Seasons in Basilicata (47 page)

“I'm sorry. I was just thinking.”

“About what?”

“About…well…how happy I am here.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. I feel as if I could just sit here for hours watching things, seeing new things…”

“The TV crew didn't seem to think there was much to see here, except dumb things like me sitting on the terrace scribbling away.”

“Well, you remember, that's what our New York friends said when we moved to Philadelphia. Even though we thought it was one of the best places we'd ever lived.”

“Right. I remember. Typical New York attitude to any place outside New York. The Woody Allen syndrome.”

“I bet those TV people never just sat down and watched.”

“Yes, that's true. They all seemed frantically busy, except when they were lunching—which apparently took up a big chunk of their time here. But I never saw any of them just sitting and watching.”

“What a shame.”

“Maybe we're biased. Maybe it's just because, as we keep realizing, and being told, we're still neophytes here. Everything still feels to have a little bit of magic in it. In fact, didn't Woody once say something like that: ‘If it's not magical, it's not real'?”

Anne smiled, squeezed my hand, and gave me one of her heartfelt “oh yes!” responses. I like those. A lot.

The season came slowly and sneakily at first. A few chilled flurries of post-autumnal air swirling the smotherings of wrinkled leaves in the piazza and sending them into dervishlike spiralings of dance. It seemed like a kind of death dance, with distinct rattling sounds as the leaves scratched and clawed at the cobblestones—a sound reminiscent of skeletal bones scraping together in some bizarre rite of passage and passing.

Then the sun would return and the soft breezes, too, seductively lulling us into a false sense that winter might be late, or might never even come at all that year.

But of course, the onset was as inevitable as the creeping assurances of aging itself. In fact you could watch its emergence in the changing rituals of the octos and even in the stoic, daily habits of the black-clad widows. Larger, thicker coats appeared, and the benchwarmers down Via Roma arrived a little later each day at their allotted spots. Some spots, where the winds were a little too chilly or where benches were shadowed by the declining arc of the sun, were abandoned until much later in the day. And there were more men inside the bars now and fewer sitting outside on the plastic sidewalk chairs. The evening
passeggiate
took on a brisker pace too, were less well attended, and shorter, as night slithered in earlier and colder.

Then came the rains. Sudden chilling
brutta stagione
(“ugly season”) downpours that cleared the streets of all activity and movement. Dogs howled, knowing what such rains would ultimately bring: lethal swathes of ice on the marble and granite paving stones and even frigid January days of snow, brilliantly white and crisp but—maybe due to some greenhouse warming trend—nothing like the white bleakness described so evocatively by Levi:

At this distinct seasonal cusp doors were closed tighter and dogs and cats and anything reminiscent of the old days—when houses were also communal animal byres—would be left to fend for themselves as the cold chilled not only the bodies but also the hearts of the populace. Not a pleasant prospect, but somehow most of these animals found somewhere to hide and survive the winter, maybe a little thinner, but still sparky with the spirit of feral hunters.

 

I
T WAS THE SEASON'S
hush that Anne and I found hardest to accept. I missed the morning bustle, even the noisy tractors and the cries of peddlers, and particularly the low hum of chatter and debate that floated up to our terrace after the octos had enjoyed their morning breakfast
correttis.
But early breakfasts, certainly our breakfasts, were no longer quite so early. The cold, low-slung light of the sun was barely apparent until after seven
A.M
., whereas in the summer, its brilliance would wake us, invigoratingly, shortly after five
A.M.
Now our bedclothes stayed in place as we slept longer. Then we had to decide who would make the tramp across icy tiles to the
kitchen to start the coffee, and, worse still, whose turn it was to try and light the ever-resistant fire, using the massive, tight-grained chunks of oak and olive from the woodpile on the terrace. Those burly logs always seemed to ignore the kindling succor of twigs and rolled-up spirals of burning newsprint. They just lay there, blackened by smoke and refusing to burn, or, even more frustrating, allowed themselves to be etched a little in flames, and even showed a few enticing signs of real conflagration, before fading yet again into a somnolent and ineffective glow that persisted throughout much of the day as the logs slowly crumbled into gray, heatless ashes.

