The Pillars of Hercules

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.”

  I sat on Levi’s porch in the shade, among the broken chunky walls of stucco and brick, the tiled roofs sprouting weeds, broken paving stones and ceramic shards and dusty cobbles. It was all poor, and lovely, and primitive, with no charm but a definite
warmth of a savage kind. Its height was part of its beauty, so close to the blue sky, the clouds, the enormous view across the ravine to the sea.

  There I stayed until I regained my balance, and then in the coolness of the afternoon I walked back through the village, noting the little quotations from the book, written on tiles, many of them not complimentary at all: “… cones, slopes of an evil aspect, like a lunar landscape.” (… coni, piagge di aspetto maligno, come un paesaggio lunare.)

  Some students were sketching pictures of an old house in the town.

  “Do you live here?” I asked.

  “No. We’re art students,” one of them, a young woman, said. “We’re from Eboli. Where the book is set.”

  “Have you read the book?”

  “No,” she said.

  I said, “The meaning of the title is that Christ stopped at Eboli. The Savior didn’t get as far as Aliano.”

  They smiled at me, looking incredulous, and perhaps thinking that I was wrong—that Carlo Levi was a man from Aliano who had written a book about their hometown of Eboli.

  The cemetery was beyond the top of the town in a grove of junipers. Some old women were tending a grave there, weeding a flower bed, digging, their fatigue giving them a look of grief. The graves were of marble and granite, sarcophagi the shape of small cottages, with flowers and portraits of the dead in niches in their facades.

  Levi’s grave was the smallest, the most modest, in the place, a gray slate stone: Carlo Levi 29.11.1902–4.1.1975.

  Some birds were chirping in the junipers and on the gate of the cemetery was another quotation from the book, referring to this spot as “… il luogo meno triste,” a less sad place than the village itself.

  How strange, the unusual power of a book to put a village this small on the map. It was also strange that this region was full of villages as obscure and poor as this one. It did not seem to me that Aliano had changed much. Already Levi was partly mythical, but one of the characteristics of Aliano he had described was the way its people did not distinguish between history and legend, myth and reality.

  I was both uplifted and depressed by the visit. The village was unchanged, the people as enigmatic as those he had described, good people but isolated, bewildered, amazed at the world. I was uplifted because it was a solitary discovery; depressed because the National Alliance was part of the coalition government. That was the new name for the neofascist party. There were Fascists in power once again in Italy. The ministries of agriculture, posts, environment, cultural affairs, and transport all had neofascist ministers; and at least one of them was still publicly praising Mussolini.

  It was growing dark. I hurried back to Metaponto. I got rid of the rental car, because it was dark—too late to go to Sant’Arcangelo to see the dragon’s horns.

  From Metaponto to Taranto on the coastal railway line there were miles of pine woods and pine barrens on a flat plain stretching inland from the wide sandy coast, and there were dunes nearer the shore covered with scrub and heather, some of the pines twisted sideways by the strong onshore wind. This counts as wilderness in Italy, which has little or none of it, about twenty miles of empty beach: no road, no people.

  A suddenness of scrappy settlements was a warning of Taranto and its smokestacks, its fearful-looking outskirts, depots and docks and freighters. Almost everyone in the train piled out at Taranto—youths, old people, nuns, and a Japanese girl who seemed terribly confused.

  The Japanese girl, another solitary wanderer who had yet to master the language, asked me in basic Italian whether I was also getting out here.

  “No. I am going to Bari,” I said. “Do you speak English?”

  “Poco.”

  “What about Italian?”

  “Poco.”

  “How long have you been in Italy?”

  “One week, but I have studied Italian for four years.”

  She was going to Alberobello, but where was the Taranto bus station? And did the bus go to Alberobello?

  My map showed Alberobello to be a tiny hamlet some distance to the north. What was there?

  “A certain building,” the Japanese girl said. “Very old.”

  “A church?”

  “I do not know.”

  “A pretty building?”

  “I do not know.”

  “Why are you going there?”

  My question bewildered her, but after I made myself understood she showed me a guidebook, in Japanese, filled with ugly pictures the size of postage stamps.

  “This is the most popular guide in Japan,” she said. “It says to go to Alberobello.”

  “Good luck,” I said. “But you should also be careful.”

  “The Italian men,” she said, and compressed her face in consternation. “They say ‘Let’s eat,’ or ‘Come to my house.’ I always say no, but they still ask. I think they are dangerous.”

  Off she went to an uncertain fate. I boarded the train again and it swung inland, crossing the top of Italy’s heel through gullies and rocky ravines and a shattered-looking landscape. Seeing ruined and cracked houses at Palagiano and Castellaneta, I turned to an old man near me.

