Seasons in Basilicata (8 page)

I'm finished, at least for the moment. And I'm exhausted in that pleasantly reassuring way when you know that, whatever the outcome, you've had a true experience, a real communion with your subject.

Time for a glass of wine in the piazza.

Thank you, amazing Matera. Your organic forms will always be in my head when anyone speaks of the “growth of a city.” And I'll think of—I'll know—one place in the world that actually looks as though it's grown out of the ground like a living thing—from gorge, to carved cliffs, to caves, to houses and churches, up and up to the very pinnacle of that beautiful cathedral tower.

I smiled to myself. The art is always where the heart is. Today was a good sketching day.

Pietro in the Piazza

I decided to celebrate this period of successful image-capturing with a glass of
prosecco
(sparkling wine)—a popular lunchtime aperitif among urbane cityfolk—in the piazza on Via XX Settembre. And that's when I met Pietro. We literally bumped into each other at a coffee bar. The bar was so dark and he so gaunt that I failed to notice him and almost dumped my wine on his long, black overcoat. Fortunately the incident was resolved by laughter, and we strolled together across the piazza to the arcaded belvedere overlooking the
Sassi.

As we walked, Pietro handed me “a typical piece of Italian propaganda,” as he called it. But it didn't look like your normal slipshod political tract. In fact, it was a fine tabloid-size, folded brochure for a “Miro in Matera” exhibition that had just ended. The brochure was filled with reproductions of some of the world-famous artist's most fluid and childlike sketches, a couple of them so off-the-wall loony and light that they seemed to whirligig above the page. I smiled at the infectiousness of Miro's art. This seemed to irritate Pietro.

“No, go to back of this…brochure, where the town gives you its propaganda!” he said.

M
ATERA

I turned the brochure over and found an enchanting piece of Italianish self-promotion that read exactly as follows:

“So, what do you think?” Pietro asked.

“Sounds like they're pretty proud and want to improve the old town.”

“Improve! That's not improve! They should pull all down! Destroy! This is terrible history of town. I am very ashamed.”

“Ashamed?” A voice of protest emerged from a nearby coterie of black-coated elderly gentlemen. The piazza was full of them: all usually neatly dressed and, even during their lively discussions, maintaining their flimsy veneers of carefully nurtured social accretions and gentile behavior. The whole street was a daylong
passeggiata
for such men, culminating in the full-blast evening promenading that was so thick with static groups and slow, oozing-lava flows of stocky, swarthy Materans that it was almost impossible to negotiate a way through them.

Apparently never one for avoiding a good argument, Pietro swung around in true alpha-male fashion to face his diminutive, elderly challenger, who stood eyeball to Pietro's chest, his face blotched red in protest.

“Yes, I am ashamed!” Pietro shouted, swinging his arms operatically to emphasize his dramatic
cri de coeur.
“To think that people are now coming from all over the world to look at this terrible way that we lived. In caves! One tiny wet room for the whole family, plus chickens and goats and pigs and whatever!”

“Stupid!” his stocky challenger rejoined. (There go those fragile veneers of mutual respect, I thought.) “The house, as you call it, was just bedroom. That's all. The street was the house. Everything was done in the street: cooking, eating, looking after the children. Everything.”

“That does not change anything. You are missing—”

“Yes, I agree.” Another elderly gentleman decided to join the fray, and notched up the noise level a little more. Other groups paused to listen. People began edging closer. Nothing like a grand rhetorical battle to get the Italian blood flowing and the Mezzogiorno sensibilities stimulated.

“Nonsense!” said another, a rather blimpish
bluffeur,
quivering with Materano pride. “The
Sassi
have made Matera famous. Before this, who had ever heard of our city? Not even in Italy.”

“That's very true,” a fourth entrant to the huddle cried out.

“But what you are forgetting is…” rejoined Pietro, trying to reclaim his position as prime spokesman in this rapidly expanding crowd.

Within a few minutes there must have been thirty or so black-coated Materans crammed into the little belvedere
Sassi-
viewing area, and I was being pushed closer and closer to the railing and a vertical tumble of fifty or so feet to the pantile rooftops of the older cave houses below. One surge from this vociferous bunch, and I'd be over the edge.

“What you forget,” continued Pietro, who towered above his jostling audience, straining his neck and head even higher, like a
goose in a chicken coop. “What you forget…” Still not fully gaining their attention (I could see him thinking of some strikingly strident phrase that would clinch his self-appointed role as prime speaker; it finally came to him), he said, “We are
all
still peasants!”

Silence descended like a thick shroud. The men stopped in midgesticulation, and all eyes turned again on Pietro. “Yes,” he said, knowing he had recaptured their attention and maybe scratched off a cultural scab or two. “Yes, peasants! We are not much different now from then: Maybe we live in a large cave in the sky in one of those concrete public housing apartments. Maybe a little hot water and a tiny pension. But in our hearts, in our heads, in our spirits are we not still peasants compared with the people in Rome and in Madrid? Because that is how they still see us! Southern Mezzogiorno peasants!
Terroni!
”

Pietro's eyes gleamed behind his rimless glasses. His fisted hands moved with Lenin-like determination and emphasis. He reminded me of one of Carlo Levi's characters in his huge and famous painting in the nearby Carlo Levi Center. Unfortunately I had seen the work only in reproduction (the center being invariably ‘closed for renovations'), but it showed Levi's antifascist friends in full rhetorical swing, preaching their “power to the people” gospel, which, even today, so infuriates and unnerves the politicians of the North.

