Murder In Matera

by Helene Stapinski

  “It’s no trouble at all,” he said, bending his head and staring down at his running shoes.

  I reached into my brown leather backpack, which I used as a purse, and took out my new beige leather wallet, which I had just bought during a shopping spree for family souvenirs. I thumbed around until I found my business card and handed it over to Francesco. “Well, here’s my email, just in case you do find anything,” I said. “Anything at all.”

  I HEADED AROUND THE CORNER AND STOPPED IN AT THE OLD HOUSE on Via Cavour where I had lived years before, to say hello to Maria Natale and Maria Gallitelli, my old neighbors. Gallitelli was away for the weekend, but Maria Natale was home—as always—and greeted me warmly, as if I’d seen her just last week. She had a friend inside with her and insisted I come in and sit with them and “prendi un caffè.”

  I went down the steps into her parlor, which was cluttered with knickknacks and old furniture. The place hadn’t changed and neither had Maria Natale. Her hair was still the color of ginger, though it no longer matched the mother church, which had undergone a cleaning and was now the color of sand. Maria was as lively and as talkative as always, the locket with her husband’s photo still pressed to her tanned chest.

  When I turned to greet her friend, I realized with a start that it was Miserabila, the one who had screamed at me in the street. I took a breath and held it as if diving underwater, preparing myself for her attack. But Miserabila didn’t recognize me. I breathed out and tried to relax. Had I changed all that much in ten years? A little chubbier maybe, but I still had that same round faccia di Gallitelli. Maybe she was senile.

  Miserabila looked the same, though, same nasty bulldog face, same balding head, same miserable frown.

  Maria and I chatted, about my mother, about New York, about the kids, whose photos I showed her on my iPhone, Paulina with braces on her teeth but still a “bella bambina.”

  “She’s a ballet dancer,” I told Maria, using my arms and doing a little step to make sure she understood me. “And an A student, just like her brother.” I showed her a picture of Dean, tall and lanky, under a thick head of dark hair and a pair of black-rimmed hipster glasses. Dondi all grown up.

  “He plays bass guitar and is in a band, but he also loves history,” I said. Dean’s love of battles had evolved into an appreciation of world history.

  I looked closely at his face and felt a stab of homesickness. “I wish I could have brought them with me,” I said, half-meaning it. “I don’t think they remember Bernalda. They were too little when we came last time.”

  Maria shook her head and said, “I can’t believe how big they’ve gotten.” Some days, neither could I.

  We talked about Maria Gallitelli across the way, who had given birth to a third son (poor Maria with all that laundry to hang), and about my possible return to do more research.

  All the while, Miserabila looked on and tried to follow along with my broken Italian, and slowly, slowly, it began to dawn on her just who I was. With a sideways glance, I saw the gradual recognition and then outright disgust fill her face. I could hear the words echoing in her head, not just mine: “Go back to America and leave the dead in peace.” But she said nothing. She finally stood up and told Maria Natale she had to go.

  Maria seemed puzzled, perhaps having forgotten the screaming rant on the street. Or maybe she was just being polite. But she said goodbye to Miserabila and ushered her outside. When Miserabila was halfway down the cobblestone street, I turned to Maria Natale, shook my head, and said, “I don’t think she likes me.”

  Chapter 11

  THE CRYPT OF THE ORIGINAL SIN

  ANTONIO TURNED ON SOME SPOTLIGHTS AND THE CAVE lit up like the inside of a jack-o’-lantern. A chill ran through me.

  A skinny man in his thirties, with downturned eyes and short dark hair, Antonio was my guide for the day. He had been part of the team that had restored this painted cave ten years earlier.

  We had driven together that morning to the edge of a cliff near the cave city of Matera, the last stop on my reconnaissance trip, just to see this place—this Crypt of the Original Sin. Since I was searching for my own family’s original sin, it seemed a poetic and fitting final destination.

  Matera was home to more than 150 painted caves, whose frescoes were created between the eighth and thirteenth centuries AD. But this one—this Crypt of the Original Sin—was supposed to be the most intact and beautiful, known as the Sistine Chapel of cave paintings.

