Seasons in Basilicata

by David Yeadon

  And then there was me, relegated to my familiar role as observer, recorder, photographer, and “occasional helper,” if help was ever needed, which turned out to be almost never and which was fine with me. The things I was to experience that morning had a strange effect on my body, which became progressively drained of energy, doubtless a result of symbiotic identification with the draining lifeblood of the three pigs.

  IT ALL BEGAN with squeals from the first pig being pushed and dragged from its sty down the sloping, hay-littered cobblestones to the massive, thick-legged slaughtering table set in a walled yard at the low side of the barn. Nearby were a handful of cows, a five-hundred-kilo bull, two donkeys, a baby donkey called Jacob, and numerous sheep and goats, all occupying the various stalls and byres in the lower level of the barn. And, just like me, they too seemed to demonstrate symptoms of symbiotic reactions as they added their brayings, mooings, and baa-ings to the increasingly high-pitched scream of the pig.

  The poor animal seemed all too aware of its impending fate. I wished someone would stun the thing and let it meet its end in a blissfully unconscious state. But in this scene of almost medieval intensity and seeming barbarity, the pig, flailing and contorting, was hoisted by the four burly farmers onto the table, with its head projecting off the edge. Massimo was kneeling directly below with a huge bright yellow plastic bowl.

  Marcello stepped forward with a knife, a remarkably tiny knife—more like a pocket device than the massive cleaver I’d expected. He waited patiently while the men struggled to restrain the pig’s movements and at one point I saw him very briefly, and very gently, stroke the pig’s head and cheek with his delicate, long-fingered left hand. I don’t know if it was some kind of ancient pagani tradition—a sort of blessing of the animal for its bounties—but I felt a lump gather in my throat at the sight. Just about the same time, the pig must have felt Marcello’s other hand stroke its throat, gently searching for the primary artery.

  It all happened so quickly, I’m not sure I really saw it. Maybe I closed my eyes for an instant. But the knife cut a knick—quite small, barely a couple of inches across—the pig gave one last piercing shriek, then its head fell and its blood gushed in deep red spurts into Massimo’s bowl…and continued gushing as the heart pumped on.

  Steam poured out from a dark, cavernous room at the side of the table, where an enormous witch’s black cauldron of water was boiling on a crackling log fire. And to complete this Macbethian witchy diorama, a wizened old woman sat in the shadowy murk, stirring the steaming water with a metal rod, with what can only be described as “an evil grimace” on her face. Upon reflection I’m sure she was merely expressing her pleasure at the upcoming cornucopia of sausages, skin, trotters, fatback, bacon, and numerous other bits and pieces that would soon be the result of all these ritualistically bloody processes.

  I wondered if they planned to parboil the pig (the cauldron seemed large enough to hold the whole animal), but then Massimo delivered the bucket of blood to his mother, who was in charge of the innards aspect of the gory procedure, and then scurried back and forth carrying huge jugs of boiling water from the cauldron. These were poured carefully over each section of the carcass as the men meticulously scraped off all the hairs with more of those small, ultrasharp knives, revealing a detergent-white skin with a soft, cushiony-smooth texture.

  The next steps were the removal of the head; gutting of the now-pristine animal; careful removal of the intestines, liver, kidney, heart, and other delights; and meticulous cleaving of the carcass into two neat halves for delivery to Massimo’s hotel kitchen and its final butchering into roasts, joints, and sausages. I mention these tasks rather hastily and objectively as I don’t think a cut-by-cut description of all the various processes is really necessary and, having seen them performed on two pigs (I’d had enough by the third), I’m not sure I’m up to regurgitating all the grisly details.

  Suffice to say that at the end of the morning there were three gleaming-white, hairless heads on display, ready for some medieval-style bacchanalian feast, and three meticulously halved carcasses prepared by Maestro Marcello. And of course a mass of all that inner stuff, which the women whisked away to the house for cleaning and chopping and other messy but meticulous processes of sausage-making and the like.

