by David Yeadon
So for the moment it was three markets, a funeral, and, thus far, no wedding. But who knew what my friend might come up with the following week.
Finally a Wedding (or at Least Part of One…)
Actually nothing happened the next week. Guiliano had got the date wrong again or something. I never found out. However, I did finally get to see a wedding a while later. It was utterly by chance, and I’m still not exactly sure who the couple, or the families, were except that they were long-time friends of good old Massimo, another maestro of making things happen…and as it turned out once again, messing things up, too.
It all began one afternoon in Accettura. A Friday afternoon, to be precise, when Anne had left with a couple of friends from Aliano for a weekend of shopping in Matera. (It was my turn to remind her that our little house had no need for more “things,” but somehow the message got lost in a flurry of farewell hugs.) I’d popped into the Hotel SanGiuliano for lunch, and Massimo approached me in the midst of a fine linguine alle vongole, the rich garlic clam sauce with succulent fat whole clams that was one of his specialite di casa.
“Ah, David. What are you doing tomorrow?”
“No plans really. So far.”
“So you want to come to wedding?”
“Massimo, you’re not getting married!?”
For some reason he found the idea utterly hilarious, but when he’d recovered his equilibrium, he explained, “No, no, no, thank you. My friend is. Near Sapri. His wedding. Tomorrow. Saturday morning at ten o’clock.”
“In Sapri?”
“Yes, near Sapri. Is not so far. You have been Sapri before I think. So, you leave after lunch today and you be there in Sapri in two, two and a half hours. Okay? You come?”
“Sure. I’d love to,” I said, amazed at my speedy decision-making.
“Okay. So, you stay at Hotel Tirreno tonight in Sapri. You like Tirreno, right? You stayed there when you first arrived to here I think.”
“Oh, yes. Very nice hotel, so long as I can have my room overlooking the beach and the passeggiata. That’s where I stayed when I first arrived in Italy.”
“No problem. I call for you. They friends of mine. So, listen. I pick you up nine o’clock, after breakfast tomorrow. Is okay? And please tell Anne to come too if she wants. I am sure she will enjoy very much.”
I explained that Anne was in the process of spending a hefty slice of our annual budget at Matera’s vast Carrefour hypermarket.
“Ah,” he said tactfully, “maybe she buy nice present for you.”
“Maybe.” I said, maybe a little morosely.
He gave me one of his irrepressible giggles. “And you always saying to me I should get wifed!”
So that’s how I came to make a delightfully dramatic late-afternoon drive over the soaring Monte Sirino range and down from Lagonegro (supposedly the home of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa model) to balmy Sapri, lazily sprawled around its sandy bay, to attend my first Basilicatan wedding.
PROMPTLY AT TEN O’CLOCK the next morning Massimo arrived at my hotel…an hour late of course.
“Sorry, sorry. I am late. Look, you follow me, okay? We go first to the house of groom, which is custom, and then you follow me again to church. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said, looking with concern at his exhausted face, bloodshot eyes, and stubbly, unshaven chin. “Are you all right?”
He gave another one of his endearing giggles. “Oh, yes, I am very fine. There was party last night. For a few friends. Men friends. We were all at school together. It was a lot to eat. Too much. And drink. Also too much, I think…and too late. No sleep.”
I was glad I’d not been invited. If the normally sparkling-faced Massimo looked like this after an all-night bacchanal, they’d have been carting me off to the local hospital, or worse.
Things went smoothly. At least at first. Despite Massimo’s typically Italian maniacal driving, I managed to keep up and join him and a coterie of male friends at the groom’s parents’ house. Most of them looked even worse for the wear than Massimo, but they still seemed able to keep up that spirited, nonstop, semi-monologue continuum that purports to be conversation in Italy. I nodded and smiled and understood almost nothing. But whatever they were talking about certainly seemed to be weighty and of the utmost significance. Of course, every conversation over here sounds like that. Even discussions of such mundane subjects as the weather invariably end up as flamboyant mutual demonstrations of oratorical and gesticulative overkill.
