“JUNE OR JULY, and the figs will arrive,” Giuseppe said, nodding toward the trees in the distant fields. Red herbs blanketed the ground all around the trees. “Maybe they’ll be ripe when you come back for the Festa della Madonna di Porto.”I was already excited about returning in just two months with Martha and my parents; it made going away less difficult.
Giuseppe had two clients back south in Brancaleone, which we had driven through on our trip a couple of weeks earlier, along the roads leading to the Aspromonte Mountains. Compared with his trip to Apulia (which hadn’t been quite the business catastrophe Giuseppe had expected), this was just a country drive.
We sped down the coast, the bright blue sea to our left and the dark, forbidding mountains to our right. Giuseppe pointed to a distant city on a hill. “I think that’s San Luca, where Corrado Alvaro was from.”
Calabria’s greatest twentieth-century writer, Alvaro, born in 1895 (three years after my grandfather was born), wrote about peasant struggle in such novels as Revolt in Aspromonte, which was published
in 1932. Leslie Gardiner, in South to Calabria, places Alvaro in the pantheon of Italian writers: “The primitive communities of Trieste produced Svevo; those of Sicily produced Pirandello; from the Abruzzi came Benedetto Croce and from Sardinia, Grazia Deledda; and the poor highlands of southern Calabria contributed Corrado Alvaro to the literary galaxy of the twentieth century.” No other Calabrese had written so evocatively about his region. He beautifully depicted the harsh lives of its people and explained their strong code of ethics. Unfortunately, nowadays, Alvaro’s star burns less bright.
In Bovalino Marina, one of the reputed sequestering towns, Giuseppe had a hard time finding the store he was looking for. After a few wrong turns we finally arrived, but the store’s gates had been lowered.
“Cullu ruputu e sensa cerasa,” Giuseppe said, which literally translates from dialect as “Busted ass and no cherries,” or “I busted my ass for nothing.”
“Why the ass and cherries?” I asked.
Giuseppe explained the story in terms of his own history.
Ten kids would set out to play just outside groves of cherry trees. (Giuseppe proudly noted that the trees in the mountains, where he lived, blossomed first.) While they were playing, five of the kids would run into the fields and climb the cherry trees. Whenever the owner looked out his window or passed by, he’d simply see children playing in his field—no harm in that.
However, it was only a matter of time before the padrone figured out their plan. He would run through the grove with a stick and beat the ass of the first boy he found. Since all the boys had spread out, the others could make away with their cherries. There was always one scapegoat. All the boys would go home with their cherries except for the one boy who would come home with a sore culo and no cherries to show for it.
Farther down the coast was Brancaleone. This was one of the few towns that Giuseppe admitted to liking.
At first I couldn’t understand the attraction. The buildings that lined the road, all one or two stories high and nicely painted, reminded me of North Miami Beach in the 1970s; charming, but so what?
“It’s a small town that has been spending money on making itself attractive to tourists,” Giuseppe explained. “And it’s been doing it the right way. Slowly, tastefully.”
You could see the ocean from the road. I breathed in a lungful of air—the smell of the ocean mixed with orange blossoms, sweet and pungent and soothing.
Giuseppe greeted the store owner, a man roughly my age. They set about talking. A blond woman smiled at me. She was small-boned, with light skin and deep-set blue eyes. When she smiled, her eyeteeth protruded from her gums, but this didn’t detract from her beauty. She was soft-spoken and smiled effortlessly.
Her name was Mirella Bala. The name sounded Italian, but she explained that she had moved here from Albania four years ago. She was now twenty-two; she had an Italian boyfriend and said that she had pretty much adapted to Italy.
“Life here is better,” she said, “although I miss my family back in Albania. But the Italians have been very nice to me and my parents.”
As we left the city, the modern apartments and strip stores struck me as suburban American. One of the last buildings I saw was a Range Rover dealership.
We returned north. At Gioiosa, the northernmost edge of the Aspromonte Mountains, we turned toward the center of Calabria. We passed Mammola, then sped through Calabria’s newest autostrada, a series of suspended highways and tunnels that had been cut through the granite. Giuseppe kept turning to me as he talked. “Mammola has a decent cultural museum, but the village is nothing to look at.”
I looked at the road ahead of us, hoping he would do the same.
Giuseppe looked at me, at the road, then back at me. Did he register my discomfort? “This is one of the most dangerous highways in
Calabria, not for robberies but because this valley acts like a wind tunnel. When it rains, the winds are so strong that you can’t see in front of you. On the rare occasion when it snows, forget about it.”
Giuseppe was trying to meet a client in a town called Taurianova, which lay in the shadow of the Aspromonte Mountains almost to the other coast. On the way we passed through a town called Cinquefrondi, known for its olive oil.
I couldn’t believe how fast we were going or how much land we were covering. It had taken days to travel from one coast to the other in Norman Douglas’s time. I was slightly envious of the travelers of that time who would actually have gotten to know each road and path. They had been forced to become intimate with a country in which each village is a country unto itself. I knew that my grandfather had seen more of the United States within the first months of his arrival than he had seen of Calabria in all his life. Traveling in Calabria had been far too dangerous then.
