Matera

(Be grateful)

Like all great escapes, ours begins under the cover of darkness, with whispered entreaties to hurry up and many misunderstood hand signals. I imagine us as runaways, fleeing a life of forced labour. Of course, our voluntary servitude on a Calabrian agriturismo is hardly comparable to a chain gang or the Gulag, but Lauren’s directive to ‘work like a tractor’ did sound like a whip at our backs, and we were technically fed leftovers – though, just thinking of Gianni’s leftover strawberry gelato is making my mouth water.

As everyone knows, a successful escape from toil requires three things: food, transport and a safe house. So in the early hours of the morning I sneak down to the farm restaurant for bread and cheese and a jar of Rosie’s delicious strawberry jam. We have a long journey ahead, and we don’t want to go hungry.

Our choice of transport requires a suspension of my imprisonment fantasy, as the success of our great escape relies heavily on a lift to the station from one of our captors. I almost have to abandon the fantasy altogether when Gianni buys us espresso and pastries at the station bar and wishes us a warm farewell. Custard drips down my chin, and I recall his generous portions of tiramisu and last night’s gastronomic revelation: chocolate and orange-marmalade pizza. I feel a little guilty about casting him in the role of oppressor. After a kiss on both cheeks, I decide he’s our man on the inside.

Three trains get us to the town of Sibari, where we lean against a low wall to wait for the bus that will take us to our safe house.

We watch as several men and a woman wearing a loose headscarf hang around a drinking fountain. The woman is brushing her teeth. A young man, when his turn comes, removes his shirt and splashes his torso with the cool clean water falling in a piddling arc from the spout. It takes a long while for him to collect enough to douse his dusty hair. Containers, large and small, are waiting to be filled. An older man comes from across the road with a shopping trolley containing two empty plastic drums. He hunches over it, leaning his thin chest on the handle bar, stretching his arms along the sides and holding the body of the cage, like a weary shopper. One wheel is fluttering uncontrollably. He joins the queue.

Some of the younger men are talking, in Arabic I think, though I’m guessing. The woman is silent. She takes her scarf off and brushes her long black hair. I wonder if she wishes for a mirror, or if vanity has been left behind with so much else.

‘What are they doing, Mum?’ Riley whispers in my ear. He’s confused at seeing such private activities in a public place.

‘I think they’re refugees, darling. They’ve come to Italy for a better life, but there’s no plumbing wherever they’re living, so this is where they wash and collect water for drinking and cooking.’

‘Why can’t they live in a proper house?’

I can’t think of a single good reason, so I pull him close and squeeze him as tight as I can without hurting him. He doesn’t ask any more.

It reminds me that I’ve been playing at make-believe from a place of privilege and good fortune – our whole journey is only possible because of the life we take for granted. We’re grateful when the bus comes. I take a last subtle look at the people queuing for the drinking fountain. They seem not to have noticed us at all, though perhaps it’s only by pretending others aren’t there that you can take care of personal hygiene in public. At this moment I’m not sure what would be kinder – to pay attention, or to turn away. What, after all, will we achieve by passively observing? I notice Riley watching them as he walks towards the bus, his brow is furrowed. Observation, I think, might achieve something – time will tell.

~

Matera has been carved out of a canyon and is thought to be one of the oldest towns on earth. Depending on which guidebook you read, it’s been continuously inhabited for between five and nine thousand years. It’s an intriguing stopover between Zambrone and Tuscany, and we’ve organised to spend one night in the Sassi,Matera’s cave-dwelling district. We’re all eager to lay eyes on them, but right now I’m not sure we’ll make it before nightfall. We’ve walked through the same stone tunnel three times, and Shannon and I are having one of those arguments where we try to establish blame in the hope that, once that’s determined, the way forward will magically be revealed.

I have a poor track record when it comes to reading maps, and the guidebook is presently in my hands. If I wasn’t so tired and hungry I’d probably just hand the book to Shannon, apologise for the half hour of unnecessary hiking and let him take the lead. It takes a child to bring reason to my weary brain.

‘I’m not going down there again,’ says Aidan as we look through the now familiar tunnel. He plonks himself on the ground and refuses to move. ‘Come and get me when you’ve found the hotel.’

It’s not a bad idea, but Shannon decides instead to grab the guidebook from my hands and examine it himself. I watch his eyes move from the street sign to the map, and just as I’m about to say something sarcastic, he turns the map around and faces away from the tunnel. Is it possible I was holding it upside down? I decide to stay quiet, and when he leads off in a different direction, I gently encourage the boys to follow – though they now seem more willing.

