NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (31 page)

An old man in a cloth cap sitting on a wooden folding chair near the main square smiled at me and said hello. We talked awhile, and then I told him what I was looking for.

“Yes. Levi’s house is down there,” he said. “There is a sign on it. There is a museum near it.”

As we were talking, another man approached. He was small, wrinkled, smiling, welcoming. He was Giuseppe DeLorenzo. His friend was Francesco Grimaldi.

“Grimaldi is a good name,” I said. “Your family rules Monaco.”

“My family is all dead,” he said. But he liked the joke. “That is another family.”

They offered to show me where Carlo Levi’s house was, and so we walked to the lower village, on the other part of the saddle, on the ridge. I was aware of being very high, of being able to see the plain stretching south to Metaponto and the sea. We were on a steep pedestal of dry mud and brush and from the street that connected the two crumbling parts of Aliano you could look straight down the Fossa del Bersagliere, 150 feet to a ledge of olive trees, and then another drop.

“You call this a gorge?” I said, using the word
gola.

“No. A
burrone.”
And he grinned at me. When I checked I saw that this word might have come from the Arabic
burr
, for land or wild slopes.

We walked down the hot cobbled street, the hot sun beating on our heads. Flowers all over the valley gave it color and perspective, especially the poppies, which glowed a brilliant crimson against the dust.

We were passing some squarish crumbling houses.

“You have to see this,” Francesco said. “This is the historic part of Aliano. It is very old.”

“The palazzo,” Giuseppe said.

Another crumbling house.

“The signorina’s palazzo.”

“Where is the signorina?” I took this to be the Donna Caterina, “mad as a hatter,” who was said to bay at the moon.

“Dead. The whole family is dead.”

“What was the family’s name?”

“The family Scardacione.”

We walked down the cobbled street, to Piazza Garibaldi, though “piazza” gives the wrong impression—this square was hardly bigger than the floor of a two-car garage—to DeLorenzo’s house. The house was ancient, a section of cracked stucco attached to a row of stucco boxes. His cat yowled at me and crawled into a strangely made clay contraption that looked like a large birdhouse fixed to the wall of the house.

“What’s that?”

“A chimney.”

He reached over and removed a large brick from under the shelf where the cat had taken cover.

“See? It’s an oven. For making bread.”

Now I saw that it was a small scorched fireplace. The cat was curled up on the shelf where the loaf was placed; the chimney flue was connected to the fire pit, where Giuseppe was replacing the brick. It was an artifact from another age, and brought to mind the hard, simple labor of bread-making that also involved someone toting faggots of wood to use as fuel. I had seen small blackened bread-ovens similar to this in Inca villages in the Andes.

“It’s very old,” I said.

Giuseppe made the Italian gesture of finger-flipping that meant “An incredible number of years—you have no idea.”

“When was the last time it was used for bread?”

“This morning,” Giuseppe said, and then barked an unintelligible word.

A wooden shutter flew open and banged against the wall of the house. A woman, obviously Signora DeLorenzo, stuck her head out of the window and groaned at her husband, who made another demand, unintelligible to me.

The woman was gone for a moment and then appeared and handed down from the window an iron key ten inches long.

I greeted the old woman. She jerked her head and clicked her teeth. Meaning: I acknowledge your presence but I am much too distracted to return your greeting.

“Follow me,” Giuseppe said.

We went down the sloping cobbled street to a narrow road that lay against the steep hillside. A little fence and a steel gate surrounded a weedy garden and a grape arbor. Francesco dragged the gate open.

“A doctor came here,” Giuseppe said, slotting the key into a wooden door in the hillside. “He was like you. Just traveling. He told me a good thing. ‘Worlds can’t meet worlds, but people can meet people.’ ”

“That’s very nice.”

“Very wise,” Francesco said. “See, worlds are big. Worlds can’t meet worlds.”

“But people can meet people,” Giuseppe said, entering the cavernous room.

“So who was this wise doctor?”

“Just a traveler!” Giuseppe beckoned me into the dark room.

It was cool inside, with a musty earthen smell of stale wine and damp dust and decayed wood. As I asked what it was my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness and I saw some large wooden casks set on racks.

