Murder In Matera

by Helene Stapinski

I looked around to see if anyone else was listening and lowered my voice. “My family always said Vita was a puttana,” I whispered, “and that there were two different fathers for her sons.”

  Tataranno and Salfi were silent for a moment and looked at one another. I wondered if they were judging me and my promiscuous ancestor. But after a few more beats, Salfi finally said, “It’s very likely that Vita had an affair with the local landowner.”

  Tataranno jumped in. “It was not uncommon for the landowner to sleep with the wives of the farmers. In fact, it was normal. Concubines were typical in this region.”

  He and Salfi told me about prima notte—or first night—a tradition that allowed the landowner to sleep with the virgin wife of his worker on the couple’s wedding night. A special dish called the Lamb of the Husband, Agnello del Marito, was typically served to distract and satisfy the farmer while the landowner ravaged his young, innocent bride. In a place where you ate meat only twice a year—on Christmas and Easter—maybe it was considered a good deal. After all, the landowner was going to sleep with your wife whether you liked it or not. It was a sacrifice that was expected of most farmers, and their wives. I figured the lamb, that universal symbol of innocence and sacrifice, was no coincidence, but the padroni’s cruel inside joke.

  At the start of the twentieth century, when guns were easier to come by, prima notte began to fade. But in small, poor towns, this way of living—this feudalism—continued right into the 1950s, Tataranno said.

  They theorized that Valente was the son of Grieco, since he was firstborn. But we had no way of really knowing. “Such things,” said Salfi, shaking his head, “are not recorded on birth certificates.”

  Chapter 6

  GO BACK TO AMERICA AND LEAVE THE DEAD IN PEACE

  I STARED INTO THE BATHROOM MIRROR AT NIGHT. MY DARK, normally curly hair was even curlier because of the humidity. My face looked more worn out than usual, with circles beneath my eyes, my skin an even darker shade because of the Basilicatan sun, the whites around my black eyes bloodshot from reading through so many files. I wished I could peel away the layers, the generations of skin and bone, to get at the hidden facts deep within my genetic code, there, no doubt staring right at me from my faccia di Gallitelli.

  A mystery was hidden here, in me and in Matera, a truth buried so deep that I couldn’t find it. All of us, I thought, are made up not only of what we know, but of all that we don’t know as well. Generations of unknowing. Centuries and millennia of secrets hidden just below the surface.

  The answer to my questions was there, right there, staring back at me in the mirror. It was the story that might help explain away the generations of vice and violence that had settled in the roots of my family tree. But I couldn’t seem to dig down far enough, or find anyone who knew this story.

  What started out as a fun family trip and genealogy project had morphed into something else, something I had never really experienced. My morbid curiosity about Vita had slowly become an obsession, with each passing, unproductive day.

  I felt, looking into that mirror, as if there was some dark stain on my soul and on the souls of my children, and instead of walking away from it and ignoring it, I wanted to stare deep into the abyss. And the more time I spent here, the more determined I became.

  Maybe coming here had been a mistake. It was like Bernalda and Vita had taken possession of me.

  I was convinced someone here knew Vita’s story but was refusing to tell me. What were they hiding? And who were they not to give me the information I needed about my family? This was my family. Not just theirs.

  I wanted to know the horror, so I could accept it or somehow make it right. Not just for myself but for my kids. What if the resemblance to my bad relatives wasn’t only skin deep when it came to them? I worried I had passed on some dirty, fatal flaw, and I wanted them to be prepared to deal with it if it ever came to the surface. Crime and tragedy had swirled around my family for generations, but it had never pierced the core of our immediate family. It had come close.

  I wanted to keep it away from me and mine. Not with talismans and magic spells. And not by moving away from it, but by getting as close to it as possible, hunting it down and inhabiting it. I wanted to find it and crush it, turn it inside out and on its head.

  I wanted to mourn it. Right it. Forget it. Go into therapy about it. But without the goods, there was no doing that. I had to know what I was dealing with in order to deal with it. You didn’t get rid of cancer by pretending it wasn’t there. You had to find it and cut it out. Or zap it until it was gone.

