Seasons in Basilicata

by David Yeadon

  Creatures of the Calanchi

  Another equally bizarre experience—and one more excursion into Aliano’s “dark side”—occurred unexpectedly a few days later.

  I WAS DOWN in Aliano’s calanchi canyons.

  Now, why was that? you might ask.

  Well, first because it was a fine, warm day and the air was crystal clean and I was restless in the house. Stepping outside into the bright sunshine, I felt as if I’d walked into one of those bucolic ad scenes for bottles of pure spring water. And second, Gianfranco, Giuseppina’s son and the father of two adorable youngsters, had promised to take Anne and me horseback riding in the canyons. I had salivated at the image of us sitting on fine steeds acting out Wild West roles as posse leaders in pursuit of malingering desperados, or something equally bold. Gianfranco had promised this two weeks ago, but he still hadn’t turned up with suitably saddled creatures dripping with leather and brass accoutrements, pawing at the cobblestones, and chomping at their bits for “the big ride.”

  In fact, I hadn’t seen him at all—which is perhaps just as well from his point of view, as there were a few more fix-up jobs needed in our apartment. Not big things, really. More like petty annoyances, such as repairs to the heavy wooden blinds that you hauled up on a kind of rope-and-pulley system inside each room and which kept getting stuck or tangled or generally busted. And the TV, of course. Not that Anne or I wanted one, but it was still sitting there in Giuseppina’s living room, its blank black screen looking like something out of a scene from 1984. We felt that Gianfranco might as well fix that, too, seeing as he was around. It might give us a few nightly belly laughs as we tried to understand why near-naked dancing girls kept popping up in the middle of serious Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?–like shows, shaking their prominent bits and pieces while the contestants took breaks and the quizmaster ogled these gorgeous things like the letch I was sure he was. And Popeye: endless nightly shows of back-to-back Popeye cartoons, and in prime, adult-viewing time for some bizarre reason. And then the “talking heads”: interminable lines of them, prattling on at typically Italian racetrack speed, no one listening to anyone else, everyone gesticulating and arm waving, and laughing at their own witty repartee, none of which was in the least intelligible to either of us. Or the studio audiences either, by the looks on their blank, bored faces—at least until the director pushed his “Smile,” “Scream,” “Applaud,” or “Go Hysterical” buttons, backed up, I’m sure, by inane laugh tracks.

  As I said, it would have made an amusing diversion during our cocktail hour at least.

  But Gianfranco had so far failed to arrange for such amusements. Nor had he fixed the two nonburning burners on our stove, nor the mysterious leak in the bathroom fixtures that always seemed to leave us with a puddled and very skiddy floor, the bathroom being one of those lethal all-tile designs that have always seemed to me to be lawsuits waiting to happen.

  And, of course, as noted, no horses.

  “The heck with it,” I said to Anne. And I was off by myself into the calanchi for a nice long scampagnata (outing). Once again, and very wisely as it turned out, Anne was not particularly keen to join me on this particular expedition, but I was eager to get some photos of my little village perched precariously high above on its cliffs of ever-melting clay. “You will like,” Gianfranco had insisted. “Many nice photographs and sketchings there for you, I think.”

  IT WAS A LONGER and steeper walk down than I thought it would be. Actually, very long and very steep. And very muddy. It seemed this corpse green/gray, not-quite-rock terrain, possessing a distinctly Samuel Beckett–like bleakness, had a remarkable knack for not absorbing rainwater but rather letting it just sit there, making any path a permanently puddled mud slide. Or at least until the torrid days of high summer arrived, when it reverted to ankle-deep dust that coated everything, including your ears, eyes, and mouths, with layers of talcumlike powder that, like stage makeup, stuck to everything.

  But I was in the middle of an unexpected mud season and wallowing along up one of these dramatic soft-wall canyons that looked as if they might decide, at any moment, to adjust their almost-vertical profiles by allowing slimy deluges of molten, porridgelike detritus to be expectorated down upon anyone dumb enough to be messing around below. Like me. And a very messy me at that.

