Seasons in Basilicata (40 page)

“Well, never mind 'bout all that now,” Giuliano said, thrusting a glass of the just-pressed wine at his son. “Whaddya think of this then?”

Vito sipped it as if he thought it might be hemlock. “I'm not much of a wine drinker,” he whispered to me, but to his dad he said, “S'great, Dad, good and strong. M'be better 'n last year.”

“S'what I'm thinking. Course you can't tell 'til it's sat for a few months in these demijohns.” He indicated a row of a dozen fifty-five-liter demijohn bottles waiting to be filled with the new brew. “C'mon then, you two, y'can start fillin' 'em now.”

Rosa and Vito nodded and began to sink plastic jugs into the new wine in the vat and pour it through filtered funnels and into the huge bottles.

“David, come an' help me with this stuff,” Giuliano said, indicating the compacted pile of deep purple
mosto
squeezed just like
he'd said, to dry, cakelike consistency in the bottom of the
torchio,
which he'd opened by disconnecting the steel hoops around the slats and pulling the two semicircles of the press outward like curved cupboard doors.

You could still see the skins and stalks in the cake, embedded like fossil layers in the earth-solid mass. It took quite an effort to break off chunks of the stuff and throw them into containers to be used as pig feed or fertilizer (alas, not to make grappa). Sometimes the mass was so hard Giuliano had to use a machete to carve into it.

“Y'see,” Giuliano said proudly. “Nowt goes to waste. Everything gets used for somethin'.”

“Very ecologically correct,” I murmured.

“Ecological my *****,” he exclaimed. “Fancy word for summat we've been doin' for centuries. Thousands of years.”

And so we all continued working together, scooping the
mosto
out of the large vat, pressing it (about half an hour per load), filtering the new wine into the demijohns, pausing to sample the product—which seemed to get stronger and bolder the deeper we dug into the
mosto
—and wondering when lunchtime might finally arrive.

Giuliano was a stickler for “getting it done because after one of Rosa's lunches you don't feel like doin' nowt.” So that's what we did, our faces, clothes, and hands soaked in aromatic juices and our bodies increasingly weary from a seemingly endless sequence of laborious tasks.

But eventually it was all completed. Giuliano announced that we'd done better than last year and had produced over two hundred fifty liters of second-run wine. And then, with a wide
la vita è bella
(“life is beautiful”) grin, he declared that it was time to wash up, eat, and drink.

And, as happens so often in beguiling Basilicata, the rest of the afternoon sort of faded away into temporal mists after a huge lunch
à la
Rosa of homemade
tagliatelle
with her smokey, meat-flavored, tomato
ragu
sauce; a succulent and fragrant casserole of chicken in garlic sauce, served with warm fava beans and huge chunks of golden-crusted bread; then salad; and finally some of her choco
late-cream (although as I was to learn later, not chocolate at all) dessert, which melted like cotton candy in our mouths and primed us perfectly, after coffee and grappa, for a long afternoon siesta.

And, I can't really remember much of what happened after that.

Night of the Werewolves

However, I do remember one particularly strange experience a few days later—one of my occasional confrontations and trepidatious interfaces with Aliano's dark side. Maybe I should have taken Levi a little more seriously when he wrote:

“W
HERE IS EVERYBODY
?” I asked Vittoria, one of the
baristi
[bargirls] at Bar Capriccio. The place was unusually quiet on that dark October evening. Biase and Salvatore were present (I suspect they actually lived there or wished they did), playing some halfhearted card game that really needed four people. Two young men were rocking and slamming the rackety football machine where you spun a series of metal tubes with wooden players attached to them and the first person to score ten goals demanded his next round of grappa from his defeated opponent. That particular machine, a new addition at the bar, was a real nuisance, not just because of the noisy spinning tubes and the raucous cries engendered by each goal, but because it had been placed right next to the bar's phone, the only one in town that functioned with any degree of regularity. It was bad enough that it was the old-fashioned pulse type, which prevented me from using my international code to dial out of the country, thus limiting me to local calls. But its location near the football machine made it even more unusable. Conversations were inevitably messy
affairs with my having to repeat everything at least twice to be understood above the din of the football machine.

But that night I had no plans to use the phone because I'd finally managed to make a couple of calls out of the country from the official Telecom Italia phone up the hill, which seemed to be working again. It had been inoperable for more than three weeks, so I'd pleaded with a
carabiniero
in the adjoining police station to call the telephone company and ask them to fix it. “But I'm a
carabiniero,
” he'd replied indignantly, puffing out his crisply uniformed chest, bedecked with abundant sparkling-white leather accoutrements, like a Mussolini wannabe. But he did it anyway. And now it was working, and was a lot cheaper than the bar's outrageous “private” rates.

Vittoria's eyes sparkled and she laughed at my question about the absence of the normal rowdy clientele. Then she pointed heavenward. An intriguing gesture. Did she mean something ungodly had happened in the little village? Had a sudden act of the Creator disturbed our normal evening flow of
passeggiate
with abundant pauses for bambino-bussing, espressos and
digestivi,
followed by the later, less formal, strollings, gatherings, and imbibings until the late hours.

I used one of my ever-increasing repertoire of Italian gestures to indicate that I hadn't understood her gesture and that maybe she could give me another hint.

“Well, just look at
la luna
!” she said and giggled.

