Murder In Matera Read online

  The pretty young painter, Luciana Gallitelli, who had a show in a gallery nearby, had never heard the story either. The old Gallitelli woman who lived around the corner barely answered me when I asked her about the murder, turning away with a grunt and a frown. I didn’t know her soprannome, but I gave her one myself: Miserabila.

  Nearly bald, with the face of a bulldog, Miserabila usually sat with my downstairs neighbor, Maria Natale (Mary Christmas), who saw everything that went on. Maria Natale perched outside on her small wooden chair and sewed each morning and night, looking up from her stitch to watch, like women here had done for centuries.

  Maria Natale was a widow, but her husband had died so long ago in a crop-dusting accident that she was no longer in lutto (dressed in widow black). She wore bright colors and was happy-go-lucky, though she did wear a picture of her husband in a gold locket around her neck, just like the other widows in the neighborhood. Her hair was the color of ginger, the same shade of the nearby church tower.

  Over the four weeks we lived on Via Cavour, Maria Natale made us stewed snails, tomato bruschetta, and Italian profiteroles and introduced us to her family members, who visited regularly. Though not as regularly as Miserabila, her best friend.

  Miserabila gave me and my mother the hairy eyeball the very first day we moved in. And every day after that. Sometimes more than once a day. The malocchio, my mother called it. The evil eye. I wasn’t usually superstitious, but if anybody had the malocchio, it was this woman.

  “I don’t trust that one,” my mother said to me in English. I smiled and nodded and pretended she’d said something else, something nice. And hoped Miserabila was not a long-lost cousin.

  Chapter 3

  PUBLIC MOCKERY

  WE HIT THE CEMETERY FOR CLUES.

  I knew Vita was buried back in Jersey City, but the bones of Francesco were somewhere around here. If we could find his grave, we could find out the year he died, which might give us a lead on the murder. We drove to the outskirts of town for a family outing to the high iron gates of Bernalda’s cimitero.

  Its tall white, immaculate tombs were called loculi. The dead were stacked six high, in long drawers, the fronts of which were dutifully decorated with fake flowers and framed photos of the deceased—like a yearbook photo, smiling out at you from Beyond the Beyond High School. We walked up and down the endless rows looking for Francesco Vena, passing old women on their knees scrubbing their family graves.

  The cemetery caretaker told us that if the tombs weren’t maintained and visited regularly, cemetery officials would exhume the bones and replace them with a newly deceased person. Space was at a premium. Harsh, I thought to myself.

  With Vita gone to America, I imagined Francesco’s grave was never kept up. God knew where his bones were scattered now.

  After several hours of searching through the loculi and then the cemetery records with the caretaker, we found no photo or trace of Francesco. I would have settled for seeing Francesco’s ghost.

  We headed over to Bernalda’s comune, or city hall, near the center of town to search for records there. Birth records, marriage records, death records. I would have been happy to find an old dog license.

  The Comune was a yellow building with a clock tower that lit up, but blinked on and off because of faulty wiring. A plaque on the building read CITTA DI BERNALDA 1497, the year the city was founded. Three flags hung outside: the Italian green, white, and red; the blue European Union flag with a circle of yellow stars; and the blue Bernalda flag, which had a cow on it. I hadn’t seen a single cow on my trip here. Eaten long ago, I figured. Beef was hard to come by in town. There was plenty of horsemeat, though I was on a strict no-horsemeat diet.

  Swordlike agave and some bushes sat in a sad clump outside the Comune. Squat palm trees—which looked like giant pineapples—ran down the middle of the Corso. The outdoor courtyard, which took up the center of the Comune, had long porticoes on either side, where the paint was chipped and the walls were worn and dirty. The place had a run-down bandito beauty to it, like something you’d see in Mexico, inspired by the Spanish invaders who passed through here centuries ago.

  While the kids played on the brown patches of grass out front with Ma, I went inside to talk to the clerk. She looked incredibly tired and unhappy, though you could see past the scowl and the bags under her eyes that she had once been very pretty.

  When I asked to see the book for the year of Vita’s birth, the clerk frowned and shook her head.

  “What?” I asked.

  “It’s unavailable,” she said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  She just shrugged.