At a prearranged signal, there was a mad dash to the cars, Indy 500–style, and we were all off again—careening around tortuously narrow turns, soaring over mountain ridges, swirling down into tight little valleys. We scared the life out of the aging occupants of the villages through which we roared, ribbons flying from car aerials, hands waving, horns blaring. Dogs scattered and fists were raised at us in protest. (Or maybe the villagers were just bidding the groom a happy life. Who knows?).
And then we were there, cars screeching to a halt in a school parking lot by the arched entryway to one of the most charming, fairy-tale villages I’d ever seen on the Sapri coast, overlooking the coast from a remarkably high precipice around which rooks floated like expectant vultures.
The numbers in the wedding party quickly grew as we all threaded our way down winding alleys between stone houses bedecked with ornate balconies, potted plants, and dangling planters exploding with flowers. Villagers nodded and smiled as we finally arrived at the quaint piazza by a castlelike church. Apparently it indeed once was the castle chapel, although most of the castle is now a vast breezy terrace with spectacular views of the sea, mountains, and velvety green foothills dotted with scores of whitewashed farmhouses.
In typical Italian “hurry, hurry, wait, wait” fashion, we’d done the hurrying bit so now we waited in a merry mood around the church steps.
I felt a little out of it because of the language barrier, until a young man, tall and shy, sidestepped over to me and asked haltingly, “Are you from English?”
“Yes,” I said. “From England.”
There was a long pause and then he asked, “Have you met Bon Jovi?”
Now that was an entirely new conversation starter! I wished I could have said “yes,” but I said, “No.” He gave a disappointed “oh” and wandered off.
The groom was standing with Massimo and his friends at the top of the church steps looking as nervous as a fox backed into a corner by baying hounds, unless it was merely the last twitches of delirium tremens from the nightlong festivities with his former school buddies. I was particularly struck by his eyes—all three of them! Two were wide open in an expression approaching “terrified.” (Maybe he was wondering if his wife-to-be had changed her mind and made a mad dash for the wild forested mountains behind us.) The third eye, right in the center of his forehead, seemed to be closed and a little on the purplish side—doubtless the result of some boys-will-be-boys antics of the night before.
Finally, the bride came down the winding alley—looking radiant in her flowing white gown and halolike camellia-laced headdress—followed by her retinue of young bridesmaids and a remarkable number of family members. After counting more than seventy I gave up. Looking at the snug interior of the church, I wondered how we were all going to fit inside it.
Somehow we did. More than two hundred of us. Crammed and jostled onto hard, narrow pews or, for most, against walls or pillars or anywhere else we could find.
While the day outside was comfortably warm, the church rapidly reached the point of claustrophobic tropic torpor. And that was before they closed the doors. Which may not have been so bad if this had been one of those relatively brief Anglican ceremonies, which would have had us all back outside and breathing freely again in little more than half an hour. But not this time. Not at this wedding. Someone had commissioned a full-blown, pull-out-all-the-Catholic-stops service with a large local choir, a toned-down rock band for odd and frequent musical interludes, and a loquacious priest who ranted on f
or an almost forty-minute sermon. He began benignly and warmly enough, but ended shrieking hell and damnation on couples who did not reproduce fast enough (and other equally intolerable and un-Catholic sins). And as the heat and stale air intensified, then came all the sittings, standings, and kneelings and the repeating of long Catholic litanies, and finally, an endless wafer-and-wine communion for just about everybody in the congregation. Except me. I stayed as long as I could—certainly for the joining of hands and the kiss and everything—but as soon as possible I was outside, gagging for breath, sucking in the fresh air like a sweet nectar, and wondering where the wedding breakfast was to be held.
Massimo had said he’d managed to get me invited, although I felt a little like a gate-crasher. But, hey, after all the effort I’d made just to be there and add my cheers and well-wishes to everyone else’s—even though I still had no idea who anybody was, least of all the bride and groom—I decided I deserved some kind of liquid and gustatory compensation.
OF COURSE, THAT’S not how things worked out. How could they? After all, this was a Massimo-organized event, and as I was to learn many times during our stay in Basilicata, Massimo’s “arrangements” existed solely in his own imagination.
