The Pillars of Hercules

by Paul Theroux

  Spivs, little old women in black, nuns whose noses were longer than their bonnets, salesmen with crates, and fussing couples got on at Catanzaro, which was a good-sized town among ferocious-looking cliffs of dusty clay. After the desolate grandeur of the great sweeping fields and valleys, littered with stones, the hills near Cutro were so scored with erosion they seemed covered with heavy folded drapes of clay. The redeeming feature was the glittering sea; no waves, no swell, just placid water nudging and sloshing at this arid edge of Italy.

  Crotone was a port with fields and factories around it, and a statue of the Virgin at the station. Cape Colonna just at the south side of town was also known as Capo di Nau, a corruption of the Greek word naos, meaning temple. The Greek Temple of Hera, made up of forty-eight marble columns, had stood on the headland for hundreds of years, but was torn down in a fit of militant piety in the sixteenth century by the Bishop of Crotone. The columns were then broken up and used to build the bishop’s palace. The earthquake of 1783, which had devastated this whole area and much of Sicily, knocked down the palace, and the remainder of the temple was used to strengthen Crotone’s harbor. Many of those marble slabs were still in place.

  “This squalid little town of today has nothing left from antiquity.” What George Gissing said of Crotone could have been said of hundreds of places in Sicily and Calabria.

  The priest got off at Crotone; a quarreling couple and an old woman took his place in my compartment. As soon as we drew out of Crotone a nun ambushed us, passing out holy cards: the Virgin on one side, a calendar of holy days on the reverse. I accidentally dropped my card and before I could retrieve it the old woman pounced and snatched it up, then brought it to her mouth and kissed it, in a kind of greedy veneration. She looked up at me and handed it over—reproachfully, I thought. I kept the card as a bookmark in Frankenstein and for weeks afterward, whenever I came across it, I thought of that old woman rescuing it from the indignity of a train floor and planting a kiss on it as a way of propitiating the Madonna. I saw stranger manifestations of religion in this trip but I remembered that gesture for its passion.

  The starkness, the emptiness, the yellow-gray slopes, and stones, the stucco houses, the bare hills matching them, the exhausted-looking soil: except for the vineyards places like Strongoli and Torre Melissa looked like places I had seen in rural China, in the poverty-stricken regions of Gansu and Ningxia, just as poor and as hard to till.

  The sea was almost irrelevant here, and it was as though Mediterranean culture did not penetrate beyond the narrow beach. The towns were a little inland or else on hills, with fortifications. There were no fishing boats for miles here, no boats at all. No marina, no docks, nothing that hinted at recreation. It was too cold for swimming but even so no one walked along the beach. So the blue coast was more like a barrier, a use I saw it serve in other places on my trip: the Mediterranean as a moat.

  Great snow-covered peaks rose behind Sibari—wholly unexpected, like the first glimpse I had gotten of the snowy crater of Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. Mountains seemed so unlikely, and the snow was an added bonus. I looked at my map and guessed it to be Monte Pollino, seventy-four hundred feet high.

  And Sibari itself, this insignificant railway station in a wide dusty valley in Calabria, deserted by peasants (who had fled to Naples or Brooklyn), where no one got on or off the train, on the Gulf of Taranto, where all I remember was the glimpse of a snowy peak—this place that passed in the blink of an eye, was once the rich Greek town of Sybaris, whose inhabitants were so hoggishly self-indulgent, living in such luxury, that their lifestyle had given a new word to the language, sybaritic.

  I alighted at Metaponto, and even accustomed as I was to small and squalid places, I was surprised by the smallness of Metaponto.

  My intention was to leave here as soon as possible. I had another book in mind, that I had read years ago, that filled me with a sense of mission. Metaponto was the nearest coastal town to Aliano, which was the scene of Carlo Levi’s brilliant memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli. The title of the book is slightly confusing. Levi was quoting a local maxim in Aliano: the point was that Christ stopped at Eboli, fifty miles away (near Salerno), and never got as far as Aliano, in the benighted province of Basilicata, where the people regarded themselves as heathens and savages, living on a crumbling hill.