HotelCaveoso is, as the name implies, a series of caves. They’ve been tamed by stone extensions, neat archways and staircases, but when we enter the small lobby the temperature drops, sound is silenced, and there’s a faint smell of limestone.

Our room is a bit of a shock, and the first thing I do is check the email we were sent confirming the modest price. It’s beautiful and enormous. The bathroom is cavernous, literally. Behind a circular wooden door set into a stone archway we find two single beds – like the bathroom, this room is part of an original cave dwelling, and it doesn’t take much to imagine a hobbit living here. We leave the boys to argue over who should be Bilbo and who Frodo and which bed each Halfling should occupy, and we step out onto the balcony to look at the view of Santa Maria d’Idris, a 900-year-old church carved into an imposing limestone cliff known as Monterrone.

‘Time to explore,’ I say to Shannon.

‘Do you want to inform the boys or shall I?’ he says.

They’re sprawled across our bed, their eyes wide and unblinking, staring at the cartoon colour coming from the television.

~

If someone were leaning on a wall looking down on Via Brunno Buozzi, they’d see four strolling figures in no hurry for anything. The adults are joined at the fingertips, and the children move back and forth between them and things imagined, as if secured by a length of elastic. They look happy.

‘I’m happy,’ I say, to whoever might hear me.

‘Why wouldn’t you be?’ Shannon replies.

‘No reason at all, but I’ve just realised that the trick to happiness is recognising it, and I just did, so I thought I’d mention it.’

‘Is it the little shampoos and conditioners, or the wide-screen TV?’

‘It’s the bidet, if you must know. But mostly it’s the fact we’re free to do as we like and choose what we eat, and at the end of the day we can put the boys to bed and close the door between their room and ours – it’s exhilarating!’ Shannon pulls me in a little closer.

The stairs don’t seem so steep now. We follow them up and down, into quiet corners that end with old wooden doors we dare not open. Past old caves that haven’t yet been gentrified, their dank interiors filled with rubbish and broken furniture. We’re lost, but the Sassi don’t go on forever and eventually paving stones give way to rough rock that falls away into the ravine. We sit down to get our bearings.

The sky seems close and enormous. Dark cloud glides under a silver blanket, animating the other side of the ravine with shadow and light. It’s riddled with caves. They’re prehistoric, abandoned lifetimes ago, and the people who sheltered in them are almost beyond my imagination. What I can guess is that they lived a hard and bleak existence.

I turn away and look back towards the Sassi, honeycombed in the late afternoon light. It’s a monochrome landscape of stone and terracotta tiles underlined by a splash of red and blue and orange – clothes hung to dry between two buildings.

‘I’m hungry,’ Riley says.

Suddenly we’re all aware of our grumbling tummies. We pass under the line of washing and return to the labyrinth.

When it comes to eating out I’m a bit neurotic. It happens so rarely that I want it to be just right. From Rome to Tropea I’ve dragged the family from menu to menu looking for the perfect meal. It’s time-consuming and ultimately disappointing, and by the time we sit to eat, we’re so hungry we’d be satisfied with a bowl of stale bread and yesterday’s pizza. I have no urge to do that now. I feel that Matera, somehow, has taken us in hand and will deliver us to where we want to go. The pursuit of the perfect meal is probably a fool’s errand anyway.

We wash up at La Talpa. We haven’t booked but we’re early, and there’s a table for four tucked into a corner of the main cave. We splurge. I ask for pasta with fungi, rocket and truffle.

‘Oh my God!’ I’ve just had my first taste. ‘This is what I was hoping for when I bought that truffle in Arezzo. What have they done that I didn’t?’

‘Hired a chef, I suspect,’ says Shannon, quickly leaning over to kiss away my objection. ‘And it’s possible their truffle hasn’t spent weeks in the bottom of a backpack with a bag of dirty undies,’ he adds for good measure.

My love of truffle is restored. I pick up my wine glass and clink it against Shannon’s beer and the boys’ cans of Fanta.

We emerge from the cave, Shannon carrying a box of leftover pizza. The streets are dimly lit, beautiful and surreal, the air is still warm.

‘Let’s walk back the long way,’ I suggest.

‘Only if we can get gelato,’ says Aidan.

