by David Yeadon
“Mister David Yeadon?” a deep masculine voice called out.
“Yes?”
“May I speak with you, please?”
Oh, boy, I thought. This sounds a little ominous. The police? An emergency back home? Someone’s hit my car down at the piazza? I hadn’t recycled the garbage correctly? (I hadn’t.) Or, much worse, something’s happened to Anne in Matera?
“Okay,” I heard myself mumble in a rather guttural tone. “Uno minuto.”
It was too late to clean up the splay of stuff all over the floor and heave the mattress back into the bedroom. It was too late to do anything but regret the fact that I was wearing a rather grubby jogging suit and walking about in bare feet. (I work better without socks.) If Anne had been around she could have handled the visitor or at least given me a chance to make myself a little more presentable. But Anne was away. So, the heck with it, I thought, this is my home, and I don’t have to apologize for anything.
I opened the door.
Standing there was a figure dressed almost entirely in black with a large, black hood pulled over his head. His face, a pleasantly open face of someone possibly in his early forties, peered out of the murk of the staircase. He looked cold. It had been an unusually cold day, with furious Pollino winds howling up through the calanchi gorges. In fact, he looked very cold.
“Come in, come in. You look cold,” I said.
“Oh, thank you. Thank you very much,” the shrouded figure said, half stumbling into the room. “Wow! It’s so warm in here. How lovely. My apartment is freezing!”
“Ah,” I said, “you live here?”
“Oh, yes. I’m sorry. My name is Antonio Pagnotta, and yes, I live very close by, across from the post office. And my place is too cold. The fire doesn’t work well. Always smoking.”
“Ah, yes. When those winds start blowing, it can be a real nuisance. Come and sit down,” I said, curious about the reason for this unexpected visit. And then I realized that sitting was a bit of an impossibility with my mattress blocking access to the sofa. So off I rambled, with apologies for the mess, etc.—which I’d distinctly told myself I wouldn’t do—while kicking the mattress out of the way. “Excuse all this,” I said. “The mattress is my desk, hence…” I let the rest of the sentence fade away. The stranger gave me a wide, understanding grin, sat down, and said, “Yes, of course, I am the same. With my work.”
And that’s when the magic of “no coincidences” began to kick in. It turned out that Antonio was also a creator of books, primarily photojournalism books, and that he was in Aliano preparing his latest project, The Wheel, the Cross, and the Pen: The World of “Christ Stopped at Eboli.” Don Pierino (my loyal network catalyst) had apparently mentioned that I was there working on a similar project and suggested that Antonio call and introduce himself.
“So…,” I said a little warily. I wasn’t quite ready to deal with professional competition at this fragile stage in my manuscript’s compilation. “Your book is mainly photographic?”
“Yes. All black and white. Of the people…descendants of the people in Levi’s book, but also, the scenery, the festas… you know. Trying to show life here as it is today and link it to Levi’s time.”
“Ah,” I said. “Very interesting.”
“So, I thought I would say ‘hello’ and see if I could help you at all in what you are doing here.”
“Well…” I was still a little uneasy with the proximity of our project concepts and wondering if “help” was a euphemism for plagiarism. “That’s very kind of you.”
“Not at all. We authors must work together, eh?”
I laughed. Actually a sort of strangled gurgle. “Ah, yes,” I said, really meaning a very different definite maybe, but maybe not. “So, you’re a writer, too?”
“Well, not so much. I will be asking other people to do the writing part for me—some of Levi’s relatives, some scholars, and of course the local people who I’m talking to. But the book is primarily photographs. The writing will be mainly long captions.”
“Ah. You know, I’ve been surprised by the fact that I’ve not yet found a single book that tries to do what you suggest, with or without photographs.”
“Yes, so have I. It seems such an obvious idea. Levi is still so important here, and in Italy generally.”
“So, your audience is primarily Italian?”
“Oh, yes. Completely. Maybe just for the Mezzogiorno itself. I don’t know yet.”
“What does your publisher think?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t have one yet. I’m hoping the Bank of Matera may publish the book. They have done so before with other books on this region. But I have to prepare a proper portfolio to show them. That’s why I’m here in Aliano now.”
