Murder In Matera Read online

  Most towns in Matera province wouldn’t allow their women to work the farms for this very reason, strange men approaching them and asking to taste their sweet pears. But some towns, like Ferrandina, encouraged their women to work. The women of Ferrandina were very attractive, taller than most of the women in the rest of the area. Maybe their active life on the farm, all that exercise, had something to do with how tall they grew.

  Leo and Francesco, juice running down their chins, liked the pears so much they bundled some together under a freshly picked tree. They spoke sweetly to the women and asked them politely to leave the pears there. “Ladies,” Francesco said, bowing, removing his cap, “would you do us the favor of leaving the pears here? They are so delicious and almost as lovely as all of you.”

  The women giggled and nodded. Francesco explained that they’d return the next day to take these pears and maybe even a few more home with them. The women shrugged and agreed. “Va ben, va ben,” they said. They had no allegiance to the padrone. Peasants never ratted on one another, but shared a strong bond no matter what town in Basilicata they came from. They were paesani. And besides, it wasn’t that many pears. The padrone would never even miss them.

  A thirty-three-year-old miller by the name of Paolo Doraio met Francesco and Leo on the road that morning. They told him about the small, round pears that were especially sweet and delicious this fall—and their plans to bring them home to their families.

  Doraio told them that returning tomorrow was a bad idea, since the landowner was very vigilant, that he had a gun and was not afraid to use it. “You should stay away,” Doraio said, wagging a finger at them. He even offered to give them some of the pears from his own padrone’s land.

  “No grazie,” they said, shaking their stubborn heads. No thanks.

  THE SUN HAD ALREADY SET, THE SHADOWS LONG AND DEEP ON THE Ferrandina farm road when Leonardantonio and Francesco returned to Contrada Avella late on Tuesday. It was best to steal at night because no one could see you, and even if they did, it was harder for them to make out the details of your face. Though they had never been arrested, they had, like most poor Lucani, done their share of harmless fruit swiping.

  These early days of November, the sun set at 5 P.M. A skinny waxing crescent moon shaped like a toenail clipping barely lit the night sky. But the brilliant stars from the Andromeda galaxy, the giant W of Cassiopeia, and the sparkling broad stroke of the Milky Way—and all the thousands of stars in between—provided enough light for them to find their stash.

  They brought a friend, Francesco Miraldi, a bricklayer. He didn’t work with the other two men but was along for the ride, his large bricklayer hands and arms there for support in hauling away the delicious, hidden pears. Miraldi was not a handsome man, like the other two. He had marks on his face from smallpox and had grown a beard to cover his scars.

  They found the pears and quietly, gently—so as not to bruise them or to make any noise—placed them in a large sack, filling it to the top with about twenty kilos, or forty-five pounds, of pears. Francesco Vena’s twenty-eighth birthday was only three days away and these ripe, round pears were a little gift to himself and his hungry family back in Bernalda.

  But before they could get to the horse cart, they heard a man’s deep voice yelling for them to stop, piercing the silence of the country night. The voice was coming from the farm and when they squinted, they could see the thin man attached to that voice approaching from the direction of the whitewashed masseria glowing in the distance. He yelled at them to leave the pears and go away. But the voice only made them work faster, Miraldi and Francesco nervously laughing and lifting the sack together, Leo anxiously readying the horse. “Come on,” Leo said, sotto voce. “Hurry up, you bastards.” They laughed, dropping a few pears, then reached to pick them up and place them in the sack again.

  But the voice from the farm rang out once more. “Put the pears down and go away,” the man said again. “I have a gun.” And as he drew closer, they could see now—their eyes adjusting to the darkness—that he was carrying a shotgun, the kind that you had to load from the front with every shot. Though they didn’t know it yet, the man’s name was Camardo. Antonio Camardo.

  Camardo’s mother, Carmina Albani, was with him, and they both shouted once again, in the dark, for Francesco and his friends to put down the pears and just go.

  With so many years—generations really—of pent-up hatred between farmer and padrone, there was no way Leo or Francesco would have backed down. Stealing these pears was revenge for the meager pay, the kickbacks, and mostly, for Francesco, the humiliating rite of prima notte. Francesco and Leo considered themselves furbo and would outwit and outmaneuver this padrone. Maybe they even dared him to take a shot. It was so dark, he would never hit them.

