Seasons in Basilicata (28 page)

 

I
REALLY SHOULDN'T
have rushed my lunch. While Giuliano had been right about the colorful array of farmers and
pas
tori
(shepherds) gathered at the roadside near a patch of open ground (occupied entirely by one extremely morose mule), I saw nothing in the way of marketing. Each of the sixty or so participants seemed perfectly happy to be there, chatting, swapping gesticulative gossip, and telling their tall
passatella
(time-passing tales—an age-old “roasting” game of eloquently insulting your friends but making it sound like a series of compliments), their deeply tanned, wrinkle-etched faces smiling and laughing. But nothing else was happening. I tried to discover if I was too early or too late for the show, but all I got in the way of an answer were cheerful shrugs and those ubiquitous “who knows?” gestures. So I waited…and waited. But beyond a sudden roar of mutual laughter when a young man tried to mount the mule and was quickly tossed off by the suddenly energized and obviously highly indignant creature, nothing whatsoever occurred. No pigs or horses or oxen were lugged up or down the hill for auction on the grassy patch. I began to suspect it was just all another excuse for more friendly banter and that Italian daily essential: pressing the flesh.

I gave up and returned to the town to inquire about the funeral. Once again I was met with shrugs and gestures of helpless uncertainty, until one elderly woman told me, “That's tomorrow. How can you have a funeral when there's a market on? They have to walk all the way down from the church.” She pointed up at the fortresslike bulk of the Church of San Giuliano, perched atop the highest point in town. “And then up this street here where the market is, and up, up, up to the cemetery on top of that hill over there.” She pointed to the second high point of the village, at its opposite end, up by the soccer field. Then she laughed: “Who told you it was today?” I decided not to mention Giuliano's name. “Well, whoever it was must be a little crazy, eh?”

I nodded in silent agreement. He can be, I thought, but his heart's in the right place.

“So, tomorrow? The funeral?”

She nodded sadly.
“Si.
A good man, too. And not so old. Only eighty-seven.”

“What time do you think?”

“Oh, around five o'clock, I suppose. Maybe.”

Always that ‘maybe.'

So, I was at the cemetery around five o'clock the next day, having driven the fifty-minute serpentine route once again along the endlessly hairpinning roads from Aliano. But I was obviously too early. I suppose I could have gone to the church and joined in the mile-long hike down the hill and then up again, but I decided to explore the graveyard instead.

It was not my first such venture. In fact, since my arrival in Italy, I'd wandered around a dozen or more cemeteries, and I was impressed by their stately similarities. Accettura's possessed a
compact, high-walled village-like enclave on a hilltop with fine views for “
i cari morticelli
” (“the dear little dead people”) and their families, who often made weekly pilgrimages to talk (I mean really
talk
) to their departed.

P
ASTORI
SHEPHERD

“Ah, how we Italians love our cemeteries,” Massimo had once told me. “You should see these places on
I Morti
—the Day of the Dead. More crowded than a football stadium. And flowers everywhere. Millions of chrysanthemums. A great tradition.”

The “village” element was most evident in the cemetery in the elaborate, houselike tombs, with their steeply pitched roofs, ornate wrought-iron doors, tier after tier of coffins inside encased by elegant, engraved marble slabs, a small altar with a crucifix, flowers (plastic or otherwise), and lots of little flickering electric lights to suggest eternal concern and prayers for the peace of the departed. On either side of the narrow central space, a chair or two might be set up in case family members wanted to carry on an extended conversation with their beloved's mortal remains.

And occasionally—as in Accettura—some of these family vaults, usually with the family name proudly displayed on the pediment above the door lintel—had other vaults, far older and mustier, below the marble or ornate tile floors of the main “house of tiered tombs.” I peered through the old rusted doors of one untended, disheveled vault, whose floor had been pulled up to reveal a stone staircase descending into the shadowy depths of the earth. There I could just make out another set of at least eight tiered tombs, barely visible in the gloomy maw. I saw a date chiseled in stone: 1775. A shiver skittered down my backbone to my toes. Two of the tombs had been broken into. I couldn't see what lay inside; I had no desire to. The illusion of those secure, untrammeled resting places—beautifully serene with their white-marble interiors and boldly invincible with their sturdy stone-and-stucco construction—suddenly disappeared…and I saw them for what they really were: piles of coffins and rotting corpses housed in fancy sheds on which fortunes had been spent, often by families unable to afford much in the way of a home for themselves. And why?
Well, I imagined to gloss over the hard reality of death and create a make-believe world steeped in righteous religiosity and the sanctimony of sweet sorrow.

At least the far more modest earthen graves—free plots for the poor—that filled the central part of the Accettura cemetery, were shaded by ancient, black-and-green cypress trees, and thus acknowledged the more basic dust-to-dust reality of death.

But the graves I found hardest to stomach were the rows and rows of burial-box
loculi
(niches—five-by-five feet openings and a good seven feet deep) racked up in square honeycomb-like structures, often twenty or more feet high, like the drawers one used to see in pharmacists' shops (and still evident in Chinese herbalists). One of the nicknames for these odd structures, seen throughout Italy and indeed much of Europe, was
fornetti
or “little ovens.” (Having lived in Japan for a while, I spotted a remarkable resemblance to those only-in-Japan “sleeping capsules” in that country's unique, space-age hotels.) The idea was simple. You slid in the coffin, sealed up the opening tightly, and, on the front, put a couple of those flickering electric lights and an engraved panel, usually with a porcelain-etched photograph of the occupant—often an unflattering portrait, the only photograph available often being the dour, don't-smile portrait taken for the obligatory Italian identity card. The wealthier residents invariably resided in the bottom tiers, easily accessible to loyal family members. The tiers higher up could be reached only by rickety ladders, and so were invariably occupied by less affluent tenants.

