Murder In Matera Read online

  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.

  Chapter 26

  EMPTY CRIB

  THE MALE CLERK WITH THE STRONG ARMS—HERCULES, I NICKNAMED him—pushed the squeaking metal cart through the open doorway with more gifts for me: bundles of records tied in white ribbon. He lifted several big piles onto our table. The three of us silently untied the ribbons and started searching again, this time not for a death, but for a life. Not for the murder, but for Vita’s missing child.

  We were back in Matera—Giuseppe, Imma, and I—searching through birth records for the years after Leonardo and Valente were born. Eighteen eighty and 1881.

  For the past ten years, I had thought of Vita’s “lost” child and often wondered if maybe he wasn’t lost at all, but had simply died. In my family, when a child died, everyone said the family had “lost” a child, to soften the blow. You never used “child” and “died” in the same sentence. Children were lost. As if they had simply drifted away when no one was looking.

  I came across a son “born to Vita Gallitelli, wife of Francesco Vena” in 1881, two years after my great-grandfather was born. When I saw their names, Vita and Francesco, my heart started beating fast. The child was a boy and was named Domenico, after Vita’s father. Little Mimmo!

  Like Valente’s and Leonardo’s birth certificates, it said here that Francesco was not present for the birth and that he was “far from town.” Lontano dalla paese. At work again, no doubt.

  But this boy was not lost on the way over to America. Domenico was stillborn.

  Maybe this was the third son, the “lost son” of family legend? Or was there another son, one whom Vita had taken on her long voyage to America?

  Working backward now, I kept searching. Filling in one request slip after another, I untied bundle after bundle and flipped through birth certificates for the years right after Vita and Francesco were married. After several hours, I came across another son born to Vita and Francesco. This one was born in 1872, a few months before the murder. The boy was born in Bernalda on April 1. April Fool’s Day. It was known in Italy as Pesce d’April, when boys would cut out a paper fish and pin it on another boy’s back, leading him to be ridiculed by his friends. It was a day of pranks and jokes.

  This baby was born “to Francesco and his wife, Vita Gallitelli.” Francesco was present this time around. And the boy’s name was Rocco.

  No one in my family had ever mentioned this kid. There were no Roccos in our family. Had he been the one who was lost on the way over?

  “You have the magic touch,” Giuseppe said, coming over to look at the birth certificate. I searched the years earlier but came across no other children born to Vita.

  So Rocco was the firstborn to twenty-one-year-old Vita, a year and a half after she married Francesco. He would be five years older than his brother Valente and seven years older than my great-grandfather Leonardo.

  Rocco was not the product of prima notte, since he was born much too long after the wedding night. He was Francesco’s son. Not the padrone’s.

  Rocco was born on Via Metaponto—later renamed Corso Italia, the main road in the historic district. The statue of St. Rocco stood guard at the entrance to this street. It was also where the jail and Our Lady of Mount Carmel church were located. The address listed for Rocco’s birth was a tavern. Was he born during a particularly long game of passatella? Had Vita come running there to tell Francesco her water had broken, and then gone into labor on the tavern table?

  Since I had never heard of a son named Rocco, I checked the death certificates for the years following his birth. I looked through the list of files for Bernalda and found the corresponding file numbers for five years following, then filled out the small white slips of paper. Hercules wheeled out the death certificates, a world of sorrow placed at my fingertips. Stacks and stacks of pages filled with the names of the dead, old men, old women, babies, children, teenagers, all of them long, long gone, murder victims, malaria victims, typhoid cases.

  And sure enough, within minutes, I came across our Rocco. Rocco Vena, son of Vita and Francesco, dead at the age of four. Rocco had died three years after the murder. His patron saint, that statue down on the corner, had failed to protect him.

  I had hardly gotten used to Rocco being alive, and now he was dead and buried.

  Rocco died at the same age Dean was the first time we came to Basilicata. I thought about Dean that night ten years ago lying in bed, his fever raging, as I brushed the hair from his sweaty forehead and tried to get him to sleep, steps from where Rocco had lived and died.

  Young Rocco would have had a big head full of brown hair like my son’s, his eyes as big, but the sockets deeper and sadder from hunger. His ribs showing through his skin, just like all the statues and paintings I had seen of the martyr, St. Rocco.

  Rocco’s death certificate didn’t say how he died. He could have died of any number of diseases, made susceptible because he had no father to provide for him and was likely malnourished.

