Murder In Matera

by Helene Stapinski

  Valente’s birth certificate said Vita was a weaver. And that Francesco was not present for Valente’s birth. Or for Leonardo’s birth two years later.

  It was with these few meager clues—a few dates and street names—that I did something that surprised even me. I went to Basilicata with my mother and the kids on a long vacation to research that first family story. I left my husband behind, just like Vita had.

  It would be fun, I told myself and my mother. We’ll rent a house in the town of Bernalda. Spend some time on the beach in nearby Metaponto. Eat some gelato. We can poke around a little, and talk to the locals, do some archival research. My mother was seventy-three and had never been to Italy or anywhere, really, and had never tasted gelato. It was time she had an adventure.

  We would be the first in four generations to visit the town of our ancestors, on the arch of Italy’s boot. Vita had left and had never looked back. And neither had her children or grandchildren or even her great grandchildren.

  I had no idea that I would cross the Atlantic again and again, that this trip was the beginning of an odyssey that would take me through ancient painted caves, over green volcanic mountains to dusty archives, to dead ends and the edges of cliffs, and to a valley of death where the drama all began.

  I had no clue about the isolated world I was stepping into, or how long it would actually take to find Vita’s true story, a story more tragic—and eventually more triumphant—than anything I could have imagined.

  How could I have known there was something hidden at the end of my ten-year journey that would change my view of my children altogether, that would make me question my very own identity? That in the end, I would discover one shotgun blast and five dead bodies, most of them belonging to my family?

  Chapter 2

  DARK TO DARK

  I WALKED OUT ONTO THE BALCONY TO CHECK THE HEAT BEFORE the kids were awake, the punishing sun barely making its way over the horizon. From my second-floor perch, with a hand on my hip, I surveyed the neighborhood, which was already stirring, unsmiling men and women quickly getting chores done before the inferno arrived. Women hung laundry and men swept the cobblestones, which were already immaculate.

  Across the street from me, on her own balcony that first morning, was a long-lost cousin. Maria Gallitelli looked up from her humongous laundry pile, wiped her dark brow with the back of her thin, brown arm, noticed me, and waved.

  “Buongiorno,” she said, loudly, and smiled the exact same smile that my cousin Jill had back in New Jersey. Yeah, I thought. She’s a cousin all right.

  “Buongiorno,” I said and smiled back. I told her I was visiting with my mother and two children and doing some family research. Young Maria Gallitelli had two sons and a husband, she said, gesturing inside with her head, so she was always hanging laundry, sentenced to a life of dirty undershirts and mutande—underwear—that would only get bigger and dirtier as her boys grew.

  We chatted for a bit and finally I asked her, in my slow, stunted Italian, if she had ever heard the story of my great-great-grandmother Vita Gallitelli, who, with her husband, Francesco Vena, had been involved in a murder somewhere around here, somewhere in Matera province around the turn of the last century. They had killed someone, possibly in a card game? I raised my dark, bushy eyebrows, hoping she would nod and the details would come spilling out past her thin lips.

  Maria Gallitelli scrunched her prominent Italian nose—a lot like my own prominent Italian nose—and thought for a second. She stuck out her bottom lip and shrugged. “No,” she said, shaking her thick head of short black hair. “I don’t know that story. I never heard it. But I will ask my family.”

  Maria owned a bomboniere shop on the corner, where, between loads of laundry, she sold expensive wedding gifts, the kind that the bride and groom give to their guests, crystal or silver trinkets that cost a small fortune. Her wooden sign, with a big Gallitelli calligraphied across it, hung over the corner and seemed to be a sign from God that I should live on this street, so I had rented this spacious, second-floor apartment in Bernalda, sealing the deal with the landlady with a shot of homemade limoncello.

  Maria and the other locals pronounced the town name “Bare-NAL-da,” with a little trill at the r. It was a perfect name for this bare-bones place still recovering from centuries of poverty and starvation, where life expectancy at the end of the nineteenth century had been thirty-nine years. My first day there I learned that the Basilicata region was also known as Lucania, its original Roman name. And residents were—and still are called—Lucani.

