Seasons in Basilicata Read online

  “So, what do you think?” Pietro asked.

  “Sounds like they’re pretty proud and want to improve the old town.”

  “Improve! That’s not improve! They should pull all down! Destroy! This is terrible history of town. I am very ashamed.”

  “Ashamed?” A voice of protest emerged from a nearby coterie of black-coated elderly gentlemen. The piazza was full of them: all usually neatly dressed and, even during their lively discussions, maintaining their flimsy veneers of carefully nurtured social accretions and gentile behavior. The whole street was a daylong passeggiata for such men, culminating in the full-blast evening promenading that was so thick with static groups and slow, oozing-lava flows of stocky, swarthy Materans that it was almost impossible to negotiate a way through them.

  Apparently never one for avoiding a good argument, Pietro swung around in true alpha-male fashion to face his diminutive, elderly challenger, who stood eyeball to Pietro’s chest, his face blotched red in protest.

  “Yes, I am ashamed!” Pietro shouted, swinging his arms operatically to emphasize his dramatic cri de coeur. “To think that people are now coming from all over the world to look at this terrible way that we lived. In caves! One tiny wet room for the whole family, plus chickens and goats and pigs and whatever!”

  “Stupid!” his stocky challenger rejoined. (There go those fragile veneers of mutual respect, I thought.) “The house, as you call it, was just bedroom. That’s all. The street was the house. Everything was done in the street: cooking, eating, looking after the children. Everything.”

  “That does not change anything. You are missing—”

  “Yes, I agree.” Another elderly gentleman decided to join the fray, and notched up the noise level a little more. Other groups paused to listen. People began edging closer. Nothing like a grand rhetorical battle to get the Italian blood flowing and the Mezzogiorno sensibilities stimulated.

  “Nonsense!” said another, a rather blimpish bluffeur, quivering with Materano pride. “The Sassi have made Matera famous. Before this, who had ever heard of our city? Not even in Italy.”

  “That’s very true,” a fourth entrant to the huddle cried out.

  “But what you are forgetting is…” rejoined Pietro, trying to reclaim his position as prime spokesman in this rapidly expanding crowd.

  Within a few minutes there must have been thirty or so black-coated Materans crammed into the little belvedere Sassi-viewing area, and I was being pushed closer and closer to the railing and a vertical tumble of fifty or so feet to the pantile rooftops of the older cave houses below. One surge from this vociferous bunch, and I’d be over the edge.

  “What you forget,” continued Pietro, who towered above his jostling audience, straining his neck and head even higher, like a goose in a chicken coop. “What you forget…” Still not fully gaining their attention (I could see him thinking of some strikingly strident phrase that would clinch his self-appointed role as prime speaker; it finally came to him), he said, “We are all still peasants!”

  Silence descended like a thick shroud. The men stopped in midgesticulation, and all eyes turned again on Pietro. “Yes,” he said, knowing he had recaptured their attention and maybe scratched off a cultural scab or two. “Yes, peasants! We are not much different now from then: Maybe we live in a large cave in the sky in one of those concrete public housing apartments. Maybe a little hot water and a tiny pension. But in our hearts, in our heads, in our spirits are we not still peasants compared with the people in Rome and in Madrid? Because that is how they still see us! Southern Mezzogiorno peasants! Terroni!”

  Pietro’s eyes gleamed behind his rimless glasses. His fisted hands moved with Lenin-like determination and emphasis. He reminded me of one of Carlo Levi’s characters in his huge and famous painting in the nearby Carlo Levi Center. Unfortunately I had seen the work only in reproduction (the center being invariably ‘closed for renovations’), but it showed Levi’s antifascist friends in full rhetorical swing, preaching their “power to the people” gospel, which, even today, so infuriates and unnerves the politicians of the North.

  My position against the railing was now even more tenuous. The crowd was still increasing, jostling, shouting, decrying Pietro’s words as blasphemous or supporting them with raised fists and the fire of revolution in their eyes. The quiet, methodical, almost somnolent pace of the passeggiata was gone now. Pietro had become the focal point of a vehemence that seemed to lie just under the surface of this normally staid and steady populace.

