Seasons in Basilicata

by David Yeadon

  I should have known the answer. “Nay, David. This thing’s hydraulic—my macchina enologica, made in Perugia, like the chocolates. S’best machine in town is this.”

  “Just like your macchina da macinare, I suppose,” I said, maybe a touch facetiously.

  “S’right. Just like that. Good machines make good wine. It’s worth it.”

  I nodded. From what I’d seen of Giuliano’s work, he took great pride in everything he and Rosa produced, from his handmade bricks and pantiles to his salamis, olive oil, and wine, to their hundreds of bottles of passata tomato sauce, and their fiery-hot pepper pickle, a true Basilicatan speciality that he and Rosa created together.

  MOST TORCHI IN the town were still hand pumped, and it was a laborious, back-wrenching process. And such torchi were usually far less productive than the hydraulic kind.

  “You end up with a lot of soggy mosto, with wine still in it. But this way—well, you’ll see in half an hour or so. Mine comes out dry and hard as stale bread.”

  By now he’d set the hydraulic press and we watched the little pressure-gauge creep around a numbered face measuring kilograms per square centimeters.

  “Three hundred’s maximum—the red zone on that dial. You don’t go over that or…who knows? You just don’t. There’s a lot of pressure in this thing and if ’owt went wrong…” His hands expressed something along the lines of a nuclear explosion.

  He increased the pressure, listened to the juicy squealing sound of the compacting, then waited, allowing the wine to pour out down between the wooden slats into a wide metal container around the base of the torchio and then through a funnel into a one-hundred-twenty-liter plastic vat on the floor. Then he increased the pressure again. And then again.

  After half an hour or so, the vat was almost full, and the pressure dial was hovering around the two-hundred-seventy-kilo-per-square-centimeter level.

  “S’bout it now,” Giuliano said with a satisfied grin.

  At that moment Rosa and Vito came into the cantina from the family house, across the street.

  “Well look at this!” Giuliano scoffed. “Right on time. Just when we’re ready for a bit of sampling.”

  They laughed. Rosa pulled out some glasses from a cupboard, and I shook hands with Vito, who told me he’d just come back from a job interview. He thought that maybe he hadn’t got the job because he hadn’t had enough raccomandazioni.

  “Them things are bloody essential. It’s that old-boy gens network thing. If you don’t ’ave ’em someone else’ll get picked who’s got more. S’nothing to do with what you know and what qualifications you’ve got. It’s all that ‘who you know’ crap.” He looked frustrated, like a stranger in a foreign land. Yet, despite his birth in England, he was Italian and he knew the rules. Unfair though they invariably were…particularly as described by Matthew Spender in his intriguing behind-the-scenes look at life in Italy in his book Within Tuscany. He suggests that Italy functions by the interaction of various tightly circumscribed “personal power” clientelari groups, so that the individual has significance and influence, not in himself, but only as a representative or member of a specific, well-defined and well-protected circle of mutual interests, reinforcement, and perpetuation. One friend told me that “some of these gens could teach the Freemasons and the Mafia a thing or two about omertà and unquestioning loyalty to the group.”

  “Well, never mind ’bout all that now,” Giuliano said, thrusting a glass of the just-pressed wine at his son. “Whaddya think of this then?”

  Vito sipped it as if he thought it might be hemlock. “I’m not much of a wine drinker,” he whispered to me, but to his dad he said, “S’great, Dad, good and strong. M’be better ’n last year.”

  “S’what I’m thinking. Course you can’t tell ’til it’s sat for a few months in these demijohns.” He indicated a row of a dozen fifty-five-liter demijohn bottles waiting to be filled with the new brew. “C’mon then, you two, y’can start fillin’ ’em now.”

  Rosa and Vito nodded and began to sink plastic jugs into the new wine in the vat and pour it through filtered funnels and into the huge bottles.

  “David, come an’ help me with this stuff,” Giuliano said, indicating the compacted pile of deep purple mosto squeezed just like he’d said, to dry, cakelike consistency in the bottom of the torchio, which he’d opened by disconnecting the steel hoops around the slats and pulling the two semicircles of the press outward like curved cupboard doors.

