NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (32 page)

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 hotel. 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.

            
W
ith 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.

In the recent Italian election, the neofascists of the National Alliance Party had helped Silvio Berlusconi’s
Forza Italia!
party win a majority. The Minister of Transportation was the neofascist who had called Mussolini “the greatest statesman of the century.” Another party in Berlusconi’s coalition was the Northern League, which was pledged to regaining parts of Slovenia and Croatia and creating a Greater Italy once again. Rijeka in Croatia had once been the Italian city of Fiume. An Italian minister flew to Trieste and, directing his comments at Slovenia, screamed, “On your knees!”

It was so much like old times that I would not have been surprised to see a gesticulating politician call for another invasion of Ethiopia. I hated noticing politics, but this verged on surrealism and could not be ignored.
It was the anticommunist element in Italian fascism, and the protection of the Vatican—in habitual collusion with Fascists—that allowed Klaus Barbie and other Nazis to be spirited to Bolivia. There “Klaus Altman” formed The Fiancés of Death, an underground organization for smuggling drugs and arms, and committing the occasional murder. After many years Barbie was caught and extradited to France, to the annoyance of the neofascists.

Having left Bari, I was in a noisy compartment, with a priest and several old women and some businessmen, on my way to Ancona via Foggia and San Benedetto del Tronto. It was such a crowded train these passengers had no choice but to join this priest and his evil eye in this compartment.

“If Jesus came on earth to save souls, huh, why didn’t he come sooner in world history?” a hectoring woman asked the elderly priest. “Eh? What about all the others before him, for all these thousands of years?”

“Good question,” the priest said.

Some other people were chattering about politics, so I asked about the neofascists. What did they actually stand for?

“I’m not sure,” one man said. He was middle-aged, tweedily dressed, possibly a lawyer, and was headed to Ancona. I addressed the question to him because he had the kindliest demeanor. “No one is sure. The neofascists say they have broken with the past.”

And yet I had the feeling they idolized Mussolini. After all, the party was formed by old-line fascists. But I hesitated to say this.

“What’s on their minds—race, imperialism, or immigration?”

“Probably all three. They also talk about the work ethic and crime and lazy people and wasted taxes.”

The man sitting beside him was blunter. He said, “They want a police state.”

Later on, a young man handed me a leaflet in a train station. The message on it was that the neofascists were intent on suppressing personal freedom, democracy, the press and to limit rights generally.