  I had met Professors Tataranno and Salfi too late. I felt I was only getting started with my research when it was time to leave. They told me everything they knew about life in Bernalda in the nineteenth century, but I hadn’t found the murder. Maybe it didn’t even exist and I would just search forever for something that wasn’t there. It’s not like there was a card in the archives that said, “Stop looking. There is no Vena-Gallitelli murder.” When would I know to stop searching?

  Part of me wanted desperately to stay and finish what I had started. But another part—the more logical maternal part of me—simply wanted to go home and retreat, just like Hannibal had centuries ago, his brother’s head in his ancient luggage.

  Dean was starting kindergarten in a few days in Brooklyn. We had to go back. Establishing a normal, respectable life had been a real accomplishment for my mother, my siblings, and me.

  Ma would go back to her day job at the Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office, where she helped record pleas in court and pulled files for lawyers during the discovery phase of criminal cases. She loved to regale Dean with tales of murders from work.

  I would go back to my regular routine and resume my freelance career writing for newspapers and magazines. I would teach college classes in creative writing and take care of my kids and make meatballs and clean the house and make the beds.

  But the mystery of Vita—the core to the identity of my family, the criminal core—would go unsolved. I had to take care of my own family before solving that mystery. I had to choose between my past and my kids.

  And so, naturally, I chose my kids. I would leave Bernalda with my two children, just like Vita had over a century ago.

  I HAD ONE FINAL TASK BEFORE I LEFT: SALFI AND TATARANNO INSISTED I see the photograph of the Gallitelli woman whose face was identical to mine. They were both busy on our last night in Bernalda, but told me what door to knock on in our neighborhood, that I should ask the woman there to show me the photo. It wasn’t until after I knocked that I learned the door belonged to the family of Miserabila, the lady with the bulldog face and the hairy eyeball.

  Miserabila appeared, her grimace firmly in place.

  Oh no, I thought. She is a relative. Had she seen my face that first day and known immediately we were related?

  I explained, politely, why I was there, laughing nervously about what Professor Tataranno called my faccia di Gallitelli. But before I could finish, Miserabila exploded in a stream of shouts. Between her strong dialect and rapid-fire delivery, I couldn’t understand what she was saying. But I knew she was not inviting me in for some homemade biscotti. She stepped into the lamplight and I thought for a minute she might try to wrestle me onto the cobblestones. Suddenly Leonardantonio Gallitelli, the guy with the horse face, appeared and joined in the shouting. I hadn’t even known they were related.

  “Gallitelli has nothing to do with your story!” he shouted, waving me off with his hand. “The murder is a Vena story. Not a Gallitelli story. Gallitelli has nothing to do with it.” He had said he knew nothing about the murder. So what was he even talking about? It didn’t seem the right time to ask. I was afraid he might haul off and sock me.

  “Tornar America e lasciar in pace i mord!” Miserabila screamed at me in dialect. It was the only sentence of hers I could understand. It was the only one I needed to hear. In meant, “Go back to America and leave the dead in peace!”

  The words echoed off the c
lean, gray cobblestones and tiny eighteenth-century houses, and eventually in the recesses of my brain for years to come.

  I WENT BACK HOME TO NEW YORK, NOT EMPTY-HANDED, BUT WITH fists tightly clenched. I knew that one day, when my kids were old enough to leave behind, I’d come back to Bernalda. It was too hard to bring the kids and take care of them, plus do all the research I needed to do. I couldn’t change diapers and flip through files simultaneously. I needed a wife, goddamnit, someone to take care of me while I took care of business. But I was the wife.

  And mother.

  So I went back home and learned patience. I waited year after year, as my children grew inch by inch, and as I worried that every fib they told and every tantrum they threw was the potential beginning of their life of crime. I wouldn’t stop worrying until I was able to solve the mystery of Vita and deal fully with the past.

  So I read all about Basilicata, the history, the daily struggles of the Lucani. When I finally did return, I would be ready, like a ninja, primed for battle.