  I took a deep breath and began again. I asked for the span of years around the time Vita and Francesco would have been married—the late 1860s, probably—but the frowny clerk shook her head again.

  “Come back in three weeks,” she said and began to walk away from me.

  “But I’ll be gone in three weeks!” I shouted after her. “Wait.” But she just kept on walking.

  We traveled to Pisticci, where Leonardo was born, to try our luck there. The locals pronounced it “Pis-TEECH.” And though the Comune and the staff there were in much better shape, all we could find was Leonardo’s birth certificate, which I already had. We found no traces of a marriage between Francesco and Vita.

  Then suddenly our research was cut short. Over and out. Arrivederci, amore.

  We were swallowed whole by the annual feast of San Bernardino, Bernalda’s patron saint, who had saved the town from famine and plague in the 1600s. When we had made plans to come here, I thought it would be fun for everyone: marching bands and costumed townspeople in medieval garb and parading farm animals and long skewers of mystery meat and strings and strings of colorful lights. But of course, it meant the city offices were closed for an entire week.

  Bernalda’s festivities grew and grew, until they exploded, finally, in a fireworks competition on the last night, rockets flying right above our bedroom, so close and so loud it felt like we were being shelled. They went on and on for hours, as each team tried to blast the hell out of the other. Paulina, who could sleep through anything, snored away to the racket. But Dean was having a hard time.

  I lay in bed with him and stroked his big head of dark, thick hair to try to comfort him. Dean had the same sad eyes that seemed to look back at you everywhere you turned in Southern Italy. (We called them Dondi eyes in my family, after the comic strip character, an Italian war orphan.) His Dondi eyes were more downturned than usual, tired and especially sad. A sadness so deep, several generations of American prosperity hadn’t erased it. When he turned a certain way, Dean looked an awful lot like Grandpa Beansie. I wondered how old Beansie had been when he’d turned to a life of crime. Certainly not four. I pushed the thought from my mind.

  Dean asked me when the fireworks would stop and why, why it was even happening to begin with. I told him the people of Bernalda were celebrating his arrival. That they were just so happy to see him.

  “Really?” he asked, suspicious, just like his mother.

  “Really,” I lied, stroking his head. He smiled and promptly passed out, bombs and all.

  I HAD THOUGHT THAT THE FEAST WAS THE REASON BERNALDA’S streets were so crowded at night. But long after the feast ended, its streets grew crowded each and every night with the passeggiata, as old people, teenagers, children, and their parents made their way down the Corso, exchanging hellos, gossip, and small talk. Cafés were packed until midnight, giving the town a lively vibe that it lacked during the oppressive afternoons.

  Despite the late passeggiata, the Bernaldans were up very early due to their long midday nap, sweeping the streets and shopping at the local food vans. The fish man or the meat and cheese man arrived on alternate mornings, announcing their arrival through a bullhorn at 7 A.M. That was my alarm clock.

  I did my shopping, fed the kids, and then went out to do some research, interviewing the locals or digging through church records here and in Pisticci.
Then, most afternoons, while the rest of the town was inside sleeping, I took my family to Metaponto to a place called Spiaggetta, which means Little Beach. I needed a nap myself, but felt guilty for having the kids and my mom cooped up in the hot apartment all morning, Dean playing with his toy plastic soldiers and Power Rangers we’d brought along, Paulina listening to Ma’s songs and stories, the first of several hundred rounds to come in her lifetime.

  The salt air usually revived me once I got near Metaponto. We could smell and taste the sea before we could see it, the saltiness of the Ionian coast filling our rental car. Leading down to the beach was a long line of tall trees, a forest that replaced the marshes Mussolini had drained back in the 1930s to combat malaria.

  The sea was turquoise blue and bathtub-warm, the cloudless sky a deep azure, the sand clean and fine like the talcum I put on Paulina’s bottom, and the beach empty except for the occasional Speedo-clad German tourist.

  I chased the children into the mild surf and bought everyone gelato at the empty wooden lido café, which also rented out beach chairs. The locals hardly ever went to the beach. Centuries of malaria and pirate invasions had left them landlubbers.

