Seasons in Basilicata (9 page)

“Three things only,” he said. “I buy the freshest baby calamari I can get. I slice them and let them sit in a mix of sea salt, water, and fresh lemon juice. Then I dry them and toss them in durum flour and fry when the oil is just beginning to smoke. And that's all.”

“No eggs in the batter?” I asked. “No salt, pepper, or spices?”

He leaned forward, gripped my arms, and said, “Simplicity. Is love for the thing you cook, not how clever you cook. Simplicity is love! And love makes your cooking sing!” (All of which sounds so much better in Italian.)

Meeting the Professor

On the third day I decided it was time to get serious and learn more about the city and Carlo Levi's links with it. I was frustrated at constantly finding Matera's Carlo Levi Center locked up and guarded by officious uniformed characters who seemed to take great delight in telling people to buzz off. So, I decided to seek out the director of the place and tell him what I thought of his off-limits center and his guards. Instead I found myself in a delightful phone conversation with a gracious gentleman, Professor Nicolà Strammiello, who suggested we meet so he could show me around the institution he had founded more than twenty-three years ago.

I saw him approaching long before he spotted me. I couldn't miss him, really. He had a distinct don's way of walking, measured and flowing, with his long, elegant camel's-hair coat wafting cloak-
like around his calves. He looked distinguished, appropriately professorial, and yet rather jaunty, with his tall, lean frame, trilby hat set at a rakish angle, and bright scarlet tartan-pattern scarf tied like an ascot around his long, ramrod-straight neck.

The Professor moved closer to my bench by the
libreria
(book-store) but he still hadn't seen me. His eyes seemed to move hazily from his meticulously shined shoes to somewhere high above the pantiled rooftops of the
corso.
He looked deep in thought—presumably deep professorial thought—and seemed oblivious to the passing scene. Not that there was much scene passing at the time, but he was oblivious to it anyway.

And, as I was about to rise and introduce myself, I experienced a sudden thwack of intense déjà vu.

“Look, look!” something inside me cried out in joy and surprise. “This isn't the Professor at all but someone you used to love more than any other person you were aware of, perhaps even more than your own parents.” It was someone I had also lost—abruptly, cruelly—to a sudden heart attack when he was in his late seventies and I was ten. I'd wept then as I'd never wept before. He had been my special friend, my only real grown-up friend, and I felt it was all so unfair. He was the kindest, gentlest man I'd ever known. We used to talk together, like equals, as we sat eating the delicious tomatoes he grew in his hothouse at the bottom of his meticulously preened garden in Yorkshire.

The Professor was my grandfather! George Herbert Marchant. A serious businessman, director of his own modest copper and bronze foundry (an enterprise that later failed), proud owner of a magnificent Alvis limousine (“next best to a Bentley,” he used to insist, “but less showy”), and lover of the good life—good food, good music, and good conversations (even those held with his ever-curious and rather rambunctious grandson). My parents were always begging him to “please stop encouraging the child” when he and I wandered off together to explore the nooks and crannies of his garden or sat side by side, looking at
National Geographic
magazines, his favorite “good read” and, hence, mine at the time. And together we dreamed of faraway places.

“You're putting far too many ideas into David's impressionable little head,” my mother would reprimand him. “He now says he wants to spend his life traveling all over the world!” (Ironic, eh?) And my grandfather, who was actually a rather quiet, shy man of gracious manners who rarely raised his soft voice above a melodious, meditative whisper, would smile mischievously, accept the reprimand with a good-natured shrug, and ask, “So, what's for dinner?” or “Have you seen my new roses?” or “Is the wine open yet?”

The image of my grandfather grew stronger as I walked up to the Professor and reached out to shake his hand. That long, gentle face, a little jowly and striated with tiny veins, the slightly purple nose, that mischievous half-smile, those eyes—soft hazel with the faintest haze of blue around the pupils—and then his hand. It was too much. I was trying to express my pleasure at meeting this stranger, and yet I felt as if I were shaking hands with my grandfather, feeling the same silky smoothness of his tissue-thin skin and seeing the delicate veins of his hands showing quite clearly through the almost translucent flesh, his manicured nails, with their mauve-colored auras. And wanting to hug him!

I was so utterly gobsmacked by these bizarre sensations—deep affection, anger at his having left me so abruptly, near tears of relief at seeing him again, joy at that conspiratorial smile of his that seemed to say, “just between us, isn't this a wonderful, zany, beautiful world we live in?” Best of all was that gentle face, with its almost Buddha-like aspect of calm contentment and pleasure at seeing me again after such a long, long time.

Fortunately, I was able to get through the “so very pleased you could spare the time” prelude without hugs or tears or laughter or anything else that might have revealed to this man the odd mix of emotions I was feeling.

The Professor responded just as my grandfather would have done, with a beatific smile, warm, shining eyes, a gracious nod of acknowledgment, and a slow, soft homily about the pleasure being all his and please excuse his English and how nice it was to be outside on such a splendid day of warm sunshine and blue sky.

I had to avert my eyes. The sensations were still too strange and eerie. This is not Grandpa, stupid! I told myself, so start thinking and talking about something else before you make a complete idiot of yourself and become a real
scemo
(one of little intelligence) in the middle of Matera's main street.

M
ATERA MONTAGE

I suggested we stroll to an adjoining terrace overlooking the southerly of the two amphitheater-like
Sassi
districts and began asking him about the history and ongoing restoration of this unique masterpiece of organic “architecture without architects.”