And so it would go, deeper and deeper into this increasingly silent season until we began to wonder if winter would ever end and thoughts of moving for a while to a warmer clime bubbled up through the icy chill of the days. But of course, we didn't move. And neither, as far as we could tell, did anyone else in the village. We all shivered together, and smiled brittle, chapped smiles, and told each other lies about signs of an early spring or predicted, with inflated assurance, changes in the dreary sequence of days…changes that never came.

So, we just made the most of it. We cocooned ourselves, wore sweaters and thick socks and sweat suits, devoured books and old
New York Times Book Review
sections we'd brought with us, listened to the great symphonies, cooked up big
ribollita
vegetable soups and slow-simmered casseroles of
cinghiale
(a huge haunch of boar, a gift), venison (another gift), even
asino
(donkey; the less said about that gift the better), and great sauce-slathered platters of pasta that we created for impromptu parties with local friends.

And the days passed, and, all in all, I guess it wasn't too bad a time, at least not for us. But others suffered, particularly those whose olive groves had been hit by the poor winter weather and the fickle rhythms and moods of the olive trees themselves. That old saying “One good year and two bad” had proven itself true once again as meager December and January harvests, hardly worth the picking, had left the villagers in a dour, defeated mood. One
con
tadino
told us angrily of his meager crop, “
Non vale un brutto pomodoro
” (“It's not worth a single lousy squashed tomato”). And, as one particular incident suggested, some were ready to blame not only the inclement weather but also the suspected devious sleights of hand of the local olive mill owners….

Agonies at the Old Olive Mill

I could hear the woman's shrieking voice echo all the way down into the
calanchi
canyons.

I was climbing up the long hill after a sketching session on an unseasonably warm January morning and feeling pretty pleased with myself. The light and the shadows had been perfect for capturing the drama of the buttes and the rugged, slightly lopsided “old town” of Aliano, perched precariously on the edge of those clay-rock precipices. How the place had managed to cling to such an impossible perch was beyond me. But I had the same reaction almost every time I sketched Italian hill towns. Their tenacity and durability boggled the mind and senses—which is precisely why I love to sketch them.

The shouting—near-screaming actually—got louder as I approached the fortresslike ramparts of the village. I realized that it was coming from the old
frantoio
(olive mill), which was due to close soon when the new Calanchi Cooperative mill finally opened. (Don Pierino, Aliano's priest and one of the proud instigators of this sparkling new pink-stucco edifice at the edge of town, insisted that it would be “very soon. Just a few final pieces of machinery still to
come…”) But in the meantime, the old
frantoio
was still grinding and pressing in the ancient manner inside its stone barn at the roadside, and rich, oily aromas (and some rather unpleasant black liquidy residues too) were rolling out into the street. When the screams started, a bunch of octos gathered around—as they always did near anything that had life, movement, noise, or smell—smirking and chuckling as usual. In fact, the louder and more strident the female voice became, the more they laughed and nudged one another and gave one another knowing “she's
baaack
” nods and winks. One of them kept repeating over and over “
Gassata! gassata!
” which means “excited and full of life,” although I don't think he was being at all complimentary.

Never one to avoid anything with a hint of drama to it—particularly in Aliano where drama was usually in pretty short supply—I peeked through the huge doorway of the mill into its musty shadows. For a moment all looked normal. It sounded normal too; I had grown accustomed to that infernal din of cranking, grinding machinery, which lasted all day and night when the harvest was abundant. Someone was tipping sacks of olives, fresh from the field (“the fresher, the better” was the motto when it came to maintaining the best possible taste and “body” of oil), into a funnel-like device in the floor—a very oily, slippery floor—from whence they were carried by conveyor belt high up to sieves that removed leaves, pebbles, and earth. Then on they went to the water spray, which gave the ripe, deep green and purple brown olives a serenely healthy, polished gleam, before they vanished into a coarse chopping mill.

