by David Yeadon
The crowd appeared weary too, by the look on their strained faces. And not much of a crowd either, compared with others I’d seen. Usually one expected half the village to turn out, which, while not a large number in the case of the tiny hilltop community of Missanello, would certainly have been more than twelve. Twelve was a definite rarity at a funeral, and an insult to the meager family who were edging ever closer to the small cemetery in clothes that, while not exactly what you might call field garb, were certainly a long way from the dark Armani and Versace rip-offs that seemed to be de rigueur at such events.
I decided to skip this one. Something was definitely not right, and I felt far too conspicuous hovering around such a small and select gathering. So, I explored the village instead, huffing and puffing up near-vertical alleys and interminable sets of steps that twined and shifted direction with all the whimsical arbitrariness of an inebriated snail. Or maybe that was me. My pace certainly had little more alacrity to it than that of a snail and I didn’t even have to carry my own house on my back.
Before reaching the tiny piazza by the castle on the summit, I was ready for a restorative pick-me-up, but the only coffee bars I’d noticed were down at the bottom of the hill. But I did see two other things up there. First, the stunning vista across the valley and the surrounding ranges, with Pollino and her cohorts rising high in the afternoon haze—always a beautiful sight and even more so there because of the height of the village and the fact that there was nothing in the foreground to block or reduce the scale of the panorama. As I peered over the parapet by the castle I felt myself to be floating in that warm, sparkling light that filled those valleys in the late afternoons.
The second thing I saw was the cars. Parked in a piazza barely big enough to make a three-point turn were half a dozen cars. Admittedly they were small cars—no fat, faddish Mercedes and the like—but I was flummoxed as to how they’d even got there because every street I’d climbed was either too narrow for cars or consisted primarily of steps.
Most odd, I thought.
And even odder was the intensely whispered debate I overheard when I finally reached the bottom of the hill again and ordered my caffe Americano (a watered-down espresso, that’s all, but at least for the same price you get a regulation cup–size of brew and not one of those meager, throat-jarring thimblesful of black tar).
The young man behind the counter seemed happy to practice his English. I suggested to him that everyone in the bar seemed very serious, with none of the typical oratorical flourishes of passatella or epithet-laced bouts of scopa or briscola card games.
Then the young man looked serious himself and started whispering something to me about a problem with the funeral.
“You mean the one…the one I saw up the hill?”
He nodded and may even have winked.
“Why? What’s the problem?”
He paused. These villages and villagers have their secrets. Strange things happen here for even stranger reasons. In fact sometimes I wondered if secrets were the invisible glue that bound them up in their individuality and created lifelong and clublike bonds of loyalty and pride and a mutual omertà-like silence. I imagined he was thinking that no matter how much he wanted to try out his foreign-language skills, sharing village secrets with a stranger who would be gone as soon as his coffee cup was empty might not be advisable in the long run. I sensed his hesitation, so I ordered an anise chaser, in the hope that he might realize I wasn’t your typical sup-’n’-run customer and maybe release his inhibitions.
It worked. At least to the extent that I could disentangle his English vocabulary from the local dialect, which was incomprehensible not only to me but doubtless to most outsiders, even if they lived only a few miles away, in villages you could see across the valley.
But the bits that did filter through the linguistic morass, as I sipped my anise and he cleaned his espresso machine, pretending he really wasn’t talking to me at all, were rather revealing. Apparently, if I understood the snippets correctly, the unfortunate middle-aged gentleman whose funeral I’d almost interrupted, had not died of natural causes but rather of a curse, a spell, that had been placed on him by a jealous woman.
“Someone in the village?” I asked, sensing a real gossip scoop here.
He shook his head violently as if to say, You’re crazy! We don’t allow witches to live in our village. “No, no” he whispered. “One of the peddlers. A woman who visits here and makes—cooks—special medicines for peoples.”
“You mean herbs and things? To cure coughs.”