  You could still see the skins and stalks in the cake, embedded like fossil layers in the earth-solid mass. It took quite an effort to break off chunks of the stuff and throw them into containers to be used as pig feed or fertilizer (alas, not to make grappa). Sometimes the mass was so hard Giuliano had to use a machete to carve into it.

  “Y’see,” Giuliano said proudly. “Nowt goes to waste. Everything gets used for somethin’.”

  “Very ecologically correct,” I murmured.

  “Ecological my *****,” he exclaimed. “Fancy word for summat we’ve been doin’ for centuries. Thousands of years.”

  And so we all continued working together, scooping the mosto out of the large vat, pressing it (about half an hour per load), filtering the new wine into the demijohns, pausing to sample the product—which seemed to get stronger and bolder the deeper we dug into the mosto—and wondering when lunchtime might finally arrive.

  Giuliano was a stickler for “getting it done because after one of Rosa’s lunches you don’t feel like doin’ nowt.” So that’s what we did, our faces, clothes, and hands soaked in aromatic juices and our bodies increasingly weary from a seemingly endless sequence of laborious tasks.

  But eventually it was all completed. Giuliano announced that we’d done better than last year and had produced over two hundred fifty liters of second-run wine. And then, with a wide la vita è bella (“life is beautiful”) grin, he declared that it was time to wash up, eat, and drink.

  And, as happens so often in beguiling Basilicata, the rest of the afternoon sort of faded away into temporal mists after a huge lunch à la Rosa of homemade tagliatelle with her smokey, meat-flavored, tomato ragu sauce; a succulent and fragrant casserole of chicken in garlic sauce, served with warm fava beans and huge chunks of golden-crusted bread; then salad; and finally some of her choco late-cream (although as I was to learn later, not chocolate at all) dessert, which melted like cotton candy in our mouths and primed us perfectly, after coffee and grappa, for a long afternoon siesta.

  And, I can’t really remember much of what happened after that.

  Night of the Werewolves

  However, I do remember one particularly strange experience a few days later—one of my occasional confrontations and trepidatious interfaces with Aliano’s dark side. Maybe I should have taken Levi a little more seriously when he wrote:

  Some people take on a mixture of human and bestial natures…as werewolves, and their identity is completely lost in that of the animal. There were some of these in Aliano and they were out on winter nights to join the real wolves, their brothers…

  “WHERE IS EVERYBODY?” I asked Vittoria, one of the baristi [bargirls] at Bar Capriccio. The place was unusually quiet on that dark October evening. Biase and Salvatore were present (I suspect they actually lived there or wished they did), playing some halfhearted card game that really needed four people. Two young men were rocking and slamming the rackety football machine where you spun a series of metal tubes with wooden players attached to them and the first person to score ten goals demanded his next round of grappa from his defeated opponent. That particular machine, a new addition at the bar, was a real nuisance, not just because of the noisy spinning tubes and the raucous cries engendered by each goal, but because it had been placed right next to the bar’s phone, the only one in town that functioned with any degree of regularity. It was bad enough that it was the old-fashioned pulse type, which prevented me from using my international code to dial out of the country, thus limiting me to local calls. But its
location near the football machine made it even more unusable. Conversations were inevitably messy affairs with my having to repeat everything at least twice to be understood above the din of the football machine.

  But that night I had no plans to use the phone because I’d finally managed to make a couple of calls out of the country from the official Telecom Italia phone up the hill, which seemed to be working again. It had been inoperable for more than three weeks, so I’d pleaded with a carabiniero in the adjoining police station to call the telephone company and ask them to fix it. “But I’m a carabiniero,” he’d replied indignantly, puffing out his crisply uniformed chest, bedecked with abundant sparkling-white leather accoutrements, like a Mussolini wannabe. But he did it anyway. And now it was working, and was a lot cheaper than the bar’s outrageous “private” rates.

  Vittoria’s eyes sparkled and she laughed at my question about the absence of the normal rowdy clientele. Then she pointed heavenward. An intriguing gesture. Did she mean something ungodly had happened in the little village? Had a sudden act of the Creator disturbed our normal evening flow of passeggiate with abundant pauses for bambino-bussing, espressos and digestivi, followed by the later, less formal, strollings, gatherings, and imbibings until the late hours.

  I used one of my ever-increasing repertoire of Italian gestures to indicate that I hadn’t understood her gesture and that maybe she could give me another hint.