  Nicolà seemed a little weary, too, by the time the third pig was hoisted onto the slaughtering table, so we strolled together around his farm as he told me tales of his life, his pride in his family (“Eight! I made eight fine children!”), and his and his wife’s ability to live an almost totally self-sufficient life on his one-hundred-twenty-acre estate. His wife was sitting on a chair out in the sun knitting a sock (“from our own sheep wool,” insisted Nicolà). She smiled as Nicolà took me inside the farmhouse to show me his racks of salamis, coppa, soppressata, and other pork products dangling from the high ceiling over the stairwell.

  “We used to have a small inn here a few years ago. And a restaurant, too. Before my son Angelo and my grandson Massimo opened up their new hotel and restaurant in Accettura. We were quite famous, I think. People wrote about our traditional dishes and described all the things we made here on the farm—all the different salamis and things, our own olive oil, our wines, our bottled sauces, our fruits and vegetables, our own burro [butter], ricotta and scamorza cheese, pecorino cheese, too, from our own sheep, and provolone, which we aged for more than a year. Delicious! Oh, and our own wheat, too, grano. We have more than forty hectares of wheat that we used for our own bread and pasta. We hardly needed to buy anything. People bought from us instead!”

  THE PIG SLAUGHTER

  We strolled slowly uphill on a rough track and turned to admire his estate. It was set in a beautiful bowl-like enclave, bound along the high, enclosing ridges by parts of the Montepiano forest. The steeply sloping hillsides were now all meticulously plowed wheat fields just beginning to glow a soft emerald green as the furlike shoots of winter wheat, planted in October, were beginning to grow in preparation for the July harvest. The farmhouse itself, strangely evocative of Andrew Wyeth’s paintings of the Kuerner farm in Pennsylvania, sat like a sturdy, square fortress halfway down the folding contours of the fields. Its windows, cut into two-foot-thick stone walls, were small and few. The even older barn across the cobbled courtyard took advantage of the slope of the hill to create entrances on each of its two levels. Echoes of the shouting and laughter of the men completing the slaughter of the third and final pig wafted up across the wheat fuzz on the fields.

  Nicolà smiled. Farming was his life, and he obviously loved every aspect of it—even his memories of the old days when he and his family plowed these steep slopes with hand plows and oxen. In fact, he was so fond of his ancient, primitive plows and other museum-quality equipment, that he still kept them, rusty but intact, in a shed by the side of the barn. Pride of place was given to a “French reversible plow,” which he tried to define for me. He laughed when I indicated my confusion.

  “What will you do with all these things when you retire?” I asked.

  Nicolà’s laughter increased. “Retire?! I’m eighty-five now and have no plans to retire! The day I retire will be the day I am dead!”

  I laughed too. I’d heard that kind of “retire from what?!” response from so many people in love with their lives and their work to the point where they saw no difference between the two.

  “And what happens to this beautiful farm then?”

  I wished I hadn’t asked that question. His mood changed faster than Basilicata’s spring weather, and a look of frustration or anger flickered across his face. He sighed. “I hoped some, one, of my children or grandchildren would…” There was a long pause. “But, they have so many other things they want to do with their lives.”

  And then came the anger, suddenly and in a flood that made his bronzed, stately face go steel-hard. The lines on his forehead looked aged and tormented, but his eyes were moist. “It will be a desert!” he said loudly. “All these villages around here. No yo
ung people left. No one on the land. No one proud of land. All full of old people. Dying, dying. All dead soon. And this land, all the lands. Back to forest. Or desert…”

  LATER ON, while lunch was being prepared on embers taken from the fire under the cauldron, one of the men approached me and we talked about the farm and Nicolà.

  “Did you hear what the men call him?” he asked me.

  “No. I didn’t notice.”

