little Lancia DoDo with its distinct exhaust prattle) roll down the hill to our parking space by the church. I say “our” space because, through some unspoken tradition of village courtesy, the space I’d found to park the car that first day I arrived months ago had somehow remained ours, except when some outsider, oblivious to local customs, claimed it as his own for a few disconcerting hours. And even then I’d invariably see that the half dozen or so octos, who always sat nearby along the low church wall, were in a quandary, uncertain whether or not to reprimand the outsider and request the prompt removal of his car. Usually they agreed, through heated debate on a “not” vote, but I was always touched by their constant concern. Although no words were ever spoken, I felt they had accepted both of us as a small part of the village community.

  It’s a pleasantly reassuring, and still surprising, realization.

  I LEAVE the terrace, focal point of my daylong dawdling reveries, and go to greet Anne.

  “Had a good day?” she asks, with her “Thank God I’m home after all those bends” smile of relief.

  “Great!” I say, dreading her inevitable follow-on question.

  “So, what have you been doing all this time?”

  There’s an uncomfortable pause, and I think, What the heck? She understands all my odd little quirks. Mostly.

  “Well, to be honest, absolutely nothing. A little reading, but mainly just looking and thinking. And not much of the thinking bit either.”

  “Ah, that’s wonderful!” she says and obviously means it, exhibiting once again the serenity of her list-less life. “You really should do it more often.”

  The Bagpipe Man

  A day or two following my “dawdle-day” something happened that reminded me once again why this little “lost world” had become ever more enticing to both of us in all its nuances, strangenesses, and “dark side” undertones.

  I SHOULD START by admitting that I have no idea at all if this story is true. Some of these bar tales, especially after one grappa too many and a bloodstream full of blast-your-socks-off, thimble-sized espresso shots, can start to verge away from what you might call the carefully annotated facts of a well-researched, journalistic-type story. But I was told by my interpreter-of-the-day, Enrico, that the story certainly had the smack of authenticity. Enrico was a lively lad just back from Naples University to visit his family for a long festival of something-or-other (how the Alianese seemed to love those festivals that no one else in the Catholic world had ever seemed to have heard of), and he actually said, in reference to the storyteller, “This guy’s cool,” which I guess means anything you want it to mean.

  I think though that he was a little skeptical at first of Giorgio Continanza’s story, even though he had been brought up on Aliano’s thick and ancient brew of incanti (strange enchantments), superstitions, local witches, healers, and fears of the dark, demon-laced supernatural. According to Carlo Levi, such emotions were entrenched and irrevocably imprinted on the psyches of local peasants and even in the minds of village dons, politicos (podestà), priests, and those notorious “sequestrators of property in lieu of tax payments”—petty officials who plagued the poorer populace in the thirties and, according to some disgruntled locals, still do today. And on every possible occasion and in every way imaginable, these dark tales perpetuated all the peasants’ deepest fears and dreads.

  But Enrico was taking his role seriously, despite whatever skepticism he may have harbored initially, and tried to give me an accurate translation of Giorgio’s strange little story.

  “This is not something from years ago,” Giorgio said by way of introduction as we all sat or stood at the bar by the fossa. “This happened only a few months ago. In Oliveto Lucano, over by Parco Galipoli. And I was there.”

  On a recent backroad “randoming” drive I had come across this extremely well-hidden little hill village, tucked into the forest-shrouded slopes of the high mountainous Gallipoli wilderness. I stopped to ask directions, which were given erroneously, and I think intentionally erroneously, by some of the strangest-looking inhabitants of the region it had ever been my displeasure to meet. If anything weird or witchy were to happen, Oliveto Lucano would be a most appropriate setting, a true place of the ancient Lucano dei pagani—the spirit of pagan Lucano.

  “It was November,” Giorgio continued. “Everything was very nice. Sunshine, but not too hot. I was visiting a cousin of mine. On my father’s side. And we were sitting in the piazza at Oliveto enjoying a bottle of his wine. Not a very good wine, but it had been a bad year. For all of us.”