  “Well, just look at la luna!” she said and giggled.

  “The moon?” I said. “What about the moon?”

  Then she did a delightful imitation of a prowling animal or monster or something of the kind while humming those memorable few bars of that international anthem of terror, the Jaws theme.

  “What? What is that? What are you doing?”

  “Lupomannaro,” she whispered in a dramatic hiss. “Werewolves!”

  Oh, right. Of course. Werewolves. Why hadn’t I thought of that? And I was turning to leave, having decided not to order a drink just to show her that it wasn’t nice to take the mickey out of a straniero who was always polite and always left decent tips and didn’t even complain (much) about the bar’s rip-off phone rates.

  VITTORIA

  “No, no,” Vittoria said, a little more serious now. “Is true. The people do not like to walk about when the moon is full, particularly around mezzanotte [midnight].”

  I peered outside and realized that, in moon terms, she was indeed correct. How had I missed that glorious silver ball, fat and bright, beaming over the rooftops in that cloudless night sky?

  “Okay,” I said to her nonchalantly. “Va bene.”

  She giggled again and repeated her monster mimic and Jaws theme rendition. Thinking that she was still having a little fun at my expense, I left the bar and strolled deep into the dark village to show her, and anyone else who might be watching, that all this werewolf nonsense certainly had no impact on a lad from the Yorkshire coalfields who knew all about black nights and full moons and silly, age-old superstitions. The miners, among whom I had spent my early years until the age of ten, were renowned for their strange little rituals intended to ward off sudden dangers in the shafts and along the seams where they hacked the lumpen stuff, near naked and often alone in that terrible claustrophobic darkness. They had their monsters and demons all right, although, if the Brassed Off–like marital shoutings and bangings in their council houses were anything to go by, such creatures seemed to be more prevalent inside the tiny parlors and kitchens of their homes rather than deep in the black, sodden bowels of the earth.

  But admittedly it was all rather odd—the silence and lack of people and movement in Aliano. And the fossa did look unusually deep and mysterious with its silver-tinged shadows. My footsteps rang on the rough cobblestones and echoed off the thick stone walls. I kept looking up at the moon and thinking how beautiful it was. Surely this was the time when everybody should be getting ready to do a little frantic pruning and trimming of things on the farms along the calanchi and the ghostly clay cliffs of the fault lines. After all, any of the popular Farmer’s Almanacs, still used with almost religious certitude in those parts, made an awful lot of fuss about the cusp between the waxing and waning of the moon. And here we were, right on it.

  The houses dropped away as I continued down the narrow road that wound along the knife-edge precipices separating the old village from the “not so old” (as opposed to the decidedly “new section” way up the hill). There was a breeze, suddenly cold. A couple of streetlamps were out—just like the telephone, it would be weeks before they were fixed—making everything darker. As I peered down toward the old village, huddled in lopsided disarray atop its flaking puy-like perch, I realized that there were no lights in any of the windows. Admittedly, the area looked abandoned even in the daytime, but it wasn’t. I’d been there many times to sketch its narrow, twisting alleys and had exchanged somewhat constrained conversations with its residents—constrained not by their attitudes, which were usually friendly, if a little guarded, but by my still-neophyte’s vocabulary. Although, I’d been assured on many occasions that a far more extensive grasp of the language wouldn’t have made much difference; even the “upper villagers” claimed to have problems understanding the indecipherable complexity of their dialect.

  Well, I thought, they must all be in bed and shuttered up for the night. A little crazy though. It was barely eleven o’clock. But, if they were asleep I decided I wouldn’t bother walking down there as I’d first intended to show everyone that at least this particular foreign resident could not be cowed by local folk tales and superstitions and werewolves! Porca puttana! (“Sow whore,” a great epithet that uses the spitting P’s to splendid effect.) Who were they trying to kid? It was a beautiful night, full of gorgeously sensual moonlight—the kind they write arias of love about—and if it weren’t for this strangely cold wind and that howling…

  I stopped abruptly. A chilling sound bounced off the gray canyon walls and faded slowly into the distance. I listened again, but all I could hear was the prattle of the wind swirling the dry, brown leaves of autumn around the edge of the road.

