Murder In Matera

by Helene Stapinski

  So she closed her eyes and imagined Francesco in the padrone’s place as he put his hands on her, his mouth on her mouth, goose bumps of revulsion covering her arms. Vita let his tongue past her teeth, and allowed his big hands to move across her young, soft skin, skin that would be passed down in her genetic code to her granddaughters, great-granddaughters, and even to her great-great-granddaughter a century later.

  Chapter 22

  PINECONES FOR BRAINS

  THERE’S A MARRIAGE CERTIFICATE,” GIUSEPPE SAID, LOOKING over at me. He had just gotten a text from Imma, who was in the Matera archives with Francesco, the lawyer. Giuseppe had arrived to pick me up in the morning for our day of interviews and research.

  “I’ll tell Imma we’ll meet her in Matera this afternoon,” I said, taking out my phone, while Giuseppe put the Lancia in gear. I wanted to drive straight to Matera to see what Imma had found, but Giuseppe and I had to make another stop before that. We had to take a ride to the nearby town of Valsinni to visit a mutual friend named Carla, the woman who had introduced us over the Internet. I hated making social calls, but Italy was all about the social calls. Without them I would never meet the people I needed to meet, or find the information I wanted. I needed to be patient, more Italian. I had to keep reminding myself.

  Carla, an Italian American woman from New Jersey, happened to have arrived here in Basilicata from America the same week as I had to visit her sick and dying ninety-four-year-old mother.

  When she was young, Carla’s father had moved to America to make money for the family. Carla was sent there to live with him in the 1970s because of her headstrong, independent ways. She gladly left and permanently settled in New Jersey, where I had met her about ten years ago at the Italian cultural center that she ran. But now she was back, at her mother’s deathbed.

  Carla was older than we were, and out of respect we agreed to meet her to thank her for introducing us—but mostly to provide her some relief from her deathwatch. As soon as Carla’s sister arrived to take over deathbed duty, the three of us headed out to see the town.

  Carla spoke in well-enunciated accented English, slowly drawing out every vowel and sound with perfectly lipsticked lips, with her hands folded in front of her as if she were an opera singer. She was well put together at all times, her highlighted, well-coiffed hair just so, her faux pearl necklace matching her outfit. Like a determined, highly organized tour guide, she led us up the mountain of Valsinni to its most treasured building.

  At the top was a rocky medieval castle, where a poet named Isabella di Morra had once lived. We climbed up and up until we were greeted by a large man named Rosario, who was the actual tour guide, and whose job it was to meet infrequent tourists here whenever they might show up. Rosario sported a day’s worth of dark stubble and looked like he had just woken up from some long slumber, surprised by the visitors who had suddenly arrived at his bear cave.

  His large eyes, with long eyelashes, shot open beneath his thick glasses. He launched quickly and effortlessly into his story of Isabella di Morra with such force and affection that you could tell he had been silently, patiently waiting for days, maybe even weeks, to share his information with someone. He confessed that he was deeply in love with Isabella, or at least her legend. And like Isabella before him, Rosario was a sort of prisoner of this castle.

  Rosario explained that Isabella di Morra was Italy’s first feminist, one of its most famous writers of all time, a fifteenth-century poetess and scholar whose father had taught her to read Dante and Plutarch by the time she was six. Unfortunately, she had a bunch of ignorant, awful brothers who—as the Italians liked to say—had pinecones for brains (“avere le pigne in testa”). They resented all the time their father spent with Isabella. When he wasn’t listening, they used to tell Isabella she was worthless, less than stone. “With stone,” they said, “you can at least build something. With a woman, you can do nothing.”

  When her father was exiled by Basilicata’s Aragonese rulers to Paris, she was left sad and lonely in her beautiful prison with the lush countryside and, on the clearest days, the Ionian Sea to gaze upon. On a really clear day you could even see Pisticci. Rosario recited Isabella’s description from memory.

  From a high mountaintop, where one can see

  The waves, I, your sad daughter Isabella,

  Gaze out for sight of any polished ship

  Coming to bring me news of you, my father.