  But sheer survival was my primary focus now. The crush against the railing was painful and precarious. So, with a flurry of “Mi scusi,” “permesso,” and “attenzione,” I elbowed and kneed my way through the throng to the safety of the main piazza.

  Pietro was still in full swing. I discovered that my newfound friend had much gusto and crowd-galvanizing eloquence in him. I watched him a while longer, but the clamor was such that I couldn’t understand much of what was being said. Briefly catching his eye as he ranted on, I mouthed, “Bar” and pointed to our previous meeting place across the piazza. And then—with a dual focus that convinced me that he truly was a politician in the making—Pietro gave me a wink and nod of agreement while still holding forth in full appassionato flair, flailing his arms like a Mussolini wannabe and apparently loving every crazy second of it.

  A quarter of an hour later he finally joined me, his eyes still sparkling with passion and the possibility of new futures for a side of himself that even he seemed surprised by.

  “Congratulations, my friend! That was one hell of a show,” I gushed.

  He grinned in agreement but also dismissed my compliments with a big Italian shrug and a modest “prego, prego.”

  But then, quite touchingly, he descended from his clouds of eloquence and brief glory to a more mundane conversational style, devoid of all florid rhetoric, and smiled at me. “Grazie. Mille grazie, David. Now, what were we talking about before?”

  I realized once again what a host of characters lurked inside each individual Italian, and how comfortably and easily they seemed to allow all these different, and contrasting, facets of themselves to make brief, and often very memorable, appearances on the stages and in the performances of their daily lives.

  Ode to Simplicity and Love

  Which leads me to another type of performance, and another insight into the Italian psyche, experienced that same day. If I could craft this little memorable mini-event in poetry, I’d be very happy. But, alas, my poetic skills got stuck at about the same level as my high school piano lessons, barely above scale-playing ability. Possibly unfairly I blame all this on two teachers. The English literature fellow somehow managed to suck out all the marrow of poetic creation in me and restrict my attempts at composition almost entirely to rhyming pentameters. Any attempt at free-form verse was greeted with ridicule and, on more than one occasion, a hundred punitive thou-shalt-not-type lines to be written out while others enjoyed games of rugby or cricket beyond the classroom windows. As for the piano teacher, the less said the better. She was an unfortunate, dispirited spinster who seemed to hate all young boys, all music, the piano, and anything else associated with the subject. I sensed no love in either teacher for what they supposedly taught, so my interest in both poetry and the piano quickly shriveled too.

  All of which has nothing directly to do with the little story I’m about to recount (although there’s certainly a moral floating about somewhere—something to do with intensely loving whatever you do). The incident took place at a restaurant I’d just discovered in Matera. A tiny shoebox of a place carved, like so much of the old city, out of the soft golden tufa bedrock and hidden down a couple of flights of stairs off the main piazza. It had half a dozen tables, a large fireplace, rough walls of native rock, and two windows with spectacular vistas across the great bowl of the ancient Sassi city.

  The maître d’ of this modest establishment was the chef’s son, and he had the gift of making the simplest of homemade pa
sta dishes sound so entrancing it was impossible to select one from among them. So I left it to him and his father to serve me whatever they considered to be the best dishes of the day.

  On this particular night, after a deliciously rich and tender orecchiette (“little ears” pasta) with a ragu sauce of ground pork and beef, the chef’s son presented me with one of Italy’s classic dishes: a fritto misto of deep-fried prawns, small pieces of fish, and calamari. Now, I’ve enjoyed such a dish many times before, often with a far more varied selection of seafood and with batters ranging from a delicate tempura to bold English ale fish-and-chips-style to American onion-ring crispness. But the fritto misto that night was easily the best. As soon as I bit into the first calamari slice through a crisp golden skin and into a briny, succulent softness, I knew I’d found genius. Calamari are notorious for rapidly developing a tasteless and rubberized quality that makes eating and swallowing them a most unpleasant chore. But the chef here was obviously a master of the art of maintaining their subtle sea and seafood flavor, soft texture, and ultra-crisp exterior.

