Seasons in Basilicata

by David Yeadon

  Both the bedroom and the living room had small balconies and spectacular views of Aliano’s North Dakota–type scenery to the east. It was an admirable apartment for fifteen euros a day, a truly serendipitous steal. But no large terrace to be found. Shame. I must have miscounted the floors, I thought. But it’ll do just fine, and I was about to tell the woman—her name was Giuseppina—that I’d take it, when she opened another door near the entryway to what I assumed would be a storeroom of sorts.

  And there was my huge terrace, bedecked in plants and flowers and pepper bushes and flurries of tomatoes; tubs of basil, mint, rosemary, oregano, and other less familiar herbs; a small table for eating; and even a metal-frame bed in case I wanted to sleep outside. And of course, just as I had hoped, those million-dollar vistas across the piazza, down the corso, over the whole town and the vast towering magnitude of the Monte Pollino massif itself.

  I tried to suppress my enthusiasm—that fifteen euros could quickly have risen to fifty if I had started to dance a jig—but my eyes and my overly flushed face must have spoken volumes, because Giuseppina smiled brilliantly, squeezed my hand, and invited the good don and me down to her apartment on the floor below to seal the deal with a glass of a strong local liqueur known as Amaro Lucana.

  Ten minutes later I was alone on my terrace dancing that jig for all the street below to see, and telling myself that this could not possibly have happened in less than half an hour from my arrival at wonderful Aldo’s beautiful bar and my introduction to a perfect priest and one of the nicest landladies it had ever been my pleasure to meet.

  Oh, and of course, endless gratitude to the wise and ultratalented Mr. Stephen Wolfram for his advice about turning things on and letting them run just to see what happens…

  Postscript

  I suppose I should add, by way of this postscript, that one more little “what happens?” happened later that evening, and was decidedly less successful. As Aldo was helping me find my new home, he had enthusiastically praised the excellence of the traditional cuisine at his bar’s restaurant. Later on in the evening I thought I’d stroll back, thank him again for his assistance, and enjoy one of his dinners. Unfortunately when I arrived at the normal dining time of around eight-thirty, he was not around; a charming young lady with crisply cut short, black hair and shy, smiling eyes was hostess for the evening. I explained why I had come and asked if I could see the dinner menu. Her face immediately changed from a friendly welcome to a decidedly “O Dio, no!” expression as she handed me the menu of five primi piatti (pasta dishes) and six secondi (meat dishes) and explained that some of the dishes were not available that night. Feeling in a generous spirit, I asked her what were the available options. She blushed and whispered, “Tagliatelle with tomato sauce.”

  I should have got the hint and returned on another night, but I felt that might somehow detract from my expressing my gratitude to Aldo. So, untruthfully, I told her I wasn’t really hungry anyhow so a plate of tagliatelle would do just fine. She still had that “Oh, no!” look on her face, but she beckoned me graciously to the upstairs dining room. Later I learned that it was customary in these small hill villages to give a restaurant ample warning of your intended visit if you expected to enjoy anything more than a hastily cooked bowl of pasta. Microwaves, pre-cooked meals, and all those cosmopolitan shortcuts are unknown here.

  The upstairs dining area was a large, dark space, empty except for bare tables and chairs and a huge TV set projecting from the wall. The hostess showed me to a table, placed a TV channel-changer in front of me, and vanished into the kitchen at the back of the dining room.

  The place was utterly silent. Even the usual chitchat in the bar downstairs had ceased. I sat and flicked through the channels for fifteen minutes, hoping to find something in English. After all, with England being part of the European Union, I thought there might be some token acknowledgment of the BBC or something like that. There wasn’t—only more of those interminable Italian game and quiz shows and one ancient, badly dubbed American movie. I turned the TV off and waited. Eventually the hostess emerged with a bowl of pasta, wished me Buon appetito, and asked if I needed anything else. When I said no, that everything looked fine, relief filled her face and she rushed toward the stairs. “So, I go now. Open bar.”