He chuckled. “No, not coughs. Other things. Things for…love. Things to…change things. And maybe to kill you, too!”
“She killed him?!”
He frantically waved his hands behind the counter in a “for God’s sake, keep it quiet” gesture, and edged closer across the bar. “They say she was his…girlfriend. But he didn’t want her anymore. There was someone else instead…another little avventura” (that typically masculine word for an illicit affair).
“So…”
“So…I don’t know. That’s what these men are saying.” He indicated the half dozen or so men whispering together by the doorway
“That she poisoned him?”
He gave a splendidly “don’t quote me” Italian shrug.
“So, that’s why the funeral was so small.”
More shrugs as he furiously polished the milk-frothing spout on his already brilliantly polished machine. One never knew the validity of such stories. Particularly in those small villages where every day brought another drama, another soap opera scenario. Given the extent to which those wildly dramatic, soft-porn, pulpy TV “daytime drama” plots galvanized Italians of all ages year in and year out, it was not surprising that reality had long been confused with volatile imaginings, which that hot stew of local rhetoric and love of ribald and risqué tales tended to generate in abundance.
A COUPLE OF DAYS later I ran the story past Rosa, always my touchstone for reasoned skepticism, and she, unsurprisingly, dismissed it as the gossip of inebriated layabouts.
“So, this kind of thing doesn’t go on then?” I asked, seeking closure to the matter. I thought she’d come back with a quick, “Of course not,” and we’d talk of other things. But this time she hesitated, just a bit too long.
“Well…not now…not much.”
“How much is not much, do you think? Give or take a few poisonings and stuff like that?”
“Well, it’s not something you can really say definitely,” Rosa said weakly. “Is it?”
A wee bell rang in my head. Back on the wall of our Aliano apartment I’d stuck a reproduction of a startling 1937 portrait of Giulia Venere by Carlo Levi (who else?). I was struck particularly by the remarkable, untamed animal spirit that infused her lean, wolfish face and the Munch-esque aura of lines and colors that made her features seem to vibrate and undulate in a distinctly unnerving manner. The famed doyenne of Aliano, Donna Caterina, sister of the pompous, overblown mayor, Don Luigi Magalone, had arranged for Giulia to look after and cook for Carlo Levi, despite her somewhat wild reputation as a “wife of many men,” and her legendary skills with herbal medicines “for love and other purposes.” Although full of admiration for Giulia’s culinary abilities (his description of her unique dishes are salivary, despite consisting of such ingredients as goats’ heads, tripe, and miscellaneous obscure offal), Levi realized that the village regarded her as “in a word, a witch.” And over time he came to understand that:
MISSANELLO SCENE
Giulia was a mistress of the art of making philters, and the young girls came to her for advice on how to prepare their love potions. She knew herbs and the power of talismans; she could cure illness with the repetition of spells and she could even bring about the death of anyone she chose by uttering terrible incantations.
Somehow this seemed not to have disturbed Levi, although, as a sometime physician himself, his skills were often diametrically opposed to hers. In the end her deliciou
s meals (doubtless fully philtered) must have won out because, as he wrote so placidly: “And earthly creature that she was, this peasant witch was a faithful servant…and content with my new solitude, I stretched out on my terrace and watched the shadow of the clouds drift over the wastes of clay, like a ship on the sea” (that definitely sounds like philter-influenced writing to me).
I doubt that the poor dead gentleman of Missanello would have subscribed to such benign sentiments in the case of his own particular witch.
First Tourists, Now TV!
While it’s true I was still “new” there and “still learning things,” my affection and concern for Aliano and that small part of Basilicata seemed to be growing daily. Maybe I should have been signed on at the town hall by Mayor Tony as his amateur, and still neophyte, public relations enthusiast-in-residence. Of course I was fully aware that such an idea was contrary to all journalistic/travel writer ethics, but sometimes I wondered if my ability to distance myself from the affairs and fortunes of our chosen home in Basilicata had been prejudiced by overly close encounters of the emotional kind. Support-for-the-underdog kind of emotions. Because that’s the type of reaction I found myself having whenever I heard my little community described with sneering disparagement or ignorant indifference. Which happened a little too often for comfort.