  After dinner I asked if I could thank the chef and ask him for the recipe for his rendition of the fritto. His son led me into a kitchen barely bigger than a bathroom and introduced me to his father. When I asked him for the secret of his perfect fritto misto, he laughed and put all the fancy chefs to shame with a single word, “Simplicity!”

  “Three things only,” he said. “I buy the freshest baby calamari I can get. I slice them and let them sit in a mix of sea salt, water, and fresh lemon juice. Then I dry them and toss them in durum flour and fry when the oil is just beginning to smoke. And that’s all.”

  “No eggs in the batter?” I asked. “No salt, pepper, or spices?”

  He leaned forward, gripped my arms, and said, “Simplicity. Is love for the thing you cook, not how clever you cook. Simplicity is love! And love makes your cooking sing!” (All of which sounds so much better in Italian.)

  Meeting the Professor

  On the third day I decided it was time to get serious and learn more about the city and Carlo Levi’s links with it. I was frustrated at constantly finding Matera’s Carlo Levi Center locked up and guarded by officious uniformed characters who seemed to take great delight in telling people to buzz off. So, I decided to seek out the director of the place and tell him what I thought of his off-limits center and his guards. Instead I found myself in a delightful phone conversation with a gracious gentleman, Professor Nicolà Strammiello, who suggested we meet so he could show me around the institution he had founded more than twenty-three years ago.

  I saw him approaching long before he spotted me. I couldn’t miss him, really. He had a distinct don’s way of walking, measured and flowing, with his long, elegant camel’s-hair coat wafting cloak-like around his calves. He looked distinguished, appropriately professorial, and yet rather jaunty, with his tall, lean frame, trilby hat set at a rakish angle, and bright scarlet tartan-pattern scarf tied like an ascot around his long, ramrod-straight neck.

  The Professor moved closer to my bench by the libreria (book-store) but he still hadn’t seen me. His eyes seemed to move hazily from his meticulously shined shoes to somewhere high above the pantiled rooftops of the corso. He looked deep in thought—presumably deep professorial thought—and seemed oblivious to the passing scene. Not that there was much scene passing at the time, but he was oblivious to it anyway.

  And, as I was about to rise and introduce myself, I experienced a sudden thwack of intense déjà vu.

  “Look, look!” something inside me cried out in joy and surprise. “This isn’t the Professor at all but someone you used to love more than any other person you were aware of, perhaps even more than your own parents.” It was someone I had also lost—abruptly, cruelly—to a sudden heart attack when he was in his late seventies and I was ten. I’d wept then as I’d never wept before. He had been my special friend, my only real grown-up friend, and I felt it was all so unfair. He was the kindest, gentlest man I’d ever known. We used to talk together, like equals, as we sat eating the delicious tomatoes he grew in his hothouse at the bottom of his meticulously preened garden in Yorkshire.

  The Professor was my grandfather! George Herbert Marchant. A serious businessman, director of his own modest copper and bronze foundry (an enterprise that later failed), proud owner of a magnificent Alvis limousine (“next best to a Bentley,” he used to insist, “but less showy”), and lover of the good life—good food, good music, and good conversations (even those held with his ever-curious and rather rambunctious grandson). My parents were always begging him to “please stop encouraging the child” when he and I wandered off together to explore the nooks and crannies of his garden or sat side by side, looking at National Geographic magazines, his favorite “good read” and, hence, mine at the time. And together we dreamed of faraway places.

  “You’re putting far too many ideas into David’s impressionable little head,” my mother would reprimand him. “He now says he wants to spend his life traveling all over the world!” (Ironic, eh?) And my grandfather, who was actually a rather quiet, shy man of gracious manners who rarely raised his soft voice above a melodious, meditative whisper, would smile mischievously, accept the reprimand with a good-natured shrug, and ask, “So, what’s for dinner?” or “Have you seen my new roses?” or “Is the wine open yet?”