  A shimmer of alarm scampered down my spine, and I stopped in mid-pasta scoop. “Open? You closed the bar?”

  “Of course. I cook. For you.”

  Oh no! Not again! That was twice in one day that I’d been the cause of the unheard-of necessity of closing that unfortunate bar.

  “Look, I’m ever so…very…sorry. I didn’t…”

  But she was gone, and by the sound of the raised voices that followed her opening the door downstairs, her customers were not at all pleased with her, or with me either.

  Sheepishly, I sneaked out of the bar quietly after finishing my meal, leaving a generous tip and vowing never to create such a dilemma again. After all, I was now a resident of Aliano and had already been the cause of far too much havoc.

  And this was barely the end of day one.

  The Homo Ibericus of Aliano

  The next day I said farewell to my Accettura friends, promised to visit them as often as I could, and made the tortuous hour-long hairpin curlicue and vertiginous drive back to Aliano, my new home.

  Once again I turn to Norman Douglas’s 1915 masterwork, Old Calabria, for a reaffirmation of my feelings toward, and observation of, the population in this part of Basilicata. Douglas described the men as:

  whiskered, short and wiry, and of dark complexion. There is that indescribable mark of race in these countrymen; they are different in features and character from the Italians; it is an ascetic, a Spanish type. Your [typical resident] is strangely scornful of luxury and even comfort; a creature of few but well-chosen words, straightforward, indifferent to pain and suffering…A note of unworldliness is discoverable in his outlook upon life. Dealing with such men, one feels that they are well disposed not from impulse, but from some dark sense of preordained obligation. Greek and other strains have infused…a more smiling exterior; but the groundwork of the whole remains that old homo ibericus of austere gentlemanliness.

  Douglas also points out another little quirk in the nature of the Basilicatan populace.

  …it is your duty to show, above all things, that you are not scemo—witless, soft-headed—the unforgivable sin in the south. You may be a forger or cut-throat—why not? It is a vocation like any other, a vocation for men. But whoever cannot take care of him-self…is not to be trusted, in any walk of life; he is of no account; he is no man.

  I had read this brief summation of Basilicatan male characteristics a few days before finding my new home in Aliano, so I felt just a trifle self-conscious when I finally arrived in the village and prepared to unload my possessions—suitcases, boxes, plastic grocery bags, etc.—from my packed-to-the-gills mini DoDo (definitely a “toy car” by American standards).

  I had parked as close to the house as possible, right in the Piazza Roma, the center of the village. The audience of octogenarians (I now referred to them affectionately as “octos”) was already in place along the benches around the war memorial and on a remarkable number of additional benches lining both sides of Via Roma. It seemed as if the whole street had been set up for permanent the-atrical performances, which is what daily life in Aliano turned out to be.

  It would be embarrassing to list precisely the number and range of ridiculously clumsy antics, faux pas, and little stupidities on my part that characterized the first half hour of my arrival there and the moving of my possessions and supplies to my third-floor aerie. At one point I wondered if I should postpone the whole process until well after midnight, when most of my audience would have retired to bed. But telling myself that “one more trip should just about do it,” I lumbered backward and forward the few yards from my car to the house under the watchful and increasingly bemused gaze of my homo ibericus audience. They doubtless decided quite qu
ickly, and understandably, that I was a prime example of a foreign scemo, and somebody who would be likely to present them with countless other inadequacies as amusing diversions during their long days of dallying and dozing around the piazza.

  A chaotic first few minutes extended to a full half hour of snapped suitcase handles; torn plastic bags disgorging bottles of olives and peppers and funghi (mushrooms) in slippery oil; a dropped camera and film spooling all over the cobblestones; locking myself out of the car; chipping the edge of the marble step to the house with a particularly hard corner of one of the suitcases; revealing the entire contents of my wallet—credit cards, cash, personal photographs, and all those scraps of paper and receipts that I kept for no good reason—which blew all over the piazza in a sudden, pernicious evening gust; and finally, my grand climax: locking my landlady out of her own house, which required a full family chorus of “Eh, Signore, Signore!” and door-pounding before I realized my gaffe.