  But my adverse and cruel destiny

  Permits no solace for my aching heart,

  But, enemy to any thought of pity,

  Turns all my firmest hopes into laments.

  For I see neither oar cutting the sea,

  Nor any sail that billows in the wind,

  So solitary is this dismal shore. . . .

  Carla was riveted by Rosario’s words even though she had already been to this castle many times and knew the story by heart. With unusual emotion in her own voice, she translated Rosario’s words for me because he was talking so quickly.

  When she was twenty-five years old, Isabella befriended a neighbor, the wife of a local Spanish baron. Eventually Isabella met the baron and fell in love. Isabella and the baron began exchanging love letters and poems. The relationship was never consummated, not even with a kiss.

  Three of Isabella’s brothers found her love letters and became enraged. One night they climbed the castle stairs to her room and stabbed her repeatedly in the heart, then hurled her body over the castle wall. I thought of Sabrina, Giuseppe’s sister, and looked over at him to see if Isabella’s killing dredged up his own memories. But he seemed all right, caught up in yet another Italian murder story, one of the country’s most notorious.

  An Italian family had recently bought this castle for a real bargain—for five thousand euro—and were excavating to find not only the original medieval rooms but Isabella’s bones. It seemed everyone was looking for bones of the past. They hadn’t turned up yet, but it was only a matter of time.

  Rosario said that on the windiest days, the ghost of Isabella—his love—passes through the castle. Because she was a ghost, she was now free to roam wherever she pleased. Into the mountains, down to the sea. But most days, he felt her here, inside this castle.

  I thought how tragic Rosario was, almost as tragic a character as Isabella. What was it like to be in love with someone who had been dead for five centuries? To be so obsessed with the dead? Why were Italians so consumed with murder stories and death? Maybe because there was just so much death and suffering years ago, they had been forced to build a culture around it.

  And then it hit me that I wasn’t all that different than the Italians, or Rosario. I thought about my being here and my own obsession with Vita. Wasn’t that just as obsessive, chasing the ghost of Vita for the past ten years? I was also obsessed with the dead.

  When Rosario was done telling us about Isabella, I felt bad leaving him here all alone. There were no other tourists and probably wouldn’t be until July. But at least he had the ghost of Isabella to keep him company.

  ON OUR DRIVE HOME, WE PASSED A SIGN THAT SAID “COLOBRARO.” Giuseppe told me to never say the name out loud because it was the most cursed town in Italy. “Even just saying the name can bring terrible luck,” he told me. “And your luck has been bad enough.” Giuseppe smiled when he said it, and was laughing, but I could tell he was kind of serious. He said that when men passed that town, they scratched their private parts to guard against the curse.

  The town’s name came from a Latin word that meant serpent—coluber (visions of Adam and Eve again). But it wasn’t clear what came first, the town’s name or the curse. It’s said to have originated many years ago after the villagers killed a woman they believed to be a strega—or a witch. Before she died, she put a curse on the town. More recently, a lawyer trying a case there announced in court, “If I’m lying, may this chandelier come down.” The chandelier fell. Since then, the curse is believed to have become even stronger.

  According
to legend, babies there are often born with two hearts. Landslides and car accidents are all too common. But every summer, the town holds a festival celebrating the curse and the sorcery attached to it. Tourists have been pouring in, despite the possibility of bad luck and having a chandelier fall on their heads. Policemen there won’t even give tickets to cars speeding through the town for fear they will be cursed.

  Giuseppe, knowing this, drove as quickly as he could and headed toward Matera. As soon as we reached our exit, he received a text from Imma. He pulled over to read it. He smiled his bright white movie star smile.

  “Francesco found some crime listing involving both a Gallitelli and a Vena man,” he said, excitedly. He read on and frowned. “But the archives are closing early today. They didn’t have time to dig out the actual file. We’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

  I stuck out my bottom lip and shrugged, Italian-style. I knew it had to be a false alarm. I had only been here for a few days. And with our rotten luck, there was no way this was the murder.