“Don’t you realize the significance of this tiny community?” I would want to say (I may have actually said it a couple of times) before launching into my diatribe about Carlo Levi’s impact and the age-old battle between the terroni or catoni and the Don Luigis, the plight of the Mezzogiorno in general and the plight of Mezzogiornos all over the world, and ultimately the need to discover “the Lucania in all of us.”
It was a pretty eloquent presentation. It should have been by now. I’d had to put up with the “northern attitude” for as long as I’d been here. So, maybe I’d be a freelance, no-pay, no-accolades defender of Aliano while the mayor struggled to balance his meager budget and the youngsters continued to leave and the octos faded away in brass band-and-bouquet funerals and buildings continued to crack and bend under the constant threat of cataclysmic landslides and earthquakes.
I felt a distinct cracking and bending in myself, too, and a Richter scale upsurge of an earthquake-like outrage when an Italian RAI-TV (the state-owned network) crew arrived in Aliano early one morning in numerous elegant sedans to produce a “mini-portrait” of the village. I watched their camera-wielding antics with bemusement from my terrace during the day, and as evening closed in, I descended to the piazza to observe their activities a little more closely.
“So how’s your day gone?” I asked the director. After what had looked like a pretty easy-flowing sequence of shoots (the long lunchtime wine, I’d been told, certainly flowed faster than this bunch of rather indolent northerners), he half smiled at me, gave me a look of languid indifference (from behind fashionable dark glasses), and mumbled, with a Roman-like sniff from his prominent nose, “Well, there’s nothing much here really, is there?”
I launched into my standard defensive diatribe, but I fear it fell on blocked ears (the director’s fashionably long hair obviously adding to the problem). He then listed the shortcomings of the village. These encompassed the always-being-restored state of the museum and Carlo Levi’s confino house; the abandoned look of much of the “old section”; the questionable quality of the recently renovated houses; the reticence of the people, who didn’t seem to want to be interviewed; the definite inappropriateness of the large, rebuilt palazzo across from our apartment on the piazza—“It’s like a bit of Lombardy dropped out of the skies; its architecture has nothing to do with the South” (an equally outraged friend had described it as “the kind of building that gives demolition a good name”)—and on and on.
The problem was…he was right. The village had all these and quite a few other shortcomings, albeit temporary in some instances. But I think it was that northerner’s smirk and the enthusiasm with which he described the next few places he had on his schedule of “mini–TV portraits of Italian life” that raised my ire. There was some fancy, foreigner-occupied Tuscan place, doubtless inspired by recent popular books on the region; “a very beautiful historic village in Sicily with many excellent ruins,” and somewhere up in the southern Alpine foothills near Valle d’Aosta—a town voted best something-or-other village in 2000.
Previously it had occurred to me that maybe it was time Anne and I took a journey to the North—to Venice, Bologna, Turin, and Milan—not just for the cultural riches that beckoned like gleaming Aladdin’s caves up there, but more important, to see our little part of the southern world firsthand from the northerners’ point of view. A perspective from the pinnacles of power, architectural pomp, and artistic abundance. But now I suddenly realized that there was really no need for such an odyssey. The North itself had descended on our humble enclave and was presenting itself in almost caricature fashion.
“But you know,” I began again as calmly as I could, “Aliano is nothing if not authentic and true to its origins. The people themselves are history personified. The calanchi landscape is unique, and the views of the mountains on a clear day (unfortunately, it was not a clear day) are absolutely breathtaking.” I was even starting to sound like a publicity brochure. “Of course there are problems, but they’re working them out without the help of affluent Italian second-homers or rich foreigners inspired by popular books and looking for retreats with vineyards and five-hundred-year-old olive trees.”
