AT THE END OF THE STREET I spotted a white Mercedes taxi and the back of a man’s head. I walked up to the car and peeked in. A man in his sixties, not the man my age I had been expecting, sat in the driver’s seat. As I walked away, I heard the car door open, and the man called out behind me, “Roccaforte?”
I turned around. “Yes,” I said. “But I’m waiting for Pino.”
The man flashed a bright smile. “Come in. He’s my son; he couldn’t make it today”
I hesitated, then got in the car.
“Good morning,” the man said, and offered his hand. “My name is Mimmo:”
I shook his hand, and we were on our way
“Excuse me, but would you mind if I picked up my niece?” Mimmo asked. He kept covering his mouth when talking to me as if he were afraid he had bad breath or would spit.
“Your niece?” I asked. I hadn’t really expected anyone else to ride along.
“Yes, she’s very nice,” Mimmo implored. “She’s poor; she doesn’t get out too much.”
I thought for a moment.
“She’s never been to the Aspromonte,” he said.
“That’s fine.” I relented. I imagined her to be a shy, quiet girl with a bad haircut and bad teeth.
“Thank you,” he said. At the next light he reached out the window and removed the taxi light from the top of the car.
“Off’ duty,” he said. Then we slid alongside another car and waited in front of a doorway between an ice-cream store and a shoe shop. He rang up someone on his telefonino.
“I’m down here,” he almost whispered. “Come quickly” He turned to me and smiled.
A young woman in her late teens with short dark hair and short pants bounced down the stairs of the doorway and hopped into the back seat. She wore plenty of rouge, eyeliner, and lipstick. She looked ready for an adventure.
“Ciao, Zio!” she screamed, and gave her uncle a big kiss on the cheek, ruffling his thin hair with her hand.
“Who are you?” she asked, turning to me.
“A visitor,” I said.
“From where?”
Mimmo interrupted. “Don’t ask him too many questions. He’s here to see the sights.”
“What sights?” she said, and, without waiting for an answer, reached in between Mimmo and me and turned on the radio. Treacly Italian pop music bounced around the car. Settling back, she brushed my shoulder with her hand. “What’s your name?” she yelled over the music.
“Marco,” I said.
“Marco?” she said. The next two sentences out of her mouth seemed to end in a question, but were entirely incomprehensible to me, filled with vowels and dead-ended consonants. It sounded like Arabic.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t quite understand,” I said.
She continued to talk to Mimmo in dialect as we left the city and skirted the coast along the Ionian Sea.
“Francesca,” Mimmo said, “speak in Italian.”
“In Italian? Why?”
“Because I don’t think our friend speaks our dialect.”
“Marco, friend, why not?” she said.
“Because I’m from New York.”
“New York!” Francesca bellowed. “Zio Mimmo, why didn’t you tell me he was from New York?”
“I didn’t know,” he said.
The Aspromonte Mountains loomed above us. I had left my map at the hotel and had no idea where we were heading or how we were to get there. I was surprised to see that we were following the coast, though. I could have sworn when I last looked at the map that Roccaforte was in the center of the mountains.
Francesca and Mimmo talked, again in dialect, then turned to me and burst into chest-splitting laughs.
“Do you like music?” Francesca asked. She offered me a stick of chewing gum. I declined.
“Some, not all,” I answered.
She ignored me and once again reached over to turn up the radio that Mimmo had just turned down. She belted out the words to the song, a lament with a catchy melody and thumping bass. Unfortunately, she was tone-deaf, but she continued to sing, stopping only to ask the occasional question, to which she did not wait for a response.
“Take me to America!” she demanded, with the innocence of a young girl. “Do you live far from Disneyland?”
“Yes, that’s across the country, in Calif—”
“Take me! I want to go to … what did you say?”
I began to answer.
“Are you married?” she asked, then hummed the next phrase of the song.
After an hour of driving, Mimmo slowed down at the exit for Melito, one of the cities whose name came up whenever “sequestering” or “kidnapping” was mentioned.
“This is the way to Roccaforte?” I asked. I began to feel nervous, silly as it seemed. And I knew I sounded nervous.
“Don’t worry,” Mimmo said with a smile.
“Yeah, don’t worry,” Francesca yelled. They turned to each other, laughed, turned to me, then laughed again. Francesca smacked her gum.
Finally, we reached the mountains and quickly climbed the steep roads. Behind us, the sea fell to the distance, and in a matter of minutes we had driven out of range of civilization. Prickly pear cactus grew along the shoulders, dropping their fruit. We wound up and down, tires grasping the sinewy roads, staying tight to the edge.
I could understand how someone could disappear here, never to be found again.
We drove through stands of olive and fig trees. The distant mountains were eerily bare, all brown soil and jagged rock. They seemed uninhabitable.
I realized that the back seat had gone quiet—no gum smacking, no talking, no singing. I turned around to see Francesca hanging her head out the window, her body shuddering each time her stomach released its contents.