  Bernalda sat on a small hill overlooking the fertile Basento Valley. And now, in the summer of 2004, I’d arrived with my family. In theory it sounded fabulous: live in a small, sun-splashed Italian village with your kids and your mother for a month and research your family’s roots.

  But even on that first day, I noticed a darkness in Bernalda, as if a cloud were pressing down on its gray cobblestone streets and melancholy population. I wasn’t sure if it was something I’d brought with me, like luggage, or if it was some vestige left from the malaria and miseria that had gripped its residents for centuries, a hangover that would take several more generations to shake.

  Our apartment was on the same street where Vita had lived more than a hundred years before, Via Cavour. The name of the street had been on the birth certificate of her oldest son, Valente. It was in the Centro Storico, or historic district, the neighborhood on the edge of town.

  I was thirty-nine (ready for the grave by nineteenth-century standards), around the same age Vita had immigrated to America with her two sons. But I was traveling in the opposite direction with my own two children, Paulina, who was one, and Dean, who was four. And Ma.

  When I looked at my mother, it was like looking in a magic mirror that showed exactly what to expect in thirty years. Along with her work ethic, I shared my mother’s temper, her impatience, her heartburn, her nice legs, thick middle, and face with its smooth, unwrinkled skin.

  I had become who I had become because of her, not just through genetics, but because she took care of me every time I was sick and knew to call the doctor when I had pneumonia at age five. She took care of me when I wasn’t sick, feeding me homemade chicken soup with pastina. She walked me to school every single day and brought me back again, until, at age fourteen, I begged her not to. And then she followed about a block behind me. She always listened to me and hugged me daily, but when I got snotty or did something bad, she yelled at me, in a very loud and scary voice. She found my stash of pot in my room as a teenager and let me know she had. I obeyed her not just because I was afraid of her wrath (which I was) but because she loved me so much, I couldn’t bear to disappoint her. She had given me her best, and expected the best of me, so I gave it. People would say to my mother all the time, “You’re so lucky. You have such great kids.” And she would say, “Luck has nothing to do with it.”

  I tried to follow my mother’s model of motherhood, and so far it seemed to be working. As far as I knew, my children had not inherited the criminal genes in my family and were not turning out to be sociopaths.

  My husband, Wendell, had no criminals in his family. In fact, his great-grandfather had been a district attorney and his grandfather a judge. It was one of the many reasons I had married him, to help balance the larcenous side of my genetic code. Wendell was a newspaper editor, and that summer was helping to cover the Republican National Convention in New York. He would join us the last week of our monthlong trip to make sure we made it back to America and that I didn’t decide to stay here.

  He shouldn’t have worried.

  FROM THE TOWN’S CASTLE WALLS, YOU COULD SEE SILVER-TINGED olive trees and arthritic-looking vineyards and fig trees with those big leaves that Adam and Eve used as underwear. Light green and yellow rolling hills stretched into the distance, ending eight miles away in the flat plane of Metaponto and the Ionian Sea. On the outskirts of town, you could still make out some of the old narrow mule paths, called mulattiere, whic
h the farmers once used to ride to work each day before the sun rose and then back home after it had set. (Buia a buia was the saying, dark to dark.)

  I couldn’t imagine why Vita would trade this country for a city as ugly and industrial as Jersey City. The landscape here was achingly beautiful, but uninhabited, and left you feeling forlorn and uplifted all at once, as if you’d just heard a favorite sad love song on the radio. This landscape made you want to sing sad love songs. Or maybe even write them.

  When you approached Bernalda from the direction of the sea, from the south, as the pirates and invaders had long ago, the first things you noticed were the ginger-colored mother church, Chiesa Madre, which was now closed and under repair, the matching wall, and rounded medieval castle, which was no longer open to anyone.

