Seasons in Basilicata (57 page)

So, thanks for the unexpected snowstorm. And thank you, Rosa, for giving us the best gift of all—the gift of time.

And the gift of giving ourselves to ourselves. Once again.

Musings on “Traveler's Melancholy”

I suppose I should admit that between all the adventures and the free days and the sheer exuberance of living in an unfamiliar and always intriguing place, there were moments when the mood would suddenly shift unexpectedly and we'd experience the oddest emotions of utter disconnectedness and moroseness.

It doesn't matter where you are or how fantastic the scenery or how outstanding the food or the evening's diversions—in fact, the more boisterous and roistering the setting, the more likely you are to get that sudden, sodden funk of “traveler's melancholy.” It usually comes with sideswiping impact when you look around, smell all the unfamiliar smells, see unfamiliar people talking, hugging, and gesticulating in unfamiliar ways, and suddenly you realize that this is their world, not yours. And no matter how kind, considerate, empathetic, and enthusiastically supportive the people of this unfamiliar place may be, you know that, in the end, they will return to their neighborhoods and homes and continue weaving the familiar warp and weft of their own intensely focused lives while you remain the outsider, the observer, the stranger. The ones whom people may be curious about and, if you're found to be inof
fensive or unthreatening, may smile at or even talk to for a while, before easing back into the comfortable nooks and crannies of their own existence.

And one of your little voices suddenly shrieks: “Take me home!”

Hating to be caught off guard by such subconscious bursts of angst and uncertainty (a fine example of Thomas Jefferson's “twistifications”), the rational mind whips out its list of “reasons for our visit and all our moving about.” But it's no use. It's too late. The homesick feeling is out and rapidly turning everything around you rancid and sour with its sharp, pungent images—ridiculously exaggerated, of course—of your own real home, your own family, your pets, your store, pub, park, favorite neighborhood path. You feel this almost irresistible and certainly utterly nonsensical and irrational urge to dump everything, grab a train or a plane or whatever, and arrive in no time at all back in your familiar armchair by the fire with a glass of good wine and the Sunday paper and the aroma of the late lunch roast, and the prospect of a beer or two later on in the evening with a few friends at the local tavern.

Fortunately I realized, the more I read other travelers' tales, that Anne and I were by no means alone in these sensations. There have always been of course eternal itinerant optimists, such as the indefatigable Richard Burton (the explorer, not the actor), whose life seemed a perpetual reflection of his lust for travel: “Of the gladdest moments methinks in human life is the departing upon a distant journey into unknown lands.”

Normally I would agree with such a sentiment, but when those odd moments of unexpected moroseness emerge, I find Frances Mayes (
Bella Tuscany
) sums up the dilemma perfectly:

Diane Johnson (
Natural Opium
) got it right: “Anyone who has traveled has said, in the middle of some desert or in a moment of intense alienation in a souk, ‘why am I here?' I have tried to account for these moments of travel ennui or traveler's panic we have all felt—the desperate wish to be transported by instantaneous space/time travel into one's own bed.”

Margaret G. Ryan (
African Hayride
) wised up eventually: “I've done it several times…come to bed in a dark hotel room fighting depression, if not downright hysteria, and then wakened to sunlight and beauty and thoughts of what a fool I had been.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins, however, reveals a more onerous mood: “It can be dangerous to travel. A strong reflecting light is cast back on ‘real' life and this is sometimes a disquieting experience…. Sometimes you go into your far interior and who knows what you might find there.”

Alain de Botton (
The Art of Travel
) suggests other shortcomings: “A danger of travel is that many see things at the wrong time, before we have had an opportunity to build up the necessary receptivity, so that new information is as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting thread.”

Jonathan Raban, one of our favorite travel writers, describes another problem, particularly frustrating to a writer trying to meld his themes of travel and discovery into something approaching coherent verbosity: “Journeys hardly ever disclose their true meaning until after—and sometimes years after—they are over.”

Albert Camus turns such adversities into spiritual potentiality:

“Stripped of all the trappings of home,” wrote Sophia Dembling (
Yearning for Faraway Places
), “and with nothing familiar behind which to hide, we are left completely to the resources that live only within us…. It is both terrifying and refreshing and always, always enlightening.”

And I round out these musings on “traveler's melancholy” and related oddities of travel with Michael Crichton's reminders to himself: “I need new experiences to keep shaking myself up.” Pico Iyer has also given considerable thought as to why we travel and has concluded that we do so:

Finally, there's something uplifting in another of Albert Camus's revelations: “In the depths of winter I finally realized there was within me an invincible summer.” Isak Dinesen (
Out of Africa
) expressed it more succinctly with her simple affirmation—something that all travelers should write down and carry with them: “Here I am. Precisely where I ought to be.”

I think that's the thought we found most useful and uplifting during our (fortunately, very rare) and rarely simultaneous melancholies in Aliano. That and, of course, Carlo Levi's celebration of his
lot despite all the hardships and lack of freedom he suffered during his
confino
there: “An immense happiness, such as I had never known, swept over me.…I loved these peasants.” And even on the day his official release was announced he wrote, “My unexpected joy soon turned to melancholy.…I was sorry to leave and found a dozen pretexts for lingering on.”

