MY ANCESTORS REALLY WERE MURDERERS.
It was no longer family legend or mythology. But reality. In black and white. Or black and yellow, really. And it was nothing to be happy about, now that I had actually found it and thought about it. In my bathroom that night, I heaved a sudden sob, and continued to sob into the sink for the next few minutes, tears of relief mixed with disbelief but also a certain grief for having actually found what I was looking for. I wondered how hard you had to hit someone to actually kill them. Maybe they had stomped on the padrone’s head when he was down, like a wedding vase placed on the ground. I cringed at the thought.
But Vita was innocent. After all those years of thinking she was a murderess, I realized she was innocent. Those pictures I had of her in my head, with a gun or a knife, killing and then fleeing to America with her hair and eyes wild, were just wrong. Grandpa Beansie had been wrong. Vita was not a killer.
Though Francesco was.
I thought about all the clues I had stumbled across. The cave wall with Adam and Eve stealing that fruit. The history of the strained relationship between the padroni and the farmers. It all played a part in my story.
I blew my nose and called my mother to tell her. I hadn’t spoken to her since landing. My mother still lived in Jersey City, up the hill from where Vita and her teenage sons had settled in 1892.
When she heard my voice, she smiled. I could hear it in her voice, which was very much like my own voice. People always confused us on the phone. It was one of the many things I had inherited from my mother.
“How’s it going?” she asked.
“Good, good,” I said. I had decided not to mention the stolen wallet. She would only worry. “Everyone here sends their regards,” I said. My mother had made many friends in her month in Bernalda and Pisticci with me.
“I have some news,” I said. “I found the murder.”
“What? Oh my God!” she shrieked. “Already? I can’t believe it. But I knew you would.”
“I wasn’t so sure,” I said.
“What did you find?”
I told her about Francesco and Vita’s brother stealing those pears from the farm in Ferrandina, and then beating the landowner. I told her about the giant crime file and how we were still deciphering its nineteenth-century calligraphy.
“So it turns out Vita was innocent,” I said. “She didn’t commit the murder.”
My mother started sobbing on the other end of the line, as if a member of some crying-jag tag team. I waited for her to calm down. Like me, my mother had wanted to know the details of the murder. But she, too, had a fondness and attachment to Vita and hoped, in her heart of hearts, that it wasn’t true.
When she finally stopped crying, she told me, “You know, the other night, I put a picture of us in Bernalda next to my bed and I started praying for you and for her. I was praying for Vita. That she would be redeemed.” She started crying all over again. “And she has been. I can’t believe it. She has been. She didn’t do it. Vita didn’t do it.”
IN BED THAT NIGHT, TOSSING AND STARING UP AT THE CEILING, I thought about that mural in the Crypt of the Original Sin and laughed at how I had missed the sign. It had been right there. The family’s original sin was the same as Adam and Eve’s. It all started with stolen fruit.
The story of original sin in the Bible involved what was probably the first crime committed in most societies. A crime that involved hunger. Stealing fruit was not a metaphor, but probably the first crime committed by most men and women on earth.
Before greed, there was hunger. And before possessions, there was fruit. Stealing from your neighbor’s harvest. It was primeval. And hardly a crime, really.
Stealing food in my family had been raised to an art form. Grandpa Beansie had his stolen crate of beans. And Chubby his stolen roast for his heroin. And my dad stole every day from work to feed us at home: frozen turkeys, frozen steaks, shrimp, lobster tails. Your family needed to eat, so you took what you could and ran. Francesco was no exception.
Just like in Genesis, the first crime—stealing fruit—was followed by the second, more serious crime, murder. The sin of Cain and Abel. As in the first family on earth, the original sins in my family would beget future generations of sinners. Generation after generation.
Though most people associated original sin with the apple, its true origins lay in the stolen pear. St. Augustine, who developed the church’s doctrine on original sin, had written about stealing pears when he was a teenager growing up in Africa in what is now Algeria.
In Book 2 of his Confessions, the first spiritual memoir ever written, Augustine told about how he and his buddies had stolen pears from a neighborhood orchard when he was sixteen years old—just for the hell of it. He asked himself why, when there was plenty of food at home, would he steal someone else’s pears, which he didn’t even bother to eat.
The pear incident, and his sexual escapades, including his keeping a concubine, led to Augustine’s soul-searching and his eventual conversion to Christianity, his belief that man needs God in his life in order to avoid wrongdoing. His fourth-century musings on those pears led to his theory on the origin of sin itself.