  The audience, gathered around us at the
bar, nodded knowingly. The previous year it had been a bad year for grapes in our part of Basilicata, too, and the problem with bad years was that, because you generally drank only your own wine, you’d be stuck with five or six hundred liters of acidic, vinegary rubbish for a whole twelve months until the next crop. Or until you’d adjusted its flavor by lavoro, otherwise known as “favorable mixing.” No one ever admits to such activities, of course, although the local vinai (vintners) claim that all commercial wines are invariably well lavorato, and they rarely, if ever, drink anything they didn’t create and age themselves. But from what I’ve learned, it’s a common, if unspoken, local practice to balance out what might be called the unfortunate and fickle follies of fate and climate.

  “So we were sitting and talking,” Giorgio continued. “His son was getting married in a few months, and he was not very happy with the bride.” Enrico tried to translate the particular words used in reference to the bride, but couldn’t. I think “roving eye” was the expression he was looking for. “So, we were trying to think how things could be changed when we heard a very strange noise. It was something I remember as a boy, but I haven’t heard it since then. It was—can any of you guess?” he asked his audience as he warmed to his own tale. “It was one of our Lucanian bagpipes, a very old zampogna. Not the small Calabrian type. This was the big one with that deep sound. Like an engine. A growling sound. And then the higher pipes on top of that. You remember?” A few older men nodded their heads slowly. Maybe they remembered. Such pipes are now museum pieces and rarely, if ever, seen or used in Basilicata. Or anywhere else for that matter.

  “Anyway, the sound was coming up the hill into the piazza. A very unusual sound. And then suddenly this man, a total stranger, appears, walking very slowly, like he was at a funeral, and playing these pipes. Huge pipes. Almost as big as him. They were very dark. Some kind of animal skin with hair on it. Possibly the skin of the cinghiale [boar]. And he was dark, too. Dressed in black with a black cap and a long black jacket, almost like a coat.”

  “Why was he in the village?” someone in the audience asked.

  “No one knows. There was no festival. The circus had been months ago. So everyone in the piazza—there must have been a dozen or so of us—just sat and wondered what was happening. Then…” Giorgio paused for a hefty swig of grappa (a feat I have yet to accomplish with any semblance of flair or panache; I’m still an insipid sipper) and continued. “Then he came to the center of the piazza and just kept playing. Not a nice tune. Sort of like a funeral march. And we sat, and he played on and on, and people were coming out to see what that strange sound was. Women came and children too. And he kept on playing. Very sad music, not nice at all. And then he stopped and took off his cap and went around the piazza wanting money. Can you believe it! Money! For that racket!”

  The bar audience had now grown. Even the young girl at the espresso machine had come from around the counter to join us. Giorgio’s tale was obviously unusual, and he was certainly worth listening to if you had nothing particularly interesting to do except sip coffee and grappa and watch the clouds massing ominously over Pollino and say things like, “I see there are clouds again over Pollino…” I was entranced by our storyteller’s fingers. They were long and delicate, like those of a concert pianist, and seemed to have an unusual knack of capturing the mood and pace of his tale. As his voice rose, so would his fingers; as it descended to a growly whisper they would turn downward and flutter; in moments of emphasis they would suddenly point outward at the audience like those of an orchestra conductor commanding a dramatic drumroll. Quite fascinating. Almost hypnotic.

  “So, nobody gave him anything. A few even got up to leave. But the man just stood there. All in black. His face dark, too. Like one of our local Albanians” (a few knowing nods in the audience at this point). “Then he put his cap on again and went back to the middle of the piazza, pumped up his bagpipe, and this time he played something very different. Very nice, in fact. Much lighter. And people started smiling. So, he kept playing for quite a while and then stopped again, took off his cap, and went around the piazza for a second time. But still no one gave him anything. You know the people in Oliveto Lucano. Real maliziosi (mean). They don’t like to part with money, for anything!”

  Heads nodded again, and Giorgio’s audience pressed in closer. “Now, he obviously didn’t like this, and we thought he would go away, but he didn’t. He went back to the middle of the piazza, put his cap back on, pumped up his pipes again, and this time started playing dancing tunes, silly tunes like the old pastorale for children. And then something very strange. We were just sitting there, and children started coming out of the houses and the little streets and they all began dancing. Childish stuff. Like a game. Girls and boys. And the man started dancing, too, even though the bagpipes were so big. And he began dancing around the piazza, and people started clapping to the tune, and more children came, and they all were dancing around him. And for a while it was very nice, and I think if he’d taken off his cap again, even the Oliveto Lucanans would have given him some money this time!”