  Chapter 23

  ECCOLO

  I TOOK THE WIDE, SHALLOW STONE STAIRS TWO AT A TIME, Giuseppe and Imma beside me, to the research room in Matera. The stuffy, warm air smelled of dust and ancient, crumbling paper, just as it had ten years ago.

  The room contained long white-topped tables made of pressed wood, with a wall of windows that were never opened very wide, maybe to prevent the wind from blowing the papers around. Imma started to sneeze as soon as we walked in. “God bless you,” I said after the first few sneezes. But after four or five, I gave up. “I’m allergic to dust,” she whispered.

  “Oh no,” I whispered back. “Maybe you shouldn’t be here then. I can look with Giuseppe.”

  “No, no, no,” she said, waving me off. “If it’s the right murder, I want to be here. I don’t want to miss this.”

  Two young Italian women searching for something together were the only ones here besides the middle-aged, bespectacled female clerk who approved all requests. She sat at a desk like a schoolteacher at the front of the room, vigilantly watching the visitors to make sure they didn’t do any damage to the antique files. She spent most of her time simply sitting there, staring into space, or glancing out the window. I wondered if it was against the rules for her to read a book or a newspaper or her iPhone. I would have been desperately bored. But she seemed content and perfectly happy.

  Ten years ago, I had leafed through arrest report after arrest report here, through yellowed piles of court records and criminal files. Imma told me that they had every birth, death, and marriage record for all the towns in the province, which either was something new or something I hadn’t known before. Searching in Pisticci was easy, but Bernalda’s bureaucrats made it nearly impossible to find anything in the comune there. People in Bernalda had nicknamed the woman in charge of the archives there “the demon.” We could search here in Matera for everything we needed instead, even though it was forty-five minutes away.

  Imma filled in a written request on a small slip of white paper to call up the case file for the listing Francesco had come across. File 644. She handed it to the clerk at the desk and a moment later another file clerk, a very efficient, serious man in dress pants and a collared shirt, came to collect the requests. Ten minutes passed in silence. Unless you whispered, it seemed wrong to talk inside the archives. The male clerk returned, rolling a squeaky metal cart into the room, breaking the hushed silence. The cart’s two shelves contained several stacks of files, not just for us but for the other women here.

  With his strong arms, he lifted from the top shelf a giant bundle in blue cardboard that was more than a foot thick. It was our bundle. He placed it right in front of me on the long research table. Inside were seven different case files, all tied together with a thin ribbon of white cotton, as if it were a big, dusty gift from the gods. I untied the ribbon with trembling hands, fumbling with its tightly knotted cloth, and realized it may not have been opened in more than a century. I wondered if moths would fly out. Part of me wanted to get it open as quickly as possible. But part of me was worried I’d just be disappointed again.

  Then I thought: it might actually be the right file.

  I paused for a few seconds. Once opened, the contents—like in Pandora’s box—would come pouring out and would be impossible to push back in. I took a deep breath and turned back the blue cardboard.

  Staring back at me from the top of the pile was a yellow page, with cracked and crumbling edges, issued from the Corte d’Assise, which was stamped at the top in bold black letters. The Italian Court of Assizes handled the most serious of crimes: murder, enslavement, terrorism, those offenses that could result in a sentence of twenty-four years or more.

  Underneath were the names of the defendants.

  Francesco Vena and Leonardantonio Gallitelli. Their names were written in elaborate, slanted cursive. It was one of seven files in the pile and the biggest in the bunch, as thick as an old New York City phone book, with more than six hundred yellowing, cracking pages inside. I carefully took it off the pile with both hands as if lifting a newborn baby and gently placed it on the table.