The olives emerged, battered and broken, and tumbled on into the slowly churning, five-foot-high and two-foot-thick granite mill wheels—three of them—powered by a massive electric motor (not so long ago they were donkey powered), which proceeded to crush the dear little things, flesh, skin, and stones—on a fourth horizontally turning wheel in a huge steel bowl—into a smooth, aromatic pulp. Usually a normal load “under the stones” was around three hundred kilos. Once crushed, the pulpy mix was then mechanically laid on circular straw mats, piled on top of one another and interspersed
with steel disks to a height of almost six feet, and then squeezed by a huge hydraulic steel press with such an enormous vertical force that you could actually feel the floor of the mill quivering.

The first run of cold press (you didn't even
mention
“hot press” in Aliano) extra-virgin (low acid content—usually less than one percent) oil was poured in thick, sensual torrents out of the mats and onto the centrifugal filtering system, which consisted of a large, circular, stainless-steel colander revolving at high speed, to remove water and waste matter, and finally disgorging its beautiful bounty of fruitily aromatic, yellow green oil into a gleaming, stainless-steel tub. And there it lay, winking with air bubbles, awaiting displacement into metal or plastic containers or more evocative glass demijohns—whatever the
padrone
of that particular pressing decided to use to contain his harvest and either sell or enjoy at home until the next year's bounty.

Apparently it was not unusual for the average extended family to consume upward of two hundred liters of olive oil a year. This usually required around twelve hundred kilos of olives (six kilos of olives for one liter of oil), from around a dozen or so mature olive trees, depending upon the age, quality of harvest, the spacing of trees, and all those subtle intangibles that made each year different from every other year.

After each individual pressing, the mats were cleaned and the sludge, now as hard as cardboard, was removed and further moistened and pressed for low-grade oil (
olio di sansa,
also known as
rettificato
or
lampante
) before finally being used for cattle feed or fertilizer, or anything else that ensured, in typical penurious-peasant fashion, that not a single crushed stone or sliver of skin would go unused.

It was another one of those great cycles of nature that, like the grape
vendemmia,
beats on rhythmically and ritually year after year, century after century, here in Aliano and across much of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.

But the screaming woman was not at all concerned about rhythms and certainly not about years and centuries. She was very
much focused on the “now” as she stood with her back to me in a long, black, threadbare skirt, torn rubber boots, a matted brown cardigan, and a red bandanna headscarf stained with what could only be pigeon droppings, by the look of all the multitudinous squiggles of yellow and white goo.

T
YPICAL OLIVE MILL

I caught fragments of the outrage she expressed in a shrill shriek that matched the din of the machinery in volume and pitch. The
person she was addressing, a young, stocky man in blue overalls with a shock of olive detritus–laden black hair, seemed to be only partially aware of her presence and was certainly unmoved by her protestations. Something about her
partita
(small amount) of olives—most locals had managed to harvest only small amounts that year—being the best in Aliano, and why hadn't she been told when they were going to be pressed, and how could she know if this oil was from her own olives and not from the grove of some uncaring peon who didn't prune his trees correctly or, worse still, someone who had used a
bastone
(stick) to knock olives from the trees rather than picking them by hand in traditional
molto lavoro
(much work) Aliano fashion…and on and on. Apparently in Basilicata the wily
contadini
olive growers tended to watch religiously over the pressing of their produce, reflecting an inbred mistrust of millers, who had, on occasion, been known to underweigh the sacks of olives or substitute inferior produce and keep the cream of the crop for themselves.

The frantic woman—this very suspicious
padrona
—kept lifting the index finger of her right hand and screaming, “Just taste! This cannot be my oil!” And then she turned and saw me. I realized then that she was carrying a small plastic cup containing, presumably, a sample of her oil. She kept dipping her finger into the gold green liquid, sniffing it, licking it, and then holding it out to the unfortunate young man, who kept as busy as he could moving the crushing mats around. Then she stuck out her finger at me instead and cried out, “Lick it!” As politely as I could I resisted the invitation, so she held out the plastic container and bawled something like, “Help yourself if you're so fussy.” So, what else could I do? I reached into the cup and stuck my finger in the oil. I smelled it. It seemed fine to me—very aromatically olive-like. I licked it. It was delicious—full and fruity and with none of the acid overtones of olives that had lain around too long after picking or had been left on the branch so they fell or that were shaken from trees onto widespread nets, a real nono in this part of the country.

