Seasons in Basilicata (35 page)

I asked Angelo how he felt things had changed since the feudal “quagmire days” of the notorious
mezzadria
system, when, on a
whim, powerful landlords might increase their fifty-percent share of all crops grown by their peasant tenants to sixty or even eighty percent.

“Well, I suppose some will tell you things are much better now. But I don't think too much has changed, really. Maybe worse now in some ways. Less people work the land now. The old men, like me” (he laughed a deep, throaty laugh, spitting out bits of olive and cheese), “we can't do too much. And the young men…well, they won't. They go away. You know old story. In past they go to America or Australia. Now today that's not so easy, so they go to the North—Bologna, Milano, or Germany. Even England for some.”

“So at least the education system, the schools, may have trained them for a better life.”

“
Porca Madonna! Dio Cristo!
” he exclaimed. “What education?! Most of them go to do building or house-painting or stupid kinda work. No security. No pension. Some find government jobs, but only if they have many
raccomandazione
[recommendations]. And you know what they think of recommendations from Basilicata? They think we still animals down here. Even though now we own our own houses and our land, and now many of us have cars, TVs, refrigerators, all these things. Just like up in the North. But they still think we all
pagani, terroni, mezzadri.
So…” Angelo gave an enormous, sad shrug and took a long slurp of his wine. “So, what can you do? In our world down here much has changed, but it has not made so much difference I think…”

The breezes were warm and playful. Grasses rasped and the sun was hot, but not unbearable. A strange halo of haze slowly revolved around Pollino's huge, rounded summit. Elsewhere the sky was azure blue and cloudless.

I asked Angelo to tell me what life was like when he was a child. His eyes glazed over and he sighed. He was silent for a while, then spoke quietly: “It's little things I remember most. Everyone was farming then—husbands and wives—all working on small pieces of land, sometimes a long walk from the village. So that's what we all did, and you didn't think about it. But the little things…like the
foccaccia,
warm from the bakery with garlic and little bits of tomato on top. We almost lived on that. We dipped it into our own olive oil. It was beautiful. And pasta. Lots of pasta. Maybe a little meat—salami, rabbit, lamb, even
cinghiale
—on weekends, but mainly pasta with olive oil and the
conserva di pomodoro
my mother made. A beautiful sauce with garlic and basil and little pieces of fennel. That gave special taste. Different from what others made. I could always tell hers. Sometimes my grandmother brought her own sauce, but it was just tomatoes and salt. You had to add things to make it good to eat. I think our home, my mother, had the best
cucina di casa
[home kitchen] in Alianello. All the family used to wait for her to shout, ‘
Andiamo a tavola
!' [‘Come to the table!']”

Another long silence. I decided not to interrupt. He would tell me things if and when he was ready. And then suddenly he laughed, his wrinkles undulating across his face like things moving under his skin. “Oh, the toilets! I forgot. We had those great chamber pots—
zio peppes
they were called or, if you are polite,
vasi da notte.
There was always argument about who should carry those outside when they were full and pour the stuff down the ditch. And we all lived in one room, you know. Eight of us. With a small
cantina
at the side for the mule, pig, chickens, three cats, maybe four, and rabbits. We tried to keep six rabbits but sometimes we got very hungry and…well, we might only have two or three then. But, oh, they tasted so good in my mother's wine-and-pepper sauce, and then she would curse at all the washing-up which she had to do in large bowl using sand and ashes from the fire. She kept soap for
real
washing—clothes and things like that. Soap was very expensive. Some people made their own soap from pig fat after they killed the pig and hung all the salamis. But they used lye in it, and it was dangerous. If they got the mix wrong it could burn your skin and your eyes. And now today when I go into our local store in Aliano, although it's very small, I see two dozen, maybe more, types of soap and detergent and washing-up liquids…and all so cheap too!”