  Carlo Levi, a Florentine Jew and a medical doctor, was banished to Aliano in 1935 because of his antifascist views (the Abyssinian War had just begun: Italian machine guns against African spears), and in this obscure and distant village (Aliano is called Gagliano in the book) he stayed for an entire year. He languished under a casual form of house arrest, confino. There was no chance of escape: Aliano was the Italian equivalent of Siberia. Levi kept a diary, he painted pictures, he attended to medical problems of the people in the village, and after he left he wrote his book, which is a masterful evocation of life in a remote place. He got to know everyone in the village. The book is unclassifiable in the best sense; it is travel, anthropology, philosophy; most of all, it is close and compassionate observation.

  I had been avoiding inland places, but Aliano was near enough to the Mediterranean shoreline to be on my route. I wanted to go there, just to see it. In The Inner Sea, Robert Fox wrote of a trip he took to Aliano in 1983, and of the mayor, Signora Santomassimo, saying that Donna Caterina “is still alive, over ninety—you can hear her shrieking at the moon on some nights, mad as a hatter.”

  Now, twelve years later, the old woman was almost certainly dead, but that compelling description roused me. What about the rest of them? What of the village itself which is such a strong presence in Carlo Levi’s book? There were other details that I wondered about, too. For example, there was a fascinating description in the book of a church at the nearby village of Sant’Arcangelo which contained the actual horns of a dragon. People went to look at the horns. The dragon had terrorized the whole region: “it devoured the peasants, it carried off their daughters, filled the land with its pestiferous breath, and destroyed the crops.” The strongest lord of the region, Prince Colonna of Stigliano, had the encouragement of the Virgin Mary (“Take heart, Prince Colonna!” the Virgin said). He slew the dragon, and cut off its head and built the church to enshrine the dragon’s horns.

  From Metaponto I could easily reach Sant’Arcangelo and see the dragon’s horns. It was only about fifteen miles to Aliano. And I was lucky to have chosen to get off at Metaponto, because in the summer it welcomed tourists, and although the summer was far off, there were facilities here that did not exist in the places I had come through.

  By the time I had found a car to rent, the day was almost gone.

  “You can see the ruins,” Mr. Gravino said.

  “I want to drive to Aliano.”

  “It’s a very small place,” he said. “You might be disappointed.”

  “If it is very small I will be very happy,” I said.

  I spent the night in Metaponto and early the next morning drove up the flat valley to Pisticci and Stigliano (where the dragon-slayer had lived) and beyond. It was a sunny day, and there were green fields beside the shrunken river, and yet the sense of remoteness here was powerful, not merely because the region was so rural and empty, but more because of the condition of the houses, which looked very poor and neglected. A branch line train had once run through here but it was gone and the stations were ruined. Many houses were in a state of disrepair, many had been abandoned. It was that look of old Ireland you see in book plates that show the effects of the potato famine—collapsed roofs, dead animals, weedy fields. This was also a region that many people had migrated from and no one else had moved in to reoccupy. It was both the prettiest and certainly the poorest area I had seen so far in the Mediterranean.

  It was also a land almost without signposts, and the signs that existed were unhelpful, directing me to the road for the distant cities of Potenza and Salerno.

  I saw three men on an embankment and when I slowed down I saw that they car
ried long worn poles. They were goatherds, two old men and a young man in his twenties. Their goats were grazing in the meadow just below the road.

  “I am looking for Aliano.”

  “Up there.”

  They indicated a cluster of old buildings on a crest of a steep dry hill.

  Then I asked them about their goats—was there enough grazing here?—just small talk, because I wanted to hear their voices, I wanted to study their faces. They were as Levi described the peasants hereabouts—short, dark, with round heads, large eyes, thin lips. “Their archaic faces do not stem from the Romans, Greeks, Etruscans, Normans, or any of the other invaders who have passed through their land, but recall the most Italic types.” He goes on: “They have led exactly the same life since the beginning of time, and History has swept over them without effect.”