  The image of my grandfather grew stronger as I walked up to the Professor and reached out to shake his hand. That long, gentle face, a little jowly and striated with tiny veins, the slightly purple nose, that mischievous half-smile, those eyes—soft hazel with the faintest haze of blue around the pupils—and then his hand. It was too much. I was trying to express my pleasure at meeting this stranger, and yet I felt as if I were shaking hands with my grandfather, feeling the same silky smoothness of his tissue-thin skin and seeing the delicate veins of his hands showing quite clearly through the almost translucent flesh, his manicured nails, with their mauve-colored auras. And wanting to hug him!

  I was so utterly gobsmacked by these bizarre sensations—deep affection, anger at his having left me so abruptly, near tears of relief at seeing him again, joy at that conspiratorial smile of his that seemed to say, “just between us, isn’t this a wonderful, zany, beautiful world we live in?” Best of all was that gentle face, with its almost Buddha-like aspect of calm contentment and pleasure at seeing me again after such a long, long time.

  Fortunately, I was able to get through the “so very pleased you could spare the time” prelude without hugs or tears or laughter or anything else that might have revealed to this man the odd mix of emotions I was feeling.

  The Professor responded just as my grandfather would have done, with a beatific smile, warm, shining eyes, a gracious nod of acknowledgment, and a slow, soft homily about the pleasure being all his and please excuse his English and how nice it was to be outside on such a splendid day of warm sunshine and blue sky.

  I had to avert my eyes. The sensations were still too strange and eerie. This is not Grandpa, stupid! I told myself, so start thinking and talking about something else before you make a complete idiot of yourself and become a real scemo (one of little intelligence) in the middle of Matera’s main street.

  MATERA MONTAGE

  I suggested we stroll to an adjoining terrace overlooking the southerly of the two amphitheater-like Sassi districts and began asking him about the history and ongoing restoration of this unique masterpiece of organic “architecture without architects.”

  And that was the right thing to do, because it got my mind off this beguiling reincarnation and encouraged the Professor to expound on the city and its famous Sassi at length, eliminating most of the preconceptions I’d gleaned from careful (or so I thought) research.

  No, he told me, in measured, eloquent English, the original cave dwellings on the opposite face of the vast gorge that formed an abrupt, dramatic boundary to the city were not Neolithic, as many claimed, but actually Paleolithic, dating from 10,000 B.C. Matera, h
e emphasized, is one of the oldest cities in Europe. And no, most of the buildings in the two adjoining bowl-like Sassi districts on our side of the gorge were not, in fact, caves, as misleading guidebooks claimed, but freestanding structures built close to, but rarely into, the rock face.

  And yes, it was true that some of the present houses were caves with façades added on, but most of the caves had actually been used originally as shelters for religious hermits and as churches, and later as storage areas—cantine—for livestock, wines, and preserved vegetables and meats. And no, it was not commonplace in Carlo Levi’s day for homes to be occupied by both people and livestock. That practice had always been vastly overexaggerated by those wishing to denigrate the Mezzogiorno and deride the way of life of its poorer terroni inhabitants.

  “Because, you see, you must understand,” he said, with full professorial emphasis on the must, “Matera has always been a place of great wealth. Just look at our shops, our churches, our museums today. We are not a poor city at all. The whole of that vast empty plateau you see beyond the gorge—we call it le Murge—is one of the largest wheat-growing areas in Italy today. And we have always, in history, been an important place for mills and for trading; even the Greeks and Romans traded together here. The Greeks, as I’m sure you already know, founded a number of important cities along the coasts of Basilicata and Calabria. This was part of Magna Graecia, and today we still have some ruins left at Croton, Sybari—home of those very indulgent Sybarites—Locri, Taranto, Metaponto, and others. The best ruins are at Metaponto—if you can find them! A beautiful temple—you must see. Virgil, Ovid, Pindar the poet, and Horace: they all loved the landscape of the South. And Pythagoras. His school of philosophy was founded in Croton in 531 B.C. And even when the Normans occupied the city in the eleventh century they granted it very special privileges and made it an even more wealthy place.”