  I read a biography of Pythagoras and anthropological studies of the region, hoping I might stumble upon a clue to my own story. I read a stack of books about the economic struggles of the Mezzogiorno—what was called the Southern Question. So much had been written on the topic, but an answer still hadn’t been found.

  I read everything about Basilicata that I could get my hands on, including Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, about the time the author had spent in the province of Matera, in the tiny villages near Bernalda.

  The Fascists had exiled Levi to the towns of Grassano and Aliano, where he worked as a doctor for ten months, traveling from village to village, tending to the sick and dying. Life there had been grim, but he had a maid, a woman who took care of him and cooked for him and even bathed him. Lucky bastard. There were times when I wanted to throw his book across the room, I was so jealous of his freedom. What was a political prisoner compared with being a full-time mother?

  But I soaked in every poetic word that Levi wrote and then reread the book a second time, underlining passages as if it were my Bible. Passages about passatella, illegitimate children, evil spells, and the poor, melancholy people who inhabited this no-man’s-land. My ancestors.

  The book’s title referred to a town farther north, Eboli, where Levi claimed civilization had stopped, leaving the peasants in Basilicata abandoned and without hope.

  “But to this shadowy land,” he wrote, “that knows neither sin nor redemption from sin, where evil is not moral but is only the path residing forever in earthly things, Christ did not come. Christ stopped at Eboli.”

  I read the books of Ann Cornelisen, who had spent two decades in Italy in the 1950s and ’60s working with its poverty-stricken women. I watched and rewatched all of the Godfather movies, because, I had discovered, Francis Ford Coppola’s ancestors were also originally from Bernalda. Maybe we were related. I studied the neo-Realists, and any other movies that were filmed in or about Italy.

  For my birthday one year, Wendell gave me an old Baedeker’s travel volume about Southern Italy from 1887, right before Vita left. There was not much about Basilicata, since hardly anyone ever went there:

  The fields once extolled by Sophocles for their richness and fertility are now sought for in vain, and the malaria exercises its dismal sway throughout the whole of this neglected district. The soil belongs to the nobility, who let it to a miserably poor and ignorant class of farmers. The custom of carrying weapons is universally prevalent here and brigandage was carried on until the year 1870. The villagers are generally wretched and filthy beyond description. No one should therefore attempt to explore the remoter parts of this country unless provided with letters of introduction to some of the principal inhabitants.

  I read an anthropological study of magic in Southern Italy, about the curses and spells people put on each other. I learned about monacelli and succobi, the mischievous dwarfs who would sometimes appear at night and sit on the chest of a sleeping person, pressing on their solar plexus and paralyzing them. The monacello was believed to be the spirit of a baby who died before being baptized.

  I reread Greek history, about Magna Graecia, the Greek settlement in Basilicata centuries ago, and reread the mythology that had always fascinated me as a kid. I’d adored Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, whose stories of all those related Greek gods and goddesses and heroes—which I traced in the family tree she provided—were a match for my own family’s crazy stories. I got lost in the tales of Zeus and Hera and Hercules and Pandora and read them to Dean aloud for the first time.

  Eventually, I moved on to the Greek philosophers: Socrates, Plato, and Pythagoras. As a student at New York University, I had discovered Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, in which he says that most humans are like prisoners chained inside a cave facing a wall. Shadows are projected onto the wall. The prisoners think the shadows are reality and don’t even know there’s another world outside the cave, filled with truth and beauty and light. I considered myself one of the lucky kids from Jersey City who had escaped into the light of the outside, educated world.

  To make money, I wrote stories for newspapers and magazines and essay collections, stories about jazz musicians and ballerinas and spaghetti tacos and dinosaurs and robots and lots of things I stumbled upon because I was a mother, when all the while I wanted to research Vita and her murder.

  I plotted and planned, making long-distance connections over social media, using it to line up my “letters of introduction.” My family thought I was crazy. And maybe I was. Batz. But I had my reasons. I was stubborn, of course. But it was more than that.

  I would tell the story to my son and daughter, use the story of the first family sin to immunize them, so they would never commit sins so mortal.