  Funny. It had sounded like a howl of some kind. Maybe just a jilted dog, kicked out of a house and left to shiver in the chill night air. Of course. That’s precisely what it was.

  Time to return. And as it was all so beautiful in the moonlight, I thought I’d go the top way, along the cliffs that edged the main section of the village. The vistas from there in the daytime were magnificent, across that Dakota-like “Badlands” topography that still, even after my having lived so long in Aliano, managed to surprise me with its mood of utter barren wilderness—unlike any other place I’d ever seen in Italy.

  It truly was serene, the moonlight silverplating the already-silvered leaves of the olive trees, earthbound in their neatly regimented rows hundreds of feet below the iron fence rail on which I rested.

  But, then, it came again. An echoing, hollow howl from the shad owy depths around the base of the near-vertical cliffs. And it was definitely not a dog. At least no dog I’d ever heard before. A set of shutters slammed in one of the houses behind me, and I jumped a good six inches off the cobblestones in alarm. Dio Christo! What was going on? All the house lights were off. No TV sounds. No muffled conversations over the last few sips of homemade wine. Absolutely unnerving silence…except for that howl, which came again, closer now to the base of the cliffs…or maybe even on that narrow track that serpentined up its flanks into the village.

  I peered again down into the darkness. The moonlight didn’t penetrate that far. It seemed content to sheen the olive and fruit orchards and look benignly romantic. Only it didn’t feel at all romantic now.

  Something was moving down there. I could hear rocks being disturbed. And wasn’t that a shadow? Something very quick, moving in and out of patches of moon glow. Something coming up the cliff track….

  I WAS BACK so fast to our apartment that I didn’t even have time to start puffing. When I did it was in grea
t gulpy gasps that came only after I’d locked the door behind me and flung myself down in the chair by the window. Vittoria’s silly little remarks had obviously mesmerized me into a half-manic state of childhood terror, taking me back to my monsters-under-the-bed years. This is ridiculous, I told myself. You’re a grown man—a little too grown at times for your liking—and should not be vulnerable to such utter nonsense. So go outside onto the terrace and take a look. There’s nothing there. Nothing at all. Come on. Open the door and confirm the fact that the moon is shining benevolently, the church clock is ticking away as usual, and all this werewolf stuff is a load of old codswallop, to use an old Yorkshire phrase I never fully understood.

  No. I think I’d had enough for one night, thanks all the same. A wee whack of grappa and it was off to bed, boy-o, to cuddle up to my lady, who’d retired early, oblivious to the evening’s trauma, and we’d both have a good laugh together about all this nonsense in the morning.

  AND WE DID. Very hearty giggles and chuckles over a large breakfast of pancetta and poached eggs with fresh-baked bread from our bakery across the piazza. The bakery had smelled so warm and welcoming and cozy that I was tempted to share my previous night’s experiences with the two ever-smiling, gnomelike, husband-and-wife bakers.

  I got as far as: “Did you hear any strange noises last night?” but before I’d finished the laborious patching-together of the question in Italian, they exchanged furtive glances, gave a brief nod of affirmation, and busied themselves around the dough-mixing machine, obviously not anxious to continue the conversation any further. Hmm, I thought, this is all most peculiar. After returning home with a mammoth loaf, I pulled out a few books from our small library over the living room fireplace and began hunting for any references to full moons and werewolves and the like.

  Good old Norman Douglas pretty much dismissed the whole thing in his book Old Calabria, although admitting a fascination with “the tigerish flavour” and pagan myths of the wilder parts of the Mezzogiorno, its “cauldron of demonology” and a “classic home of witchcraft” full of “ghostly phantoms of the past” where “wise women and wizards abound.” In his one reference to the werewolf myths he explains that “it is not popular as a subject of conversation” although he had been told that “the more old-fashioned werewolves cling to the true versipellis habits, and in that case only the pigs, the inane Calabrian pigs, are dowered with the faculty of distinguishing them in daytime, when they look like any other ‘Christian.’” But Douglas’s research got him nowhere. “A foreigner,” he writes, “is at an unfortunate disadvantage; if he asks questions, he will only get answers dictated by…a deliberate desire to mislead.” So he ended up agreeing with the local mayor, who stated emphatically, “‘Believe me, dear sir, the days of such fabulous monsters are over,’” and promptly dismissed the whole matter.