Seasons in Basilicata Page 5

  I paused for a restorative coffee—a post-lunch cappuccino, much to the confusion of the bartender—at a gas station on the main valley highway linking the Basilicatan coast near Policoro and Metaponto with the A3 Naples-to-Reggio freeway. For a few minutes I reentered the twenty-first century: Cars and huge tractor trailers whizzed past (whizzing is apparently the only mode of movement for Italian drivers); billboards rose high on huge pillars, displaying evocatively underdressed young ladies sucking with erotic delight on Coke bottles or sprawling invitingly across gleaming latest-model automobiles. Farmers were out in ultra-fertile and immense fields with huge machines very unlike the donkey and oxen contraptions and tiny, waddling Ape trucks I’d noticed in the pocket-handkerchief patches of hardscrabble land way up in the mountains.

  But soon it was northward again, hairpinning like a pinball, dizzied by heights and constant glimpses of vertical-sided canyons and gorges dropping off a few inches from my front wheel.

  Infrequent white hill villages popped up, perched on distant puys, and then vanished almost magically into the swirl and tumble of the ranges. The lower foothills were often cloaked in deep, dark forests of oak, beech, and holly, while the higher peaks—Volturino, Caperino, and Montemurro—rose bold and bare, the great ancient bastions of Basilicata.

  “No wonder Christ stopped at Eboli,” a wisecracker once suggested. “Our mountains keep out anyone coming from the North.”

  “Well, they didn’t stop all those invasions though, did they?” I wisecracked back, only to be told with fierce southern logic that “the invaders cheated and came by sea!”

  I was tempted to remind the wisecracker that Christ could walk on water and obviously had the option therefore of entering Basilicata by the aquatic route. However, as would happen later in Basilicata, I found it best not to carry my “Italianish” repartee too far. A lot gets lost in the translation, and apologies for unintended slights are not always accepted gracefully.

  Just outside Laurenzana, one of the larger hill towns of the region, and perched even more precariously than most on a sheer precipice of rock, an ancient castle tower rose like a warning finger…one I perhaps should have heeded because I was soon about to have my first little meeting with misfortune—and the “dark side” strangeness—in this desolate realm.

  IT ALL BEGAN PLEASANTLY enough as I came upon a sign handpainted on a rough slab of wood. It read Castelmezzano and pointed down an enticing-looking backroad that sinewed its way across the top of a high forested ridge. My map showed no such road, but I’d been told that Italian maps, despite their elegantly nuanced colors and air of authorative accuracy, were often notoriously deficient in the finer points of what one might call definitive cartography. So, off I went down the road, dust clouds spuming behind me from the unpaved but relatively rutless surface.

  It was a little late in the evening, and dusky shadows were rising up from the valleys far below as the sun began its final declining arc, spraying the higher hills with brilliant flares of gold and amber. According to my crow-flying estimates, Castelmezzano couldn’t have been more than twenty miles or so to the north, so I reckoned I should reach the comforts of an evening coffee—or maybe even a real cocktail, a multicourse Italian dinner, and a cozy bed in some local pensione—in an hour, tops.

  A few miles farther on, deeper and deeper into those silent, seemingly unpopulated ranges, my schedule became somewhat disjointed. As did my little Lancia DoDo. (I knew I shouldn’t have trusted a car with such a dumb name.)

  Maybe I’d become a little too cocky on this particular backroad, but its relatively rutless, uncorrugated surface encouraged speed and the pleasure of seeing half a mile of dust trailing behind me in true outback-explorer fashion was captivatingly hypnotic.

  Then came the rut. Some massive gouge out of the road’s surface possibly caused by erratic drainage following one of Basilicata’s sudden and very fickle spring thunderstorms. Anyway, the rut came, and I didn’t see it, and the little DoDo slammed into it at full speed. First there was an abrupt downward crunch, then a wheel-spinning surge upward, with the impact of an untamed bucking bronco, and then the car crashed back down onto the road, pebbles and rocks flying, dust everywhere, me choking and spitting…and the engine dead.