  Of course, when I was being honest, I knew there was another reason: I wanted revenge against the two long-lost relatives who had screamed at me that night on the street in Bernalda. I wanted to find the story, walk up to Miserabila and Leonardantonio, and stick it right in their miserable faces and say, “Here. Here it is. I found it without your help. Thanks for nothing. Here is the family story. My family story.” Then I would give them the finger and yell, “Vaffanculo!”

  Chapter 7

  A TURNED-UP NOSE IS WORSE THAN HAIL

  AS MANY AS NINE MILLION SOUTHERNERS FLED ITALY BETWEEN 1871 and 1951. Nine million. A crowd bigger than the population of New York City.

  Most of them were dirt poor.

  And some of them were criminals.

  A congressional study started in 1907 drew a link between the high crime rates in Southern Italy and immigration numbers. The authors of the study claimed that as the emigrants left the South, the crime rates in those parts of Italy dropped substantially. “Certain kinds of criminality are inherent in the Italian race,” the report concluded in 1911. “In the popular mind, crimes of personal violence, robbery, blackmail, and extortion are peculiar to the people of Italy.”

  Was Vita one of those criminals? Was Matera happy to see her go?

  Vita’s sons, Valente and Leonardo, would become upstanding citizens in Jersey City. Had the criminal gene skipped a generation?

  Grandpa Beansie, Leonardo’s son, was by far the biggest and baddest character in the Rogues’ Gallery that was my family album. As a kid, he stole a crate of beans off the back of a truck—hence the nickname. But that was just his first crime. He was a career criminal who stole, beat people up, and even murdered a guy once during a fight. Ma said Grandpa did it with his bare hands, that he beat the guy so badly that he eventually died.

  There were tales about Beansie’s siblings, particularly his sister, Aunt Katie. She worked for the corrupt administration of Jersey City mayor Frank Hague, “getting the vote out,” which usually involved either bribes or beatings. But there were so many stories about Katie, I couldn’t even keep track of them all.

  My favorite was the one about her rigging the St. Mary’s parish bingo game with the help of her son, my cousin Mike,
who was blessed with a photographic memory. He would memorize the bingo boards of the women who paid Katie a kickback before the game started. He would whisper the “winning numbers” to his mother. Katie would then call out the fake winning numbers to reward the women who had paid their tribute. She made a killing every week.

  Cousin Mike later went to Harvard Law School, where he studied beside Antonin Scalia. Instead of a chief justice, Mike became a mob consigliere.

  His brother, my cousin Chubby, had the dubious distinction of being Jersey City’s first heroin addict. He stole to support his habit. One time he knocked on our apartment door and tried to sell my mother a pot roast from Aunt Katie’s freezer.

  I had witnessed firsthand the petty crimes that my Polish father committed each day. He stole frozen food—sometimes lobsters and steaks—from the warehouse where he worked near the mouth of the Holland Tunnel in order to feed us at home.

  Burglars and bookies, killers and con men filled the Polish, Italian, and Russian sides of my family. But sad to say, most of the criminals came from the Vena side, the Italian side. I hated to admit it, but it was true. Overwhelmingly so.

  The name Vena can be translated a number of ways. It can mean mood, either good or bad. Or it can mean streak, as in having a lucky streak or a wild streak. Vena poetica means having a turn for poetry. But Vena’s main meaning is vein, as in a vein that runs through a family, a trait passed down from one generation to the next. In our case, a penchant for crime.

  CESARE LOMBROSO’S THEORIES WERE RACIST, REPUGNANT, AND crazy. He claimed, for instance, that the reason Southern Italians were more likely to be murderers than their brethren in the north was the heavy concentration of African and Asian blood in their veins. But I couldn’t help reading every word he wrote, since those words were written around the same time Vita and Francesco were committing their own crime.

  I stumbled upon the work of Lombroso, a nineteenth-century Italian doctor, while doing research at the New York Public Library. He had studied seven thousand different cases, many of them Southern Italian criminals and brigands, and developed a detailed theory on what a typical criminal looked like. According to him, criminals were throwbacks to more primitive savages and apes. And he believed that criminal behavior was inherited.