The valley road to Taurianova was lined with mythically proportioned olive trees, the tallest I had ever seen. Some must have been a hundred feet tall. They reached across the road, forming a seemingly endless canopy that blotted out the sky.
“A shortcut,” Giuseppe said. He slowed the car and turned onto a small road. Here, next to smaller olive trees, were some of the few freestanding houses I had seen in Calabria. They looked like American ranch houses, complete with driveways. It was as if we had taken a detour from the the Middle Ages straight to wealthy modernity. I thought about Giuseppe and realized that he, too, straddled the time periods. He knew the literal meanings of folksy sayings, and he knew how, and preferred, to make bread the old-fashioned way. He picked herbs and grew vegetables. But he was also an entrepreneur, he was well read, and he knew the ironies of the world around him. While he enjoyed leisurely strolls through the woods scavenging for porcini mushrooms or walking through his garden picking figs, he became annoyed at the people of Calabria who, to him, couldn’t look beyond their fields of mushrooms and their own fig trees. The engines of progress had long shifted from steam to gas, but the Calabresi preferred mule carts.
“Look at all the olives, look at them,” Giuseppe said. “More olives grow here than anywhere else, with the exception, perhaps, of parts of Spain.” He sighed. “And with all these olives, or the oranges or figs or onions or artichokes, for that matter, do you ever hear of anything coming from Calabria? No, no, you don’t. And why? Because of Calabrese pride:”
“Their pride?” I said. Then I realized that he was being sarcastic.
He looked at me. “Yes, their pride. They don’t want anyone else telling them what to do; they want to control their own land, their own manufacturing.
“All these olive trees. The farmers could easily do what they do in Tuscany: form a union, pool their fields together, and produce massive amounts of olive oil—and rich, green olive oil! And they don’t. Why? Because they are stuck in the old ways. They refuse to change. Testa dura!” he barked, rapping his knuckles on his head.
I couldn’t help thinking how in the heavily industrial, conglomerated, mass-produced, pasteurized and homogenized United States, people were yearning for a return to simpler times with mom-and-pop companies. Here in Calabria you bought your olive oil not from stores but from neighbors, or you bartered it for, say, some fragrant, potent miniature strawberries.
Of course, nowadays entrepreneurially minded Calabresi are everywhere, and many of them are trying to use the indigenous agriculture to their advantage. At a time when everyone is looking for organic produce, the lack of large-scale farming has nicely poised Calabria to fill that need; here the farmland has been largely untouched by pesticides (though I did see many private gardens coated with them). More and more in specialty stores in New York, I’ve been finding food products from Calabria touting their organic origins.
It was almost nine at night by the time we pulled into the village of Rizziconi. The piazza was run-down and completely empty, except for a tiny, clean tabaccheria, which we entered just before closing time. The two old ladies behind the counter looked up and, after a
moment’s pause, called out, “Ah, Pino!” using Giuseppe’s nickname.
“We had no idea you were coming,” the younger of the women said.
“I’ve been trying to call since this morning, but no one picked up,” he said. “I was worried that you had moved or that something was wrong.”
“No, we’ve been here all day”
“And you didn’t hear the phone ring?”
“That’s funny, it hasn’t rung all day.”
For Americans, this would have been bizarre, but for these older women, all was just as it should have been. No one really needs to call a store.
Giuseppe took out his cell phone and dialed the number. “Listen,” he said, and held the phone up to the woman’s ear. “I’m getting the ringing signal, but it’s not ringing here.”
“Oh, my gosh, how is that? I wonder what calls we missed,” one woman asked, more out of curiosity than concern.
An old man who had been standing by the cash registers looked at the phone. “Maria, could it be the fax machine?”
“Oh, my God. I forgot to switch it back to phone,” the older woman said.
“When did you use the fax?”
The two women thought about it, looked at each other, then began giggling.
“We turned it on to receive a fax, but that was the day before yesterday,” one woman said, turning to Giuseppe. “Thanks, Giuseppe.”
Giuseppe and the two women caught up on what had been happening since they last saw each other—almost a year ago. I was starving, but knowing Giuseppe, I realized it would be at least a half hour before we got out of there.
I walked outside, looking in vain for a pizzeria. The piazza was truly empty Naked lightbulbs lighted the street in a way that reminded me of the postwar Italian movies set in Rome or Naples. A young man, a teenager perhaps—I couldn’t tell—walked out onto the street, sputtering with laughter. He was out for the night. Italians
don’t keep their disabled children indoors; they aren’t embarrassed by them, and in any case, the streets are safe enough.
I looked the other way, and between two buildings I saw a tall shadow limping its way toward me. I focused on the shadow. An old man walked out of the alleyway and passed under the light in front of the church. With the aid of his cane, he hobbled his way home for dinner.