MY PHONE RANG ON THE WAY TO THE ARCHIVES. IT WAS A call from America, but I wasn’t sure of the number.
“Pronto,” I answered, forgetting the person on the other end probably wasn’t Italian.
“Hi, Helene?” the woman said. “This is Dr. Pytlak.”
My children’s pediatrician.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I just wanted to let you know the strep test came back positive for Paulina.”
“What strep test?”
For the past few weeks, Wendell had been trying to keep me in the dark about anything negative happening at home so I could concentrate on my family research. But the strep had slipped past the goalie.
I gave Wendell regular updates and news flashes and he sent me short bursts of encouragement. Not once did he bother me with any of the small dramas unfolding in Brooklyn.
Wi-Fi (which the Italians pronounced “WEE-fee”) was spotty at best in Basilicata and nonexistent in my apartment. So communication was at a minimum anyway. My children, like most American teenagers, were allergic to phone conversations.
I tried texting them but only got one-word answers. Often Paulina responded with a single letter, “K.” If they missed me, they weren’t showing signs of it. Maybe they had no time to text because they were too busy getting into trouble without me there. I tried not to think of all the bad things I had done at Dean’s age: standing watch while my friends shoplifted, the forty-ouncers in the school yard after dark, the joint passed around before the school dance.
On nights when Imma and Giuseppe spent time with their own families I just stayed in and read or watched bad television, the crib with the sheet over it in my peripheral view. It was then that I became homesick and missed my family. As long as I stayed busy, I was okay. So I watched a dubbed version of the movie Casino, with Joe Pesci yelling at Robert De Niro in Italian, and music videos from the 1980s, including Flock of Seagulls and one by Men Without Hats set during medieval times.
I watched several episodes of the children’s Claymation show Shaun the Sheep, which was deeply satisfying since there was no talking in it and so I didn’t need to translate anything. But there was really only so much children’s programming I could take.
A few evenings, to escape both that crib and my homesickness, I went out with my long-lost cousin, Leo, the beach bar owner from Bernalda, whom Wendell started referring to as my “Italian boyfriend.” Leo was always at least an hour late. He couldn’t understand why I was staying in Pisticci and offered to put me up in his empty beach house. “It’s so boring here,” he said, giving dirty looks to the Pisticcesi as they walked by.
One night he took me for pizza at a place called Ruota—the Wheel—in a town named Tinchi, population 472. If you sneezed while driving through Tinchi, you could easily miss the entire town. Even its name sounded small: Tinchi (pronounced “TIN-ki”).
The pizza place was run by an old mother and her son, who looked like a cross between Salvador Dalí and Larry from The Three Stooges. He had long curly hair and a fancy mustache and mostly just looked on as his old, gray-haired mama cooked. Her pizza was terrific, though not as good as the miracle pie at a place called Padre Pio, in the nearby town of Scanzano.
One night Leo took me to dinner at the masseria resort Torre Fiore—Flower Tower. Basilicata was littered with abandoned and renovated masserias, the large country estates where the padroni had lived and the workers had toiled. One in Scanzano had been turned into a music academy. One of my favorite masserias, Recoleta, was built in the seventeenth century from a fortified medieval monastery.
The palazzo had tall, arching windows and two gun towers on the corners of the building to guard against brigands and other invaders, and a giant metal armored door leading into the open courtyard, with a hole for a key that must have been as big as my head. The rusty, puckered metal door was several hundred years old. Recoleta had been taken over by local squatters, who kept animals like Vita’s family did in the old days, goats and chickens.
Several masserias in the area had been turned into luxury hotels. They had heated swimming pools and lush gardens scented with jasmine and citrus trees, gourmet meals with fresh seafood caught on the beaches of Metaponto and Taranto, and rooms decorated with antiques from around Vita’s time, spinning wheels, irons, and locks and keys. One still had its gun towers, which were now just part of the luxury “tower suite” that looked down on the rest of the palm-tree-dotted property. Something was slightly obscene about staying in such luxury in a place where workers had suffered and gone hungry, particularly when they were your ancestors.
At Torre Fiore, Leo knew the chef, who served us seafood pasta with shrimp, baby clams, and tiny scallops, all caught by the fishermen in nearby Taranto. Our main course was seared tuna with local greens, all served in an open-air dining room overlooking the countryside, the stars glowing overhead and the lights of Taranto twinkling on the horizon like a distant galaxy.
Leo invited me to a dinner party at his beach club with his entire family, and then back another night to celebrate a local filmmaker who had won a Donatello Award—the Oscars of Italy. He introduced me around to one character after another who spoke at me in rapid-fire Italian. I felt like I was trapped in some Fellini film. They spoke so fast, I had no idea what anyone was saying. A television journalist interviewed me for RAI—the state-owned, twenty-four-hour, all-news station. I started out all right, answering his questions about the search for my family crime, but I’m not exactly sure what he said after that or what I said back. I just smiled and nodded and said, “Sì. Sì,” over and over again as he babbled on. I hoped he and the other people here weren’t asking me to perform root canal on one of their relatives. “Sì, sì,” I said, smiling and nodding like an idiot.
My last night with Leo was in the café outside Coppola’s hotel in Bernalda, where he had introduced me to Francesco, the lawyer, back in October. Leo knew the whole white-jacketed staff and chatted them up as we drank Spritzes—Campari, prosecco, and soda with a slice of orange—which glowed fluorescent pink in the Bernaldan streetlights.
I have to admit that after being married for twenty-one years, I was enjoying the flirting that was going on here, the attention I was being paid. And so were the residents of Bernalda.
The locals passed in their steady passeggiata and craned their necks to get a good look at us. I was no longer the only American in Bernalda. But they all knew who I was and probably clucked their tongues when they saw me alone in the café with Leo, one of the town’s most eligible bachelors. “Vergogna, vergogna,” they were probably mumbling under their breath. Shame, shame. I had a wedding ring on my finger. And they all knew Leo was not my husband.
My husband was “far from town,” just like Francesco had been when Vita gave birth.
And though I didn’t hear anyone say it, I could hear them think it when they looked at me.
Puttana.