There’s not much left of the boys’ gelato when we stumble upon a jazz quartet in Piazza Sedile. They’re playing the kind of jazz that I love and Shannon is warming to. The sounds are smooth, and I’m quickly falling for the man playing the trumpet. Adam Rapa is bald, a little thick around the waist and the voice of his trumpet is like silky Italian hot chocolate. I start dancing. Music has a way of overriding my natural reserve, but it’s too much for the boys, and Shannon has decided to sit this one out on the steps of an old palace. After five minutes Riley decides to burst my bubble.

‘Mum, you look really weird, can you stop?’

‘I’m enjoying the music, sweetheart.’

‘But it’s really embarrassing, and we want to go home’

It’s these moments that start me thinking about life without the pull of family. I keep picturing myself alone in these cities and towns. Usually I’m younger, so perhaps it’s just reminiscing (or wishful thinking), but sometimes I’m my 43-year-old self. Instead of working on farms I imagine I’ve rented a beautiful apartment with tall windows that let morning light fall across an old wooden desk. Tonight I will fall in love, and tomorrow I will spend all morning writing about it.

But Adam Rapa hasn’t once looked in my direction. If Shannon and the boys weren’t here I would, perhaps, dance a little longer, but when the trumpet finally stopped playing I’d have to wander back to that beautiful apartment alone. The joy of the moment might end up in a notebook, but it would remain unshared and be a prelude to nothing.

I look towards Shannon; he hasn’t been completely indifferent to the sway of my body.

‘Dance as long as you like,’ he says, with a smile. But the boys just groan.

I relent, ‘Okay, let’s go,’ I say. Riley takes my hand and we dawdle back to our room.

~

At breakfast, we’re shown to a table laid for four in a little cave at the back of the dining room. It feels odd being a guest rather than a worker. I feel like a fraud and say ‘thank you’ too often.

I look at my hands, dry and scarred from all the work they’ve done since arriving in Italy. I’m proud of them, but I’m also glad to be able to give them some time off. I catch the eye of the waiter and ask him to bring me another coffee. We have this one day to be tourists before the work starts again.

Matera is a mixture of tamed and untamed rock. The church of Santa Maria d’Idris hasn’t tried to discipline the caves in the way Hotel Caveoso has. Outside, the paving undulates over natural contours, moves around rocky eruptions, reaches under the ledge of a huge boulder. The boys run up and down the irregular slopes like surfers on the swell, then come to rest under the boulder, and it’s as if a monster wave has frozen in time – I take a photo before it comes crashing down.

‘Do you think that’s the way in?’ asks Aidan, pointing to a small doorway cut into a formidable lump of rock rising out of the ravine.

Its face is bright under a rising sun, but the sky above is troubled, dark grey and churning. It could be a dragon’s lair. They hurry us up the stairs. When we approach the door we know we’re entering something far more ancient than a 900-year-old church.

There’s treasure aplenty, though not what any of us expected. A tunnel joins a large anteroom to an older series of caves. The floor is coloured flagstone, and the walls are fading frescos, some whole, others just fragments, sometimes no more than the rich hem of a saintly gown. The frescos were painted between the 12th and 17th centuries. Some have been restored, and their colours are almost garish. Most, though, look like memories lost in dementia.

I stare at them for a long time, trying to conjure the past. The caves of Matera were once full of people living in abject poverty. This church must have seemed like a haven, if not heaven itself. In my mind, the reverent whispering of tourists becomes the clamour of neighbours gossiping and solving problems, reigniting old arguments and insults. A priest enters and they all quiet down, some to listen, desperate to hear of an afterlife, and others just content to rest their tired bodies and settle their eyes on the beauty of the painted walls.

After we’ve lunched on cold pizza we make our way to Casa-Grotta di Vico Solitario, one of Matera’s original cave dwellings. In the 1950s it became clear that living in a cave the size of a double garage with a few chickens, a pig, a donkey and six or seven siblings was bad for your health. A 50 per cent child mortality rate prompted the government to forcibly relocate the entire cave-dwelling population to concrete apartments on the less spectacular side of town. With the poor out of the way, proper sewerage and electricity could be installed, and all those uninhabitable caves were renovated to become hotels and restaurants, artisan studios and expensive homes.