As it became increasingly clear that our projects, while mutually reinforcing, were quite different in scope and intent, I began to relax a little and tell Antonio more about the intent of my own book and ask him about his life and career.
Coincidences abounded. In his forty-six years of life he had traveled to many of the places Anne and I had explored around the world. He’d even lived in Japan for ten years, from 1990, and had in fact scooped aspects of the sarin nerve gas story there—an episode where a fringe group of radical religious fanatics known as Aum Shin Rikkyo had tried to wipe out a crowded subway in Tokyo and, although things could have been a lot worse, succeeded in killing eleven people and injuring hundreds more.
Prior to that Antonio had spent considerable time in Muro Lucano on the Basilicatan border with Campagna, a town devastated in a 1980 earthquake. He’d recorded the town’s “reconstruction” and the conflicting reaction of the residents to much of the new, soulless architecture in his photographic book I Know How Many Steps, published in 1998. His second photographic book on Salerno University, Faces, Chaos, and Shooting Stars, published in 2000, was praised as a remarkable portrait of the people, politics, and dynamics of teachers and students involved in the process of education and learning.
I decided I liked him. He was direct, open, and amusing, and he seemed to possess a spirit seething with vision, ambition, and vitality. And most of all he’d helped me, right at a moment of questioning and self-doubt, to clarify the scope of my own wanderings and work there. I thought that his book, while very different from mine, would be an important contribution to Italy’s understanding of itself and its heritage. And I told him so. He looked pleased—maybe a little relieved, too. He’d heard from Don Pierino of my links with National Geographic, and he admitted that he had feared that I might have already stolen his thunder and jeopardized his own work.
We continued sharing tales of our travels and adventures. He was obviously a serious photojournalist, with a penchant for perilous places around the world. It was fascinating to listen to his stories. I particularly admired his pluck and his apparent ability to circumvent the clutches of authorities in dangerous parts of the world many other photographers would have avoided, if only to keep his expensive collection of cameras and lenses out of the hands of envious “officials.”
More important, in his first selection of Alienese photographs, I was beginning to see Antonio as something of a “primitive sensualist” who in his art was able, as Thomas Moore puts it: “to capture the eternal in the everyday—the eternal that feeds the soul—the whole world in a grain of sand.” He seemed haunted by the piercing humanity of his subjects’ faces and eyes, the vastness of the individual self captured in powerful black-and-white images. There was something of that old aphorism, “the eye you see with is the eye that sees you back” in his work.
AROUND MIDNIGHT he left. I felt a little guilty at the thought of his having to return to his cold apartment by the post office so I offered him my “writing bed” by the fire in the living room. But he assured me that he had lived in far worse conditions. “And soon my girlfriend, Graziella, will be here from Salerno, so I shall be very warm then!” We agreed to meet in a couple of days, when he would show me more of his photographs a
nd we’d continue discussing our contacts and ideas.
However, it seemed we were fated to meet earlier than that (another “no coincidence”?)—at precisely one o’clock the following day, when I was trying to sneak out of the village in my car during the silent, sacred lunchtime siesta period. For a while I’d had my eyes on a large pile of wood left over from the construction of Don Pierino’s new olive mill and dumped by the side of the road. It was thin, rough-cut planking, broken and nail pocked, but I thought it would make fine kindling for our recalcitrant fire. I assumed it was there for the taking, but decided to collect my piles during a quiet period, just in case anyone should object. “Darling,” my darling had warned me in her usual “what’s he up to again” tone of voice, “be careful. Someone may need it.”
“Yes, precisely,” I said. “We need it,” which I thought was a pretty neat response. As Anne-appointed heat maestro of the house, I was fed up with struggling, usually unsuccessfully, to burn those enormous and very dense slabs of oak and olive that Giuseppina had piled high on our terrace. At first I’d had been delighted by her thoughtfulness. Later I was a little less grateful. The damn stuff hadn’t been covered against the furious and endless winter rains that came while we were away for a few days, and now the wood hissed and crackled and threw out sudden flurries of explosive flames before dying down to a simpering, glowing ash with no heat or comfort in it at all.