A pear tree there was near our vineyard, laden with fruit, tempting neither for colour nor taste. To shake and rob this, some lewd young fellows of us went, late one night (having according to our pestilent custom prolonged our sports in the streets till then), and took huge loads, not for our eating, but to fling to the very hogs, having only tasted them. And this, but to do what we liked only, because it was misliked. . . . A man hath murdered another; why? he loved his wife or his estate; or would rob for his own livelihood; or feared to lose some such things by him; or, wronged, was on fire to be revenged. Would any commit murder upon no cause, delighted simply in murdering?
I had never thought much about pears. But now my whole family history hinged on them. There had been no card game. No passatella. Only the stolen pears.
My brother-in-law, Will, had told me years ago that when he was a kid back in the 1960s in New Jersey, he and his friends stole dozens of pears from a neighbor. Just like St. Augustine. They hid them in Will’s garage, but when his father found them, he made Will eat them all. Every last one. Sixty years later, Will still couldn’t eat a pear.
In most places, pears were considered a rare blessing. Only the rich ate them in ancient China. In medieval Japan, a pear tree was planted on the northeast corner of properties—considered the cursed corner—to ward off evil spirits. And in Greece, the pear was considered the gift of the gods and was written about for the first time ever in The Odyssey. On the island of Scheria, his last stop on his ten-year journey, Odysseus encounters a beautiful garden in the king’s palace, a virtual paradise.
Of these the fruit perishes not nor falls in winter or in summer, but lasts throughout the year; and ever does the west wind, as it blows, quicken to life some fruits, and ripen others; pear upon pear waxes ripe. . . .
Seven centuries later, Basilicata’s own Horace would write:
. . . when crowned with a garland of ripened fruit,
In the fields, Autumn rears its head,
How he takes delight in picking the grafted pears.
A good pear, a truly good pear, was hard to find. So when you found a juicy one you ate your fill or gave one to the person you loved. There’s the partridge in a pear tree, naturally, the very first gift in the Twelve Days of Christmas.
It wasn’t until I met the man I would marry that I ate a good, ripe pear for the first time. On the first day of Christmas, 1990, his mother served a salad with blue cheese and ripe, sweet pears that she’d gotten from the Harry & David catalog. Those pears cost a small fortune. And I still remember biting into a slice of one of them, with a bit of blue cheese speared on my fork. It tasted so, so good. There was actually an Italian proverb that went, Don’t tell the farmer how good cheese is with pears.
When I moved to Brooklyn to live with Wendell, I saw pear trees for the first time, Callery pear trees growing around the corner from our apartment, their white blossoms pungent and smelling of dead fish in springtime.
We had a painting of a pear in our living room, a picture that Wendell’s stepfather, a still-life painter named Bob Kulicke, had given him as a gift for his college graduation. The pear was Bob’s signature still-life fruit. Bob had started as a framer, mounting Morandi still lifes, which led to his own still lifes. He had started painting pears around the time Wendell and I were born and had become obsessed with them over the years.
“St. Pear,” he called his subjects, placing each one in an elaborate frame of his own making, the type usually reserved for religious paintings, with Gothic arches and gold-leafed surfaces.
A Wallace Stevens poem from 1942, “Study of Two Pears,” starts with Latin, “Opusculum paedagogum”—a little work that teaches. And it sums up why artists like Bob loved painting pears.
The pears are not viols,
nudes or bottles.
They resemble nothing else.
Pears did resemble the female figure, particularly the shape of the earth mother. Along with figs and apples, they were considered sacred fruit in Christianity and were often used in paintings of the Madonna and Child, with Mary offering the fruit to baby Jesus.
The Spanish had an idiomatic expression “to be healthier than a pear,” which was similar to our own “fit as a fiddle.” The heart, in medieval times, was thought to be pear shaped. Diamonds were pear shaped, as were certain people.
The very same year Vita left for America, 1892, Lizzie Borden was charged with murdering her parents, and used pears as part of her alibi. While her father was being axed to death, she was in her barn, eating three pears, she claimed. Her pear defense was a success. Borden was found not guilty.
“Sweet Pear” was the title of one of my favorite Elvis Costello songs—a love song with a double entendre (sweet pair) and which my husband had put on a mixtape for me once when we were still just dating:
Sweet pear, sweet pear
Those who say they love you would never dare
I’ll watch out for you. I’ll always be there
In the hour of your distress, you need not fear.