Murder In Matera Read online

  Lombroso forged his theory while working as a doctor at an asylum in northern Italy. As he was performing an autopsy on a criminal named Vilella, Italy’s version of Jack the Ripper, Lombroso came across a small hollow at the base of his skull, which was not found in normal specimens, and an enlarged spinal cord near the same spot, which was typical in lower primates. He claimed to find it in other criminals as well and so began his life’s work.

  Lombroso’s research, though embraced in the United States, was eventually debunked in most of Europe. His work gave me insight into the incredible ignorance and mind-set of that time and place. But mostly, I thought one of my relatives might pop up in one of his illustrated studies.

  Since I didn’t know what Francesco looked like, and had very little to go on with Vita, I substituted their physical characteristics with Lombroso’s descriptions of the natural-born criminal, using his books as if they were a family album.

  Typical criminals were short in stature and usually skinny, with several of these traits:

  an asymmetrical face

  a large, jutting jaw with strong canine teeth

  high cheekbones

  deep, arched eye orbits with drooping eyelids

  handle-shaped ears that stuck out (like a chimp’s)

  apelike long arms

  an elongated big toe

  a hairy body but a lack of much facial hair (except in female criminals, who tended to have mustaches and beards)

  either an extremely large head or an unusually small head, with a lined forehead and lots of wrinkles

  dark hair (rarely bald or with gray hair)

  bushy eyebrows

  thin lips

  missing or extra ribs

  extra nipples in men, and flabby breasts in women

  The nose varied depending on the crime. Murderers tended to have flat noses, whereas thieves had birdlike noses that often pointed up. Turned-up noses were so typical of criminals in Italy that there was a saying that went: “Naso che guarda in testa è peggior che la tempesta,” which translated as “A turned-up nose is worse than hail.” Hail being the archenemy of farm owners.

  Criminals were also more likely than the general population to be left-handed.

  My family had a large contingent of southpaws, including Grandpa Beansie, who was forced by his teacher to write with his right hand as a child. They would scold and beat him if he tried to write with his left hand. (The Italians called the left sinistra, a Latin word that by the Middle Ages had come to mean evil or sinister.)

  Forcing a little kid to write with his right hand when he was really left-handed could lead to learning disabilities and, of course, terrible frustration. It seemed cruel and could likely drive a normally precocious kid over the edge. Beansie was held back in school several times and finally dropped out at thirteen.

  He also suffered a head injury as a child when he was hit by one of the only cars in Jersey City. My relatives were convinced the accident left him bipolar, which might explain his violent outbursts. Ma had tons of excuses for why her father turned out the way he did. But my favorite excuse was the one about him being a twin, conceived separately, and his mother giving birth to a dead baby a month before Beansie was born. When Beansie finally was born, his mother was so depressed about losing that other baby that she was unable to breastfeed him. So Beansie was suckled by his Zia Maria, Valente’s wife, a kind woman to whom he stayed attached for years.

  Ma claimed that all that formative psycho baby trauma had caused Beansie to become the criminal and murderer that he would become. Separation anxiety from his twin and separation anxiety from his cold, depressed mother had both taken their toll and made him no good. I worried he was simply born that way, the murderous gene passed down from our ancestors.

  LOMBROSO MEASURED HEAD SIZE AND ARM LENGTH AND TOOK DETAILED notes on other physical attributes to prove that criminal character was indeed inherited. He found criminals had worse hearing, sense of smell, and taste. Their eyesight was more acute than the average Joe, though they tended to be color-blind and their field of vision more limited.

  Criminals were incredibly lazy, Lombroso said, and would rather starve than put in a good day’s work. They were reckless and often sloppy in their handiwork, leaving bloody weapons lying around, or in some extreme cases, even tattooing their criminal exploits on their bodies.

  They loved tattoos and were much more likely to be tattooed than the normal person. They also were big drinkers and were often violent when drunk.

  Lombroso also found that natural-born criminals had the uncanny ability to heal their wounds more quickly than the average person. One case involved a man who ripped out his mustache, including a big chunk of skin, only to have it heal a few days later. Lombroso thought that maybe this was some throwback in evolution. Criminals were like salamanders and lizards who were able to regrow tails and other body parts.