“She’s never been to the mountains,” Mimmo whispered. “It’s all the curves.”
I remembered Giuseppe’s telling me about traveling through these mountains a few years back. It was late afternoon, and he was slowly ascending a mountainside when right before a curve a man stepped out in front of him with a machine gun. He motioned for Giuseppe to pull off the road and cut his engine. Then, with his gun, the man motioned for Giuseppe to get out of the car. In a calm, matter-of-fact voice, he said that Giuseppe couldn’t go any farther—and he couldn’t go back. He must wait until he was told to continue. The man with the gun then disappeared into the brush. Giuseppe waited two hours, his car parked at a curve on the road so that he couldn’t see what was in front of him or behind him. After almost three hours, with no sign of the man, Giuseppe decided to take a chance. He got in his car and drove ahead. There was not a soul in sight. He realized that something had been going on in front of him that the man with the gun didn’t want anyone to witness.
We had been winding through the mountains for almost an hour
and had seen only two other cars, both heading in the opposite direction. Francesca had curled up and fallen asleep in the back seat. Mimmo was silent, glancing at me from time to time and offering what seemed to be a forced smile. For the first time we passed what might be called a village, five or six adjoining houses built on the uphill side of the road. Across the street were small barns or chicken sheds. Two men and a woman were walking along the road; we slowed down and passed them with just inches to spare. They stared into the car. They didn’t return Mimmo’s nod.
Mimmo’s telefonino rang. He answered and spoke softly. He looked at me, then shrugged his shoulders. He continued to talk on his phone, turning his head so that he was talking almost into the window. Just at that moment we passed a white car parked along the side of the road. Mimmo nodded to the two men, one of whom was also on a cell phone.
The white car pulled out behind us. Mimmo hung up. My pulse quickened.
“Who’s that?” I said, trying to hide my nervousness.
“Who’s who?” Mimmo said, looking perplexed.
“The car behind us?”
Mimmo looked in his rearview mirror, then back at me and said innocently, “Just two guys.”
I told myself that it was just a coincidence. But I began to plan my escape, just in case. I could jump out of the car and run. But where? How far to the next village or even the next person? And what would happen when I got there? Who would help this foreigner, especially here, where everyone relied on the mafia? I remembered the expressionless faces of the people we’d passed just minutes ago.
I looked to the right, out of Mimmo’s window, and saw that the white car was pulling alongside us. My heart raced. Then the car passed us and disappeared into the distance. I felt foolish.
We stopped to let a shepherd guide his sheep across the road. Mimmo rolled down the window and asked him, “How far to Roccaforte?”
The man said, “Diesh.”
“Diesh?” Mimmo turned to me. “Aah … dieci” Ten kilometers. “I can barely understand the language.”
We wound around a large curve. Francesca woke up and, like a child, said, “Are we in Roccaforte yet?”
And there it was, in front of us, the village of the Greeks. I had imagined sweetly rustic houses destroyed and rebuilt over centuries of earthquakes. What I saw instead was four tiers of brick houses, without any stucco, the Italian equivalent of wooden shacks in 1950s Appalachia. Only the church and what looked to be the foundation of a Norman castle below it stood out against the rocky gray cliffs and the run-down cinder-block buildings.
“This is Roccaforte?” I asked Mimmo.
“I guess so,” he said hesitantly
Just then we passed a simple white sign with black letters that read ROCCAFORTE.
One of my British guidebooks explained that there was a town that could only be reached by mule from here. I shared this with Mimmo.
“I wouldn’t doubt it,” Mimmo said. “Although I believe there is a new road that goes to another Greek village, Roghudi.”
Three old ladies sat outside their houses, blankly staring at us. Two dark-haired children with Down’s syndrome faces regarded us with a bit more curiosity At the church we parked and walked out to the edge of the Norman wall.
I realized that we had arrived at siesta time; the town felt empty, as if it had been evacuated. So far the only beautiful thing about Roccaforte was the view out above the Aspromonte tree line. In front of us an almost mythical landscape unfolded. The sandy riverbed slithered through jagged peaks and led out to a hazy horizon. I could just make out the trickle of a stream cutting through the bed of the once-powerful Amendolea River. In the distance, where the river reached the Ionian Sea, the sun cut through the clouds and shot down to the water in a blaze.
Francesca, not yet over her nausea, waited in the car. Mimmo and I walked to a doorway covered with beads. I thought that it might be a café, but it turned out to be the entrance to someone’s
house. An old man approached us. His gray eyes glowed in an unshaven face.
“Excuse me,” Mimmo said. “Is there a place to get something to eat here?”
The man adjusted his head in a way that said he didn’t understand.
“Mangiare,” Mimmo said. “Is there any place around here to eat?”
The man shook his head, then spouted off something completely incomprehensible to me. Usually I can understand a little bit of dialect, but this language didn’t even seem Latinate.
