by David Yeadon
initially, to lose ourselves; next, to find ourselves…to become young fools again—to slow time down…and fall in love once more…By now all of us have heard too often, the old Proust line about how the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new places but in seeing with new eyes…. But it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty…. We even may become mysterious—and, as no less a dignitary than Oliver Cromwell once noted, “A man never goes so far as when he doesn’t know where is is going”…or as Sir Thomas Browne sagely put it, “We carry with us the wonders we seek without us.”
Finally, there’s something uplifting in another of Albert Camus’s revelations: “In the depths of winter I finally realized there was within me an invincible summer.” Isak Dinesen (Out of Africa) expressed it more succinctly with her simple affirmation—something that all travelers should write down and carry with them: “Here I am. Precisely where I ought to be.”
I think that’s the thought we found most useful and uplifting during our (fortunately, very rare) and rarely simultaneous melancholies in Aliano. That and, of course, Carlo Levi’s celebration of his lot despite all the hardships and lack of freedom he suffered during his confino there: “An immense happiness, such as I had never known, swept over me.…I loved these peasants.” And even on the day his official release was announced he wrote, “My unexpected joy soon turned to melancholy.…I was sorry to leave and found a dozen pretexts for lingering on.”
If Levi could endure all that he had to during that time and still emerge with such a realization of the ultimate positive outcome of his ordeal—his love and caring for the people of Basilicata—then our little moments of uncertainty and confused displacement were barely worth acknowledgment.
So, from then on we agreed to consider them unacknowledged, particularly as we were beginning to dread the leaving of Aliano far more than the staying.
Our Nonmeeting with Maria the Witch
Some experiences—neither melancholic nor exuberant—just dangle like those metaphorically elusive carrots on sticks, shriveling a little in their inaccessibility, but still potentially full of color and flavor.
AND ONE OF our most enticing carrot experiences, the meeting with Maria the witch, had still not taken place. But, in a way, the antics involved in our “nonmeeting” with this increasingly illusionary icon of Aliano’s darkside were possibly more humorous and mysterious than any actual face-to-face interview would have been.
Giuseppe, the bank manager, appeared increasingly uncomfortable in his role as self-appointed instigator of the meeting with Maria. At first he’d seemed very enthusiastic about it, and maybe we should have accepted his offer to introduce us to Maria and act as interpreter on the day it was offered, before he had a chance to reflect and reconsider—which he obviously had done on the second and third occasions Anne and I mentioned wanting to take him up on his kind suggestion.
His excuses were masterpieces of mysterious obfuscation: “Maria has not been around recently”; “No one seems to know where Maria is”; “Her neighbor told me she was in, but no one answered the door”; “I think she has been ill” (a case of the physician not being able to heal herself? Or maybe that didn’t apply to a “traditional healer”?).
We realized that something had obviously happened, and that Giuseppe was now very anxious to forget his suggestion and his participation in this whole strange affair as quickly as possible. As a perfectionist of polite procrastination and the pregnant pause, he explained: “You know, I don’t think I would make such a very good translator. My English is not so good really…”; “You know I have a feeling that maybe Maria doesn’t want to meet with us.” And the real clincher: “To be truthful, I’m not sure it would be a good idea at all to meet with her.”
I was tempted to challenge him and ask him why the change of heart, but Anne suggested (with yet another of her quick but full-of-meaning glances) that we should liberate the poor man from his obviously ill-considered offer—which we did as politely as we could. Something along the lines of: “Well, never mind. Maybe next time, when we both come back to Aliano.”