My position against the railing was now even more tenuous. The crowd was still increasing, jostling, shouting, decrying Pietro's words as blasphemous or supporting them with raised fists and the fire of revolution in their eyes. The quiet, methodical, almost somnolent pace of the
passeggiata
was gone now. Pietro had become the focal point of a vehemence that seemed to lie just under the surface of this normally staid and steady populace.

But sheer survival was my primary focus now. The crush against the railing was painful and precarious. So, with a flurry of “
Mi scusi,
” “
permesso,
” and “
attenzione,
” I elbowed and kneed my way through the throng to the safety of the main piazza.

Pietro was still in full swing. I discovered that my newfound
friend had much gusto and crowd-galvanizing eloquence in him. I watched him a while longer, but the clamor was such that I couldn't understand much of what was being said. Briefly catching his eye as he ranted on, I mouthed, “Bar” and pointed to our previous meeting place across the piazza. And then—with a dual focus that convinced me that he truly was a politician in the making—Pietro gave me a wink and nod of agreement while still holding forth in full
appassionato
flair, flailing his arms like a Mussolini wannabe and apparently loving every crazy second of it.

A quarter of an hour later he finally joined me, his eyes still sparkling with passion and the possibility of new futures for a side of himself that even he seemed surprised by.

“Congratulations, my friend! That was one hell of a show,” I gushed.

He grinned in agreement but also dismissed my compliments with a big Italian shrug and a modest “
prego, prego.
”

But then, quite touchingly, he descended from his clouds of eloquence and brief glory to a more mundane conversational style, devoid of all florid rhetoric, and smiled at me. “
Grazie. Mille grazie,
David. Now, what were we talking about before?”

I realized once again what a host of characters lurked inside each individual Italian, and how comfortably and easily they seemed to allow all these different, and contrasting, facets of themselves to make brief, and often very memorable, appearances on the stages and in the performances of their daily lives.

Ode to Simplicity and Love

Which leads me to another type of performance, and another insight into the Italian psyche, experienced that same day. If I could craft this little memorable mini-event in poetry, I'd be very happy. But, alas, my poetic skills got stuck at about the same level as my high school piano lessons, barely above scale-playing ability. Possibly unfairly I blame all this on two teachers. The English literature fellow somehow managed to suck out all the marrow of poetic creation
in me and restrict my attempts at composition almost entirely to rhyming pentameters. Any attempt at free-form verse was greeted with ridicule and, on more than one occasion, a hundred punitive thou-shalt-not-type lines to be written out while others enjoyed games of rugby or cricket beyond the classroom windows. As for the piano teacher, the less said the better. She was an unfortunate, dispirited spinster who seemed to hate all young boys, all music, the piano, and anything else associated with the subject. I sensed no love in either teacher for what they supposedly taught, so my interest in both poetry and the piano quickly shriveled too.

All of which has nothing directly to do with the little story I'm about to recount (although there's certainly a moral floating about somewhere—something to do with intensely loving whatever you do). The incident took place at a restaurant I'd just discovered in Matera. A tiny shoebox of a place carved, like so much of the old city, out of the soft golden tufa bedrock and hidden down a couple of flights of stairs off the main piazza. It had half a dozen tables, a large fireplace, rough walls of native rock, and two windows with spectacular vistas across the great bowl of the ancient
Sassi
city.

The maître d' of this modest establishment was the chef's son, and he had the gift of making the simplest of homemade pasta dishes sound so entrancing it was impossible to select one from among them. So I left it to him and his father to serve me whatever they considered to be the best dishes of the day.

On this particular night, after a deliciously rich and tender
orecchiette
(“little ears” pasta) with a
ragu
sauce of ground pork and beef, the chef's son presented me with one of Italy's classic dishes: a fritto misto of deep-fried prawns, small pieces of fish, and calamari. Now, I've enjoyed such a dish many times before, often with a far more varied selection of seafood and with batters ranging from a delicate tempura to bold English ale fish-and-chips-style to American onion-ring crispness. But the fritto misto that night was easily the best. As soon as I bit into the first calamari slice through a crisp golden skin and into a briny, succulent softness, I knew I'd found genius. Calamari are notorious for rapidly developing a tasteless
and rubberized quality that makes eating and swallowing them a most unpleasant chore. But the chef here was obviously a master of the art of maintaining their subtle sea and seafood flavor, soft texture, and ultra-crisp exterior.

After dinner I asked if I could thank the chef and ask him for the recipe for his rendition of the
fritto.
His son led me into a kitchen barely bigger than a bathroom and introduced me to his father. When I asked him for the secret of his perfect fritto misto, he laughed and put all the fancy chefs to shame with a single word, “Simplicity!”