As we walked off, Mimmo said to me, without a hint of irony, “I’m sorry, but it’s all Greek to me.”
The road to Roghudi was yet another hour. Mimmo said that he could take me there. Perhaps it would be nicer than Roccaforte. Or, if we hurried, we could make it to Scilla, on the other coast, by sunset. I had wanted a chance to see the legendary home of the six-headed sea monster, so we drove just far enough across the village to see Roghudi in the distance, set snugly in the saddle between two mountain peaks. It was smaller than Roccaforte, and its only distinguishing feature was a kind of watchtower or concrete silo poking above the village.
Francesca came to life a couple of hours later, as we returned to civilization. In the village of Chorio, we stopped at a little roadside café. I offered to treat. Mimmo and I each ordered a panino.
Francesca gleefully ordered. “I’d like a panino con prosciutto crudo. And a panino con formaggio e piccantino, Oh, yes, a bag of chips. Oh, and can I have an aranciata? And a limonata?”
Mimmo opened his billfold, but I motioned for him not to worry about it. “I’m sorry,” he said. “She’s very poor, and she doesn’t get to go places much. But I have no idea how she can eat so much.”
“Musolino was not a thief,” Mimmo was saying. “He only took back from the padroni what they took from the peasants.” We were talking about how far Musolino’s travels took him.
“He went everywhere,” Mimmo said. “He would be here in Montebello one day, and the next day someone would say they’d seen him way over on the other side of the mountains in Delianuovo. But he never stole from the peasants. On his travels, whenever he ate something, a fig, for instance, he would leave money, maybe place it by the trunk or hang it on the branches.”
Driving along the highway that would take us along the coast to Scilla, Mimmo pointed to a rock formation called Pentedàttilo that looked like a hand with its five fingers joined together, pointing up to the sky. When I looked closely, I saw that there were houses built into the mountains. Mimmo told me that in the 1950s, fearing future earthquakes (and in order not to have to put in plumbing or electricity), the Italian government subsidized the villagers’ move to new apartment buildings farther down the mountain. The old village had been virtually abandoned ever since.
Scilla is a dragon’s head emerging from the water. I climbed it from behind and looked down, remembering the passage from The Odyssey:
There was Scylla, and on the other side godly Charybdis
Sucked back terribly the salt water of the sea.
Whenever she disgorged, like a basin in a large fire,
She seethed, all stirred up. And from overhead, foam
Fell down on both sides of the peaks of the crags,
And when she swallowed down the salt water of the sea
She appeared all stirred up within, and the rock roared
Terribly about, and the earth appeared underneath
In dark blue sand. Sallow fear seized the men.
I was surprised to see the waves docilely lapping the rocks, like a Labrador retriever licking the hand of its master. Looking out toward
Sicily, I tried to locate the spot where Charybdis might have been. Believed to have been a series of whirlpools in Homer’s time, it would have swirled at the narrowest point between Calabria and Sicily The sea was glassy calm, reflecting the orange-and-red rays of the setting sun. Perhaps with the shifting of ocean plates and the subsequent volcanic activity, the seafloor and coast have all changed. At any rate, Charybdis, like Odysseus—like the Greeks, Saracens, Normans, and Spanish, and the peasants themselves, emigrating to America—had moved on.
We drove back to Reggio with the setting sun warming the car. My eyes fluttered to a close.
“Sleep, sleep,” Mimmo said. “I’ll wake you when we get to the hotel.”
That evening back at La Bracieria, I told Giuseppe, the waiter, the events of the past two days. He seemed pleased and surprised that I had visited Musolino’s grave site—or had at least tried to. He shook his head, though, when I told him that I had gone to Roccaforte.
“You didn’t get kidnapped, did you?”
“Not unless you consider Mimmo and Francesca kidnappers.”
“Do they really speak Greek there?”
“I couldn’t understand them for the life of me.”
Giuseppe brought me an antipasto platter even larger than the one he had provided two nights before, with homemade ricotta, still bearing the imprint of the wicker basket, pitted olives and roasted peppers with oregano, eggplant and zucchini fritters, and a selection of bruschette topped with tomatoes and piccante.
Next, he brought me the house special, stuffed calamari grilled on an open fire. And once again he set in front of me a cordial glass of bergamotto.
Sweetly drunk, I stumbled out onto the chilly Corso Garibaldi. Its ornate lampposts and balconies at first reminded me of what New Orleans’s Bourbon Street might be like without the tourists. Then I stopped for a moment and looked around. I was transported back to
Tampa, Florida, to La Settima Avenue in the Latin Quarter of Ybor City Perhaps this was what Ybor City had been like in the 1930s.
I was feeling homesick, but not for Florida and not for New York, although I missed Martha. Knowing that soon my trip was coming to an end, I was homesick for Gimigliano and the people I knew there.