Angelo laughed, a deep, warm, rumbly sound that echoed back into the cave. “Yes, it's all so crazy! Once we had almost nothing—
and not so long ago either—and now we've all got these new things in the stores. And all the TVs, too. My grandmother used to refuse to watch. She said the Pope should ban TV—all those naked women and stupid, rude shows and all the bad news about a world full of sin and evil things. She was very angry. And very strong. Like most women here. They say the men are the head of the house—the
capo della casa
—but…well, maybe that's what the women like us to think. But I don't think so. The young children worship their mothers like Madonnas, but as they grow up they see that she's tough, too. Like my wife, Maria. She can be very sweet and kind, but she's also very good at keeping all our affairs organized and looking after our money. There's not very much, but she makes sure we use it carefully and save some.”

He paused, nodded, and smiled to himself, lost for a while in some pleasant reverie about his domestic life. Then he was off again. “Once we had five bad years here in a row, crazy times: The hot winds,
levante
and
libeccio,
burned up the olives, the
grandine
[hail] flattened the wheat, the grapes got some kind of fungus, and most of our house crops—tomatoes, onions, zucchine, and things—were lost. But somehow Maria looked after the children and also went out and got jobs, little things: sewing, cleaning, teaching music. And she made sure we got through okay until things were better. And she never complained or got angry like some of the other women—real bitches, some of them. Hard, crude, always cursing, and shrieking.”

Another long, introspective pause. Then Angelo continued quietly. “I thank God I am lucky to marry my Maria. And she always say to me, ‘We've had all our bad luck. Things can only get better now for us.' And she was right. They always did. And when we look after another small farm, she work with me in the fields until our fifth child came. A bad birth…” Angelo paused. Obviously his memories hurt. “I thought I'd lose her, Maria. Baby came the wrong way. There wasn't time to get her to Potenza, to the hospital, so everything was done at home like all the others. And you know…” He paused again. “She never cried once. She…just bit into the
blanket until it was all over. Not a single cry of pain. She knew that was the old way it should be: no cries. Although it was very, very bad for her.”

This time the silence went on longer than usual, so I poured us both another glass of his Montepulciano and decided I had to say something: “A toast, Angelo. You're very lucky to have such a fine wife, so let's drink to your Maria!” And we did, almost draining our glasses in one gulp. “And to you, too, Angelo, to a fine winemaker, genius of the art of salami-creation, and master of olive marinades.”

“…And very happy man, too,” Angelo added with a big grin.

“Why?”

“Because although we are not rich peoples, we are
autonomi
—our own bosses—not
dipendenti
[employed workers]. Also we don't have two much
sotto le stelle
[stress] in our lives. And, of course, I am also happy because my wife lets me come here and drink and eat and talk to peoples…good peoples.”

“Thanks, Angelo. I owe you another cigar.”

He turned and gave me a quizzical grin. “Eh! Who say I was talking 'bout you!?”

Our wine-daft laughter echoed in the cave behind us, rolled over the edge of the cliff, and drifted off in the direction of Pollino's hazy halo and the beginning of a lovely, luminescent sunset.

Freedom Is the Absence of Choice…or Not

Between these sudden spontaneous happenings, the simplicity and slow, steady pace of daily life here encouraged moments of reflection, so bear with me on this story. We're taking a little diversion, but I promise we'll soon return to Aliano.

 

O
NE OF MY FATHER'S
unrequited ambitions in his later life was to write a book with the title
This Freedom.
He mentioned it many times with a wistful look in his eyes, usually after he'd closed up his grocery store in the small village where we lived on the fringe of the once-great Yorkshire coalfields. He would slam the door tightly
shut, turn the lock with a sigh, and climb the stairs for a “quick wash” (he was very fond of that word “quick”: quick drive, quick nap, quick lunch, quick cup of tea). Then, without a scintilla of quickness in it, he would go into our lounge above the garage, sit at his old upright Steinway piano, and play Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata or some gorgeous Debussy prelude or fragments of Chopin or Mozart or even parts of a Bach concerto, with all the grace and touch of a concert-hall maestro.