  From the highway, Matera resembled a collection of skulls, all looking out into the distance. The rounded doors and windows to many of its hushed caves were black, and against the chalky, treeless landscape resembled eye and nose holes.

  Once you got up close, you could see that the caves—called sassi—were carved from tufa rock inside two giant sunken pits, one house haphazardly built atop another like in an Escher drawing. You climbed long, worn stone staircases to get from top to bottom.

  Though the caves were created in Paleolithic times, some were painted with religious murals in the Middle Ages by troglodytic monks hiding from persecution. In the seventeenth century, Matera was named the regional capital of Basilicata. But in 1806, Napoleon’s brother, Joseph, declared Potenza the capital. Materans were still angry about it.

  Less than a century ago, some of the poorest people in the region lived in the sassi with their farm animals, but they were evacuated in the 1950s because of Carlo Levi’s book.

  He had written about Matera and the poverty and disease there, the children’s eyes closed shut with trachoma, the flies crawling all over them, the levels of the sassi like Dante’s rings of hell. Because of his depiction, its residents were moved to more healthy living quarters. The sassi were called “vergogna nazionale.” A national shame.

  But in the 1980s, local politicians and citizens started a movement to renovate the sassi and have families move back in. The caves were now filled with spas and hotels, luxury apartments and pizzerias, but were quiet as a graveyard.

  These days, Matera was the capital of Basilicata’s movie industry. Its rocky exterior was hauntingly beautiful and was often used as a stand-in for Jerusalem and Rome in biblical films. If you saw a movie with ancient Israel as the backdrop, there was a good chance it was actually its stunt double, Matera. The walls of many restaurants were covered in autographed photos of Hollywood stars, the latest invaders to pass through the city’s eroded, shiny stone streets.

  The upper reaches of Matera, above the sassi, were more typical of a modern Italian city, bustling and very sophisticated, with upscale wine shops, expensive specialty grocers, and luxury shoe stores. In those upper reaches were the archives, kept in a modern building with a red gate on a quiet side street where I had searched years ago for the murder.

  But I had been looking in the wrong place.

  ANTONIO’S SPOTLIGHT ILLUMINATED A SMALL CROWD OF FACES ON the amber, glowing cave walls. They greeted me as if I had arrived at some unexpected bizarre family reunion. The faces looked like mine. My faccia di Gallitelli.

  The hermit monks who had painted these people in the ninth century likely modeled them on the shepherds and shepherdesses they had encountered on their less hermity days. The monks’ models were my ancestors.

  I recognized the portraits of the archangels as if they were my uncles, with their wings spread mightily, and a haloed St. Peter and St. John the Baptist, whose images were slightly chipped, done in bright gold, poppy red, and vibrant blue. Staring back at me was a painting of the Blessed Mother with her baby on her lap, looking sad, as usual, maybe knowing that her son would one day die in front of her. She had high cheekbones and a long nose, like mine. Her portrait was completely intact and looked like it had been painted last week.

  “You’ll see that connecting one scene to the next,” said Antonio, pointing at the wall, “are strings of blue and orange flowers that the monks painted in ochre and lapis lazuli, a motif repeated on the edges of all the stories.”

  On the right side o
f the rocky cave mural was the main attraction—Adam and Eve, the most distressed of all the characters, with large swaths missing from their limestone faces and bodies. But you could tell they were naked, covering themselves with big blue bunches of leaves with one hand, and exchanging the forbidden fruit with the other.

  A Basilicatan monk had published a dramatic poem about the fall of Adam back in the seventeenth century and I wondered if he had come here to see this cave, if its beautifully simple, elemental version of good and evil had inspired him. His name was Serafino della Salandra and somewhere along the line, the English poet John Milton either met him or stumbled upon his work while visiting Southern Italy. Milton borrowed heavily (some would say stole) from Salandra’s opus—Adamo Caduto—for his own Paradise Lost, published twenty years later.