So I was rolling down Via Roma on the way out of the village to pick up the planks when a voice called out from the bench by Bar Capriccio: “Hey, David!”
And who should it be, of course, but Antonio, laden with cameras and looking a little weary from the morning’s shoot. I stopped, and he strolled across the street. “Where are you going?”
I told him, and immediately he offered to help. So off we went together. We gathered five enormous stacks of that lovely kindling, and, as we were returning to the village, he said, “I’m going to photograph a very interesting lady who got a part in Rosi’s film of Levi’s book. Almost.”
“Almost? How do you mean almost?”
“Well, it’s a very funny story, but why don’t you come along with me, and she can tell you herself.”
Abandoning whatever plans I had for the rest of the afternoon (not many), I said I thought that was an excellent idea. A few minutes later we were sitting together on a lopsided sofa in a cramped little kitchen–dining room in a house hidden away in a narrow alley near the fossa and enjoying truly excellent espressos prepared by a young woman with a distinctly striking, film star–ish kind of face. Not the soft outlines of a Melanie Griffith but rather the stronger, attractive-but-no-nonsense ambiance of a Sigourney Weaver.
“So, that’s the almost film star?” I whispered to Antonio.
He laughed aloud. “Oh, no, no, not her. She’s far too young!” (Of course. I knew that.) He indicated an elderly lady in black widow’s attire, complete with black shawl and walking stick. She was seated in a shadowy corner by the warm part of a wood-burning cooking stove looking a little forlorn and forgotten.
But not for long. As Antonio encouraged her to tell her story, which she’d obviously told countless times before, she suddenly became an animated and whirling-gesture raconteuse, explaining how Rosi had begged her to play the role of Levi’s witch-housekeeper, Giulia Venere. She had said “yes” at first…until it became clear that in one of the scenes, she would have to scrub the back of a naked Levi, played by Gian Maria Volonté, one of Italy’s most heartthrobby male stars at the time. At that point she adamantly rejected the part, despite all the protestations of Francesco Rosi himself and even her husband and her own relatives, who relished the idea of having a film star in the family.
“I could not be near a naked man!” she explained, still remarkably full of indignation years later at such an outrageous idea. “I was married!”
“Yes,” Antonio said. “But he’d have been sitting in a tub of soap-suds, and even your husband said it was okay with him.”
“That didn’t matter. I had my own reputation to keep.”
After that tale we couldn’t stop her. She launched into a whole series of colorful anecdotes about the war (“…terrible food—all wild stuff from the fields”); the sale of the family pig to buy cloth to make clothes and underwear (“…in the war we had nothing…underneath!”); her only sight of the invading Americans coming in from Sicily to drive the Germans north (“…down in the valley, a few of them only, and on bicycles! Poof! Not so much of an army!”).
When, inevitably, the subject of Levi came up, she said she’d only seen him walking up and down the streets in 1935, when she was a little girl, but didn’t know, even now, what all the fuss was about. “What has changed?” she said with a flamboyant gesture of raised arms and then the traditional under-the-chin flick indicating the small kitchen, the ancient stove, and the even more ancient smoke-smudged photographs of family members on the walls. I pointed out the TV and the VCR on the shelf by a staircase, and she said something pithy in the Alianese dialect, which, according to Antonio, meant: “All these machines are useless and never worked properly anyhow!”
ONE RAMBLE LIKE THIS with Antonio led to many more over the ensuing days. And then came another one of his insistent phone calls:
“How do you feel about Potenza?”
“Not much.”
“Ah, you, too? Like most others.”
“Well, I know it’s got a very interesting Basilicatan kind of history. A history from way back whenever, then it was destroyed by the Romans, then taken over by just about every warmongering militia in North Africa and Europe. And then half obliterated again and again by all those terremoto del Vulture (earthquakes). I didn’t find much to look at really when I was there a couple of months ago. The old part on top of the hill has kind of a genteel, nineteenth-century flavor, and I seem to remember a rather pleasant winding street of shops but…”
“So, why not meet me there tomorrow?”
