Seasons in Basilicata (33 page)

It was a frustrating climb, too. Alleys ended without warning in sudden shadowy culs-du-sac; stairways had collapsed entirely in places so I had to find other alleys. And it was getting darker and colder. I realized I was becoming increasingly lost in a labyrinth of twisting, sinewy streets, some barely more than a body's length in width and so contorted that I couldn't see any landmarks—the church or the castle tower or anything else I could recognize.

And then came the first few drops of rain.

This was not working out at all the way I had planned. All I had on was a cotton shirt, jeans, and sandals, and I had no desire to be drenched to the bone in one of Basilicata's notoriously fickle and furious rainstorms.

The hell with it, I thought. I'm getting nowhere except lost, so why don't I just go back the way I've come and try again another day? After all, it's not a long drive from Aliano.

And what should come next, of course, was indeed one of Basilicata's notoriously fickle and furious rainstorms accompanied by seething winds, which seemingly sprang out of nowhere and were suddenly howling around me, tearing up the alleys and across the half-collapsed rooftops like shrieking banshees.

One moment, a few warm drops; the next, a deluge.

I began to hurry back down the increasingly slippery marble steps, but I'd forgotten the way back and kept running into dead-ends or places where I had to climb higher to find another alley going downhill. And all the time the downpour was growing stronger and louder….

“Find shelter!” I yelled aloud (an occasional odd habit of mine, this talking to myself).

Fortunately, I spotted a half-open door to one of those dreadful one-room houses. I pushed it open, jumped inside, and closed it tightly against the rain, which was now flailing in wet sheetlike deluges up and down the alleys.

The thick door jerked and rattled against the power of the storm, but I managed to keep it almost closed. “Geez!” I shouted aloud again. “This is ridiculous!”

I'm not exactly sure of the next sequence of events. It all happened so quickly. One moment I was inside, out of the rain, and the next I was…outside again, petrified! Something behind me in the blackness of that pitch-black house had been moving. There was a strange shuffling on the floor, then a sort of scratching sound, like claws on hard stone. Almost leaping out of my sodden clothing, I flung the door open, hurled myself back out into the pounding rain, and ran down steps and more steps, oblivious to my skidding and sliding on their lethally slippery cobblestone.

At least I was going downhill, I thought. I turned and saw nothing. Whatever it was in that hovel was not coming after me, so I slowed my pace. Directly ahead and below me I saw the roof of the palazzo. As I grew closer I noticed a small building projecting from its side, and this time there was no door so if anything was lurking inside…

But there was nothing lurking. At least nothing you would call animate. So I flung myself inside, away from the rain, and stood heaving and panting like a hog in heat, which, as it turned out, is rather an appropriate metaphor for what happened next.

It seems that I had inadvertently sought shelter in the family tomb of the palazzo
padroni.
I could have let out another yelp and run like hell once again, but I didn't. I was tired of running and tired of being terrified. So I stood my ground and looked around with the cool gaze of an amateur anthropologist. I allowed myself to be impressed by the majesty of the memorials to past generations of
padronale,
and by the meticulous nature of the carved inscrip
tions, and by those strange porcelain-etched photographs that are used throughout Italy to ensure realistic remembrance of generations past. And I was thinking, what a cozy collective setup they once had here, with the living occupants enjoying the sumptuousness of their lives in that ornately decorated palazzo and their deceased loved ones nestled in dusty peace right next door in this cozy chapel tomb, and…

Then I noticed one particular photograph, larger than all the others and set apart on its own inscribed tablet. And I recognized it, him, immediately. (Now you'll think, this poor fellow's gone a little crazy what with the storm and all that running and the scratching thing in that pitch-black little hovel, and more running—but all I can do is tell you what I saw clearly and unambiguously.)

It was the face of the boar. Not a boar in actuality, of course. It was a man's face—his head, shoulders, collar, tie, and huge, bristly head of hair—but it was also the face of the boar. The same startling eyes and obviously unusually large teeth as displayed in the sinister half-smiling sneer of the boar's mouth. No doubt whatsoever about it.