  Here in this cave paradise, Adam and Eve were very relaxed and natural looking, Eve’s breasts full and sagging, Adam’s head tilted up at the tree of knowledge, the serpent in blue and red tightly slithering up the trunk. Eve offers the stolen fig to Adam, not an apple, naturally, since this was Southern Italy—land of a billion figs.

  Beneath them was the line of ochre and lapis flowers. “A symbol,” Antonio said, “of the rebirth, regeneration, and forgiveness that comes after mankind’s fall. The crypt, with its frescoes, speaks of original sin that man has committed, but it also speaks of rebirth and regeneration that follows the awareness of being wrong.”

  It was as if Antonio knew all about me and my sinful family. “Thanks to error, man has the ability to grow and mature,” he explained. Without the sin, he said, there is no knowledge, no growth. No learning curve. No making things better. No forgiveness. “And that’s the intimate message that the monks were trying to send us, and have sent us, these twelve centuries later. With their flowers.”

  We’re all connected, they say. One story leads to the next. One generation to the next. But we learn from our stories and our past. We learn from our sins. And we grow. Hence the tree of knowledge. We were put here on earth to have our eyes opened.

  And though I could see the images, I couldn’t see that right before me was the actual key to my own family story. It was hanging right in front of my eyes, a piece of ripe fruit just waiting to be picked. It was as if Antonio, along with God and Salandra and Milton and all the angels and saints, was yelling in my ear, “Here it is. It’s the clue you’ve been looking for, right up there on the wall. Can’t you see?”

  But I couldn’t see it. Not just yet.

  Chapter 12

  THERE’S NO TWO WITHOUT THREE

  TWO GENES LINKED WITH VIOLENT CRIME, THE HEADLINE read.

  It was a small story, which most people probably missed, and it broke the week after I got back from Italy. I read it once and then read it twice, thoughts of Cesare Lombroso spinning in my head.

  A genetic analysis of almost 900 offenders in Finland has revealed two genes associated with violent crime.

  Those with the genes were 13 times more likely to have a history of repeated violent behaviour. The authors of the study, published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, said at least 5–10% of all violent crime in Finland could be attributed to individuals with these genotypes.

  The study, which involved analysis of almost 900 criminals, is the first to have looked at the genetic make-up of so many violent criminals in this way.

  This group had committed a total of 1,154 murders, manslaughters, attempted homicides or batteries. A replication group of 114 criminals had all committed at least one murder.

  These all carried a low-activity version of the MAOA gene, which previous research has dubbed the “warrior gene” because of its link to aggressive behavior.

  The warrior gene. Is that what it was called? And did we have it in my family? Dean had always been especially obsessed with military history. Was this why?

  I DIDN’T MENTION THE STORY TO ANYONE BUT MY HUSBAND. I DIDN’T want the kids to know that Mommy’s crazy rantings about her criminal family genes might actually have some basis in reality.

  But the story pushed me over the edge in some strange, emotional way. I decided right then and there that no halfway measures were going to get me what I wanted. No more reading books from 4,500 miles away. Or searching for cryptic clues in prehistoric caves.

  Lying in bed at night, my body still tanned from the beach, I decided to dive back in, headfirst, to find my family murder. I couldn’t wait for another ten years to pass. I was going to find Vita’s story, to solve the question once and for all of whether my family was genetically flawed. It seemed counterintuitive, but I had to leave my family to make sure they were safe.

  I needed a month—at least. Maybe two. Maybe even six. I announced my plans to my stunned family and booked my return flight to Rome. I bought my train tickets to and from Metaponto and arranged to have Leo, my long-lost cousin and beach bar owner, pick me up at the station.

  As if getting ready to give birth, for the next eight months I prepped and researched and hunkered down for the blessed event. I contacted everyone I knew there and planned my strategy. The owner of the San Teodoro farm knew a woman who rented an apartment in Pisticci for fifteen dollars a day. I took it. I contacted a professor in Potenza—a friend of a friend of a friend—who could help me search the archives there.

  I emailed Professors Tataranno and Salfi and everyone else I had ever met in Basilicata and asked for recommendations on hiring a researcher/translator. I made list upon list, with names and numbers and email addresses, then interviewed a dozen candidates over Skype.