  These days, no one was out to conquer Bernalda. The few outsiders, like me, typically approached from the north, from either the city of Matera, the provincial capital, thirty-six miles inland, or from Bari, ninety minutes away on the Adriatic Coast, where you could rent a car.

  On that route, you drove through desolate valleys and past badlands-like mountains called calanchi. The isolation and nothingness were interrupted by the occasional hill town hovering in the distance, and finally, by an immense white and red water tower, which looked like a giant poisonous mushroom. The tower was hideously ugly, an awful eyesore that ruined the natural beauty of the landscape but was a point of pride for the Bernaldans. It was their way of saying, “Hey! Look at us! We got water!” They were rightfully proud of their water tower, since running water had only arrived in most homes about fifty years earlier.

  My balcony looked out over the historic district, a maze of cobblestone streets and tiny cavelike houses the color of old bones, some tumbling down. The houses were side by side, crowded together from the days when Saracen pirates and other invaders would launch sudden raids, forcing the frightened population to huddle together for safety. The region’s history of constant attack helped explain the residents’ mistrust of newcomers, including me.

  Most of the twelve thousand people who lived in Bernalda were small and scrappy, like I was, with rough features and black hair and black eyes that darted about nervously and gave you the once-over the first time they spotted you. It was an animal-like quality that I recognized because I had seen it in myself, a searching, aggressive look that said, “I really don’t trust you, so keep your distance. At least until I get to know you better.”

  Bernalda was still rough around the edges. People dumped their garbage over the wall of the city, a small band of local heroin addicts and dealers held court in the most secluded streets of the historic district, and a pack of stray dogs—sad and mangy—loitered not far from the main corso on Via Galileo Galilei.

  Most houses in the district were the size of a walk-in closet, where people had lived in past centuries with their farm animals. When the beasts relieved themselves, a mix of straw and sand or soil was placed on top to absorb the stench. No real soap. No disinfectant. Disease had been rampant: cholera, tuberculosis, trachoma, smallpox. Hunger was a given, malnutrition common. Nearly half of the children born in the mid-1800s in Southern Italy died before the age of five.

  It was the reason our family—and most Italian families—held huge bashes for the baby’s first birthday. It was to celebrate that the baby—miraculously—had made it through the first year of life. In fact, we had had a big party for Paulina with the entire family and all our friends right before we left for Italy. I bought her first baby shoes in the city of Matera, and she took some of her first steps in them on these cobblestone streets.

  Paulina was my secret weapon. She learned within the first few days in Bernalda how to wave the Italian way, palm facing in, scrunching her pudgy fingers up and down. People who would otherwise never talk to me smiled widely and started a conversation because I had Paulina with me. “Bella bambina!” is how they always started the exchange.

  But most of the time, no one was out on the street to even start a conversation.

  WALKING OUTSIDE MIDDAY WAS LIKE STEPPING INTO A PIZZA OVEN. It took approximately three minutes for laundry to dry when hung out on the line. Southern Italy was called the Mezzogiorno, aptly named for the time of day when the sun was highest in the sky. The fields were bleached yellow from a sun so strong it closed all the businesses from 1 to 7 P.M. The whole town retreated home for an epic lunch and nap.

  This was a long siesta compared to the surrounding villages. Even Bernalda’s toothless old women, the anziane, who especially loved Paulina and spent all their time outside on miniature wooden rush-bottomed chairs, pulled them inside their houses the entire afternoon. I soon learned that this siesta was not just in August, but every season in Bernalda, and helped contribute to the townspeople’s reputation among the Lucani as being especially unmotivated.

  Bernalda smelled of burning wheat stubble, as the farmers cleared their fields for the new crop. It was still an agricultural town, though many of the young men refused to work in those fields. Old women still put out woven baskets on straw chairs to sell produce from their latest harvest. That first week melons were in season, especially watermelon. The town was lousy with watermelon. We received three as housewarming presents from our kind, watermelon-plagued neighbors. Then came the figs. A tsunami of figs. Green figs, purple figs, yellow figs, and brown figs, which Paulina ate like candy.