  Carlo Levi, as usual, captures the unique character, the genius loci, of the calanchi:

  And all around white clay, no trees, no grass, only clay dug by waters to create hollows, cones, lands with a malicious look, like a lunar landscape…and everywhere nothing else but white clay precipices, on which the houses above stood as if floating on air. And the clay started to melt, to slowly trickle down the slopes, sliding down, gray streams of mud in a liquefied world….

  “The silence here is nice though,” my little eternal optimist piped up. “No one around to disturb you. You’ve got the calanchi all to yourself. Perfect for photographs, don’t you think?”

  I like my little optimist. Couldn’t do without him, really. On many occasions he’s the happy little watchman at the gates of my deeper, darker, emotions—the “black ogres” as I call them—making sure they’re locked up solid and secure against any unexpected inner tumult awaiting me.

  “Best not to go there,” he’d chirp up if I was about to descend into occasional moments of desperation.

  “Right-o,” I’d say. “Good idea. Let’s have a chuckle or two instead.”

  Which is what I normally did, until the mood mellowed and I got on with whatever it is I was doing before my darker self tried to lure me in.

  Which it was doing again.

  “Oh, forget it. It was nothing,” insisted my mental gatekeeper.

  “No, it was something, I heard an odd noise…” I said, not feeling quite so optimistic now and remembering that strange line of Levi’s, “Invisible animal forces here reveal themselves in the air.”

  “Like what?” the optimist asked with an indulgent chuckle. “What could possibly be bothering you in such a nice, quiet little canyon like—”

  “Dogs, I think,” I said. “Barking.”

  “Ah,” my optimist responded. “Well, at least it’s not wolves, is it? Or boars? Or bears?”

  “They don’t have bears around here anymore. Boars, yes. And wolves, too, so I’ve been told.”

  “Yes, but this thing is white. It’s not a scroungy old gray monster with big fangs and those kinds of things.”

  “But it’s very big. More like a small lion.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “And there are two of them.”

  “Oh, that’s nice. Maybe they’re just out for a little stroll, like you.”

  “Make that three.”

  There was a rather unnerving silence at the optimist’s end of the conversation.

  “I said there are three of them.”

  “Yes, yes, I heard you.” The optimist’s voice was now distinctly less optimistic. “Well, let’s see, maybe you’ve had enough of this canyon for the moment. Why don’t you just slowly turn around and stroll back out…”

  “They’re starting to run.”

  “Run?”

  “At me. Now. They’re coming like the clappers! And they’re snarling and showing their teeth.”

  “Ah.” Another unnerving pause at the other end. “Well, you could try a gentle trot.”

  “A trot?!”

  “Okay, so you want to panic? So panic! Run like hell if you want! Might not be a bad idea, actually, under the circumstances.”

  So I ran like hell and skidded and slid and ran again, but those fangy monsters were gaining on me fast. And I knew exactly what they were. They were those lethal Calabrian sheepdogs (pastori maremmani) that the local pastori (shepherds) used to protect their flocks of sheep and goats and themselves from anything less threatening than a nuclear attack. They might look rather sweet and cuddly when they’re lolling around at the roadside or in the fields, but, from two prior experiences, I’d learned that even a
hint that you’d like to pat the cute, white, furry heads of those creatures—once renowned for their wolf-fighting abilities—and they’d transform themselves in a nanosecond into slavering, snarling beasts ready to tear off your arms for lunch and devour the rest of you leisurely. All this while one of those shepherds doubtless watched with a devilish smirk on his weather-worn face and without so much as a “stop that now, stop eating the nice man” suggestion of protest.

  “I’m running as fast as I can!” I called out to my optimist, but, like the shepherd, he seemed to be showing total disinterest in my impending fate.

  I was on my own. Doubtless the demons behind my mental gates were prancing and screeching with delight knowing that I’d soon be entering their darkest realms of despair.

