Seasons in Basilicata

by David Yeadon

  The upstairs bedrooms were classic forties, too, with washbasins and jugs, an enormous polished-steel (or zinc?) bed with a most flamboyantly scrolled headboard, and more large artworks. The corridor led to an expansive terrace with spectacular vistas to the east across the valleys and foothills toward Stigliano.

  “I would so much like to make this into an official bed-and-breakfast,” Alberto said a little hesitantly. “You think?”

  “I think—with a few changes and some repainting—it would make a great B and B,” I said. “When will you open it?”

  “Ah,” Alberto murmured sadly, a sound I’d heard so often before when ambitious plans were discussed there. “That’s the problem. Too much paperwork…permissions…the mayor, the police…”

  “For a two-room bed-and-breakfast? Why all the bureaucracy?”

  Alberto nodded, smiled sadly, and shrugged. “This is Italy,” he said.

  “But everyone I’ve talked to agrees that the only real future for a place like Aliano is in “cultural tourism,” linked to Levi and the whole spirit of Basilicata. I’d like to think they would be pleased to have some B and Bs in the village. There’s nowhere for people to stay here at all!”

  Alberto continued shrugging and shaking his head. “I know, I know. You are so right. It’s the only way. But…”

  I waited for the coda. We actually spoke the words together: “This is Italy.”

  Outside again, we bid farewell to yet another newfound Levi enthusiast and promised to visit him in Grassano.

  “You will both come for big lunch. Then I will show you passatella games in the bars. Very interesting, very crazy!”

  “Excellent. We’ll look forward to that.”

  BACK AT THE HOUSE, Anne made the morning fire to countertact the strange late-summer chill. She’s a far better fire-maker than I. Something to do with the way her dad taught her to build diagonal layered stacking and spaces for the flames to “breathe.” I tend to cram everything in, light a couple of fire-starters, and hope for the best. Which means there’s rarely a “best” and usually a frustrated me blaming wet wood, lousy newsprint that won’t burn, or bunged-up chimneys.

  “Could be, darlin’, could be,” Anne usually responds as she sets about remaking the whole thing after my pathetic efforts, and invariably ensures that the fire lasts throughout the day and well into the evening.

  We chuckled over our little adventures in the bakery and with Alberto as we munched on the remaining fragments of our special bread.

  “You know it’s market day today,” she said, and I remembered that market day was indeed every second Thursday.

  “Great,” I said. “We’ve got time before Sebastiano. Let’s go and see how massive the piles of panties are this time.”

  “You’re so crude,” she reprimanded me, but laughed when I indicated with elaborate arm gestures that one pile at last month’s market had been more than four feet high.

  A while later we were walking up the long hill past the twenty or so market vans with their cooking pots and huge casserole dishes, China-made trinkets galore, cheap curtains and clothes and duvets, and a couple of delivery trucks packed with cheeses, hams, and sausages.

  And unexpected delights began again. The peddlers seemed to be in the mood for generous bargaining, so we ended up with a few bags of things we really didn’t need—“couldn’t resist the price” type of household goodies. And also a bag of enormous plate-size fresh funghi prataioli (meadow mushrooms) free of charge. We still have no idea why. We had only smiled pleasantly at the Buddha-bellied salesman whose van was packed with large boxes brimming with these just-picked wonders, and he’d smiled back…and next thing we knew, Anne was presented with a bag full of these delicious items. Doubtless, if I hadn’t been around, she would have bussed both his red, shining cheeks for his kindness. As it was we all just shook hands and vowed always to buy our fresh funghi from him, despite the frowns of dismay this would generate if our local greengrocer ever found out, which she might, given that her store was directly below our terrace. (She seemed to regard us as part of her extended family, sharing the daily gossip with us in exuberant torrents of local dialect, none of which we understood.)

  Back home we selected two of the largest funghi—both more than eight inches across—doused them in raw egg and heartily seasoned flour, and sautéed them into succulent mushroom steaks, liberally sprinkled with fresh grated parmesan cheese and served for an early lunch with the remaining fragments of our special bread.