My father's life had not been particularly easy. Born to a rather poor Catholic family of Irish descent with younger siblings galore, he'd seen his beloved elder brother die a terribly slow death from lung-destroying mustard gas at the end of World War II. Later he played the piano for silent movies at local picture houses to boost the meager family budget. He rarely saw his father, my grandfather, who was a popular world-touring, music-hall performer, billed as “Yorkshire's Own Harry Lauder,” from whose apparent successes the family rarely benefited financially. But Dad persevered at the piano, and his talents were recognized by a local mill owner, who adored the classics and who encouraged my father to take the scholarship exam for the London School of Music.

My father passed, the mill owner offered to support him financially during his studies in London, and for once the world looked very rosy…until a series of sudden calamities in the family, including a sudden marriage for one of the other brothers, made Dad suddenly responsible for supporting his mother and younger sisters. London and a life of music and concert-hall recitals were now out of the question. He became an engineering draftsman briefly and then an insurance salesman until, not long after he married, he was posted to the British Air Force in Australia in World War II.

Four long years later, he returned home a very different man, according to my mother. He was frustrated and disillusioned by the disasters of war, and by the loss of his job at the insurance company, a job supposedly “held in trust” until the war's end.

So, he became a shopkeeper. “It may not be much, but at least it's all ours,” I remember his saying when he showed my sister and
me our new home. His face showed a mix of emotion: pride in his independence and “freedom,” but I also remember seeing tears in his eyes. Music still coursed through his veins. The lost opportunity of his youth still rankled, dangling as a constant reminder, like a rotten carrot on the end of a broken stick.

I think that's when his idea for the book
This Freedom
may have germinated. He was nonplussed to put it politely—disgusted may be more accurate—by all the rallying cries for “Freedom!” during the sixties and seventies. And it didn't help much for him to watch me enjoying my own wild, roller-coaster ride on through that gloriously anarchistic era of Dylan Thomas, Brendan Behan, John Osborne, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez—all those bold, “break all the rules,” “get out of the way if you can't lend a hand,” “make love not war,” role models.

“Freedom isn't free,” he would say during one of our infrequent “serious chats.” “It requires rigorous discipline. Without discipline there's only indulgence, hedonism, selfishness, anarchy, and ultimately self-destruction.”

“But, Dad,” I would try to explain, “I'm just trying to find out who I am first and what my options are. Discipline can come later, when I've made some basic choices, when I have a clearer idea of where I'm going and what I want to do with the rest of my life.”

And that's when he came out with that ancient saying: “True freedom is the absence of choice.”

I gagged. “And you believe that?!” I said.

To give him his due, he patiently tried to explain the deeper implications of what sounded like such an obvious oxymoron. He placed particular emphasis on the Orthodox Jewish Hasidim who, because they devoutly followed their more than six hundred rules of daily life, which encompassed the most intimate of personal activities, claimed to release themselves from the constant natter-chatter of petty choices and find abundant time and freedom to focus on the higher, Talmudic aspects of their existence. And then he became more personal. “I reached a point where I had no job and, because of my age, not much chance of getting one. So, the only ‘choice' I
could see was really no choice at all. I had to find a way of becoming my own boss in order to support us all. So, that's what I did. And insofar as it may have been a choice, it's the best one I ever made. And now, although it's not always been an easy job, I feel I've got all the freedom I want and need.” Which brings me back to Aliano and most of the other hill villages in this once-forgotten, subsistence-economy part of Basilicata.

Watching the octos day after day happily chatting away with friends they've known since they were kids, and who all once worked similar small patches of land among the
calanchi
buttes, with their handfuls of olive trees and fruit trees and vines, I wondered if they ever saw life as having any choices in it whatsoever. I actually brought the subject up one evening with a group of local friends and was greeted with deep, throaty guffaws of amusement and astonishment. And the essence of their general reply was that, except for those who'd emigrated to America, they never had any choices as
contadini.
The land was their birthright. For better or worse—usually worse—it was all they had, and they held on to it with the tenaciousness of those vicious Basilicatan shepherd dogs.