  But the produce chairs were becoming more and more scarce, especially outside this neighborhood. The chairs embarrassed the younger members of the farm families. Farming was beneath them, though unemployment was ridiculously high for the younger population—around 60 percent. Young men preferred to sit in cafés and bemoan the state of Italy’s economy. I couldn’t blame them. It was much cooler under the café umbrellas.

  It was so hot on our first night in town that Dean, Paulina, and I fell asleep on the apartment floor, our faces pressed up against the cool marble tile. I woke up stiff after an hour and placed the kids in their respective playpen and bed, then stayed awake half the night wondering how I would survive this heat, but also how I would ever find Vita’s story.

  I had had visions of arriving and my long-lost relatives clamoring around me—perhaps with watermelons—to tell me their stories, which would jigsaw with what I already knew.

  But it wasn’t like that. Not even close.

  YOUNG MARIA ASKED EVERYONE IN HER GALLITELLI FAMILY ABOUT the murder. She updated me one morning on the street, under the Gallitelli sign, as she was opening up her shop and I was heading out to the market to buy groceries for the day, the first of my many chores.

  “I asked everyone,” she said, shaking her head. “But no one has ever heard this story.” I nodded and frowned. But Maria Gallitelli had a consolation prize for me. She told me to wait and quickly walked inside her apartment, which was next door to the shop. She emerged with the local phone book, a skinny volume she had pulled off a kitchen shelf and now handed to me.

  “Take a look at the other Gallitellis listed here,” she said, thumbing through to the G section. “And the Venas,” she said, flipping to the back. “Maybe they know something.”

  Sixty-one Gallitellis were listed in the phone book. And in Pisticci, the neighboring hill town seven miles away, where my great-grandfather had been born, thirty-five Venas. They were the Smiths of their respective villages. I now knew that the Gallitelli sign hanging on this street was not a sign from God, not even a coincidence. So many Gallitellis lived here that it would have been unnatural not to see a Gallitelli sign somewhere in the neighborhood.

  Over the next few weeks, I met many of those Gallitellis. To differentiate themselves from one another, each Gallitelli clan took on a nickname. A soprannome, they called it.

  The Gallitelli man around the corner, the old guy they called Marinaro, had a seaman’s history. God knows what happened to the family boat. But this guy had run aground ages ago. He owned a garage down the hill, his very own man cave, where he kept chickens and hung his hom
emade soppressata. You could see him hanging out in there amid the dried sausage, day after day. When we asked him if he knew about our Gallitelli/Vena murder, he shook his big round head no, pointed down the street, and said to try his cousin, the local butcher.

  He was named Gallitelli as well and owned a shop called Paradiso. In Bernalda, the butcher shop was a kind of paradise. For centuries, these people had no meat to eat. Which helped explain why they barely broke the five-foot mark. Though the Paradiso butcher was very happy to talk, wiping his bloody hands on his white apron as he chatted, he smiled and said he knew nothing of my family murder. I took two pounds of veal cutlets and moved on.

  Leonardantonio Gallitelli, who lived on our street, bumped into me one day and said he had heard I was asking a lot of questions. He said that his family nickname was Caschedette, which translates into casket, as in a funeral casket.

  The name, Caschedette, refers to some long-forgotten Gallitelli who nearly died as a boy. His family had a casket made. But when he recovered, the casket was kept under his bed for the rest of his life, not as a reminder of his mortality, but for safekeeping, just in case he—or another relative—needed it. Nothing in Basilicata ever went to waste. Not the goat’s head. Not the entrails. Not the ashes from the fire. And certainly not a perfectly made casket. Someone in the family—someone particularly short—was bound to die sooner or later.

  Leonardantonio was friendly in a nosy, abrasive sort of way, with a comb-over and a long, horsey face. We chatted one night over a drink in one of the local cafés, though Leonardantonio said he had never heard of a Vena-Gallitelli murder.