  “They call him Cavaliero. It is a name of great honor because he received many awards during the last great war. Then when he came back home he made this farm to grow wheat. And peoples say he saved our village, Accettura, because we had no much wheat and very little bread after the war. We ate weeds, wild onions, anything. But the Cavaliero grew enough wheat for all of us, and he did not charge high prices that other people did and that we could not pay. So he saved us. And people love him and respect him very much. And today that is rare: honor and respect. In the old days you earned respect, and it was very important. If you lost respect, you were nobody.”

  THE CAVALIERO, Nicolà, was toasted heartily over our huge casserole pranzo of pork chunks slowly simmering with bay leaves, olive oil, onions, peperoncini, and thick red wine. It was a simple-sounding concoction, cooked over a mound of smoldering embers in a huge earthenware pot, but when I tried to reproduce the superb dish on several occasions on our own stovetop in Aliano I never quite managed to capture its intensity and richness.

  We served ourselves on old porcelain plates and, munching great slabs of golden bread, we all stood around the slaughtering table, which had been covered with a plastic cloth to disguise its previous use earlier that morning. Nicolà’s strong red homemade wine flowed from large glass flagons and the traditional cries of “Buon appetito!” and “Salute!” and my favorite “Cin cin!,” echoed against the thick stone walls of the barn.

  I felt that I was experiencing, touching, something unique that morning. Maybe it was the absolute freshness of the meat and that mood of ancient, time-honored rites that seemed to permeate the atmosphere. Or maybe it was just the camaraderie of a bunch of hardworking men, mainly contadini farmers, who continued to share a timeless tradition together and would do the same thing every year until they themselves faded back into the earth—which, hopefully, would continue to be as fruitful as it is today.

  But I knew that all would agree with Nicolà. If the land was not nurtured by people like them, it could indeed ultimately “become a desert.”

  Postscript

  Apparently the pork casserole we’d all enjoyed in the late morning was merely a prelude—a minor merenda (snack)—to a far larger traditional pranzo (lunch) at Massimo’s restaurant overlooking Accettura. I hadn’t realized this so I’d consumed the equivalent of a hearty midday meal with the men. When the time came for us all to move from the farm, I inadvertently glanced at the three grinning, decapitated pig heads hanging on the barn wall and decided: enough pork for one day. In fact, enough pork for quite a while. So, I slipped away from the farm, pretending ignorance of the celebratory feast. Looking back I realize that I possibly reacted a little too hastily and doubtless would have enjoyed a splendid, wine-and grappa-laced bacchanal, which, I’m sure, could have made a far more colorful tale.

  As indeed it will. Next year, maybe.

  Giuliano’s Little Trick and Rosa’s Magic

  A week or so after the pig fest I experienced yet another rather unique, and certainly unexpected, event as part of my ongoing rites of passage here.

  FOR ALL HIS tendency to portray himself as a kind of chuckling, good-natured bumbler, Giuliano apparently had a wily side, too. Others had warned me of this in a kind of warm-spirited, wink-and-nod manner, and suggested that I should be a little wary of the wheeler-dealer persona in his nature. But I preferred to take him as I saw him—as a generous and helpful friend who was always ready to advise and assist us and expand our network of new acquaintances and “interesting characters.”

  But there was a particular day when I realized that maybe one reason Giuliano was so helpful and so willing to be seen with me around Accettura was the fact that the small village was rarely visited by “writers” (or any other outsiders, for that matter)—certainly not by writers writing a book on Basilicata and linked, albeit tenuously, to such venerable publications as National Geographic and the New York Times. It was a win-win situation. I benefited from Giuliano’s help, and he, in some modest, secretive way, seemed to gain a little local kudos from his association with me.

  On this particular day, Giuliano chose his moment well. We’d just enjoyed one of Rosa’s splendid five-course lunches (another one of her “just a spuntino” [snack] masterpieces)—featuring as secondo, pungent, garlic-filled rolls of thin-sliced veal that had been slow cooked in her own rich homemade tomato sauce—and Giuliano and I were basking in the glow of glasses of grappa and Rosa’s thimbles of robust espresso coffee.

  “So, we workin’ on your ‘farm calendar,’ right, David? This afternoon?”