  And so was Vita. Malnourished physically and emotionally and every other way a person could possibly be. She held Rocco’s skinny body as he lay dying, maybe wiping it with a cool cloth like I had wiped Dean’s head the night he had that fever and no medicine. Rocco died in the middle of July in the afternoon, around what the Lucani called “the hot hour.” When mothers called their kids inside and told them the marawall was coming to get them.

  I had seen countless pietàs in my time in Italy, Michelangelo’s in St. Peter’s, medieval versions in Siena, and the one in the Chiesa Madre in Pisticci. That one was especially dramatic, Mary’s robe a bright red and her veil a vivid blue, her son’s lifeless head lying in her lap, his body bleeding from his wrists, torso, and knees. She was tenderly looking down into his face, cradling it in her hands, trying to coax him awake. But his body was pale, like the color of the stone houses. He wasn’t coming back. Her baby wasn’t coming back.

  I thought of Vita holding Rocco’s head in her hands, that big, round head like my son’s, and her crying and crying, shaking and not being able to stop, her tears falling on his small, lifeless, skinny body. How did she survive it? I wondered. How did you survive the death of a child, especially when you had no other children to live for? When he was your only son? When your husband was in jail and not there to comfort you?

  The book on Southern Italian magic explained that many women in Basilicata suffered from attasamento, a common state that renders the victim immobile and is brought on by intense psychic trauma. Back then, people thought attasamento was brought on by a spel
l. But it was just a defense against daily life in Basilicata.

  The attasata doesn’t remember the death of a loved one and doesn’t recognize anyone around her, not even her closest friends and family. When asked questions, she either doesn’t answer or answers in nonsense phrases. Attasamento was a coping mechanism in a place where the horrors of life were constant and just too much to handle. A place where your children died, one after another.

  When she comes to a few hours later, the mother cries out, remembering the horror suddenly. Then the opposite of attasamento happens. The woman flies into an explosive fit, throwing herself on the ground, banging her head against the wall, tearing her clothes, scratching her cheeks, howling and pulling at her hair—much like I did the day my wallet was stolen. But what was a lost wallet compared to a lost son, your firstborn?

  Once her son was dead and the reality set in, Vita thrashed and pounded her head against the wall. She fell to the floor and tore at her blouse and scratched at her soft skin and cried like a wolf until her voice was gone. Vita cried and cried until she was empty and there were no tears left to cry. Only then would she lift herself up off the dirty floor and take care of business like she always did.

  She arranged for Rocco’s small body to be laid in a simple wooden coffin—the caschedette—to be carried by the family just a few blocks in a short funeral procession to the mother church, the same one built by Bernardino de Bernaudo, the same one where she and Francesco had been married. Inside the church, underground near the baptismal font, Rocco was laid to rest, in the small cemetery just for children who were under seven years of age when they died.

  It was a wonder there was room for them all.

  BACK IN MY APARTMENT IN PISTICCI THAT NIGHT, I NOTICED AN OLD bamboo crib on the tall bureau facing my bed. I had never noticed it before. But now it was all I could see as I tried to fall asleep.

  I thought of the succobi and the monacelli I had read about in my book on magic, the unbaptized babies that came back from the dead and haunted people. I thought of Vita’s dead children, my dead ancestors. Four-year-old Rocco and the stillborn Domenico. I got up and turned on the lights and grabbed a magazine to distract myself, but all I could see was that empty crib up there. I tried turning the lights off again and closing my eyes tight, but that was even worse.

  Because he was stillborn, Domenico was not baptized. I thought of him appearing to me here, a ghostly presence of a baby in a long white gown as white as his blood-drained face, as white as the walls of Pisticci, eyes black like Vita’s and boring right through me. I even imagined a creepy baby voice, high-pitched and frightening in that quiet room in Pisticci, telling me to leave the memory of his poor mother alone. “Please,” I imagined a baby voice crying, “leave my mommy alone. It’s not Mommy’s fault I’m dead.”

  With eyes wide open, then eyes tightly shut, I waited and waited for a monacello, or one of Vita’s babies, to visit me. I got up and tried to pull the crib down to move it. But it was too heavy and too high up. If I dropped it, I’d likely end up with a concussion, Vita’s final revenge against me digging up the past.

  I collapsed back into bed and finally somehow fell asleep, my dreams turning to nightmares of dead babies and tiny murderous spirits.

  The next morning I asked Giuseppe to take the crib down and move it into the living room, where I would cover it with a sheet. He didn’t even need to ask why.

  III

  TRIAL

  Chapter 27

  PUTTANA

  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.