  I was running the wrong way, too. I didn’t recognize any of the topographical features—not surprising, as all the calanchi start to look alike after a while. And what was even more interesting was the fact that it seemed as if my course was coming to an end at an abrupt drop-off just a few yards ahead.

  “I’m trapped!” I shouted to my optimist.

  No response.

  “Are you deaf? The bloody things are almost on me!”

  “Well…” There he was again, with that irritatingly benign tone of his. “What’s over the edge?”

  “A long drop.”

  “Vertical?”

  “Almost.”

  “Well, if you don’t fancy being torn apart in this god-forsaken place you decided to explore, you might consider jumping.”

  CALANCHI LANDSCAPE

  “Jumping!?”

  “Well, it’s either jumping or watching bits of you get ripped off and disappear into those slavering mouths in what I feel might be a rather painful demise…for both of us.”

  So, I jumped.

  I half-closed my eyes and let myself fall, legs downward, and doubtlessly doomward. Well, legs down at first. Then it all got a bit mixed up, with legs up and head down and then sideways and then a somersault or two. After that I sort of lost track.

  At least the mud at the bottom of my slide was soft and there had been no protruding boulders on the journey down. But there’s soft and then there’s something that more closely resembles a mud Jacuzzi, which is what it felt like as my body continued to spin and flail about in a foot or two of the gooiest, grayest, most god-awful goo it had ever been my displeasure to experience. Of course, people pay small fortunes for this kind of mud bath treatment in fancy health resorts, but somehow it loses its appeal when it’s free and unrequested.

  But at least there were no dogs. They were still high up at the edge of my drop-off, barking and howling and snarling and slavering—but definitely not coming down. In fact, their attention seemed to have been diverted now as they began squabbling among themselves, then lashing at and trying to bite chunks off one another in an apparent tirade of “You let him get away, stupid,” “No, you did, you idiot,” “No, you did…” and so on.

  Slowly I rose, soaked and shivering. The dogs paid me no more attention, and one can assume (hope) that they ultimately all devoured one another in a frenzy of frustration and bloodlust as I wallowed like some kind of mud monster slowly downhill to where the calanchi opened out to a benign scene of leafy olive orchards and orange trees bedecked with garlands of fat, round fruit.

  I won’t bother describing the rest of my limp-legged clamber (distinctly resembling one of those Pythonesque “silly walks”), back up to the village, through the groves of gum trees. (These oddly out-of-place Australian imports are found throughout the South, and are dismissed in no uncertain terms by Norman Douglas in his book Old Calabria as “this grey-haired scarecrow, this reptile of a growth,” and an “abomination.”) I used the most elusive paths and back alleys I could find to avoid contact with anyone I knew. Or anyone at all.

  AS A LITTLE POSTSCRIPT to my calanchi calamity, I got a call that evening from Gianfranco, who informed me with unabashed enthusiasm that he’d managed to arrange for horses the following Saturday “so we can all have together a nice ride in the calanchi, eh?”

  The Day of the Pig

  We managed gracefully to postpone Gianfranco’s outing but couldn’t avoid the day we’d been anticipating for quite a while…and dreading.

  Anne had been dreading it simply because she wanted nothing at all to do with, shall we say, the mechanical side of pork production. Of course she didn’t at all mind enjoying the actual products themselves. In fact, she adored home-cured Lucanian prosciutto, coppa, and soppressata, and was intrigued by all the multitudinous flavors of the sausages and salamis made by our friends. She also had been known to regularly indulge in breakfast platters of fried pancetta and eggs and to crunch through crisp sautéed guanciale (cheek jowl) in the belief that it was some kind of extra-fatty belly-pork with a special flavor that three months’ salted aging and hanging in a cool cantina could create.

  But the actual slaughtering and butchering of the pig held no appeal for her. “No, thank you,” she said. “I want to continue liking pork.”

  “NEXT SATURDAY at my grandfather Nicolà’s farm,” Massimo had told me on the phone. “Ten o’clock in the morning okay for you?”

  “Sure. Fine,” I said in a steady voice that belied far more reluctance.