  Spartacus had once rested on the sandy beaches of Metapontum with his troops between battles with the Romans in the first century BC. I told stories of Spartacus to Dean, who loved battles and military history. I shared the little I knew from the Kubrick film I had seen years ago, and we imagined him here, looking an awful lot like Kirk Douglas, chin dimple and all, lounging on the beach next to us with his slave army.

  It seemed everyone had passed through because of the topography of the Ionian coast—a wide-open mouth, unintentionally welcoming ship after ship of invaders.

  The philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras had settled here; Hannibal made his way through, but retreated when his brother’s head was delivered to him. They were followed by the Lombards, the Normans, the Aragonese, the pirates.

  The locals joked that they talked with their hands for good reason, after centuries of trying to communicate with strangers. Now I was one of those strangers.

  BACK ON VIA CAVOUR, I WASHED THE KIDS IN A BIG PLASTIC BASIN, scrubbing the sand from their hair. I made sure to remove all traces of gelato from their faces, or else the flies—which flew freely into our apartment, since there were big windows with no screens—would feast on their cheeks.

  I cooked dinner or got the children dressed for eating out, then headed back for another round of research, making my way from house to house, like a detective searching for a suspect. If I took Paulina and Dean with me, people opened up easier, but it was harder to follow the conversation when I had to constantly keep an eye on them.

  I grew exhausted from being a single parent in a strange and foreign land. Everything was a struggle, from changing diapers and figuring out what the right size was to buy, to food shopping, haggling with the fish man, cooking the fish, translating baby food labels (prosciutto and cheese flavored!), doing laundry, hanging it out to dry, driving a stick shift on roads I didn’t know, and reading signs I didn’t understand. My brain hurt from constantly translating. At night in bed, I read to Dean, then lay awake until the early morning hours, staring at the ceiling, praying to the saints that the next day I would find some tiny morsel of information about Vita. I wasn’t normally a religious person. Angry, estranged Catholic was the box I checked. But in Bernalda, you couldn’t avoid religion. And I needed every bit of help I could get.

  Stations of the Cross, each carved with a Roman numeral, and a picture of Jesus making his way to his fate, step by painful step, were posted on the corners of the historic district, as were murals and dioramas dedicated to the Blessed Mother and the saints: Santa Lucia with her gouged out eyes on a dinner plate. St. Rocco with his pet dog, who liked to lick the plague sores on his master’s leg. And a doctored photo of Padre Pio, with blood dripping not just from his hands, but from his eyes. They were a gruesome bunch, those saints.

  When someone was sick, you went to church—either the Chiesa Madre over near the castle or to Mount Carmel, a smaller, seventeenth-century church in the historic district—and lit a votive candle to pray to your patron saint for help.

  One night, Dean had a high fever. I ran to the local pharmacy to buy the Italian version of Tylenol and waited impatiently on line at the counter. But when my turn came, the pharmacist said I needed a doctor’s prescription. “But I’m not from here,” I explained, using my hands for emphasis. “I have no local doctor. Please, help me. My son is very sick.”

  The pharmacist shrugged and moved on to the next customer. I wanted to put him in a headlock and insist he give me some medicine. But I figured it would only land me in the town jail. Instead I stormed out, stomped all the way home, put a cold rag on Dean’s head, and resorted to prayer.

  All night I lay awake, checking his forehead and saying the Rosary. What if it was something serious? What if he’d been bitten by a bad mosquito and had malaria? What kind of mother was I, dragging him and his baby sister here on some cockamamie genealogy field trip? What was I even thinking?

  After hours of mom guilt and worry, after several hundred rounds of the Hail Mary, I finally fell asleep, Dean’s small, hot body tucked into mine. Whatever he had, I was bound to catch it. If he had something bad, I wanted it, too.

  Of course, when we woke up in the morning, the fever was gone.

  SOME DAYS I PRAYED TO ST. LEONARDO, THE PATRON SAINT OF PRISONERS, to help protect us and to help me find my family murder. Thousands of children in Bernalda had been named after Leonardo, including my great-grandfather. St. Leonardo protected the site of the old town jail, which was marked by a giant clock with Roman numerals and a brick tower with two small bells. It was where I’m sure my relatives passed many a day, behind bars. Now it was a garage for motorbikes and bicycles, its vaulted ceiling painted in orange and purple graffiti by Bernalda’s disaffected youth.