  Dead, as you might appropriately say, as a DoDo—that huge, ungainly mega-turkey creature from Mauritius that has been extinct for centuries. It was one of the most trusting birds ever in existence, virtually inviting its own demise just by standing around haplessly waiting to be clubbed over the head by hungry sailors.

  I sat for a moment to regain my equilibrium (maybe even contemplating my own hapless, DoDo-like demise), then turned the ignition, listened to the whirrings of the flywheel, and waited for the sudden reassuring power-burst of valves and pistons…which never came.

  I waited a few more minutes, humming some inane tune and trying to assure myself that all would be well and that I’d soon be in Castelmezzano enjoying its abundant comforts and coddlings.

  But the engine still refused to revive itself. The road rut must have really done a number on something or other in the crammed mechanical complexities under the hood, of which, I admit, I know very little. I’ve never been much of a spark plug, carburetor, and alternator nut and I invariably stand in awe as friends of mine, immensely knowledgeable, tinker around with the oddest of instruments in the belly of their beasts and produce remarkable purring, jetlike sounds from their beloved machines. “Wow,” I’ll normally say as they try to explain to me the subtleties of electronic ignitions and torque and traction and valve synchronization and Lord knows what else, and claim that “it’s not quite right yet.” And I’ll mumble inanities like “Well, it sounds great to me,” and they’ll give me side-long glances and smile tolerantly like dads with blissfully ignorant offspring, and say things like “Right, Dave” or, worse, nothing at all.

  But, for all their gentle, patronizing put-downs, I’d have welcomed any one of them there right at that moment to help me out of this rather difficult situation—what with darkness creeping in, chilly breezes filtering through the forests on either side of the road, the prospect of a cold night alone in this unpeopled wilderness, and the possibility of a long, lonely hike in the morning to find help.

  I sat in the car, a little forlorn and depressed by my inability to solve my dilemma, even after lifting the hood and looking for loose wires or anything that might explain the DoDo’s utter refusal to spring reassuringly to life. And as I sat, I remembered a line from Levi’s book: “In this atmosphere permeated by divinity the time passed, while the angels watched over me by night and Giulia’s witchcraft by day.” He was describing his perception of Basilicata’s mystical nuances and his total reliance upon the local Aliano witch, Giulia Venere, who acted as his housekeeper and general protectress from the daily vicissitudes of his life as a confinato (prisoner), where he floated in a metaphysical soup of unexplainable sensations and strangeness.

  MY OWN STRANGENESS began half an hour or so later, when dusk was merging into night and the last amber glows of sunset had flickered away over the far western ridges. It certainly wasn’t Carlo Levi’s Giulia who watched over me on that particular night, but it was definitely a woman, “a woman of the fields,” or what the northerners often referred to disparagingly as a mezzadra (sharecropper peasant). Not that peasants (locally referred to as cafoni or braccianti), in the ancient feudal meaning of the term, exist there anymore. And yet in some ways, for the older, now landowning contadini (farmers), things hadn’t changed all that much in terms of the rhythms and rigor of their lives. On my mountain journey that day I’d seen them in those little rackety furgoncini (small vans), on tractors, in tiny three-wheel Ape trucklets, occasionally on motorini or perched atop donkeys invariably overburdened with twin wicker panniers full of field tools or huge bundles of wood.

  Maybe I dozed off for a few minutes (there wasn’t much else I could think of to do), but I awoke with a jolt to find myself staring into one of the most furro
wed faces I’d ever seen, in a region renown for the furrowed countenances of its overworked terroni. It appeared to be an old woman. Well, I thought it must be a woman because it was wearing large gold earrings and a gold necklace, sort of gypsy style, and the hand tapping on the window had a remarkable number of rings on it.

  “Buona sera,” I said sleepily and lowered the window.