The relief on his face was an essay in instant psychological destressing. All his little worry lines vanished, and he once again became the smiling, benign, and generous-spirited man we’d first met and liked so much. He searched around in the drawers under his desk and produced a copy of Aurelio Lepre’s Mussolini L’Italiano, which he insisted we keep as a gift “because you have both shown much interest in the life of this important man of Italian history.” The photograph on the book’s dust jacket showed the bull-jowled, thick-necked dictator posing in his familiar hands-on-hips, head-back-in-rhetoric-ready manner, and wearing one of his self-designed lapel-less uniforms criss-crossed with leather straps and bound at the waist by an enormous cummerbund-thick leather-and-brass belt. I don’t remember our being particularly interested in this oddity of history. More like dismayed by the calamities he had inflicted upon his countrymen. However, we accepted the gift and had started to thank him, but he was back in his “anything you need” delivery mode, emphasizing that all we had to do was pop into the bank and he would drop everything and help us in any way possible with anything. And oh, by the way, please would we join him and his family for lunch next Sunday at Bar Centrale at one o’clock because he had told them all about us and they would love to meet us….
Maria was never mentioned again.
And what was odd, too, was the reluctance of anyone else in the village to act as go-between with the elusive lady. Once again, the responses ran the gamut from the offhand “She’s never home” and “I’m not sure where she lives now” to the more direct “She’s not a very nice person”; “She can be very dangerous if you’re not careful”; and “She’ll give you malocchio [the evil eye]”. One particular response from someone who had been adamant at dismissing “all that nonsense about Maria and her special powers” was truly surprising: “Listen, it’s better you don’t get involved with these…things.”
“But what things?” we asked. “You said it was all nonsense.”
“Oh yes, of course, and I believe that. But others think differently. She doesn’t frighten me. Never! But other people are very nervous…cautious…and well, for your own sakes, maybe you should just…not try to meet her…for just now.”
Stranger and stranger. But Anne decided that, as far as she was concerned, she’d rather “forget the whole silly thing and get on with enjoying our life here in the village.” I said something like, that’s fine with me, but it really wasn’t, despite Ann Cornelisen’s sensible commentary on modern-day witchcraft in her book Torregreca:
Every village has one, often a woman, proficient in the art of casting and uncasting spells, of healing mysterious diseases and driving away evil spirits. It has always been a respectable, lucrative profession but it does not attract the young of today. The idea has been embarrassed underground. Medicine has improved. Spells have softened into superstitions and the “evil eye” has become a generic explanation for anything not understood.
Despite the apparent declining faith in witches, one dark evening on the way back from the bakery with one of those “medium”—only eighteen inches in diameter—loaves, I thought I’d just saunter past the house near the bank where I’d been told Maria lived.
The air had a slight chill to it. I climbed up through the shadowy, poorly lit cobblestone alleys. No one seemed to be around, at least not in front of me, but twice as I turned to look back after hearing sounds behind me, I was sure I saw doors crack open and then suddenly close.
As I turned the corner into Maria’s street a black-clad widow suddenly scurried out of the darkness, almost bumping into me in her haste. Despite the black scarf drawn tightly around her face, I saw a flash of fierce eyes that were distinctly unfriendly. There was no response to my cheery “Buona sera,” which was odd because even the most reticent of the village black-clad widows—and most looked as if they wanted
no contact with anyone or anything—usually gave some kind of mumbled response from behind their burqa-like shawls.
I was approaching what I’d been told was Maria’s home, a tiny bare-stone place with an ancient unpainted door. There was a single window, heavily curtained, but a slight chink in the drapes showed there was a light on inside.
Well, I thought, all I’m going to do is say hello. Can’t be any harm in that, surely. I’m not here to embarrass the lady, just to ask in my still-neophyte (“cute,” as Felicia, Giuseppina’s daughter, described it) Italian whether Anne and I could arrange to have a brief chat with her at her convenience.
GIULIA VENERE (LEVI’S WITCH)
The light went out.
I had just raised my hand to knock on the ancient wooden door and the window went black. I think the curtains may have moved a little, too, closing the chink. It was hard to tell in this particularly dark part of the alley. I could hear no sounds inside. My hand was still raised.
And then lowered. For the very first time I felt a tiny frisson of fear and uncertainty. Was it possible that Giuseppe and all the others who had, for one odd reason or another, felt unable to help me meet Maria had some credible justification for their obvious, and in some cases adamant, reluctance?