And if you don't believe me, all I can do is invite you to go see for yourself. But tread cautiously. There are creatures lurking in that malevolent place—shape-shifting boars or otherwise—and the palazzo, along with much of the rest of Craco, is dangerously unsafe. So, once again,
caveat emptor
(which is a phrase I must learn to heed more often in my spontaneous rambles). Another apt phrase, and one I've always rather treasured, is, “The world of the imagination is the only one worth living,” although I guess I should consider discarding that one.

Things Elemental

Our simple life in Aliano occasionally made us introspective and encouraged us to reevaluate our other existences, in New York and Japan.

Someone once asked us: “Why, of all places to live in the South, did you choose a place like Aliano?” Actually, a number of people
asked that question, back in England and the States, when we described the kind of “back to basics” life we were living there. Others who asked it were Italian. For example, my grandfather's doppelganger, Professor Nicolà Strammiello, founder of Matera's Carlo Levi Center. He had looked down his prominent, aristocratic nose with a mischievous glint in his eye, given one of his hasty, devil's horns finger gestures, and said, “And it's where Don Pierino lives, too!” (I never found out the real reason for his odd sentiments toward my favorite priest.)

We usually managed to offer a pretty convincing rationale, putting heavy emphasis on the significance of our living where Carlo Levi had been imprisoned and the importance of feeling, up close and personal, some of the emotions and even terrors he'd experienced in what was, and still is, a very tough, unadorned, unpretty, worn-down kind of place.

But once in a while, after rambles through nearby villages more aesthetically appealing and generously infrastructured—places like Guardia, Accettura, Corletto, Stigliano, San Mauro Forte, and even tiny Cirigliano, perched perkily on its rocky puy, tight, twistily mysterious and artistically appealing—we would ask ourselves, “So, why Aliano?”

And we realized that something about Aliano's utterly unassuming and unselfconscious spirit appealed to both of us in the same way that Giuseppina's house, with its splendid terrace, had lured me in despite the fact that nothing about it, beyond the magnificent vistas, reflected the slightest iota of our own tastes in furnishings or our delight in gadgets, climate-control, diversionary amusements like our video library, a fine sound system, a well-designed and equipped kitchen, and space, lots and lots of good old American domestic space.

Our home in Aliano was cramped, invariably too cold or too hot, and devoid of a TV or a decent stereo system. It possessed an inadequate hot-water system, a kitchen stove with two malfunctioning burners, a non-operative oven, and a bed that creaked and groaned like a dying elephant. The lighting system, consisting of high, cen
trally placed, low-watt bulbs that, until we supplemented them with a few inexpensive market-bought table lamps, produced a form of illumination so depressingly Hopper-like that we named them “suicide sockets.”

And yet, we both loved the place. And if we had to be away for more than a few days, we yearned to be back, happily cursing the stove and the erratic shower and the long, laborious climb up from the street, and the constantly clanging church bells across the piazza, and the barking dogs outside the window, and the toe-numbing chill of the tile floors in the early morning, and the fact that we could never cook Yorkshire puddings or cakes or pies or soufflés in our nonfunctioning oven.

I wondered if I was in some kind of masochistic mode or some bizarre male-menopause interlude or perhaps seeking to return to my Yorkshire childhood, when, from what I can remember of our little home among the coalfields and “muckstack” slagheaps, conditions were not much better than in Aliano.

But then, looking back over our married life, Anne and I reminded ourselves that despite our over-large upstate New York home and our smaller, but delightful rented house in Japan, we'd also spent years living together out of VW campers (we later upgraded to a twenty-foot-long Winnebago motor home), rented places (well over twenty, ranging from the barely tolerable to the outrageously sumptuous), and other homes were loaned occasionally by kind colleagues, who, intrigued but also concerned by our gypsy ways, possibly felt that they should offer some form of “get real” respite for their two erratic world-wandering friends.

“Isn't it time you had a real home of your own?” some would suggest with well-intentioned earnestness. “After all,” one architect friend reminded me, “you were once an urban planner. You appreciate the pleasures of fine design and the joy of sensitively articulated spaces. Surely you can't keep on living in vans?”