Once the ceremony had ended and the photographs had been taken and the happy crowd had marched back down the alleys of the picturesque village (I still didn’t have any idea where we were), I followed Massimo’s hastily whispered instructions. Which were: “Follow us. Don’t go with other cars. We go faster way.”
And indeed it was faster. A lot faster. So quick that I lost Massimo’s car in a maze of backroads with forks and dead ends and everything else to confuse a neophyte explorer of that wild mountainous terrain.
I had not been told where they were going for what Massimo had described as “a big, big dinner, you won’t believe!” And I couldn’t ask anybody because first, there wasn’t anybody around to ask, and second, I wouldn’t have understood the reply anyway.
So there I was, lost in that primitive tangle of unsigned (and in some instances unpaved) lanes deep in a vast forest in the midst of seemingly endless mountains, with this mantra hammering away in my head, “Massimo, this time you’re a dead man!”
A Day of Delicious Delights
After my long drive back from the wedding fiasco and Anne’s bagand-box–laden return from her Matera splurge, we thought we would enjoy another one of our more relaxing days: a chance to cook and read or maybe a stroll around the village at passeggiata time. Or maybe not. After all, the weather was in moribund mood. The tail end of summer had produced dreary, gray doldrums for the last couple of weeks, the intervals of balmy blue were rare, and there was a distinct early-fall chill in the air.
So an “in day” it was to be.
Until the door rattled. Not exactly a knock, but Giuseppina’s odd way of shaking the door to indicate her presence with, as usual, her cell phone and Sebastiano at the other end.
“David, I have someone I think you two should meet.”
“When?” (I wasn’t really in the mood, so I may have been a little abrupt in my response.)
“Today, if is all right. I am not at school today.”
“Who?”
“A very interesting man. A potter. But not like Giuliano. Not tiles and bricks and things. Things for the house. Plates, jugs, these things.”
“Where does he live?”
“In Stigliano. Not far from my house. Can you come over about two o’clock?”
“Hold on,” I said and consulted the oracle.
“Okay,” Anne said with smiling enthusiasm. “We don’t have any other plans.”
“Excuse me,” I reminded her, “this was supposed to be an “in day’.”
“Oh, we can do that tomorrow. And if the weather doesn’t change, maybe for the rest of the week…or month,” she said, mumbling the last bit as a rebuke to the strange, depressing climate of the last few days.
“Okay, Sebastiano. Sounds like a great idea. We’ll be at your place by two o’clock.”
“Good. Ciao.”
“Ciao.”
So much for our “in day.” But, as it happened, this particular day turned again into one of those magical potpourris of delicious and unexpected delights.
FIRST IT WAS our loaf. The previous evening we’d taken a small plastic bag of chopped-up leftovers from our kitchen to our baker across the piazza. I seem to remember we’d included garlic, parsley, bits of four different cheeses, prosciutto, salami and soppressata fragments, and sun-dried tomatoes, all mixed with a little oregano, basil, and marjoram. Maybe some bits of anchovy, too, from the dregs of Anne’s version of Caesar salad dressing from the evening before.
We’d discussed with the baker what size and shape of loaf we wanted with all our tidbits mixed in, and I’d suggested the eighteen-inch–diameter donut-shaped loaf that was one of his specialties. Of course we knew that this was a complete waste of time because, just as on other occasions, it would turn out to be the same one-foot–diameter, circular pielike loafs cooked in a special pan with all our ingredients spread in a layer in the center of the bread. And that’s exactly what it was. But what made it so enticing this time was the baker’s wife, a tiny and very huggable, gnomelike lady with sparking eyes. With a distinct blush—an unusual sight in a seventy-year-old person—she asked if she might have a tiny taste of the strange bread she’d been baking for us on and off for weeks. We were delighted. Using the cleaver-like knife she handed me, I cut her and her husband two generous wedges, and a third for her sprightly young counter assistant, whose fresh, country grin had brightened so many of my early mornings.