  Aliano exactly crowned the hill. I had not expected it to be so high up, but of course the height of a village here did not indicate its importance. The poorer and weaker peasants put their villages in these almost inaccessible places. All around it was dry light-brown soil, and some olive trees with grayish leaves and gnarled trunks, and tussocky grass.

  A narrow winding road led to the summit and, climbing it, I could see that the village was not at the top of the hill, but rather spread on the ridge between two steep ravines.

  Ahead, an old woman laden with two pails, a shovel, and a bag of freshly picked spinach was laboring up the road. She wore a kerchief on her head, and a black skirt, and an apron—the uniform of the peasant in the deep south of rural Italy. I slowed down and saw that she was perspiring, gasping from the effort of carrying all that paraphernalia.

  “Please, I am looking for the house of Dr. Levi.”

  “It is on the other side of the village.”

  “Far?”

  “Yes. Very far.”

  “Do you want a ride?”

  “No,” she said, not out of pride or obstinacy, I guessed, but because of the impropriety of it. She was a poor old woman carrying more than she could manage, but still it was wrong for her to ride with a strange man. Levi had something to say about that too. As a young unmarried man he had to be careful not to cause a scandal by appearing to compromise the virtue of an Aliano woman. That meant he could never be alone with any woman.

  The houses were built so close to the edge of the hill that the walls of some of them were flush with the sides of the cliffs. Between the upper part of the town and the lower part there was a small square and at its edge a precipice, still known as “the Fossa del Bersagliere, because in earlier days a captured bersagliere [infantryman] from Piedmont had been thrown into the ditch by brigands.”

  The old woman had said “Very far,” but I knew it was nothing like that. I left my car at the edge of the upper village and walked down the narrow street. Passing cave entrances that had doors on them, I thought of China again, how I had seen people near Datong, in a landscape just like this, living in the hollowed-out sides of mountains. But these were wine cellars.

  An old man in a cloth cap sitting on a wooden folding chair near the main square smiled at me and said hello. We talked awhile, and then I told him what I was looking for.

  “Yes. Levi’s house is down there,” he said. “There is a sign on it. There is a museum near it.”

  As we were talking, another man approached. He was small, wrinkled, smiling, welcoming. He was Giuseppe DeLorenzo. His friend was Francesco Grimaldi.

  “Grimaldi is a good name,” I said. “Your family rules Monaco.”

  “My family is all dead,” he said. But he liked the joke. “That is another family.”

  They offered to show me where Carlo Levi’s house was, and so we walked to the lower village, on the other part of the saddle, on the ridge. I was aware of being very high, of being able to see the plain stretching south to Metaponto and the sea. We were on a steep pedestal of dry mud and brush and from the street that connected the two crumbling parts of Aliano you could look straight down the Fossa del Bersagliere, 150 feet to a ledge of olive trees, and then another drop.

  “You call this a gorge?” I said, using the word gola.

  “No. A burrone.” And he grinned at me. When I checked I saw that this word might have come from the Arabic burr, for land or wild slopes.

  We walked down the hot cobbled street, the hot sun beating on our heads. Flowers all over the valley gave it color and perspective, especially the poppies, which glowed a brilliant crimson against the dust.

  We were passing some squarish crumbling houses.

  “You have to see this,” Francesco said. “This is the historic part of Aliano. It is very old.”

  “The palazzo,” Giuseppe said.

  Another crumbling house.

  “The signorina’s palazzo.”

  “Where is the signorina?” I took this to be the Donna Caterina, “mad as a hatter,” who was said to bay at the moon.

  “Dead. The whole family is dead.”

  “What was the family’s name?”

  “The family Scardacione.”

  We walked down the cobbled street, to Piazza Garibaldi, though “piazza” gives the wrong impression—this square was hardly bigger than the floor of a two-car garage—to DeLorenzo’s house. The house was ancient, a section of cracked stucco attached to a row of stucco boxes. His cat yowled at me and crawled into a strangely made clay contraption that looked like a large birdhouse fixed to the wall of the house.