  The woman nodded and smiled a huge, toothless smile. A large wart on her chin, sprouting thick black hairs, wobbled. Her muddy, purple head scarf wafted in a faint breeze, and she began talking at such a furious pace that I couldn’t discern a single word. Doubtless one of the many regional dialects in these parts, I thought, as I watched almost hypnotically as froth and bubbles collected at both corners of her mouth. I explained that I was not Italian, and once I’d pried myself out of the DoDo, I indicated that the engine wouldn’t start. I thought I should add that bit in case she was not familiar with all the complexities of today’s internal-combustion engines. Admittedly a rather sexist assumption on my part but…

  She kept on talking, chuckling, and chattering, and then opened the hood and began rubbing her hands over bits and pieces—the distributor, the air manifold, the radiator cap—as if seeing an engine for the very first time. I tried to do a body-language charade indicating that I needed another car to tow me to a garage somewhere, but she was still chuckling, touching, and rubbing things. Then she stopped and indicated that I should lower the hood. I started to explain that I didn’t think that that was the appropriate thing to do under the circumstances, but she’d have none of it. Lower the hood, her hands indicated, and start the engine.

  Oh, this is a treat, I thought. But she seemed pretty adamant, and I had no wish to offend her, so I did as she instructed. I lowered the hood, got back inside the car, turned the ignition switch, and…Voila! The engine started! A glorious throaty roar of new life and energy. All the little dials were flickering as they should be, the radio was playing, the engine responding beautifully as I pumped the accelerator. Wonderful. How the heck did she do that? Was it a loose wire on one of the battery terminals? Is that what all the touchy-feely stuff had been about? Yet I didn’t remember seeing her hands anywhere near the battery. Anyway she’d done the trick, so perhaps it was time for thanks and maybe a gift of a few euros, if she wouldn’t be too insulted.

  Except, when I got out of the car, having assured myself that the engine was humming along nicely, there was no one around. Nothing. And no sign that anyone had even been there. Just that chill breeze that frilled out from the raggedy forest by the roadside.

  Where had the old woman vanished to? She’d been there, as large as life. (Well, not quite large: She had had the traditional diminutive, stumpy figure of older Basilicatans.) But then she was not there. Maybe she’s gone into the trees for something, I thought. I peered into the forest, but it was all very dark and tangled. I called out, “Scusi, Signora…dov’è Lei?” But there was no response. Nothing but a bird chirp or two and that cold night breeze.

  HALF AN HOUR OR SO later that night I finally arrived in Castelmezzano. It was too dark to see much except a dimly lit street and, thankfully, a charming little pensione with a flickering restaurant sign. When I’d settled myself inside, I explained to the owner my odd little experience up in the mountains.

  There was a long pause and then a sigh. I got the distinct impression that he was not keen on “the local mysteries,” as he called them, so at least I thought he’d eliminate any mysteriousness in this particular occurrence. But he didn’t. In a rather tired voice he explained that some people just had “the touch.” They could put things right, heal things. Usually people, but he’d also heard that it could happen with inanimate things. “Like with your car, I suppose, too.”

  “So, that’s what you think maybe she had? The touch? She brought the DoDo back to life just by touching the engine!?”

  “Who knows?” the pensione owner said, obviously wanting the conversation to end. “Things happen around here that are not easy to explain. In places like this you just don’t know.”

  “Don’t know what?”

  “Precisely,” he said.

  Somewhat dissatisfied with such a nebulous response, I told the story as straightforwardly as I could to the smiling locals gathered around the restaurant bar, with none of the Italian gesticulationtheatrics used normally by locals.

  The climax of the car’s starting and the woman’s vanishing was not greeted with the “wows!” and “amazings!” I had anticipated. In fact, there was just a series of heads nodding sagely and seriously.

  “Why are you all nodding?” I asked.

  After more silence, one of the men said, “Yes, I know of things like this.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Well, this…healing of things…” he mumbled ambiguously.

  “Yes, of course,” I said. “Healing of coughs and headaches and things with potions and philters and tisanes. That still goes on in many places, I suppose. And the power of mystical suggestion—that’s a very potent cure sometimes, too. Or even death caused by a curse…. But healing car engines!?”

  CASTELMEZZANO

  There was more silence, until another man gave an elaborate “it happens” shrug and left me just as frustrated as the pensione owner had.

  “So, none of you is surprised at all?” I asked.

  More communal shrugs. A whole bar full of shrugs.

  So, I left it. Some things in these wild hills and canyons, I guess, are, as both Levi and Douglas suggested, way beyond rational explanation.