  “But then…” Giorgio’s voice deepened, and people clustered in closer. “But then it all became very strange. Some clouds came over the mountain—very dark clouds, like for a storm—and they blocked out the sun. And a wind started. A cold winter wind. Coming out of the pines in the forest. And everything got very dark. But the children didn’t seem to notice. They just kept coming into the piazza and dancing and following the man around and around until…” Another grappa swig for Giorgio, which emptied his glass. The girl rushed forward and took it into the bar for a refill. The audience was utterly quiet now: not even a dog barking in the street (a most unusual occurrence) and none of those irritating crackling little tractorettes either. Just silence. Giorgio knew he had captured his listeners, and he began to relish his role as a village storyteller, a true local narratore delle fiabe.

  “Until…he began to lead the children out of the piazza. Some of the old men laughed and laughed even more as the man turned around and made a ‘be quiet’ sign to them, as if he wanted them to be part of a game. So everyone just sat there, giggling, as the man danced out of the piazza with the children, maybe twenty or more of them dancing after him. And you could hear his pipes, all the happy tunes now, and the children singing to his tunes. I could hear them skipping and jumping on the cobblestones. We all could. And I was thinking, when is he going to come back and collect his money. I had a euro all ready for him. He was strange but he’d livened up that miserable old place.”

  TRADITIONAL BAGPIPE BAND

  More grappa for Giorgio. And more utter silence.

  “And then it all became very odd. The music had been fading, and we were thinking he would lead them around the church and then back into the piazza but then we realized that there wasn’t any more music…and there weren’t any children either….”

  Giorgio’s pauses were becoming more theatrical, and his gulps of firewater grappa more substantial. And yet, as I looked at him, even though I didn’t know him at all, it seemed that it was not all theater. There was something in his eyes that appeared disturbed. Even a little fearful.

  “So, then there was nothing. Just this cold wind out of the forest and the black clouds and no sun. And it really was cold. Almost like the middle of winter. And people started looking around, and the women were calling their children’s names. The men stood up, and the women were suddenly running across the piazza and around the corner. I could hear their shouts, and then their voices got higher and higher. They were frightened, really frightened. Screaming, some of them. I could hear their cries echoing as they ran uphill in the narrow alleys behind the piazza, looking for their children. We followed, of course. Everyone left the piazza. But it was so strange. There was no sign of them anywhere…no sounds of the pipes. Nothing. Just that blackness over everything.”

  Giorgio paused. He was obviously moved himself by the memory. His audience waited, giving him time to sip his g
rappa again, until someone asked the inevitable: “So, what happened? What happened to the children?”

  Giorgio blinked and coughed and began again, a little more slowly: “It was very, very odd. We’d all gone running around trying to find the bagpipe man and the children. We looked everywhere, but there was no sign of them. So one by one we all came back to the piazza and…”

  Giorgio’s audience couldn’t wait. “And what?!” they cried almost in unison.

  “Well,” Giorgio said, “they were all there. Every one of them. No bagpipe man, but all the children, lined up like for a school parade or something. Just standing. Not smiling or anything. Just standing. Waiting.”

  “For what!?” someone asked.

  “We never found out. Everyone was hugging the children and asking them what had happened and where had they been, but they just kind of stood there and said nothing. Like some kind of…trance or something.”

  There was silence. I don’t think I’d ever heard the bar so silent. Until Giorgio started again in a hushed voice. “The only thing we got was when one of the boys came over to the mayor, who had rushed out to join us when we came back to the piazza, and handed him a piece of paper. Just a small piece.”

  Giorgio’s audience was now reaching the exasperation point: “And what was on the ****** piece of paper?” asked one, after a tense pause, and else everyone nodded.

  “Nothing much. It just said, ‘I will see you all again.’”

  “That’s all?” another asked.

  “That’s all,” Giorgio said with a shrug.

  “And the man with the bagpipes? Where was he?” a third asked.

  “Who knows? Disappeared into the forest, I suppose, just like a mago [magician],” Giorgio said in an unusually quiet voice, and then he slowly drained his third glass of grappa and waited, unsmilingly, for a fourth to be brought by the now goggle-eyed espresso-machine girl.