If Levi could endure all that he had to during that time and still emerge with such a realization of the ultimate positive outcome of his ordeal—his love and caring for the people of Basilicata—then our little moments of uncertainty and confused displacement were barely worth acknowledgment.

So, from then on we agreed to consider them unacknowledged, particularly as we were beginning to dread the leaving of Aliano far more than the staying.

Our Nonmeeting with Maria the Witch

Some experiences—neither melancholic nor exuberant—just dangle like those metaphorically elusive carrots on sticks, shriveling a little in their inaccessibility, but still potentially full of color and flavor.

 

A
ND ONE OF
our most enticing carrot experiences, the meeting with Maria the witch, had still not taken place. But, in a way, the antics involved in our “nonmeeting” with this increasingly illusionary icon of Aliano's darkside were possibly more humorous and mysterious than any actual face-to-face interview would have been.

Giuseppe, the bank manager, appeared increasingly uncomfortable in his role as self-appointed instigator of the meeting with Maria. At first he'd seemed very enthusiastic about it, and maybe we should have accepted his offer to introduce us to Maria and act as interpreter on the day it was offered, before he had a chance to reflect and reconsider—which he obviously had done on the second and third occasions Anne and I mentioned wanting to take him up on his kind suggestion.

His excuses were masterpieces of mysterious obfuscation: “Maria has not been around recently”; “No one seems to know where Maria is”; “Her neighbor told me she was in, but no one answered the door”; “I think she has been ill” (a case of the physician not being able to heal herself? Or maybe that didn't apply to a “traditional healer”?).

We realized that something had obviously happened, and that Giuseppe was now very anxious to forget his suggestion and his participation in this whole strange affair as quickly as possible. As a perfectionist of polite procrastination and the pregnant pause, he explained: “You know, I don't think I would make such a very good translator. My English is not so good really…”; “You know I have a feeling that maybe Maria doesn't want to meet with us.” And the real clincher: “To be truthful, I'm not sure it would be a good idea at all to meet with her.”

I was tempted to challenge him and ask him why the change of heart, but Anne suggested (with yet another of her quick but full-of-meaning glances) that we should liberate the poor man from his obviously ill-considered offer—which we did as politely as we could. Something along the lines of: “Well, never mind. Maybe next time, when we both come back to Aliano.”

The relief on his face was an essay in instant psychological destressing. All his little worry lines vanished, and he once again became the smiling, benign, and generous-spirited man we'd first met and liked so much. He searched around in the drawers under his desk and produced a copy of Aurelio Lepre's
Mussolini L'Italiano,
which he insisted we keep as a gift “because you have both shown much interest in the life of this important man of Italian history.” The photograph on the book's dust jacket showed the bull-jowled, thick-necked dictator posing in his familiar hands-on-hips, head-back-in-rhetoric-ready manner, and wearing one of his self-designed lapel-less uniforms criss-crossed with leather straps and bound at the waist by an enormous cummerbund-thick leather-and-brass belt. I don't remember our being particularly interested in this oddity of history. More like dismayed by the calamities he had
inflicted upon his countrymen. However, we accepted the gift and had started to thank him, but he was back in his “anything you need” delivery mode, emphasizing that all we had to do was pop into the bank and he would drop everything and help us in any way possible with anything. And oh, by the way, please would we join him and his family for lunch next Sunday at Bar Centrale at one o'clock because he had told them all about us and they would love to meet us….

Maria was never mentioned again.

And what was odd, too, was the reluctance of anyone else in the village to act as go-between with the elusive lady. Once again, the responses ran the gamut from the offhand “She's never home” and “I'm not sure where she lives now” to the more direct “She's not a very nice person”; “She can be very dangerous if you're not careful”; and “She'll give you
malocchio
[the evil eye]”. One particular response from someone who had been adamant at dismissing “all that nonsense about Maria and her special powers” was truly surprising: “Listen, it's better you don't get involved with these…things.”

“But what things?” we asked. “You said it was all nonsense.”

“Oh yes, of course, and I believe that. But others think differently. She doesn't frighten me. Never! But other people are very nervous…cautious…and well, for your own sakes, maybe you should just…not try to meet her…for just now.”

Stranger and stranger. But Anne decided that, as far as she was concerned, she'd rather “forget the whole silly thing and get on with enjoying our life here in the village.” I said something like, that's fine with me, but it really wasn't, despite Ann Cornelisen's sensible commentary on modern-day witchcraft in her book
Torregreca:

Despite the apparent declining faith in witches, one dark evening on the way back from the bakery with one of those “medium”—only eighteen inches in diameter—loaves, I thought I'd just saunter past the house near the bank where I'd been told Maria lived.

The air had a slight chill to it. I climbed up through the shadowy, poorly lit cobblestone alleys. No one seemed to be around, at least not in front of me, but twice as I turned to look back after hearing sounds behind me, I was sure I saw doors crack open and then suddenly close.