  “The war?”

  “The earthquake.”

  Dust and yellow clay and rock gave way to flatness and agriculture, vineyards and vegetable fields, then the poor suburbs of Bari.

  I finished reading Frankenstein, sad that it was over. “I am … the fallen angel … Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy and I shall again be virtuous.” Also, I noted, the monster was a vegetarian: “My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb and the kid to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford me sufficient nourishment.”

  It had been cold and windy at Taranto, and the people were dressed unfashionably in sturdy clothes for the bad weather. But here in Bari the weather was pleasant, and I decided to stay for a while to do laundry and make phone calls and make plans for the journey ahead. I had run out of books to read. Bari seemed to me a useful city in every sense. It had bookstores and restaurants and inexpensive hotels. It had a concert hall and an ancient fort. It was small scale, everything in the city was reachable on foot.

  There was an air of unfussy helpfulness and goodwill in Bari that I put down to its being a Mediterranean port which dealt more with people than with cargo. With Ancona and Brindisi it was one of the great ferry ports of the Adriatic. The fact that it was a busy port meant that it had to be efficient. At the moment the ferries to Croatia were suspended, but there were numerous ferries to Greece and there were four a week to Durazzo (Durrës) in Albania.

  I ran into a man in Bari who said that if I stayed another week he would take me cross-country skiing.

  “You mean there’s enough snow in southern Italy for cross-country skiing in March?”

  “Plenty,” he said. His name was Ricardo Caruso, he was a fresh-air fiend after my own heart. He hiked, he rock-climbed, he skied.

  I told him I had been to Aliano.

  “That’s a good place,” he said. “Padula’s also good. There’s an old ruined abbey near Padula. Hidden—and so beautiful.”

  Having established some rapport, I asked Ricardo about the Albanians who had escaped from their country and come to Bari in their thousands in big rusty ships, so laden with refugees that the ships were on the verge of foundering. At first the Italian government had admitted many of them on political grounds. This charity provoked an outcry: What will we do with these indigent Albanians?

  It was only an overnighter from Albania to Bari. What if thousands more came?

  Thirty thousand more did arrive, very soon after. Some worked as waiters or manual laborers. Many joined the beggars on Bari’s streets—panhandlers often advertised themselves on placards as “Albanian Refugee” or “Ex-Yugoslavia,” meaning Croatian.

  “It was terrible,” Ricardo said, with such feeling that I dropped the subject.

  I asked a woman at my hot
el. What exactly was the story on the Albanians?

  She made a grieving sound, and she was so ashamed, she said, she could not talk about it.

  “A tragedy,” she said, and turned away. “Please.”

  I finally found a man in Bari willing to talk, and more than that, he drove me to the Bari Stadium, where the Albanians had been held until they could be repatriated.

  “Thirty thousand of them,” Giacinto said. “Most of them young men, all of them screaming. But we have problems, we couldn’t let them in.”

  There was Albanian graffiti still scrawled over the stadium door; the largest motto read in Italian: We Are with God, God Is with Us.

  “The worst was when some of them got loose,” Giacinto said. “So they’d be running all over the place—in the city, all over the streets. Listen, this is a nice city. Then you’d look up and see some skinny strange Albanian guy, his eyes like a madman’s. He’d run into a restaurant, to hide, or into a hairdresser’s. And the police would have to drag him out bodily, while he’s struggling and screaming in Albanian.”

  Giacinto smiled at the weirdness of it.

  “Misery turned them into fiends,” I said, quoting Frankenstein.

  “True. And this is a little country. Business is awful. What are we supposed to do?”

  Three days of good meals in Bari set me up, too. Gnocchi was a local specialty, so was risotto made with champagne; eggplant, olives, cauliflower, and fruit and fish. My laundry was done. I had books to read, among them one by Italo Svevo, who had lived in Trieste, where I was headed. I bought some more maps. Everyone in Bari had been pleasant to me.

  I went on my way, up the Adriatic coast in a mood of optimism. For consolation and mothering, I thought, no country could match Italy.

  10

  The Ferry Clodia from Chioggia

  With fascists in the Italian government for the first time since the war, I was interested to see whether the trains would be running on time. But even in Christian Democratic times they had nearly always been punctual. Italians told me that in the era of Mussolini, who boasted of railway promptness, the trains were often late. These days Italian State Railways were so eager to please they printed Buon Viaggio in big blue letters on each square of toilet paper—under the circumstances creating a rather puzzling and ambiguous impression of farewell.