Casa-Grotta has been preserved for the sake of history and the tourist dollar, but I suspect it’s far more charming now than it might have been in the 1950s. Twenty tourists, at least, are squashed in here with us, so it’s easy to imagine the feeling of claustrophobia. I hold tight to Riley’s hand and pull him through spaces that barely exist. We look under the small bed and find four stuffed hens in a nesting box. In one corner of the room are a model donkey and pig. A small alcove just beyond is where food and hay and water were stored. The walls are hung with implements for cooking and cleaning and caring for animals. Close to where the family prepared food is what looks like a pit toilet – that would explain the 50 per cent child mortality rate. But no, it turns out to be a cistern, a typical feature of cave houses all over Matera. With no natural reservoirs, people needed to collect rainwater, and so the town is riddled with drains that funnel water into stone catchments carved out of the bedrock and accessed from within the caves. I’m reassured, though conscious, now, of a lack of toilet facilities.

A bassinette is set up by the bed, and there’s a black-and-white photograph of a woman sitting on a wooden chair with a baby in her arms. Five other children press close around her. The dresser in the background is still here. The mother is smiling. By all accounts, six children, well-fed and healthy looking, was something to be happy about. I suspect she had little time for day-dreaming, but if she did, where would those dreams have taken her? What would a good life have looked like to her? Beyond the survival of her children, perhaps it resembled a neat and tidy apartment with indoor plumbing.

‘I wouldn’t like to live here,’ says Riley.

‘Why not?’

‘It’s way too crowded.’

‘It sure is, especially today.’

‘And there’s nowhere to play soccer.’

The boys are used to space, so the crowds of cities have sometimes unnerved them. But I’m the product of a hive. It was nothing like the honeycombed squalor of Matera’s 1950s Sassi, but as I imagine the life this family was moved to, I’m back in my childhood bedroom in an eight-storey apartment block in a crowded seaside suburb of Sydney.

As a child I spent endless hours imagining the lives lived on the other side of my bedroom wall. When I found it hard to sleep, I would piece together sound clues: the faint strains of music abruptly stopped, the slam of a door, then the central lift being summoned. It worked like an iron lung, that lift, bringing life in and out of our building, its mechanical hum regular and strangely reassuring. In fact, thinking of it now, I realise that I’ve always loved the closeness of strangers, that I find comfort in the way we buzz around each other – contact a constant possibility but never a requirement. It’s easy to observe life in a city, and not be observed doing it. I think that’s why I feel so comfortable in Matera. Why I love to sit in cafes. Why I enjoy travelling by train. And why, when I flew the nest that first time, it was a city I landed in.

We spend our last Matera hour in Piazza Vittorio Veneto,eating gelato and watching a wedding party have their pictures taken.The bride and groom wear white and florescent green. The sash around her waist matches perfectly with his sneakers, though it doesn’t light up like his shoes do every time he takes a step – a small mercy.

The Sassi have disappeared behind the piazza. Matera, from this angle, looks no different to any other Italian town. Churches and noble homes mark the perimeter of a wide expanse of precisely cut paving stone. In the centre there’s a fountain. It’s all beautiful, and it’s easy to watch the spectacle of the newlyweds, but it doesn’t excite me like the Sassi do. I think I even resent it a little for turning its back on the cave dwellings and trying to be beautifully ordinary when it could have been something far more interesting.

I’m already missing this place, wishing we had more days to get to know it. We take a turn around the piazza, a farewell tour, and discover, behind the fountain, the ruins of an older Matera. The whole piazza sits on the roof of a Byzantine town, which included churches and a castle and houses for rich and poor. Looking down into one of the excavation pits, I’m reminded that history, and life, is a series of cover-ups and reinventions – each re-creation aiming to be better than the last. I have no idea if the lives lived above this ruin are better than the lives that were lived within it. Their expectations would have been different, but would joy and sadness have felt the same? I’ve felt joy in Matera, and I’m sad to leave so soon, but the real source of my joy will leave with me. I wrap an arm around each of the boys and pull them close, kissing each on the head in turn. Behind my back their arms intertwine, a rare gesture of brotherly affection.

Then a tussle begins. They pull and shove and start calling each other names. They ignore me when I ask them to stop – in my blissful state I’ve used an ineffective sing-song voice – so eventually I just push them away, and hiss.

The joys of motherhood can be so infuriatingly fleeting. Real joy, I suddenly think, would be sending Shannon ahead with these quarrelling boys and staying another night in Matera, alone. I had a dream last night that I wouldn’t mind pursuing, it involved a bald man and a trumpet, and I danced until dawn.