  I found two—one from each of the towns my family lived in a century ago. I hired Imma, a twenty-eight-year-old writer from Bernalda, and Giuseppe, a farmer whose family were landowners from Pisticci, who would help me between his apricot and wheat harvests.

  We strategized over Skype and they got started immediately, searching town records and quizzing the locals. Meanwhile, I downloaded translating apps, texting apps, and used the Internet to brush up on my Italian and connected with countless Bernaldans and Pisticcesi over Facebook. I went to Chinatown and bought a duffel bag full of baseball hats and T-shirts with New York emblazoned on them to hand out as gifts to anyone who might help once I got off the train in Metaponto.

  I packed and repacked, including my favorite books on Basilicata, then checked and double-checked my itinerary, my flights and train rides, the places I would stay, and the contacts for the people who, I hoped and prayed, would help me find my family murder.

  When I told my mother I was going back to Italy for a month alone, I could hear the disapproval and worry in her voice. What kind of Italian mother left her kids behind for a month? Now I was slightly sickened by the thought. I didn’t eat on the day of my departure, though the refrigerator and freezer were crammed with food. I left frozen dinners I had prepared in the weeks before, meatballs, beef stew, sausage and peppers, pasta fagiole. It was a greatest-hits medley of my Italian family classics, for fear my family wouldn’t survive without me. In keeping with my family credo, passed down from the prosperous days following centuries of poverty and hunger, it was always better to make too much than not enough. Basta!

  Being without my children on that last weeklong trip had been incredibly freeing, but unnerving the whole time, as if I were missing a limb or had forgotten my purse somewhere. But I knew I shouldn’t worry so much. My kids were good kids and they were in safe hands with my husband. Maybe the criminal gene had luckily skipped over them, like it had over me and my siblings and Leonardo, my great-grandfather, or maybe it was because I had been there to yell at them when they did something wrong and hug them the rest of the time. Nature versus nurture. We would never know.

  But maybe, just maybe, that warrior gene was buried deep inside them, or one of them, slowly ticking, ticking, until finally it exploded in some tragedy or drama that I couldn’t foresee or control. Maybe it would happen while I was gone.

  SO I LEFT AMERICA IN SLOW MOTION.

  First I was stopped at a
irport security because they inexplicably found explosive traces on my hands. After an “over the clothes” body search and some tough questions in a private room, I was allowed to proceed to the gate, only to have my flight delayed, and finally, because of a raging thunderstorm, canceled. I rescheduled my flight and texted Leo, Imma, and Giuseppe that I’d be a day late.

  Though a part of me—mostly my stomach—didn’t want to go at all.

  What if my plane crashed? What if someone else, someone they should be inspecting for explosive traces, had a bomb? Would my children ever recover if I never returned home? Would Wendell remarry?

  He would have to remarry. He could never raise them alone. Maybe my mother would move in. I imagined that scenario and thought it would make a good premise for a TV pilot. What happens when a mother dies on her way to Italy and her eighty-three-year-old mom moves in to raise the kids? Hilarity ensues. Tuesday nights at eight on Lifetime.

  Maybe I should just stay home, I thought that night as I pulled up to our house in Brooklyn, back from my unsuccessful visit to Newark International Airport. Forget Italy. Forget the crime. Maybe this was a sign I should forget the search for Vita. First the explosive traces and now the canceled flight. Leave the dead in peace, like Miserabila had said.

  And then it hit me: maybe she had understood what I was saying to Maria Natale back in October in my broken Italian, knew I was returning, and had put a curse on my plane.

  I laughed at the thought of it, trying to shake the idea from my head.

  That evening, with Paulina sleeping next to me, curled inside me like a shrimp, I couldn’t help but think of all those curses I had come across in the book I’d read on magic in the South. The evil eye. The potions. The spells. The horrible little people who tried to suffocate you.

  I pressed Paulina closer to me.

  I fell asleep and dreamed strange dreams. I most vividly remember one in which I rent a mule instead of a car when I get to Italy. The mule moves so slowly that I decide to simply walk everywhere I go, from town to town, much like my ancestors.