And that was the right thing to do, because it got my mind off this beguiling reincarnation and encouraged the Professor to expound on the city and its famous
Sassi
at length, eliminating most of the preconceptions I'd gleaned from careful (or so I thought) research.

No, he told me, in measured, eloquent English, the original cave dwellings on the opposite face of the vast gorge that formed an abrupt, dramatic boundary to the city were not Neolithic, as many claimed, but actually Paleolithic, dating from 10,000
B.C.
Matera, he emphasized, is one of the oldest cities in Europe. And no, most of the buildings in the two adjoining bowl-like
Sassi
districts on our side of the gorge were not, in fact, caves, as misleading guidebooks claimed, but freestanding structures built close to, but rarely into, the rock face.

And yes, it was true that some of the present houses were caves with façades added on, but most of the caves had actually been used originally as shelters for religious hermits and as churches, and later as storage areas—
cantine
—for livestock, wines, and preserved vegetables and meats. And no, it was not commonplace in Carlo Levi's day for homes to be occupied by both people
and
livestock. That practice had always been vastly overexaggerated by those wishing to denigrate the Mezzogiorno and deride the way of life of its poorer
terroni
inhabitants.

“Because, you see, you must understand,” he said, with full professorial emphasis on the
must,
“Matera has always been a place of great wealth. Just look at our shops, our churches, our museums today. We are not a poor city at all. The whole of that vast empty plateau you see beyond the gorge—we call it
le Murge
—is one of the largest wheat-growing areas in Italy today. And we have always, in history, been an important place for mills and for trading; even the Greeks and Romans traded together here. The Greeks, as I'm sure
you already know, founded a number of important cities along the coasts of Basilicata and Calabria. This was part of Magna Graecia, and today we still have some ruins left at Croton, Sybari—home of those very indulgent Sybarites—Locri, Taranto, Metaponto, and others. The best ruins are at Metaponto—if you can find them! A beautiful temple—you must see. Virgil, Ovid, Pindar the poet, and Horace: they all loved the landscape of the South. And Pythagoras. His school of philosophy was founded in Croton in 531
B.C.
And even when the Normans occupied the city in the eleventh century they granted it very special privileges and made it an even more wealthy place.”

On he went, this true Matero-phile, demolishing so many of my impressions and cutting to the core of fact with such precision that I felt it was time to forget all about his resemblance to my grandfather and start to challenge some of his professorial authoritativeness…delicately, of course. The Professor not only was a gracious man but he also had a mischievous glint in his eye that seemed to invite spirited, but scrupulously polite, debate.

“I understood that Carlo Levi was so incensed by the inhuman living conditions of the Materani down in the
Sassi
that he triggered a whole new attitude toward the problems of the Mezzogiorno,” I said as forcefully as I could. “They even say he managed to have much of the area closed and public housing built for the impoverished population. Good housing—well planned, with lots of air and open space.”

The Professor smiled, stroked my arm affectionately, gave one of those odd “devil's horns” (
corno
) gestures (a closed fist with index and pinkie fingers extended and wiggled as a protection against “the evil eye”), and said, “Aha! An admirer of Levi, I see. Well, in that case I have something to show you in my center.” He pointed down the street to the elegant façade of Palazzo Lanfranchi, a mid–seventeenth-century seminary, part of which was now being used as Matera's Carlo Levi Center.

“Ah, yes, I've been there before, but it's always closed for restoration.”

“Ah, yes, the restoration. Of course. A long process.”

“How much longer, do you think?”

He leaned forward conspiratorially, gave another one of his wiggling
corno
signs, looked around to make sure there were no eavesdroppers, rubbed his thumb and forefinger together in the universal “it's all about money” gesture, and whispered, “Who can say? You know what I mean? Who can say, eh?” He ended by tapping a finger on his cheek just below his left eye (the popular Italian
furbizia
gesture indicating conspiratorial insights).

But this time, despite the “ongoing restoration,” I was able to enter the modest rooms of the center and its small conference hall and library. “And now, the best room of all,” said the Professor, leading me by the arm across half-completed flooring into a large cryptlike space and pointing at an enormous series of ten-foot-high painted panels extending over sixty feet along one of the walls.

“So, tell me what you think of this!” he gushed, his eyes twinkling.

And there it was: Carlo Levi's most notorious and skillful artwork, his
Lucania '61,
painted for the Turin “Italia '61” Exposition—a centenary celebration of Italian unity—and regarded by many as one of his most blatantly strident and socially condemning of all his works.

Its impact was overwhelming, so great in fact that I couldn't absorb it all at once. I had to study it segment by segment, guided by the loquacious Professor, whose enthusiasm for this huge masterwork knew no bounds. Many of the finer subtleties and graphic jibes at local politicians and the omnipresent “Luiginis” (Levi's term for “middle-class petty power parasites”) were lost on me. However, its ultrarealistic depiction of the appalling living conditions of the
terroni
in Matera and the surrounding hill villages, the furor of outrage and protest by such writer-philosopher-orators as Rocco Scotellaro, one of Levi's closest friends, and the fear and trepidation on the faces of the regional powerbrokers at the possibility of revolution and retribution, all burst from the canvas like riotous explosions. And Levi's choice of colors—from the dark hovels filled with even darker coteries of black-clad widows to the glaring scorch of
the summer sun on the bodies of bone-weary peasants to the vibrant hues of the angry crowds—reflected perfectly the range of moods and powerful actions he intended to portray.

Great art speaks, and this masterwork spoke volumes of almost biblical length and import. I left the room dizzied by the scope and power of the work.