  Three hundred years ago, at the sound of its small bells, prisoners were paraded out to the barred window of the jail up on the third floor, subject to public humiliation. It was the perp walk of its day, before people had the six o’clock news, and was called pubblico ludibrio, public mockery. Their hands were tied, honey was spread on their bare torsos, and they were forced to stand in the window as bees and flies and other insects attacked them. The townspeople watched and pointed and laughed. It seemed insanely brutal. But daily life in Basilicata—pronounced Boz-ee-lee-GOD—was so brutal, I figured lawmakers had to go to extremes to make the prisoners suffer a bit. Life in a quiet, dry jail cell, with a meal of bread and water, was a step way above normal life in town. As I gazed up at that jail window, I wondered if the honey torture had happened to anyone in my family.

  But no one would tell me about my family’s crimes. Those with stories to tell told tales that had happened too late, long after Vita had left for America.

  I heard the story about the Fascists chasing a Gallitelli man into his home, finding him under his bed and dragging him out by the heels and beating him and then shooting him in the head. Not our story.

  I met a mechanic by the name of Beano Vena (Beansie Vena; Beano Vena; maybe he was related!), who told me the story of the great-grandfather who was woken at night by a knock at the door. When Vena went to see who it was, the visitor refused to answer and he became frightened. Vena fired one shot through the closed door and killed the visitor instantly, who, it turned out, was a deaf mute peddling olives. But the story had happened after the turn of the century.

  An eye doctor named Vena from Pisticci told me about the Vena murder that happened out in the countryside, a lover’s triangle that ended in the husband being slaughtered with a scythe by his wife and her lover. But there was no Vita or Francesco involved.

  We found, in three weeks, nothing that had to do with our Gallitelli or Vena. Maybe it was my fault, I thought, as I lay awake sweating night after night. Maybe I was too forward, too demanding and brusque. Women didn’t usually ask the question
s around here. Or maybe I wasn’t bold enough. Maybe I should offer bribes.

  The less I found, the more fixated I became on finding something, anything, about Vita.

  I ventured farther afield, scouring the dusty records in the archives of Matera, where I flipped through every criminal case file from the end of the 1800s. I turned up many of the crimes the locals had told me about.

  But not mine.

  Then, just when I began to worry that Vita had never even lived here, I discovered one scrap of evidence, a simple piece of paper, sewn inside an old leather-bound book. I found it with the help of the town historian, right around the time of Vita’s birthday in late August, in a small annex to city hall. Proof of a newborn baby girl buried deep in the dusty files of antiquity.

  Vita’s birth certificate.

  Chapter 4

  IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER, SON, AND HOLY SPIRIT

  TERESINA STIGLIANO WAS UP EARLY AS USUAL THAT FRIDAY, August 22, 1851, earlier than anyone else in the house. The day was guaranteed to be a scorcher, even at 6 A.M. She lay on the elevated, lumpy, straw-filled mattress in the only bed in the back part of their one-room hovel. Besides the bed, and maybe a bench or a wooden chest, there wasn’t much furniture. A small straw and wood chair was kept out on the street to make room for the eight to ten people who slept inside—and to have a good seat to the drama that unfolded now and then in the rione, or neighborhood.

  The couple’s farm tools, a mattock and hoe—called a zapp—their cheese forms, baskets, and pots hung from rusty metal hooks all around Teresina on the cracked, darkened walls, made black by the smoke from the small hearth, where they cooked their meals.

  But that day there would be no cooking. Just pain. And a knotted cloth shoved into Teresina’s mouth by the midwife, so that she wouldn’t scream out loud. Thirty-three-year-old Teresina knew it was a dishonor to scream out in pain during childbirth. But the farm animals, the ones who lived under the high bed, sensed her pain—the skinny, dying chicken, which they kept for her occasional egg, which was usually sold or given to a sick child, and the half-starved goat, used now and then for a squirt of milk, though hardly ever enough for cheese. The goat hunkered down, its head on its hooves, with worry. The chicken clucked more than usual, in a nervous panic, emerging from beneath the bed and making anxious circles around the room.