  “After we kill, big pranzo, lunch, eh? Lots of pig to eat!” Massimo added with a chuckle, and I could imagine his cherubic face grinning with expectant delight.

  “Great!” I said and tried to mean it.

  “Va bene, David.”

  “Va bene, Massimo.”

  It occurred to me that I could pretend I’d misunderstood the date. Or come down with the flu. Or suddenly had to go to Potenza. Or Naples. Or anywhere.

  But, “No,” my conscience told me. “One of the reasons you’re living here is to try and record and understand life the way it is lived in these wild hills, and if that means having to watch a pig being decapitated, then that’s what you have to do.”

  “ACTUALLY,” one of Massimo’s English-speaking friends told me after I’d arrived promptly at Nicolà’s farm on a bright blue and unseasonably mild February morning, “we don’t cut the heads off until later on.”

  “Heads?”

  “Scusi?”

  “Heads. You just said ‘heads.’ Plural.”

  “Yes. That’s right. There are three pigs to be butchered this morning.”

  “Three.”

  “Yes. And not too old. Only eight or nine months. About eighty kilos weight each one. Not like the big adults. They can weigh over two hundred kilos.”

  “These are not suckling pigs, porchetta? The meat that almost melts in your mouth?”

  “No, no. Porchetta is very young pig, maybe only two to three months.”

  “So, that’s around a total of two hundred and fifty kilos. Well over five hundred pounds. That’s a lot of prosciutto and salami to make.”

  “Well, no,” my informant said. “They’re too young for that. The meat is too small for prosciutto and coppa and all those things. There’ll be plenty of sausages though. The women will be cleaning the intestines in the main house, and they’ll stuff them with chopped-up meat for sausages later. Most of the meat will be used for cooking—stews, roasts. That kind of thing.”

  “I understand. And you were saying about not cutting heads off…”

  “Well, not at first. That’s not the way. First you have to cut the vein in the neck and drain off all the blood. And the heart has to keep pumping, otherwise the blood stays in the body, and that is not good for the butchering or for the meat.”

  I considered this for a moment, trying to envisage the upcoming ritual. “So, the pig, it stays alive while the heart pumps and you drain out all the blood from its neck?”

  Massimo’s friend, a tall, swarthy man with the build and earthiness of a real contadino, which, of course, he was, looked at me closely and then smiled. A rather paternalistic smile. “Ah, your first time, eh?”

  I was tempted to deny w
hat to him must have been glaringly obvious. (Sometimes I got tired of being the eternal neophyte, always on the learning end of things.) But I just nodded and grinned. A little sheepishly, I guess.

  He nodded back and patted my shoulder, which felt a little odd as I was sure I was a good decade or so older than he. But he had the advantage of years of this kind of rural rite, and I was standing there, worried about the poor pig with its throat cut but not being really dead.

  “No, no. Don’t worry. The pig’s brain is dead. There’s no blood going to it, so it dies very quickly. But the heart keeps pumping.”

  “Okay,” I said uncertainly.

  And it was then that the squealing began.

  There were eight of us altogether standing at the base of Nicolà’s huge two-storey stone barn, once used as the original farmhouse, until the new farmhouse was built in 1820, immediately across the courtyard. Four of the men were there primarily for their renowned strength in holding down extremely nervous and energetically flailing pigs. Massimo was playing his usual run-around, do-whatever-is-needed role. Nicolà, the eighty-five-year-old grandfather patriarch, was also present to observe, criticize, and praise where appropriate, and generally to keep an eye on all the flurried activities of the morning.

  Marcello was the key man responsible for overseeing and undertaking most of the actual butchering. (“You must watch him when he halves the pig,” Massimo had told me, his voice resonant with respect. “He is like a surgeon. Right down the backbone. Straight line. No wobbles.”) And indeed, Marcello had something of a surgeon’s aura about him, too. His fine-featured face; prominent, aristocratic nose; thin pianist’s fingers; and lean, muscular body—all made him stand out from the bulky, farmhand appearance of the other men, who seemed to regard him as the natural leader of this little throng.