  This was one of those on-off projects I’d begun weeks before. I wanted to create, mainly for my own education I think, a sort of month-by-month chart of all the things that small farmers had to do in order to be traditionally self-sufficient in terms of producing their own olive oil, wines, cheeses, meat, prosciutto, and all those salamis, fruits, and vegetables—the lot. I wasn’t quite sure what I would actually do with the chart. Maybe there was a part of me that wondered if Anne and I could handle a subsistence existence if we ever decided to constrain our peripatetic ways and settle down enough to try the “simple life” for a longer period

  “Yes. I’d like that. We’ve got quite a few things to cover. Also I need more details on all those pork products you’ve got dangling from the rafters in your cantina. I want to know how you both make the perfect prosciutto, coppa, soppressata….”

  “’Azright. Rosa knows all that. But she ’as to go out for a while so we can start that later on.”

  “Okay. Fine with me,” I said, looking forward to another glass or two of grappa, for digestive purposes only, of course.

  “So I was thinkin’, maybe you like visit our school, where Rocco, my grandson, goes. It’s a nice little school up by church.”

  “Oh, I’ve been to quite a few schools, Giuliano. Sebastiano has taken me around to most of his places in Aliano and Stigliano.”

  “…And the headmaster say he like show you ’roun’…”

  “I honestly don’t think I…”

  “…’bout two o’clock this afternoon. If is awright with you.”

  Giuliano looked at me appealingly, and I realized that he’d already set the visit up. He wasn’t really asking me, but telling me what our agenda for the afternoon was to be.

  “Course, if you don’ wan’…” he said with a sad frown.

  What the heck? I thought. I could hardly say no when I’d just enjoyed a superb lunch at his home, and we had nothing else to do anyway until Rosa came back later on.

  “Okay. That’s fine,” I said, sensing I had been cleverly nudged into a corner. Often my first reaction to such a situation is to become unusually assertive and openly negative. I guess that’s what happens when you’ve spent a large part of your life “on the road” and you treasure your personal freedom and boundless choices almost as much as life itself. But this time, I surrendered with barely a whimper.

  A few minutes later we were rolling up to a very airy contemporary structure set on a high bluff overlooking the village and the sequence of ranges and hill villages that eased eastward into a heat haze. Most of the schools I’d seen previously had similar locations, and their classrooms invariably had large picture windows offering enormous vistas of wild Lucanian landscapes—a refreshing improvement on the hovel-like pit that was Aliano’s school in the thirties and described so evocatively and with outrage by Levi.

  I assumed that, as had occurred on my other visits to schools in the region, I’d be shown the halls bedecked with proclamations and school awards
and photographs of soccer teams, and then a few of the classrooms filled with charts, projects, maps, and artwork done by the children (another notable improvement on Levi’s morose descriptions of the typical classroom environment in his days).

  But this time things were a little different. Suspiciously different. When we arrived the headmaster came out to greet me formally, saying how honored he was to have “a very famous writer from America” visit his small school. I looked at Giuliano, wondering where the “very famous writer” label had come from. He nodded and grinned mischievously. Then the teachers, all women, were introduced to me one by one. Fortunately the first to be introduced spoke and taught some English, so the comments of the others, with references to my twenty-odd travel books and National Geographic magazine and my illustrations, etc., were translated with embarrassing floridity. Once again I realized that Giuliano had been here and prepared the ground well by telling them about my books and articles. One glance at his glowing face, basking happily in reflected glory, was enough to confirm my suspicions.

  That glance should also have warned me of things to come.

  The hallway was suddenly full of marching lines of young pupils—all the girls in white Alice in Wonderland–type “over-dresses” and all the boys in traditional royal blue smocks. They walked summarily in single file past our little gathering of teachers and down the corridor into one of the larger classrooms at the end of the building.

  The headmaster watched them pass with a look of paternal pride and then asked if I was ready.

  “Sorry?” I said, already suspecting what the answer would be. “Ready for what?”