  Normally we would relax a little after lunch, but not this time. “Oh, damn!” I said. “My hair. I forgot. I’ve got to get it cut before we see Sebastiano. These side pieces are beginning to make me look like Einstein on a really bad hair day.”

  Anne was silent but smiled with catlike complacency. She’d been urging me to have a haircut for the past two weeks. So, before the village closed for the “sacred time,” I scampered across the piazza to the local barber, who I’d been told was far younger and more “modern” than other nearby barbers and who actually listened to your requests regarding styling. I even had the correct word for a trim (taglio) written down along with poco, which usually means “a little.” And, delight of delights, for five euros he applied his tonsorial skills masterfully, giving me the perfect trim—even though I had to listen to a litany of complaints about his latest girlfriend, which ended with a dramatic tirade when he denounced her for having had the audacity to use another hairdresser for her last perm. I commiserated as best I could and escaped before my own hair became the recipient of his macho-misery flailings with scissors rampant.

  Finally we were off to Stigliano to meet Sebastiano and the potter. And when we arrived, who should also turn up but Giuliano, in his familiar coppola cap. We stood together in the small, pot-crammed studio watching Michele Rasulo, a ceramista artistica, create intricate little flared pots, wine jugs, and olive oil decanters on his electric-powered wheel. I could have watched for hours this magical transformation of crude misshapen gray balls of clay into finely articulated fluted jugs and bowls. Giuliano, whose primary skill was the creation of his handmade bricks and pantiles, and more recently little souvenir-type animals for children (another one of his dozen or so ongoing projects), watched in awe, too.

  STIGLIANO POTTER

  Michele showed us his kiln crammed with just-fired items, all now salmon pink and ready for his vigorous hand-painting with decorative borders and sprightly cockerels sporting flared blue tails, and other equally convincing birds created by four or five minimalistic brushstrokes. Almost Japanese in the freshness of the flourishes.

  Maybe it was our smiles and exuberant praise, but we all walked away with personally signed gifts—olive oil and balsamic vinegar holders and a special pot for olio piccante (a redolent, throat-scorching mix of extra-virgin olive oil and peperoncini, that ubiquitous Basilicatan seasoning mix).

  Not far from the pottery, we met a young man, a friend of Sebastiano’s, who invited us in for a “little coffee,” which we all readily accepted. As the young man flung open his cantina doors, we discovered that a full bacchanalian Italian family lunch was in progress. At least four generations were seated all together at a long table spread with salads, pasta, mounds of golden bread, wine bottles everywhere, and two huge casseroles of steaming pork stew, richly spiced with peperoncini (of course), anise, and big chunks of the same type of mushrooms Anne and I had been given as a gift earlier that day. So a “little coffee” actually turned out to be wine, stew, bread, fruit, grappa, and then finally the coffee.

  The family seemed to enjoy our intrusion, and we certainly relished their hospitality. Then Sebastiano said he’d like to show us one more little delight before we all collapsed into a wine-and grappa-induced stupor.

  And so it was that we met yet another friend of his, a man who had been a potter before his recent retirement. After a little prompting from Sebastiano, he asked if we would be interested in seeing his foot-powered potter’s wheel, which he kept “in
storage” just outside town. Five minutes later we were all standing on a bare patch of land with amazing vistas across the Stigliano hills and even as far as the Mediterranean Sea, way in the distance near Metaponto. Close by stood a junk pile of discarded bricks and beams and old cement blocks. The potter, who bore a striking resemblance to Anthony Quinn in his Zorba role, pushed his way into a riot of weeds and straggly bushes and slowly pulled out an ancient and dilapidated four-foot-high contraption built out of wooden planks and metal disks. Daintily for a man of his bulk, he eased himself into the “seat” (a triangular slab of board) and proceeded to spin a three-foot-wide circular wooden plate with his right foot, which turned a one-foot-wide potter’s wheel. And with his hands crafting and sculpting nothing but air, he proceeded to show us how, in the days when he was a local professional potter, he used to create huge jugs, bowls, casserole dishes, and Greek-influenced amphora. The delicacy of his hands and fingers was such that we could almost see these finely shaped objects emerging from the nonexistent clay. Giuliano stood silently (a most unusual occurrence) watching those fingers with a childlike intensity. The potter seemed to forget we were there. His foot moved with a drumlike beat as the wheels turned and his invisible creations emerged in his mind and in his heart.