“The moon?” I said. “What about the moon?”

Then she did a delightful imitation of a prowling animal or monster or something of the kind while humming those memorable few bars of that international anthem of terror, the
Jaws
theme.

“What? What is that? What are you doing?”

“
Lupomannaro,
” she whispered in a dramatic hiss. “Werewolves!”

Oh, right. Of course. Werewolves. Why hadn't I thought of that? And I was turning to leave, having decided not to order a drink just to show her that it wasn't nice to take the mickey out of a
straniero
who was always polite and always left decent tips and didn't even complain (much) about the bar's rip-off phone rates.

V
ITTORIA

“No, no,” Vittoria said, a little more serious now. “Is true. The people do not like to walk about when the moon is full, particularly around
mezzanotte
[midnight].”

I peered outside and realized that, in moon terms, she was indeed correct. How had I missed that glorious silver ball, fat and bright, beaming over the rooftops in that cloudless night sky?

“Okay,” I said to her nonchalantly.
“Va bene.”

She giggled again and repeated her monster mimic and
Jaws
theme rendition. Thinking that she was still having a little fun at my expense, I left the bar and strolled deep into the dark village to show
her, and anyone else who might be watching, that all this werewolf nonsense certainly had no impact on a lad from the Yorkshire coalfields who knew all about black nights and full moons and silly, age-old superstitions. The miners, among whom I had spent my early years until the age of ten, were renowned for their strange little rituals intended to ward off sudden dangers in the shafts and along the seams where they hacked the lumpen stuff, near naked and often alone in that terrible claustrophobic darkness. They had their monsters and demons all right, although, if the
Brassed Off–
like marital shoutings and bangings in their council houses were anything to go by, such creatures seemed to be more prevalent inside the tiny parlors and kitchens of their homes rather than deep in the black, sodden bowels of the earth.

But admittedly it was all rather odd—the silence and lack of people and movement in Aliano. And the
fossa
did look unusually deep and mysterious with its silver-tinged shadows. My footsteps rang on the rough cobblestones and echoed off the thick stone walls. I kept looking up at the moon and thinking how beautiful it was. Surely this was the time when everybody should be getting ready to do a little frantic pruning and trimming of things on the farms along the
calanchi
and the ghostly clay cliffs of the fault lines. After all, any of the popular
Farmer's Almanacs,
still used with almost religious certitude in those parts, made an awful lot of fuss about the cusp between the waxing and waning of the moon. And here we were, right on it.

The houses dropped away as I continued down the narrow road that wound along the knife-edge precipices separating the old village from the “not so old” (as opposed to the decidedly “new section” way up the hill). There was a breeze, suddenly cold. A couple of streetlamps were out—just like the telephone, it would be weeks before they were fixed—making everything darker. As I peered down toward the old village, huddled in lopsided disarray atop its flaking
puy-
like perch, I realized that there were no lights in any of the windows. Admittedly, the area looked abandoned even in the daytime, but it wasn't. I'd been there many times to sketch its narrow, twisting alleys and had exchanged somewhat constrained conversations
with its residents—constrained not by their attitudes, which were usually friendly, if a little guarded, but by my still-neophyte's vocabulary. Although, I'd been assured on many occasions that a far more extensive grasp of the language wouldn't have made much difference; even the “upper villagers” claimed to have problems understanding the indecipherable complexity of their dialect.

Well, I thought, they must all be in bed and shuttered up for the night. A little crazy though. It was barely eleven o'clock. But, if they were asleep I decided I wouldn't bother walking down there as I'd first intended to show everyone that at least this particular foreign resident could not be cowed by local folk tales and superstitions and werewolves!
Porca puttana!
(“Sow whore,” a great epithet that uses the spitting
P'
s to splendid effect.) Who were they trying to kid? It was a beautiful night, full of gorgeously sensual moonlight—the kind they write arias of love about—and if it weren't for this strangely cold wind and that howling…

I stopped abruptly. A chilling sound bounced off the gray canyon walls and faded slowly into the distance. I listened again, but all I could hear was the prattle of the wind swirling the dry, brown leaves of autumn around the edge of the road.

Funny. It had sounded like a howl of some kind. Maybe just a jilted dog, kicked out of a house and left to shiver in the chill night air. Of course. That's precisely what it was.

Time to return. And as it was all so beautiful in the moonlight, I thought I'd go the top way, along the cliffs that edged the main section of the village. The vistas from there in the daytime were magnificent, across that Dakota-like “Badlands” topography that still, even after my having lived so long in Aliano, managed to surprise me with its mood of utter barren wilderness—unlike any other place I'd ever seen in Italy.

It truly was serene, the moonlight silverplating the already-silvered leaves of the olive trees, earthbound in their neatly regimented rows hundreds of feet below the iron fence rail on which I rested.

But, then, it came again. An echoing, hollow howl from the shad
owy depths around the base of the near-vertical cliffs. And it was definitely not a dog. At least no dog I'd ever heard before. A set of shutters slammed in one of the houses behind me, and I jumped a good six inches off the cobblestones in alarm.
Dio Christo!
What was going on? All the house lights were off. No TV sounds. No muffled conversations over the last few sips of homemade wine. Absolutely unnerving silence…except for that howl, which came again, closer now to the base of the cliffs…or maybe even on that narrow track that serpentined up its flanks into the village.