  But, as an interesting postscript, I should mention that this bizarre “laying-on of hands” episode provided me with a car that never failed me again.

  Of course, I still prefer to think that the old woman just spotted a loose battery wire and fixed it.

  Strangeness evolved into utter fantasy the following morning.

  I rose from my bed, gave thanks once again to the old woman with the “magic touch,” shuffled across the cool, tiled floor of my room, and flung open the shutters onto a scene out of some exotic fairy tale.

  I had been looking for this place all my wandering life. Somewhere, sometime, in dreams, I had been there. I had entered a deep, wild country full of shadowed valleys and gorges whose depth could barely be gauged. I had climbed laboriously up ragged, rock-strewn mountainsides so precipitous that looking down was tantamount to vertigo-suicide. I had been told that way up among strange, jagged peaks with great fangs of twisted strata hundreds of feet high I would find a village so melded with the rock and built of the rock and bent and buckled like the rock that I wouldn’t know it was there until I was in it. But it would be there. Waiting…

  And, there it was at last, in a region of soaring white and dramatically eroded peaks, their spires and knife-like profiles slicing the clouds into long transluscent ribbons; a region they called the Lucanian Dolomites. Not as extensive as the Alpine Dolomites of northern Italy, but equally dramatic as they rose abruptly, unexpectedly, out of ancient rounded ranges. Houses, interlocked like Lego blocks, appeared nestled against and in the rock, almost like off-spring in a kangaroo’s pouch. They looked so small and vulnerable in this fantasy landscape, and yet they were tough buildings with thick, bulging stone walls and small windows to resist the wind and the cold that certainly froze the place solid in deep winters. A place that was one of the highest communities in Basilicata, set on an impressive three-thousand-two-hundred-foot ridge. Roofs were of solid stone. Where pantiles were used instead of stone, huge rocks were placed along the eaves to hold them down when the gales came shrieking from the canyons that soared up from the huge gorge of the Caperrino River far below.

  There were clusters of houses crammed in under the rocks along a narrow ledge that dropped off into a hazy space only the buzzards would call home. The main street—if it can be called a street—was more like a medieval alley, sinewing across the turbulent contours. I walked down this ever-narrowing passage, under the arched fangs
of rock. There was a sudden right-angle bend, and then another, each offering new vistas of peaks and canyons and clusters of buildings clinging like limpets to vertical, bare precipices. This is the kind of place, I thought, that only a madman could have fashioned. A marvelous madman though. A madman who could cram one of the most tightly packed communities I’d ever seen, laced with alleys and houses perched on houses perched on houses, into this bizarre wonderworld of topography that surrealists, even the irrepressible Dali, could never have hoped to conceive.

  But there were more surprises to come.

  “Have you seen Pietrapertosa yet?” the pensione owner asked me after breakfast, happy, I imagined, that I had put aside my search for explanations of the region’s strange mysteries and was now fully appreciative of his unique village.

  “I’ve heard of it,” I admitted.

  “Well, you should. Castelmezzano here is very beautiful, but Pietrapertosa…”

  FOLLOWING HIS DIRECTIONS, I wound my way out of Castelmezzano, after exhausting my supply of color film on its exotic charms, and began a long, tortuous ascent higher into the Lucanian Dolomites.

  He was right. Pietrapertosa, set even more dramatically among the jagged peaks at around four thousand five hundred feet, boasts a record as the highest community in Basilicata. Its name translates as “perforated stone,” and indeed the white fangs and peaks there, some towering hundreds of feet over the clustered village, were liberally pockmarked with hollows and holes, bared and smoothed by millions of years of erosion and harsh climatic fury.

  PIETRAPERTOSA

  Like Castelmezzano, the village offered a perfect defensible refuge in the tenth century for invading Saracens, who constructed a fort to guard the gorges, so hidden among the pinnacles of rock that it was hard to spot at first. Even after climbing up through the steep warrenlike alleys of the Saracen’s Rabatana quarter, I had to reach the top of the ridge before appreciating what a remarkably impenetrable bastion they had created for themselves more than a thousand years ago.