  And, as if in celebration of this moment on this wild hillside with all these amazing vistas, the sun, which had been cloudbound all day, slowly emerged through a tear in the gray, bathing the whole scene in a regal light of amber and gold.

  CHAPTER 7

  Strangenesses

  The Basilicatan Way of Death

  The funeral earlier in the month had piqued my curiosity about some of the more unusual aspects of what I could refer to only as “the Basilicatan Way of Death.” So, along with my young and faithful interpreter-friend, Gino, I set out to find someone who could enhance my still-neophyte understanding of local mores and customs.

  “IT WAS DIFFERENT from village to village all around here. We were like separate kingdoms then. Fifty years or more ago. The idea of ‘Italy’ being one country was still strange. We all spoke different dialetti. Sometimes even different parts of a village would speak differently. Sometimes there was an Albanian part or a Saracen rabatana, and then it was very difficult to understand anything. So, one place would treat the death of a loved one one way and another place another way. But…”

  Giulia Colucci paused and lowered her wrinkled face, foxy lean and wrapped tightly in a dusty black scarf. A little tighter and a little more cloth around the mouth and eyes and you’d have had an Islamic burqa. And this was the way our conversation went: Sudden deluges of recollections and information followed by long reflective silences, sometimes accompanied by moist eyes or even tears as her memories jostled and her brow became more deeply furrowed, and sometimes a gentle chuckle to herself. And, once in a while, her gnarled fingers would reach out to touch mine, followed by a quick squeeze—an indication, I think, that she was surprised and pleased that anyone would take an interest in her, her life, or her memories. Oh, and very rarely, came a sudden outburst of cackling, hoarse laughter as a particularly amusing memory popped into her mind. I could tell she relished the richness of her recollection and was eager to express its often rather risqué humor. But this time her “but” obviously preceded a serious series of thoughts and memories, and Gino and I gave her all the time she needed to put them into words

  “In those days it was hard,” she eventually began again. “Very hard. Today is much easier. The women now often refuse to do all the things that were once expected. If they lose a husband they even think about finding another. We didn’t do that. It was not the right thing to do. ‘One husband forever into eternity,’ the priests would tell us, and we never really thought about it. There was no choice. Everyone watched you to make sure you did everything right. Your mourning, years and years of deep mourning …lutto… everything in black—scarf, cardigan, skirt, blouse, stockings, slippers, even black underwear, intimi.”

  “What did you actually have to do?” I asked, wanting to understand just how onerous these “black widow” obligations once were (and still were, if the odd habits of some of the Aliano widows were anything to go by). I’d seen some signs of the enduring strangeness and intensity of a death in the family in nearby Cirigliano a while back. I could still feel the shivers of doom and dread that scampered up and down my spine that day in those narrow, shadowy alleys. Echoes of howling and wailing, seemingly ceaseless, had pursued me as I tried to wriggle my way out of the intense maze around the village’s ancient defense tower. The sight of twenty or more black-shrouded women raising their skinny, vein-etched arms in unison and releasing their eerie, ear-scratching screams and shrieks of sorrow into the chill morning air was something I would carry with me to my own grave. And yet, even in the apparent intensity of all that collective emotion, I had seen flickers of ironic, Monty Python–esque humor. One old woman had stopped in mid-scream to kneel and hug a child who kept pulling at her long, black widow’s weeds; another had a fit of coughing and couldn’t hold her screech, so she stopped, cleared her throat with a gutteral rasp, and spat a great blob of phlegm over the terrace of the room where the dear departed lay and onto the cobbled street below; two other women, obviously exhausted by all their wailing, moved decorously to the end of the terrace and began chatting and smiling together as if they’d just met on the street on the way to the store.