I tried to be tactful. In fact, all I said was something innocuous like “very nice,” but her voice once again soared into the operatic
stratosphere and her deeply furrowed, lean and foxy face became even leaner and foxier—one might say almost wolfish—as she hurled rather offensive epithets about
stranieri
(foreigners) and what the ****** did they know about real olive oil, before turning back to the young man in the blue overalls—who, very sprightly and understandably, had taken advantage of her diatribe with me, and vanished.

At this point the woman had reached a ballistic, all-engines-go point, and I half expected to see her rocketing through the rafters and pantile roof of the mill and out into the bright blue yonder, clutching her little cup, her red, pigeon shit–dotted bandanna trailing behind her. Her apparent out-of-control dementia reminded me of a line in Robert Fox's book
The Inner Sea,
when, on a visit to Aliano in 1983 he asked after Donna Caterina, who had tended to Carlo Levi's comfort during his
confino.
He was told that she was still alive but “shrieking at the moon, as mad as a hatter.”

For a moment I wondered if this lady was some reincarnation of the unfortunate Donna Caterina but decided not to research the matter further. Rather, like the young man at the press, I decided retreat was by far the better part of valor, so I eased my way through the chuckling cluster of behatted, walking stick–wielding octos outside, and made my getaway up the street.

A single glance back made me realize that I'd definitely left at the appropriate moment. I saw the woman rush outside and hurl her little plastic container of oil in the general direction of the rapidly dispersing audience of chuckling elderly spectators. Then she gave her bedraggled mule, tied up outside the mill, a hefty boot in the backside, which generated a raucous, bellowing protest from the unfortunate creature and, for a moment or two at least, drowned out the unhappy woman's lamentations.

 

I
N
A
LIANO
, which prides itself on the unusually high quality of its oil, the winter olive harvest can last for weeks, especially if it's a “one in three” year. It's a slow business of handpicking, often by both men and women, and the loading of twenty-five-kilo boxes
similar to those for the
vendemmia
but stretched out over a longer period to ensure that the olives are picked at the very peak of ripe perfection and quickly taken to the mill before that insidious acidic oxidization process begins. Of course there's always the lurking fear of leaving the picking a little too long and risking a frost or, worst of all, a repeat of the devastating “Day of Wrath” of January 19, 1985, when a winter ice storm in some regions sent temperatures to as low as minus fifteen degrees centigrade. At that point the sap froze, and in doing so expanded, and millions of olive trees literally exploded, especially in Tuscany and Chianti, where orchards are still recovering from the massive devastation. (One interesting fact emerged, however, from that calamity, which sent the government into a frenzy of olive oil–industry investigations: Despite the decimation of over three quarters of the trees in some areas, barely a dent was noticeable in “regional olive oil exports”!)

But despite the slowness of the harvest, and the fear of storms and the back-wrenching nature of the work, there's a mellowness to these time-honored rituals. It's rather touching to watch each tree being treated as an individual, with its own particular quirks and needs and its own sense of timing and, ultimately—if the weather's been good—a generous reward to the farmer for an enduring and endearing partnership in productivity. Of course there are always those who will never share my somewhat sentimental perceptions, and the woman with the “lick this!” finger, I'm sure, is one of them.

Creatures of the
Calanchi

Another equally bizarre experience—and one more excursion into Aliano's “dark side”—occurred unexpectedly a few days later.

 

I
WAS DOWN
in Aliano's
calanchi
canyons.

Now, why was that? you might ask.

Well, first because it was a fine, warm day and the air was crystal clean and I was restless in the house. Stepping outside into the bright sunshine, I felt as if I'd walked into one of those bucolic ad
scenes for bottles of pure spring water. And second, Gianfranco, Giuseppina's son and the father of two adorable youngsters, had promised to take Anne and me horseback riding in the canyons. I had salivated at the image of us sitting on fine steeds acting out Wild West roles as posse leaders in pursuit of malingering desperados, or something equally bold. Gianfranco had promised this two weeks ago, but he still hadn't turned up with suitably saddled creatures dripping with leather and brass accoutrements, pawing at the cobblestones, and chomping at their bits for “the big ride.”