“It is a
cantina,”
he said, gesturing in the vinegary coolness. He was using the word in its precise sense, for cellar. “In the Aliano dialect we call this
una grota”
—a cave.

Apart from the six wine casks, there was also a wine press that had been taken apart, and a great deal of dusty paraphernalia—rubber tubes, glasses, bottles, pitchers, buckets.

“What do you call this?” I said, tapping a cask.

“In Italian it’s a
botte
, but we call it a
carachia,”
Giuseppe said, using a word that was not in any Italian dictionary. “Please be seated.”

Francesco drew off a pitcher of wine and with this he filled three glasses. We toasted. Francesco downed his in two gulps. Giuseppe and I took our time.

Sitting at a rough wooden table, in the semi-darkness of the little cave, the bright white day glaring in the doorway, I asked the men their ages. Francesco was seventy-two, DeLorenzo was seventy. They were little boys at the time Carlo Levi had lived as an exile in the village.

“You must have seen Carlo Levi,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” Francesco said. “I remember him well. I was a small boy at school.”

“Have you read his book?”

“Yes, yes,” both of them said.

I had a strong feeling this was not true, yet as it was the book that had put Aliano on the map, they had a civic duty to say that they had read it, even if they had not.

“He was a doctor,” I said. “Did he ever take care of you or your parents?”

“Doctor? He was no doctor,” Francesco said, and poured more wine for us.

We toasted again, and I recalled how on his first day in the village, and almost the first page of the book, Levi was asked to cure a man stricken with malaria. Levi asked why the man was in such a bad way (he died soon
after) and he was told that there was no doctor in the village. So, in addition to being an exile, he was Aliano’s doctor.

The men smiled at me.

“Carlo Levi was a writer,” Francesco said. “A very intelligent man. He was writing most of the time.”

“We saw him writing!” Giuseppe said.

According to the book, which Levi began (so he said) in 1943, some seven years after leaving Aliano, Levi sketched pictures, and went for walks, and tended the sick. Because of his status, an antifascist political prisoner in a village whose mayor boasted that he had been described as “the youngest and most Fascist mayor in the province of Matera,” Levi was hardly likely to be seen writing in public.

“We would see him walking up and down.” Francesco got up and walked a few steps, swinging his arms. “He would be writing the whole time.”

“What did the village people think of him?”

“We put up a statue of him!” Francesco said. “That’s what we thought of him!”

“Thanks very much,” Giuseppe said, as Francesco filled his glass again. “He’s buried in our cemetery! You can visit his grave!”

Francesco was urging me to finish my wine so that he could fill my glass again. It was red wine, strongly flavored with a dusty aftertaste, and drinking it in the cool shadows of the cantina, with the full glare of the doorway in my eyes, I quickly became dizzy. Nonetheless, I obliged, because I liked talking to these two hospitable men.

They were recognizable from the book. It was the first feeling I had had when I encountered the woman with the buckets toiling up the hill. She had looked at me as though at another species and had turned away. The men were small and compact, the old Italic round face and large eyes and thin lips. Their language was different and they were proud of that. But there was something more, a greater difference, the very thing that Levi wrote about. The sense in which the villagers felt they were regarded as not Christians, not even human; “we’re not thought of as men but simply as beasts, beasts of burden, or even less than beasts, mere creatures of the wild. They at least live for better or worse, like angels or demons, in a world
of their own, while we have to submit to the world of Christians, beyond the horizon, to carry its weight and to stand comparison with it.”

Levi had written a great deal about the language. Their word
crai
, for tomorrow, was a version of the Latin
cras
, but it also meant forever and never. Yes, Giuseppe laughed, that is our word and he was delighted that I used it.

“This is a lovely village, not a prison,” I said, my happiness fueled with wine.

“Who said it was a prison?” Francesco said.

“For Carlo Levi it was a prison,” I said. “He was sent here by the police.”

“Because we are so isolated,” Francesco said. “There was no road, nothing at all, just a path. We had no water, no electricity.”

“I remember when the electricity came,” Giuseppe said. “And the water for drinking.”