As they all began to munch on their slices, I cut thin slices for Anne and myself, and we all stood like wine connoisseurs at a tasting—nibbling, chewing, and savoring the rich tastes and aromas from the still-warm bread. And smiling. The little shop was suddenly full of smiles—honest ones, I think—as our three co-conspirators in creative baking all agreed that the flavor was superbo. Anne and I praised their skill at baking and the selection of the appropriate shape (despite our request for the ultra-large donut); they praised our selection of ingredients and the finely chopped mix we had given them. But despite this warm aura of mutual admiration, when I asked the husband-and-wife team if they thought such a loaf would be popular with the villagers, they shook their heads sadly. The young girl also shrugged eloquently as if to say, “What can you do in a place where the old ways are as rigid as the sequences of a Catholic mass?”
“But you all seemed to be enjoying it. Why wouldn’t other people in the village enjoy it?”
There was a flurried exchange of eye contact and unspoken debate until the lady baker explained, “We only have twelve different kinds of bread.” This really wasn’t an explanation at all, more like an apology for the constricting regimentation of old traditions.
Well, I thought as we left the bakery, at least those three enjoyed it. And it was definitely one of our best. Something about the mix of the tiny warm pieces of prosciutto and salami with those four cheeses and just the slightest hint of anchovy, garlic, and basil had given it a rather unique character.
We looked forward to enjoying more of our creation when we returned to the house. But we never got that far. As we were approaching our door, a plump gentleman in a long, black cashmere coat, red scarf, and perky black coppola cap strolled across the piazza with a determined air and held out his hand.
“Buon giorno. Hello. How are you? ’Scuse me for interrupting, but I am Alberto Garambone.”
“Ah,” I said, having no idea who Alberto Garambone was except that, with his plump, smiling face, fat moustache, and bright, shining eyes, he seemed the kind of person it might be fun to get to know.
“Yes. I am the son of the Americano. You remember from Carlo Levi’s book? He had lived much of the time in America. The one who owns this palazzo.” Alberto was pointing at the large, stately, and a little aloof, house by the post office, which, since I’d arrived, had always be
en shuttered and empty. I’d often been curious about this place but had never seen anyone enter or leave. So far it had been a rather splendid mystery.
“Oh, really? The Americano’s home. Of course. I remember it well. Levi described its elaborately carved door and lots of geranium pots on the balcony.”
“Yes, you are correct,” said Alberto, with a cheek-bulging grin. “You know his book well.”
I smiled and nodded. I should. I was into my ninth read, and in places the text was barely decipherable in a blizzard of my notes and underlinings.
“Maybe you would like to see inside?”
“Yes, indeed, we would. When?”
“Well, now,” Alberto said, his happy grin widening. His face reminded me of that of an equally plump British actor who always played the character role of a well-meaning Dr. Watson–type bumbler. I still can’t remember his name.
“Fine,” we said.
And so off we all went across the piazza. Alberto unlocked the huge, brown doors of the palazzo, with their elegant carvings of cherubic faces. They opened onto a steep staircase leading to the upper living floors. As soon as Alberto opened the doors to the kitchen and “informal” dining area, I knew we’d stepped through a time warp and back to the early 1940s. An ancient but immaculate white-enameled wood-burning cooking stove had pride of place against the far wall near a glass-door cupboard filled with delicate porcelain dinnerware. The table, with elegantly carved legs, was set for one. “I sometimes stay here overnight, but I live in Grassano. Maybe you would like to visit me there? Grassano is very famous for its passatella games. Maybe you and your wife would find interest.”
We murmured agreement but were distracted by the tour of this museum-like mansion, with its elegant formal dining room, over-stuffed armchairs, lacy crochet covers on all flat surfaces, and tall, windup gramophone. (“It still works beautifully,” Alberto said proudly.) Melodramatic Victorian-spirited paintings in elegant frames hung on the walls, including one of those “Monarch of the Scottish Glens” works of a majestically antlered stag standing proudly atop a highland peak. (These had once been almost obligatory accoutrements in British homes, including my grandfather’s house in Yorkshire.)