  “What’s that?”

  “A chimney.”

  He reached over and removed a large brick from under the shelf where the cat had taken cover.

  “See? It’s an oven. For making bread.”

  Now I saw that it was a small scorched fireplace. The cat was curled up on the shelf where the loaf was placed; the chimney flue was connected to the fire pit, where Giuseppe was replacing the brick. It was an artifact from another age, and brought to mind the hard, simple labor of bread-making that also involved someone toting faggots of wood to use as fuel. I had seen small blackened bread-ovens similar to this in Inca villages in the Andes.

  “It’s very old,” I said.

  Giuseppe made the Italian gesture of finger-flipping that meant “An incredible number of years—you have no idea.”

  “When was the last time it was used for bread?”

  “This morning,” Giuseppe said, and then barked an unintelligible word.

  A wooden shutter flew open and banged against the wall of the house. A woman, obviously Signora DeLorenzo, stuck her head out of the window and groaned at her husband, who made another demand, unintelligible to me.

  The woman was gone for a moment and then appeared and handed down from the window an iron key ten inches long.

  I greeted the old woman. She jerked her head and clicked her teeth. Meaning: I acknowledge your presence but I am much too distracted to return your greeting.

  “Follow me,” Giuseppe said.

  We went down the sloping cobbled street to a narrow road that lay against the steep hillside. A little fence and a steel gate surrounded a weedy garden and a grape arbor. Francesco dragged the gate open.

  “A doctor came here,” Giuseppe said, slotting the key into a wooden door in the hillside. “He was like you. Just traveling. He told me a good thing. ‘Worlds can’t meet worlds, but people can meet people.’ ”

  “That’s very nice.”

  “Very wise,” Francesco said. “See, worlds are big. Worlds can’t meet worlds.”

  “But people can meet people,” Giuseppe said, entering the cavernous room.

  “So who was this wise doctor?”

  “Just a traveler!” Giuseppe beckoned me into the dark room.

  It was cool inside, with a musty earthen smell of stale wine and damp dust and decayed wood. As I asked what it was my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness and I saw some large wooden casks set on racks.

  “It is a cantina,” he said, gesturing in the vinegary coolness. He was using the word in its precise sense, for cella
r. “In the Aliano dialect we call this una grota”—a cave.

  Apart from the six wine casks, there was also a wine press that had been taken apart, and a great deal of dusty paraphernalia—rubber tubes, glasses, bottles, pitchers, buckets.

  “What do you call this?” I said, tapping a cask.

  “In Italian it’s a botte, but we call it a carachia,” Giuseppe said, using a word that was not in any Italian dictionary. “Please be seated.”

  Francesco drew off a pitcher of wine and with this he filled three glasses. We toasted. Francesco downed his in two gulps. Giuseppe and I took our time.

  Sitting at a rough wooden table, in the semi-darkness of the little cave, the bright white day glaring in the doorway, I asked the men their ages. Francesco was seventy-two, DeLorenzo was seventy. They were little boys at the time Carlo Levi had lived as an exile in the village.

  “You must have seen Carlo Levi,” I said.

  “Oh, yes,” Francesco said. “I remember him well. I was a small boy at school.”

  “Have you read his book?”

  “Yes, yes,” both of them said.

  I had a strong feeling this was not true, yet as it was the book that had put Aliano on the map, they had a civic duty to say that they had read it, even if they had not.

  “He was a doctor,” I said. “Did he ever take care of you or your parents?”

  “Doctor? He was no doctor,” Francesco said, and poured more wine for us.

  We toasted again, and I recalled how on his first day in the village, and almost the first page of the book, Levi was asked to cure a man stricken with malaria. Levi asked why the man was in such a bad way (he died soon after) and he was told that there was no doctor in the village. So, in addition to being an exile, he was Aliano’s doctor.