“Antonio. Did you hear anything I said?”
“Of course. I always listen to what you say. But I have a surprise for you. So how about one o’clock at Tito Station? Just outside Potenza in the mountains. Tomorrow?”
I heard myself saying “okay” and wondered if it was me talking.
“Very good. See you,” he said, and was gone.
The next day, after a splendid mountain-and lake-laced drive from Aliano, I was sitting in my car at the Tito train station wondering exactly what my newfound friend had in mind this time—and what exactly was his promised surprise.
It turned out to be a number of surprises. First, he rolled up in a small, battered four-wheel-drive SUV with his girlfriend, gorgeous Graziella, beside him, her long leonine black hair blowing in a chill breeze and her impossibly long, pointed-toe boots (the latest Italian fashion) polished to a Rolls-Royce–coachwork shine.
Five minutes later we were seated for lunch at Graziella’s parents’ house, adjoining the station above an extremely shining, pristine-clean forno (bakery) and pasticceria (pastry shop) once run by her father, Pasquale. I hadn’t expected lunch. Was this the surprise? If so, I thought, it’s a good one because, not only was the home-cooked meal a typical gargantuan Italian eight-course—antipasto, pasta, secondo (roast lamb), salad, fruit, cheese, pastries, and coffee—midday bacchanal, but it was made especially memorable when Pasquale produced a little plastic bag from his shirt pocket just as the homemade orecchiette arrived.
“Maybe you would like some of this with your pasta?” he said, handing me the bag.
I opened it, and the aroma hit me with the force of a tempest. Fresh, black tartufo (truffles)! Rich, earthy, and guaranteed to kick your saliva glands into top gear—a scent so musky and primeval that it resonated somewhere back in your early evolutionary memory banks.
“Ah, wonderful!” I gushed. “Where do you get these? I’ve seen almost no truffles anywhere in Basilicata.”
“I find, with my dog, this morning,” said Pasquale.
&nbs
p; “But where?” I gasped because the Tito topography was comprised mainly of bare, brazen foothills and mountains for as far as you could see in all directions.
HILL TOWN NEAR POTENZA
“In a small forest. Not so far away.” He explained how he had just purchased, for the impressive price of twelve hundred dollars, a “truffle hound” named Lola. Today had been a kind of test day for the dog, and he’d been delighted by her prowess, not only in locating the elusive truffles in the earth around the roots of oak trees, but also in digging them up (“She very careful. Better than me!”) and even carrying them in her mouth—“But not with her teeth. Just her lips”—straight to Pasquale’s outstretched palm.
It was obvious that Pasquale’s investment, at least in his own eyes, had been a very sound one. He smiled a little complacently as he performed the ritual grating of two of the largest truffles, each the size of a table tennis ball, onto a plate, which was then passed with appropriate reverence around the table.
That was surprise number one.
Surprise number two came immediately after lunch, when Pasquale took us downstairs to show us his old bakery, now rented to a younger man. The tenant was in the kitchen creating tiny tartlets filled with zuppa inglese (an odd name for a kind of creamy custard) topped with clusters of chopped orange, kiwi, pineapple, and mango. The kitchen was as clean and sparkling as the store itself. Big loaves of bronze-crusted bread sat in piles waiting for the evening commuters coming home to Tito from Potenza, a few miles down the line.
I asked Pasquale if he ever made “weekend bread,” one of those richly aromatic mega-donut–shaped loaves Anne and I used to buy from the Arthur Avenue bakeries in the Bronx’s own version of Little Italy. Not so evocative as the Mulberry Street madness of Manhattan but, in its own lower-key way, far more genuine and with a truly enduring neighborhood feel.
Pasquale didn’t seem to understand my question, so I described the ingredients: chopped-up bits of leftover prosciutto, salami, coppa, soppressata, cheeses, sun-dried tomatoes, and anything else lying around that needed clearing out before Saturday, the big buy ing day, when families were already salivating about and preparing for the week’s great gastronomic climax of Sunday lunch.