  So Camardo did. He fired a single shot.

  It sounded like a cannon in the dusky silence, causing the horse to rear up and whinny, waking the sleeping Maremma sheepdogs. The shot hit Leo in the finger. He let out a loud roar, like an injured lion. Leo was stunned and surprised that Camardo had actually fired at him. He stared for a second at his bleeding, nearly missing finger in disbelief, then pulled out his dirty white handkerchief to wrap it and stanch the bleeding. Francesco looked at his brother-in-law, his mouth hanging open.

  When he turned around, he saw that their horse was wounded as well. “Vaffanculo!” Francesco shouted, more angry about the horse than his brother-in-law’s finger. His padrone would have him beaten for the wounded horse.

  Francesco could see in the dark that Camardo was on the ground now, probably reloading his gun, so—without even thinking—he picked up a wooden stick, a branch from one of the pear trees, and ran straight at Camardo before he could reload. Miraldi cheered him on from the sidelines, watching the scuffle, the two men wrestling with one another on the dusty ground, the gun lying to the side now.

  Leo ran over and grabbed the shotgun with his good hand as Francesco stood and backed away, Camardo bleeding at his feet. With the mother screaming like a madwoman and Camardo bleeding out on the fertile Ferrandina soil, the three men jumped into their cart and fled to Bernalda, their wounded horse slowly pulling them.

  And their big sack of pears.

  Even after they were out of sight from Contrada Avella, they could still hear shouting and commotion echoing from there, the mother wailing, several men’s voices joining hers, along with the barks of the sheepdogs.

  The sun had set farther past the horizon by now, so they drove into Bernalda under a heavy black veil, like widows in lutto. They hid out at a friend’s stone house for a while, at first laughing about their haul, but then slowly realizing it was a mistake to bring the stolen goods home after beating that man. They still had the shotgun Leo had taken from Camardo. Why had they kept the shotgun and taken the pears with them? It was evidence against them if the padrone followed up the robbery and pressed charges. “Stunad,” Francesco would say, insulting himself and his friends.

  A neighbor, Giovanni Campagna, a friend of Leo’s, noticed that night that the horse was injured. As well as his friend.

  Hiding like a wounded animal, Leo spoke with Campagna and told him the whole stupid story. Campagna urged him to turn himself in. “It’s no use,” Campagna said. “The carabinieri will come for you eventually.”

  Leo considered his friend’s advice, his head lowered, but said nothing. “All you will be charged with is stealing those pears. You didn’t even hit the guy. And he shot at you first, remember. If you confess, they will have some mercy. Your sentence won’t be so long.”

  So that night, Vita’s big brother turned himself in at the small carabinieri station on the other side of town.

  His surrender caused a commotion in the neighborhood. The women wept on the cobblestone streets, tearing at their hair and their patched and ragged clothes over the tragedy that was unfolding among them. Their sons and husbands were only trying to feed them, and now look. The women would starve even more. “Andare al fresco” was the s
aying. Go to cool. Which meant go to jail. That’s where Leonardantonio was headed.

  There was no justice. No fairness in this world. The hungry would suffer. And the padrone would grow fat on his pears, the pears that their sons and daughters planted with their own dirty hands, tended for him, watered and nurtured, and finally picked, only to hand them back over to the padrone and his family. Bastardo. He should choke on those pears.

  Late that night, around 4 A.M., while most of Bernalda slept, Camardo died from his head wounds in his home in Pisticci, his blood staining his pillow and fine linens.

  A few hours later, the police came for Francesco and Miraldi. They were placed, with Leonardantonio, in the cold, damp Bernalda jail with the big clock and the small bells, and paraded past that third-story window for all to see, including young Vita, dressed in her pacchiana outfit.

  I can see her now, her long skirts blowing in the autumn wind, her veil pulled tight over her dark hair, her kalamata olive eyes looking up toward that window, the rims red now from crying all morning, her face smudged with dirty tears, wondering what would become of her if her husband and brother were convicted of murder and sent to prison.

  Chapter 25

  DON’T TELL THE FARMER HOW GOOD CHEESE IS WITH PEARS

  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.