Seasons in Basilicata (59 page)

“And it's working?”

By way of reply, Roberto swung off the highway on the outskirts of the village of Bella. Suddenly, there before us, stood a huge, meticulously renovated Lombardy-style palazzo.

“No, no, not palazzo. Stables,” Roberto said. “Built after World War One for the Ministry of Agriculture. The minister was from the North, so he chose this unusual style. We have full teaching and conference facilities here and twenty bedrooms. And over there…” He pointed over to the left of the broad lawn campus. “We have pens for the animals—mainly goats, but some Merino sheep, too, and a small herd of buffalo.” And there they all were—scores of farm animals frisking, sleeping, and pursuing amorous activities in the warm afternoon sun.

“And we have a dairy, cheese-making plant, an aging ‘cave,' and many offices and research facilities. We do a lot of research on animal breeds, but mainly on cheese composition—studying flavor and aroma terpenes to see how to create the best tastes, aging methods, different types of rennet, and improved cheese-making with such other traditional cheeses like
cacioricotta,
made from mixing goat's and ewe's milk. Also we have revived
pecorino di filiano,
an aged hard, sheep cheese; we hope to get a DOP (
Denominazione di Origine Protetta
) certificate for that. Oh, and of course we have our big success in Moliterno, a lovely hill village to the south of Potenza. They once used to age pecorino there in perfect cellar caves. It was very famous in New York and France a hundred years ago, but it faded away. But now we have been able to open up the cellars again, and our trainers are supervising the aging, for years, and hope to make it famous again!”

All in all his institute was a most impressive establishment, particularly the aging cave dug into the campus hillside and packed with dozens of different kinds of goat cheeses. (The distinctive “ammonia” aroma remained on my clothes for days.)

But one room made me lose my journalistic cool—not that I have much of that left these days. It was the Cheese Analysis Examination Room, which consisted of two lines of enclosed booths facing a narrow central passage. Each booth had a little trap door, which could be raised in order to pass through samples of cheeses to be analyzed by students in terms of their appearance, texture, aroma, flavor, strength, and consistency. I tried to imagine twenty or so students—some of whom would be burly hill farmers who rarely left their fields—nervously waiting behind their little trap doors at exam time
to be fed those morsels of subtly different cheeses. A sort of Pink Floyd's
The Wall
meets Pavlov's dogs.

Well,
I
thought it was amusing anyway.

Roberto was chuckling at his own little joke. “You know, I am thinking: These traditional cheeses we are making are so good, so rich, maybe we will have to put a warning sticker on them like cigarette packets—‘Danger! If you eat too much of these delicious products of great quality it may be destructive to your health.'”

“Y'know, your job could be pretty detrimental to your health, too. Look at all the battles you're fighting with the big boys—all those researchers fiddling with DNA and creating new animal species; intensive feeding factories with herb-less fodder in ‘industrial dairies'; widespread hormone and antibiotic injections; the obligatory processes of pasteurization and ‘processing'; that depressing McDonald's ‘One Taste Worldwide' mentality; mass distribution systems not geared to local ‘specialized' products; the homogenization tendency of the EU and all those other bureaucratic regulators….”

“Oh, yes, yes, I know,” Roberto said cheerfully, “and many more. But you know, every time I eat one of our cheeses or see one of our farmers start to make real money with his own traditional cheeses, I feel very happy. And I agree with Schlosser. Do you know his book about America,
Fast Food Nation
? He condemns the plague of the industrialized agricultural system and says we must all push for the ‘re-localization of food.'”

“Especially in ‘marginal areas' like Basilicata?”

“David!” he said, laughing and giving me another one of his extravagant hand, arm, and upper torso gestures. “You must remember—there is no marginality in Basilicata!”

At Last
—Carnevale!

A truly climactic “celebration of the old ways”—very old ways in this case—began a few days later in Aliano. And there was certainly nothing of Roberto's
marginale
about these festivities. Weeks of gleeful anticipation and secretive preparation erupted into the great annual romp
and communal “roastings” of the pre-Lent
Carnevale.
It came with a flurry of devilish masks; skeletal-white figures; rowdy bands of wandering musicians; sudden dousings of thrown water, flour, and foamy squirtings; all suffused with a feral spirit of surprise, shock, and colorful chaos.

For Anne and me at least (despite the dousings and the squirtings), it was a key event of the year, which wove together so many of the individual threads of our experiences and our gleaned understanding of life in our little village. It was a riotous melding of the “dark side” elements that had added a strange piquancy to our lives, with the villagers' irrepressible spirit of mischief, fun, and pride in their own distinct folkloric and
terroni
heritage.

Other towns nearby celebrated the
Carnevale
in very different ways. Cirigliano offered to its proudly insular villagers a mysteriously intimate, alley-by-alley procession of musicians, oddly dressed characters reflecting village legends and folktales, frantic dancing to accordions, drums, and flutes, and feasting on time-treasured culinary oddities such as sheep's head, pig trotters, and tripe (all of which tasted far better than they sounded).