  The court document was from 1873 and described a murder committed the year before. This was twenty years before Vita had left for America. I had always assumed the murder had happened right before Vita left in 1892, that she had run away to America because of it. The timing seemed off, but the ages of the men seemed right. Francesco Vena, age twenty-nine. And twenty-seven-year-old Leonardantonio Gallitelli, the same name as the man who had yelled at me ten years ago on the street with Miserabila to go back to America and leave the dead in peace. He was definitely a relative. He knew this murder story, whether it was mine or not. I knew all along that he knew something.

  I read through that first page and saw that a third man was arrested along with Francesco and Leonardantonio, a man named Francesco Miraldi, age thirty-one.

  With Imma looking over my shoulder, her hands on the back of my chair, and Giuseppe sitting beside me, I flipped through several pages of witness lists, jury records, and depositions, all written in fancy Italian calligraphy.

  I leafed through a few more pages and found Francesco Vena’s deposition, in which he states his name, his father’s name, Donato, and his birthplace and residence, Bernalda. He states that he is a farmer, and gives his wife’s name.

  Vita Gallitelli.

  I stopped breathing. I blinked once. Twice.

  I read it silently again, to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. And took a breath.

  Vita Gallitelli.

  Goose bumps crawled up my arms, forcing the hair to stand straight up.

  I read once more, this time aloud, my voice high and trembling, slicing through the silence of the room, “Vita Gallitelli. It says his wife’s name is Vita Gallitelli.”

  “Eccolo,” Imma said, towering behind me and nodding. Here it is.

  “I told you that we would find it,” Giuseppe said, smiling widely and wiping the sweaty front of his face with the palm of his hand. I turned and hugged Imma and then him.

  “But I didn’t believe you,” I said.

  “I know you didn’t,” he said, nodding, his eyes closed. I put my hand to my forehead and stared at the document.

  After ten years, here it was, my family murder, right in front of me. I couldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t believe it. Not yet anyway.

  Maybe it was a different Francesco Vena and Vita Gallitelli. They were fairly common names. I had to make sure they were the right ones.

  Francesco goes on to say in his deposition that he is not guilty and that Leonardantonio is his brother-in-law. Next are Francesco’s and Leonardantonio’s birth certificates. I scanned Leonardantonio’s. His mother’s name was Teresina.

  “He has the same mother as Vita!” I shouted, pointing at the birth certificate, which set him as four years older than Vita. Vita’s big brother.

  Imma put in a request for the marriage certificates for that decade and moments la
ter, she again had the one she had found yesterday for Francesco Vena, born November 8, 1844—same as on this birth certificate—and Vita Gallitelli, born August 22, 1851, same as on Vita’s birth certificate. Now there was no doubt this was it. This was the same Francesco.

  And this was our Vita.

  This was our murder.

  Chapter 24

  GO TO COOL

  FRANCESCO AND LEONARDANTONIO LEFT BERNALDA FOR work just past dawn. They drove their horse and wagon, which belonged to their padrone, through nearby Ferrandina, past a piece of land called Contrada Avella, not far from Pisticci’s western border. A contrada was a piece of land on which several farms were located, as many as ten or twenty. Avella was the name of a small stream and bridge nearby.

  This land was much like the land in Pisticci, mostly clay based, with a few patches of green sewn in, calanchi rising nearby. Livestock grazed here and there, cowbells tinkling in the distance, and the occasional blond Italian Maremma sheepdog, mangy and covered with flies, wandered about with a spiked collar to protect it from wolves. The dogs paid Francesco and Leonardantonio no mind.

  The two men often passed this way and were familiar not only with the dogs but with the women, dressed in their long pacchiana outfits, already out on the farm by the roadside. It was November 4, 1872, a pleasantly crisp 50-degree Monday in Ferrandina, the orchards overflowing with fruit, ripe for the picking.

  Ciccio and Leo, as they called each other, stopped and chatted with the young women and asked to taste some of the small pears—perastre, a particularly sweet variety from the region—lying in their big baskets. The perastre were green with a deep red blush. The women, blushing like the pears, obliged. Leo flirted with them and told them how much he loved their sweet pears. Leo nudged Ciccio, winked, and snickered at his joke. Ciccio rolled his big brown eyes.