There I was, standing with my loaf of bread, waiting at the door of this utterly silent, dark, but obviously occupied, house and wondering what to do next. If I knocked, the knock would be ignored. I was not wanted there. I suddenly felt sure of that. I was definitely not welcome.
Normally my what-the-hell self would have taken over at this point and forced the situation to one conclusion or another. But on this occasion, the often foolishly intrepid part of myself failed to step forward and offer his services. Even he seemed to be saying, “Let it go this time. You can always call again. Maybe in the daylight, or maybe when you return to Aliano later in the spring.”
And so I found myself wandering homeward slowly down the dark alleys, clutching my loaf and feeling rather foolish, maybe even a little ashamed at my own trepidation.
But then I sensed—I knew—that Maria’s door had slowly opened behind me on creaking hinges…and then abruptly closed again, with an angry, cracking slam.
Just like a warning. A definite procedere con prudenza.
Celebrating the Old Ways with Roberto Rubino
Another meeting I’d been looking forward to turned out to be far more successful, and encouraging, particularly from the point of view of Basilicata’s possible future “small is beautiful” role in the Mezzogiorno.
“HOW ABOUT A little lunch?” said the tall, elegant, moustached man driving his polo-green estate car across the wild, rock-pocked upland moorlands high above and beyond the city of Potenza.
“Fine,” I said, but hoping it would not be another of those multicourse marathon midday extravaganzas that invariably left me leaden-framed and siesta-somnolent for the rest of the day.
I looked around. We were on a narrow, winding, watershed road with huge vistas of mountain foothills and the spikey silhouettes of bare, frost-shattered ridges. Deep in the hazy valleys were salt-sprinklings of tiny, whitewashed farms. On the highest peaks, snow-she-ened summits looked like melting dollops of ice cream. Fantasy-like hill villages perched on impossible pinnacles, as they did throughout Basilicata, but here, rising out of serpentining mists, their Tolkeinesque flavor seemed even more pronounced.
We continued winding along the ridgetop road, and I wondered where in all that upland wilderness of weather-chiseled strata and stunted grasses one could possibly find a restaurant.
In a hollow, we passed through a remnant of an ancient oak forest.
“Good truffle-hunting here?” I asked the man next to me, who had recently been described in Corby Kummer’s intriguing book The Pleasures of Slow Food as looking like “the hero of an early 1960s Italian neorealist film, except that he smiles a lot. He even gestures like an Italian movie star, with big, sweeping arm movements and that language of the hands only Italians know.” All in all, I thought, a very apt description.
“Oh yes. All around,” he said with hands-off-the-steering-wheel enthusiasm. “And I helped start the autumn tartufo-gathering here.”
There was no boastfulness in his voice, just a simple statement of fact. For that was what Roberto Rubino did for a living: He started things. As director of the regional Experimental Institute for Agricultural Research, linked to Potenza University and the Italian Ministry of Agriculture, Roberto acted as a catalyst for protecting, enhancing, expanding, and promoting indigenous resources and almost-forgotten processes of agrarian production. Particularly traditional methods of cheese production.
“Everyone told me when I came here that there were no truffles in these forests,” he said with a wry smile. “But they were wrong. I had my dog from Calabria, where truffles are everywhere, and we went out together and found many here. Big ones. Lots and lots of them. At first the people did not believe, so I took them into the woods and showed them.”
“Seems you had the same kind of battle with your cheeses: making people believe in keeping the old traditional types of cheese and production methods in Basilicata—particularly for your caciocavallo podolico cheeses, your ‘white cow’ cheeses.”
“Yes it was—it still is—not easy. You always have to figure on that old negativism. Everywhere. Defeatism. They call Basilicata marginale—marginal in quality of land and production and most other things. But I hate that word. There is no marginality here! We can do—we are already doing—so many things and making things better.”
“I think Carlo Petrini and his Slow Food movement has to fight similar challenges of negativism and indifference—the steam-rollering inevitability of homogenized everything.”