Stigliano's
Carnevale
was by far the most extrovertedly flamboyant, featuring processions of costumed dancers and musicians and half a dozen enormous and bizarre floats, including a Harry Potter extravaganza; a marvelously satirical Bush–Saddam Hussein creation by some of Sebastiano's teachers, with moving caricatured heads the size of weather balloons; and a witchy peasant tableau inspired, so it seemed, by Levi's vast
Lucania '61
artwork in Matera. Then came something that resembled a macabre graveyard scene, with skull and skeleton-like figures rising and falling and scaring the bejesus out of the children, who clung frantically to their parents in the enormous, laughing and drinking crowds filling the main piazza.

Accettura had a more modest float—just the one—but a highly charged, punkish rock band and frantic dancing kept things lively until the early hours. Giuliano said it was “lotsa fun—like we was all kids again!” Rosa displayed her usual caution but admitted that “it brought everyone together—although it were all a bit daft really.”

But Aliano's
Carnevale,
while certainly modest in comparison to Stigliano's, possessed far deeper and darker elements that reflected the bedrock of ancient
pagani
traditions and attitudes there. Levi's description of his own experiences during that unique festival seem as valid today as they were in 1935:

While the degree of repression and “enslavement” had obviously been much modulated since the thirties, there certainly remained a spirit of “devils let loose” in our little community.

They were everywhere. Frighteningly bedecked in garish, devil-like masks, with enormous horns and swirling
cappelloni
(headdresses) of colored ribbons, hundreds of them to each mask, they tore around the piazza and Via Roma, chasing the villagers with sticks and whips, all the way down the
corso
and into Piazza Garibaldi. Shouting and screaming like the mad animals they were, they threatened everyone with fiendish clubs, ridiculed the village's higher-echelon “Don Luigis” (a permissible activity apparently for
this brief and bizarre rite), and encouraged youngsters to join them in their pernicious pranks, water-dousings, flour-throwings, and squirt-can antics.

The village was in chaos despite the laughter and exaggerated screams of the devils' victims. Cars, doors, and windows became smothered in squirted goo; dogs and cats ran frantically for cover, cowering in shadows; shopkeepers closed early to protect their precious hordes of goodies; and the local police kept well out of the way behind the thick, wooden doors of the
comune
(town hall).

Even the good Don Pierino, usually prime instigator of and participant in village festivities, was nowhere to be seen. Giuseppina told us he'd “gone to Rome to see the Pope.” Vincenzo Uno whispered that “the poor Don hates all this
pagani
stuff and stays inside watching videos.” Aldo, at the Capriccio, insisted that “he'll be keeping record of all peoples being
pagani
!”

Incanto,
that dark witchy Alianese enchantment, floated thick through the streets and the shadowy alleys. Despite the tongue-in-cheek antics and attitudes of some of the villagers, Anne and I sensed that the
Carnevale
reached deep into their collective consciousness, releasing memories and myths of once-strident peasant rebellions against the stranglehold of the local
padroni
and “petty tyrants.” Levi called it a “parody of freedom,” and indeed in his day this was the one occasion in the year when the “repressed ferocity” of the
terroni
could be released in a tumult of cutting satire, overt disrespect, and even occasional physical confrontations. The local phrase “
a Carnevale ogni scherzo vale
” says it all: “Everything is permissible at the Carnival.”

But the borderline between satire and more severe actions is sometimes thin and tenuous. And even today, after all the land reformations and social-assistance systems for the poor and for the Mezzogiorno as a whole, we could sense the ongoing frustrations of the villagers. They knew about all the petty corruption that still nibbled away at village coffers; the disappearance of the youth to the fleshpots of the North and beyond; the dispirited emptying and slow decay of the houses, creating a potential
città fantasma
(ghost town)
where there was once a thriving community; the increasing regularity of funerals for the aging villagers; the strutting popinjay pomposity of the “petty tyrants”; the cushy “early-retirement” scams of the
statali;
the entrenched power of the secretive
gens;
and the black farce of Italian authority from the most mundane village level to the peaks of national political power.

They knew all this and so much more. And they cheered as the devils attacked and parodied the rich and the powerful. And they laughed and shouted at the improvised village
sarcastica
theatrical production, the
Frase,
in the piazza, which ripped the scabs off festering wounds of economic inequality, corrupt justice, avaricious tax collectors, and the moral degradation of social institutions.

We watched that particular event from our terrace along with a
gathering of friends we'd invited over for a thank-you dinner before our imminent departure. Although much of the dialogue was in the local Alianese dialect, we could tell just by watching the expressions on the faces of our friends—Sebastiano, the two Giuseppinas, Bruno, Margherita, Tori, Rosa, Giuliano, Massimo, Antonio, Graziella, and many others—that the scenes being played out on the rickety stage below us were tantamount to rebellion.

A
LIANO
C
ARNEVALE

Afterward, when the play was over, the devils roared about the streets again and the musicians fluted, screeched, and fiddled, and the
cupi-cupi
droned. (This bizarre instrument is played by rubbing a stick through a hole pierced through the center of a hide skin wrapped tightly around the top of a flowerpot-like vessel. It gives off eerie, echoey sounds—something like a bass and drum combined.)