Usually the
loculi
were rather quiet, somber places despite, or maybe because of, all those tiers of white marble and robotic flickering bulbs. But not today. At least not for one
loculo
perched high up near the top of one of the structures.

I was just about to move on to explore more of the elegant family tombs when a black-clad widow, thin to the point of emaciation, limped up, grabbed a ladder lying on the ground, hoisted it in the air, and rested it against a burial slot four tiers up at the top of the
loculi
structure. She proceeded to climb its creaking rungs with a
sense of urgency and purpose quite contrary to her diminutive, seemingly frail frame. And then, with barely time for a nice “How are you in there?” to the occupant, she started hammering away on the
loculo
with a gnarled fist and shouting at the marble plaque (complete with finely chiseled inscription, porcelain photograph, and flickering lights) as if trying to gain immediate access.

This is perhaps something I don't need to watch, I thought, and was just about to make my escape when an elderly couple, elegantly dressed and walking arm in arm, emerged from behind a nearby tomb.

They heard all the noise, saw the flailing arms of the black widow, and smiled benignly.

I was a little concerned for her, particularly as I could now hear gulpy sobs echoing against the marble wall in between her more strident orations.

“
Scusi,
” I said to the elderly couple. “Do you think that lady is okay?”

Their smiles remained fixed and benign. “Oh, no, no, she's fine,” they tried to reassure me. “She always comes here. For over ten years, I think.”

“But why all the tears? She seems very upset.”

“Of course, I think maybe she is. This is the tomb of her husband, and unfortunately he left most of his money to…how you say…his…other lady. Not to her.”

“Oh.”

“Yes. It's sad, isn't it?” They nodded sympathetically, still smiling.

“But all that shouting? She must have been very angry.”

“Oh yes, I'm sure. But also, he was always a little deaf.” the man said.

I could think of no response, polite or otherwise. They both smiled at me again, with a polite
buon giorno,
and moved on, blissfully unaware of the irony of their remark.

So I moved on too and continued mooching around this typically neat, manicured walled cemetery, admiring the wonderful roll-off-the-tongue names of the local families—Bartilucci, Cherubino,
Lobosco, Barberito, Sansone, Belamonte, Mastronadi, Montemurro—when from way outside the tree-shaded sanctuary came the sound of a band. A brass band. The funeral! I'd almost forgotten.

I scampered around the towering tomb houses and out of the main gate to see the first part of the funeral procession approaching the top of the long, long hill out of Accettura. First came a large wagon, so smothered in wreaths and piles of bouquets that I could hardly make out its shape. Then came the hearse—a huge, old, black Mercedes polished to a brand-new sparkling shine—followed by a fifteen-piece uniformed brass band led by half a dozen lovely young girls playing piccolos and clarinets. They were reinforced by tall young men with trumpets and horns, backed up by three burly giants “serpentined”—actually they looked as if they were being strangled—by enormous, snakelike euphonia with great, gleaming, three-foot-in-diameter horns emitting a bellowing brass rhythm line, along with a single drummer, almost invisible behind his huge, resounding instrument.

It was a most impressive display, and doubtless an occasion for great pride among the family, relatives, and friends—scores of them—who followed the hearse to the cemetery entrance, basking in the societal “face,” the
bella figura,
that such an elaborate procession must be giving them.

But at that point everything came to a rather confused halt. The coffin was lifted out and carried by the funeral directors through the gate and into a small side chapel. The band immediately stopped playing and, without a glance at the coffin or the mourners, put down their instruments, stripped off their elegant blue, brass-buttoned jackets, and began waving them about like cooling fans while lighting up cigarettes and joking among themselves. After all, it had been a long, steep, and doubtless sweaty slog up the hill, and what with their death marches and dirges, they'd had little chance to breathe normally for the last hour or so.

A few key family members walked behind the coffin to the chapel. The rest of the mourners (I counted over sixty) either milled around by the gate or stood in clusters chattering, apparently uncer
tain of the next steps in the funeral protocol. But unperturbed—knowing things would sort themselves out, in the Italian way.

They stood and stood. The chapel door was closed, and nothing much seemed to be happening. So, I thought I'd follow them later and went off again to continue exploring the extravagant family tombs.

When I returned, after maybe fifteen minutes, there was no one around except a cemetery maintenance man.

“
Per favore, Signore. Dove sono…?
” I asked with the appropriate Italian gestures for “Where the heck has everybody gone?”

He grunted and pointed to the top end of the cemetery. While I was following his directions, who should pass me, limping angrily toward the cemetery gate, but the black-clad widow of the errant (and deaf) husband. I offered a quiet “
Buon giorno,
” but she was talking to herself so intensely and furiously that I don't think she even noticed me.

Eventually I found the funeral party, but not as I had expected to find them—standing with heads bowed as the priest gave his homily about dust and ashes and hope for the hereafter. Instead, they were more like a group of bystanders at an accident scene, chatting together, laughing softly, and all trying to peer into the shadowy maw of the family vault. I couldn't see what was going on inside, but I could certainly hear sounds, the oddest sounds: of hammers and trowels scraping on marble, and drills, and the gruff and growly comments of men—workmen, I assumed—doing something very messy and laborious.

Of course. They were sealing up the deceased in one of the coffin niches. But the sounds were anything but reverential and muted. I'm sure I heard epithets of a most vulgar kind as the men struggled to slide in and cement over the thick and very hefty seven-foot-long solid-marble inscription plaque. Oddly, no one seemed to mind the unholy racket. In fact a couple of the mourners seemed to be shouting out suggestions to the workmen, which were greeted with more grunts and epithets. And I was thinking, this doesn't feel like a funeral at all, but more like a crowd watching, as they invariably do,
the arduous and always fascinating antics of laborers at a construction site.