He was not with me. His eyes roamed the piazza for his crew. It was five o’clock and time for “the wrap.” Lunch had been long and lazy, and he’d not had his siesta. “Well,” I said weakly as I prepared to leave him, “I’m sorry things didn’t work out for you.”
His attention reverted briefly to me. “Ah, well, that’s not quite true. At least we got one wonderful shot!” he said with what seemed like genuine enthusiasm.
Oh, good, I thought. Maybe all is not lost. Maybe the director was not the insensitive urbane clod he appeared to be and had captured something genuine and real that would portray the enticing essence of our unique little village.
“Oh, and what was that?” I asked hopefully.
“You! Sitting at your table high up on your terrace overlooking the piazza. Writing away. Observing the whole village. Now that was a really excellent shot.”
Ba-da-bing, ba-da-boing.
Pigeon Passeggiata
Such a droll, and rather depressing, interlude deserved the nurturing restoration of a coffee break and an amusing diversion of some kind. So Anne and I spent a pre-passeggiata half hour sitting in the piazza watching pigeons. In fact, I think I can say with absolute certainty, that this was our first real pigeon-voyeurism experience. But the sun was still warm and our coffees so decadently rich that it seemed the perfect time and place to while away those moments of early evening hedonism after the TV crew had packed up and roared away in their fancy cars.
THE FIRST THING you notice about pigeons is that the males of the species are irrepressibly arrogant. The big, plump ones seem to spend most of their time just strutting their stuff, with their bulging breasts and ruffled neck feathers, swarthy walking-tall swaggers, and a seemingly endless desire to show off their tail feathers in elegant fanlike splays to any diminutive female who happens to be around. Most females appear to be decidedly unimpressed or turn suddenly into little feathery bundles of outrage. I mean how many tail feather displays and bulging breasts can you look at in a day before wondering if these guy pigeons have nothing better or more imaginative to do with their time? Definitely no-brainer territory here.
So then begins the little promenade, lots of mini-passeggiate made up of male and female rituals of the “look at me,” “no, I’d rather not, but maybe you’ll get lucky and I’ll get bored and then maybe I will” variety. You see it all the time in the nightly human passeggiate. Of course they’re far more subtle. In the pigeon world, if the lady shows the slightest interest in the feather
fan or any other part of the male anatomy or just merely recognizes that he exists, then up he leaps in full erotic enthusiasm ready to impale the unfortunate lady on the spot without so much as a “by your leave” or a “wham, bam, thank you ma’am.”
Humans of course play far harder to get. The young, furtive males in Aliano gaggle up in guffawing groups or play who’s-the-strongest games and all those other “look at me pretending not to notice you girls” type of antics. Lust and lascivious fantasies swirl around these hormone-driven lads, but “cool” is the name of the game. The girls are cool, too, in their uniquely coy girlish way of walking arm in arm, three or four abreast, giggling and whispering and displaying apparent utter disdain for the presence of the opposite sex.
Not so your average male pigeon. His whole day, in between sudden collective flurries of flight with his buddies (something deeply genetically imprinted here) and a constant search for enticing things to nibble on, seems to be focused on regular and rapid sexual conquests. I’d like to be able to suggest far more significant findings as a result of our half-hour research, but in the pigeon world, sex seems an eternal driving force, and the females seem to surrender regularly without complaint after the usual coquettish “and what on earth do you think you’re doing?!” protestations.
I’d like to hope we humans are above all that. And I will indeed continue to hope, despite constantly depressing indications to the contrary.
I explained my conclusions to Anne, who I thought had been watching the evening pigeon passeggiata with as much interest and amusement as I had.
Apparently she hadn’t. “Sorry…what?” she said, as if stirring from a deep meditation.
“Didn’t you hear anything of my erudite observation on the love lives of our oversexed pigeons?”