  While there had obviously been enormous sorrow and genuine despair in that house, I had begun to see a distinct structure in the public demonstrations of “formal” grief by some of the women, whom I felt had been invited more for their enduring howling and head-clawing abilities than for their close relationship to the deceased.

  Giulia eventually began to answer my question. “Well, after the wake, veglia, and the funeral, the real mourning began. Years and years of it. The first two or three months were the worst. You had to stay in the house all the time, without any fire or any cooking. The family or your friends were supposed to shop for you and bring you food. You couldn’t play the radio or TV, but,” Giulia added with a sly grin, “if you did, you did it very quietly and turned them off if anybody came near your door. And you wore black clothes and a black scarf all the time. Inside the house even. Sometimes it was so like a prison that you began to wonder what was worse. Dying or being left to live like this. My mother used to describe it, the way we had to live, as ‘dust delayed.’ You could do nothing except cry in your house—and make sure other people outside could hear you cry—and go to church. For at least one year, sometimes two—depending on what your village said was correct—you became almost invisible. No visiting, no joining in the feste and processions, not even a family wedding or baptism—unless you got a special dispensation from the priest. Even after five years you could still do very little. Wearing the black, all black, was still expected, and no jewelry or anything fancy was allowed, nothing to show that you might have forgotten your dead spouse. And this could go on and on—it often did—for more than ten years. Sometimes until you died.”

  When I finally left Giulia a while later, I had developed a new respect for all those aged “black widows” I saw every day bearing their ritualistic burdens of perpetual mourning. This once-obligatory lot in life is described so powerfully by Anne Cornelisen in her book Torregreca, in which she likens these women to “human snails as they shrank deeper into the shells of their shawls.” However, it was also a constant reminder to me of the all-encompassing “silent endurance” of today’s terroni, still bowed and bound by the ancient ways of Basilicata.

  Soft Porn and Pasta

  Death, love, emotional tirades, scandalous gossip, and infrequent moments of calm all seemed part of the daily collage of existence in these tight-knit, clannish hill villages. But food was undoubtedly the great bonding factor that nurtured and focused family life—that intricate cat’s cradle of unspoken links and loyalties requiring obligatory mutual gatherings at least once and usually twice a day, no matter
what emotional turmoil or angst serpentined through sibling and parental relationships. Sit, talk, drink, argue, eat, and love were the laws of familial longevity and endurance. And television. Watching television seemed to be another prime requisite of daily life, as we learned on many occasions, most memorably when we’d been invited to dinner at friends of Sebastiano’s.

  “OOPS, THERE SHE GOES again! Wow, she’s big. Grossa!” Antonio, the father, ogled the television screen briefly as he sucked up long strands of fettuccine doused in a decadently rich sauce of porcini, parmesan, black pepper, and cream.

  Televisions are a ubiquitous fact of Italian life. They’re always on—in bars, in restaurants, and invariably in homes, no matter how small or modest. “Oh, it’s just noise,” Antonio’s wife said, shrugging to display her utter indifference to the oddest mélange of hyper-emotive soaps, game shows, quiz competitions, endlessly talking heads, dubbed American movies bursting with bad language and street gore galore, and a whole menu of colpo grosso (soft porn) shows, which seem to generate huge ratings even though no one we met ever admitted to watching them. But then, when she thought no one would notice, her eyes strayed to the screen and between generous mouthfuls of pasta and fat, iron-crusted crostini (toast) dipped into a rich mix of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and garlic, she would gaze hypnotically at the oddest images. We found we couldn’t resist either, particularly when, as the secondi platters of saltimbocca and salad were being served by our generous and talented hostess, a cluster of four “ordinary housewives,” apparently selected at random from a raucous audience, stripped off a garment whenever they failed to answer general knowledge trivia questions correctly.