I remember trying to explain that we found something deeply satisfying in condensing our lives and our needs into a compact, ingeniously designed traveling box. “You get rid of all the super
fluities,” I'd said. “You only have what you really need. You become…elemental, in practice and in spirit.”

And how valid I realized that off-the-cuff remark was when, years later, we did in fact (somewhat nervously) buy our first home in the United States, and found that in no time at all the place was packed to the rafters with…stuff. Unbelievable amounts of superfluous stuff that we'd never needed before but that now suddenly somehow seemed vital to our daily existence. A sort of Peter Principle of clutter: Stuff tends to fill to the space you have.

But thinking again about Aliano I realized how significant that word
elemental
had become for us. For that's what we found there: a space small enough to ensure that we surrounded ourselves only with things that were truly of value in a village where superfluity, materialism, exhibitionism, and a “he who dies with the most toys, wins” attitude were not, and had never been, options.

Most homes we visited in Aliano were masterpieces of minimalism. A few even consisted, as they had for centuries, of a single tile– or flagstone-floor room—some barely bigger than a twenty-foot-long motor home—with bed, table and straight-backed chairs, a small stove and sink, a fireplace (sometimes), a well-used armchair (rarely more than one), an ancient wardrobe and chest of drawers, maybe a TV, and a tiny screened-off bathroom. The only items of decoration were invariably limited to framed religious icons (with a distinct bias toward the late Padre Pio of Pietrelcina famous for his recurring
stigmata
[wounds] and now a saint), a few family photographs, and a nailed-up calendar usually adorned with kittens. The last item always struck us as rather odd, given that the Alianese were not particularly fond of house pets, possibly because in the old days they had to share their single-room houses with a menagerie of farm animals.

Even where an Aliano home boasted additional bedrooms and maybe a larger bathroom, the same hard-edged, no-frills minimalism persisted. Little attempt was made to soften the spectral gloom of the rooms. Low-wattage bulbs, often of the fluorescent kind, were used, producing that dreary, autopsy-room light. And in some of the farmhouses we visited, the living space often contained a beguiling
mix of basic domestic necessities—piled sacks of animal feed and fertilizer underneath clusters of homemade salami, prosciutto, and pancetta dangling from cobwebby rafters, alongside earth-encrusted collections of farm implements—all in the same living room. At one farm in particular, a flagstone in the floor of the main (only) room was lifted to reveal a basement byre filled with a jostle of cows, sheep, and goats, all of whom turned to look at us with baleful eyes as we peered down from above.

But, similar to New Age productions of Shakespearean plays featuring minimalist stage sets, such homey spaces were quickly transformed into intense, vital theaters of life. Characters entered, conversations began, laughter rose, flamboyant gesturing flared, voices clashed and collided, and emotions ran the gamut from ribald to ripe affection to rhetorical excess and climaxes of emotional release that far out-Olivier-ed Olivier and even surpassed the gilded gushings of Gielgud.

Shakespeare would have indeed felt perfectly at home in such a medieval morass of familial affection and endless squabbles and bawling babies and sauces and stews bubbling on the stove and the day-and nightlong dramas of human beings hacking out their conjoined lives with such edgy intensity that the primitive stage “set” in which Alianese lived everyday lives faded into utter insignificance. In fact, anything more elaborate or self-consciously fussy would have detracted from that drama. Elegant drapes, chintzy accoutrements, elaborate displays of family china, or excessive concern over matched dinner sets or fine crystal, would have created a distinct sense of dislocation and discomfort.

So, “elemental” my dear Watson, was the key in and around Aliano. And what were a few chipped cups and mismatched odds and ends of cutlery, when the food was rich, filling, and generous, the wine homemade and strong, the
bruschetta
dripping with homemade olive oil or creamy chicken-liver paté or melted pecorino cheese, and the spirit of affection and camaraderie so intense and all consuming that nothing else seemed to be of any real importance whatsoever.