  By my count I created a brutta figura more than half a dozen times!

  To think of these calamities any further would bring instant apoplexy. I can only hope that writing them down as a confession of my temporary incompetence in front of that critical audience will dissipate further recall. And I also hope that the gentlemanly spirit of my fellow villagers will enable them to forgive the inadequacies of this straniero (foreigner), if not entirely to forget them.

  They say that most people in the village are known not by their real names, but by nicknames often gained after some notable stupid or certainly memorable event in their lives. I dread to think what mine might be. And of course, as true homo ibericus gentlemen, the villagers in Aliano would never tell, and I shall therefore never know.

  Waiting for a Train

  Day seven was much, much better.

  At last, Anne is on her way, flying into Rome from England and thence by train to Basilicata. At long last!

  I WAS AT the train station right on time the following morning to pick her up…if you could call it a train station. More like a non-architectural afterthought. A token, aid-funded, pantile, breeze-block and stucco structure flung together as a gesture of the North’s recognition that even the Mezzogiornese might need access to a train or two, although rarely (I could imagine them sniggering) to go anywhere north of Naples.

  The station stood alone in the broad, sun-soaked valley. The air was thick and stagnant. You’d think that with all those mountains around there’d have been some kind of breeze, token proof that cold air flows down and hot air up. But no tokens today. Just pure unseasonable southern Italian torridity. A wham of heat that just keeps on whamming.

  I looked at my watch. Fifteen minutes to go. I’d made good time down the endless switchbacks from the village. My adrenaline was pumping. My heart, if not exactly pounding, was certainly racing along at an abnormal pace of excitement and expectancy. It had been too long since I’d seen her. I reprimanded myself for not being more persuasive in my attempts to lure her there earlier away from all those onerous teaching responsibilities in Japan. But then her mother was ill in Yorkshire, and she’d wanted to stay in England longer.

  I too had wondered if I should have left Italy for a while and returned to Yorkshire to be with the family, but Anne had insisted that there was nothing I could do and that she would soon be joining me as planned.

  So, here I am waiting in the middle of this empty valley in the shade of a shed, watching long looping lines of ants do whatever ants do so incessantly, and thinking of the fun and feasts that await us over the next few days back at the village. Massimo is gathering a small circle of friends and promises me “one of the best meals you and Anne will have in Basilicata.” Rosa and Guiliano are also offering a family extravaganza “better ’n’ Christmas and Easter lumped together.”

  And there it is. Way, way up the line is a hazy, gray shape getting closer. There’s no sound at first, just heat and flies and emptiness. But then I hear it. A tinkling and clinking in the rails getting deeper and louder as this modest little train (only four carriages) wobbles and rumbles to a halt in the middle of all this nowhereness.

  She’ll have far too many bags as usual. Fortunately the car is parked right next to the tracks. And she’ll get all embarrassed when I give her one of my bear hugs in front of all the other passengers.

  But I don’t see any passengers. The train looks empty. So, why has it stopped? Maybe it is an obligatory stop, because it’s now starting to roll again and no doors have opened and there’s no sign of Anne.

  No Anne. It takes a few seconds for that fact to sink into my over-heated, befuddled brain. I peer into the carriages as they move away, but all the seats are empty. Well, maybe there’s another train expected. I check the rain-stained, sun-bleached timetable and find that, no, except for a very early train at six thirty-two A.M., this is the only train until a much later night train. I can feel the sweat running down my forehead. Cold sweat. I check my watch, read my notes made the last time we talked a couple of days ago. London, Heathrow, to Rome. Train from Rome, arriving here at 5:20 p.m. Plenty of time to get to the station from the airport. Well, maybe the flight was delayed. I never thought to check. How stupid! So that’s what I should do, I decide. Back on the highway, find a phone at the first gas station, call British Air. No, better still: Call Anne’s sister, Susan, in England. She’ll probably know where Anne is, or if there’s been a delay. Yes, that’s right! That’s what I’ll do. Some stupid mix-up. Some typical traveler’s confusion. I bet she’ll be smiling at my exasperation.