“Oh, sure,” Francesco said. “Before that it was just candles, and getting water from a well. That meant a long walk down the hill.”

“I didn’t mean to say that Aliano was a prison.”

“Not a prison at all. Just far!”

“And full of Fascists,” I said.

“Yes, it was all Fascists,” Francesco said. “But I’ll tell you one thing. The police liked Levi a lot.”

This was not true, according to the book, but if it allowed the men to take pride in the village and not be ashamed, that was all right with me. In fact, the police had from time to time made life difficult for Levi, who was prohibited from leaving the village. This was enforced. The limit of his world was the boundary of Aliano. “The surrounding lands were forbidden territory, beyond the Pillars of Hercules.”

Meanwhile we were still at the table, in the little wine cave, drinking and talking. Levi himself had spoken of the hospitality of the people, how they would share whatever they had, how attentive they could be in the presence of strangers.

“Was he tall or short?” I asked. “What was his face like? Very kind, I imagine.”

Giuseppe considered this. He said, “A strange face, of course.”

“Why strange?”

“Well, he wasn’t Italian.”

“Yes. He came from Florence.”

“No. He came from another country—far away.”

People in Aliano looked upon strangers from the north as though they came from another world, Levi had written, “almost as if they were foreign gods.”

“I’m sure it was Florence,” I said.

“He was a Brega,” Francesco said. “He had a foreign face.”

What was this “Brega”? I tried to think of a country that it might apply to, but I drew a blank. I asked each man to repeat the word. Still it sounded incomprehensible to me.

“If he was a Brega,” I said, using the word, “then where did he come from?”

“From far away.”

“Not Italy?”

“No. Maybe Russia,” Giuseppe said.

This seemed pretty odd. His Italianness was the whole point of
Christ Stopped at Eboli:
an Italian from Florence was exiled to a village in the south of Italy, and living with such a strange breed of Italians, he felt as though he was “a stone that had dropped from the sky.”

“This word Brega, is that his nationality?”

“Yes,” Francesco said, and he could not imagine why I did not understand him.

Then the light dawned. I said, “Are you saying
Ebraica?”

“Yes.”

Two syllables, four syllables, what was the difference, the word meant Jew, like our word Hebraic. He was no Italian—he was a Hebrew!

And so sixty years and twenty-three printings of the book in English, and twice that in Italian, and fame, and literary prizes, and a world war and the fall of Fascism—none of these had made much difference. The man who had suffered exile and made Aliano famous in this wonderful book was not an Italian, after all, but just a Jew.

These two men were not anti-Semites. They were villagers. Everyone who visited was measured by the standards of the village, and when it came to nationality the standards had strict limits.

By this time all of us were full of wine. I stood up and staggered and
said, “I have to go. I want to see Levi’s house. And then I want to go to Sant’Arcangelo.”

“A lovely place.”

“There are said to be the horns of a dragon in the church.”

“That’s true. A lovely church.”

Francesco stacked the tumblers that we had used for the wine, and outside he used his enormous key to lock the door to the cavern.

“I imagine this historic part of town is old,” I said.

“Very old,” Giuseppe said.

“Probably fourteenth or fifteenth century,” I said.

Francesco laughed so hard I could see his molars and his tooth stumps and his tongue empurpled with his own wine.

“No! Before Christ!” he said. “Some of this was built in the ancient times.”

And walking back up the narrow road to the piazza and the edge of the ravine, they went on encouraging me to share their belief that the village of Aliano—many of these same buildings, in fact—had existed for the past two thousand years.

Because of our drinking—almost two hours of it—the lunch hour had passed. I was dazed from the alcohol and dazzled by the sun. They pointed me in the direction of Levi’s house, and there I went and found it locked. It was high, at the top of a steep street, off the crooked Via Cisterna. It was signposted
Casa di Confina
, and it had not been renovated, only preserved, with a crumbling wall around it, the shutters broken and ajar, facing south. There were two small hilltop villages in the distance, Sant’Arcangelo and Roccanova, each one “a streak of white at the summit of a bare hill, sort of miniature imaginary Jerusalem in the solitude of the desert.”