“Oh yes, Carlo Petrini, a very good man and a good friend. His Slow Food movement is now worldwide—seventy thousand members in almost fifty different countries. What I am trying to do at my institute and with our new organization, Cheeses Under the Sky, and our cheese magazine, Caseus, is like what he is creating with his movement. It’s all about Slow Food. To grow and produce foods naturally, to let them fully mature, to share them with others in a traditional way as part of everyday life. Carlo calls these “ark” foods and spends much time identifying them and helping to maintain, improve, and market these types of foods. That’s what I hope for, too—with, of course, cheeses playing a very big part in all of this. I want to keep all the aromas, flavors, textures, and surprises of cheeses that can differentiate one region, even a single valley, from all the others. It would be terrible if—what is that phrase that McDonald’s uses? ‘One Taste Worldwide,’ I think, something like that—it would be terrible if that happened.”
“But where did you suggest we meet this morning in Potenza?”
Roberto laughed a warm Cary Grant–type of laugh. “Yes, I know. Good joke, eh? To meet in the McDonald’s car park. Well, Potenza is a difficult city, so I thought it would be better for you. But you didn’t go inside I hope.”
“Only to use the bathroom,” I said.
“Ah, well, that is permissible. They have very nice bathrooms. Someone told me! But I promise my lunch for you will be far, far better than any fast food anywhere.”
Still no sign of any restaurant, I thought.…For the simple reason that there wasn’t one.
We drove off the ridge road and onto a rough track, then past a sign reading Azienda Montana Li Foy, and into a farmyard with a huge new barn and pens filled with a fascinating mix of goat species, as I was to learn, from all over the world.
Roberto stood beside me, admiring his flocks. “Aren’t they beautiful?” He beamed. “These we use for our experiments in animal husbandry and cheeses. We have Maltese and Ionica—those white ones. The ones with those big twisted vertical horns, like corkscrews—they’re Girgentana from Sicily. Those with the really big horns are Orobica, found mainly in Lombardy today. The smaller ones are Sarda, from Sardinia, and my favorites are the floppy-eared ones with those b
eautiful red coats—Rossa Mediterranea, from Syria. And look at our cashmere goats. Can you see that beautiful wool on their stomachs? Only fifteen microns thick. Top quality.”
“And what are those over there in a huddle?”
“Ma! Those are Scottish. We bought them recently from a farm north of Edinburgh. But I think they are all sick.”
“Not foot-and-mouth disease, I hope! They had a lot of problems with that in Britain recently.”
But he’d turned away, disgusted by these new arrivals, and called out, “Lunchtime!”
We entered a simple building that could have been a farmhouse but was used by the institute mainly for onsite courses and “long, slow, dinners.” A huge log fire roared against the far wall. A long dining table with benches took up most of the room, and at the far end sat a picnic basket crammed with delights that Roberto was slowly unpacking. “See what I have brought for us—some different local cheeses, my homemade beer and wine, sausages my wife makes, a lovely big piece of guanciale, which we’ll eat with bruschetta using my local baker’s bread, some manteca [a small ball of caciocavallo-coated ‘ricotta-butter’], and a real specialty…” He held up one of the moldiest round cheeses I’d ever seen and stroked it like a newborn lamb. “Our caciocavallo podolico, the one we are most famous for. The Podolico cows are a special white breed, originally from the Polish border. Normally it’s aged for only up to a year. But this one,” he whispered dramatically, “is one of my own, and it’s over six years old!”
I will not recount (again) a crunch-by-crunch description of our lunch, except to say that everything tasted even better than it looked. Pride of place indeed went to Roberto’s six-year old masterpiece of skill and patience, a pungent golden-cream creation made from the unpasteurized milk of pasture-grazing white Podolico cows and possessing the most enticing aromas and flavors of herbs, hazelnuts, and pineapple (yes, pineapple!), and distinct overtones of a truly mature parmigiano-reggiano.