  I’ve never been very good at “systems”—things that require neat dovetailing of plans and schedules. They rarely seem to work. At least not for me. But this time I’ll surprise her and just laugh the whole thing off. Like I did on the first occasion we met in our late teens, when we worked in the same office and she watched me with eagle eyes (or was it a humorous glint?) as I signed in that I’d arrived at the office earlier than I actually had…but that’s another, long story. For once, I’ll be a mature adult used to handling crises like this with a cool, detached Zen-like demeanor, and humor too. A Yorkshireman can always find something amusing in any situation. And these two Yorkshire folk, born—believe it or not—on the same day in the same year, in Yorkshire towns only seven miles apart, and now married partners for over thirty-five years, will have a real laugh at it all together. So that’s it. Find a phone. Fast.

  Fortunately, inspiration struck, even in the midst of all that mental anguish, confusion, and fantasizing.

  Forget England. Forget the airline company. Just call Rosa. Of course! Anne has her number in case of emergencies or, in this case, what looks like a typical Italian botch-up of itineraries, timetables, schedules…and my dreams. (A couple of days previously I really had a bizarre, ultraromantic Bogart-and-Bergman–tinged dream of me hairpinning across the wild ridges and ranges and descending into a broad, empty valley to greet my beloved at a godforsaken little, stucco-peeling railroad station in the middle of nowhere and our dissolving into a welter of hugs and kisses and whispered sweet-nothings and vows of never being apart so long ever again.)

  Rosa, calm and stoic as ever, told me that, yes, Anne had called, and the train had left on time, but that there had been some kind of mix-up of station names and locations and that she’d finally emerged at another middle-of-nowhere station way down the Basilicatan coast, at Metaponto.

  “How long ago was all this?” I asked.

  “Oh, ’bout an hour ago,” Rosa said laconically.

  “So, where is she now?”

  “Well, she waited a long while for you at the station and then she got a taxi.”

  “A taxi?! From Metaponto? Where to?”

  “To Aliano.”

  “From Metaponto!? That’s fifty miles away!”

  “Well, she didn’t know what else to do. At Metaponto there was no one around, and she said she was getting a bit nervous so…”

  So much for my dreams of starry-eyed reunions in the wilds of the Basento
Valley.

  “So, she’s on her way to Aliano?”

  “Likely she’ll be there already.”

  “But she doesn’t know where I live. She hasn’t got a key. There’ll be no one around to meet her.”

  “Ah, she’ll be fine, David,” Rosa said encouragingly. “Aliano’s only a tiny place, and your friends’ll look after her just fine.”

  And how right good old reliable Rosa was. Once again, I swirled my way back through all the ridges and ranges, roaring like a rally driver on the twists, turns, and tortuous grades and soaring up the final twenty-two tornanti to my precipice-perched village. And, there she was, there was my darlin’—as I skidded to a dusty halt by the church—being escorted around the piazza by a coterie of locals, most notably Don Pierino himself, proudly pointing out the nuances of Alianese architecture, with Giuseppina and her two sons all smiling and chatting with Anne in ripe Alianese dialect (which sounds nothing like Italian), and Anne nodding and responding in her usual warm way, as if she understood every word, and beaming that beautiful smile of hers. And then waving at me like a schoolgirl and scampering across the cobblestones to greet me—just as I’d imagined—with hugs and kisses. And I was thinking, We really shouldn’t be doing this in front of my friends and all the octos and the black widows (looking askance as usual at the slightest outward demonstration of affection). But, the hell with it! Anne’s safe, she’s happy, she’s radiant…and she’s here. At last!

  The rest of the evening faded into a blissful blur, the two of us well lubricated with wines, liqueurs, bountiful snacks provided by my, and now our, new friends. In fact, the next few days were a moveable feast of fun, frivolity, and endless indulgence with our dreams come true, well and truly manifested in glorious, rainbow technicolor.