  When I read that, I cringed. Doctors in Jersey City had marveled at the speed with which my Italian relatives healed. Beansie, for instance, would be beaten by the cops on a regular basis, but within a day or two his bruises and cuts would miraculously disappear. His sisters were known to heal extremely quickly as well. And my mob consigliere cousin Mike—he of the bingo game fix—recuperated so fast from open heart surgery that his doctors were astounded. He hardly even had a trace of the incision on his chest.

  The ability to heal his wounds quickly was only one of many Lombrosian criminal traits Grandpa Beansie possessed. The laziness and refusal to work, the perfect eyesight, the tattoos and violent alcoholism described Beansie to a tee. He also had thin lips and very little facial hair, and was pretty short.

  In Lombroso’s books were photos of his various patients, whose faces I scanned for any family resemblance whatsoever. I knew Vita was supposed to have had an underbite, so the enlarged-jaw theory worried me right off the bat. Lombroso claimed that nearly half the criminals he studied had a jaw that jutted out beyond the forehead.

  Women, when they turned to murder, could be much more vicious than men, Lombroso claimed. The female brigand, Ciclope, chastised her partner for murdering his victims too quickly. And a subject by the name of Rulfi killed her niece by stabbing her with long pins.

  But women rarely became criminals, Lombroso said. He believed the equivalent to criminal behavior in women was prostitution.

  The most common form of murder for women was infanticide, rampant in Southern Italy. Women with no means of feeding another child, and without access to abortion, sometimes smothered a newborn rather than watch it die a slow, painful death from hunger and disease.

  I hoped the family murder in Italy didn’t involve Vita killing one of her children. Killing someone in a card game was one thing; killing your own kid was another.

  Lombroso wasn’t a big believer in environment, though he did admit that growing up in a poor place, surrounded by other criminals, didn’t help your chances. But he didn’t cut the poor much slack. “If thieves are generally penniless, it is because of their extreme idleness and astonishing extravagance, which makes them run through huge sums with the greatest ease, not because poverty has driven them to theft,” he said.

  It seemed obvious to me that people with misshapen heads, giant jaws, and such were more likely to be shunned by society, which would lead, inevitably, to them participating in antisocial behavior. And that because they were antisocial, chances were their kids would be, too. But Lombroso didn’t see it that way. They weren’t criminals because they looked this way and were mocked. They looked this way because they were naturally born criminals. Criminal behavior wasn’t learned and passed down, but was in the blood.

  Climate, he thought, played a bigger role. Murder was more frequent in warmer climates, while theft was more prevalent in the north, where food was harder to come by.

  Hunger, I knew, was a prime criminal motive. My father stole all that food from work every day to feed us. Beansie’s first foray into the criminal underworld was stealing that crate o
f beans. All you needed was to think back on the story of Adam and Eve and their stolen fruit.

  Most of the world disregarded Lombroso’s theories, but Germany and America accepted them. The Germans used them in the study of eugenics and the Americans in drafting strict immigration laws. By the turn of the century, crime in America was on the rise and the immigrants—particularly Southern Italian immigrants—were taking the fall.

  Thanks in good part to that 1911 congressional report and to Lombroso, the United States passed the Immigration Act of 1924, more or less ending immigration for Southern Italians and Eastern European Jews. After the turn of the century, around two hundred thousand Italian immigrants were pouring into the country every year. After 1924, only four thousand were allowed in each year.

  A drop of over 90 percent.

  By this time, the Italian government was happy to stanch the flow. Emigration had devastated the small landowners, who were unable to find young men to work the land—since most of them had left for the Americas.

  Wages doubled in Southern Italy for farmers, who also demanded better food. Because of the exodus, many of the small landowners either had to work the land themselves or abandon it, since they were making hardly enough to pay the land tax.

  The situation led one politician from Reggio in Calabria to tell the U.S. congressional commission that emigration from Italy had gotten out of control. He regretted, he said, that Columbus had ever discovered America.

  Chapter 8

  YOU’LL NEVER BE SATED WITH BREAD AND OLIVES

  LITTLE VITA WAS ALWAYS HUNGRY.

  Each morning Teresina would feed her and the whole family a thin minestra soup made with tomato and oil. Then Vita’s father, Domenico, trudged into the piazza, with his hat pulled tight over his head, where he would get in line for the shape-up with the rest of the town’s braccianti, waiting to be called as a day laborer by one of the village agents. The only thing worse than working the lattifondi (estates) was not being called to work the lattifondi. This was the 1850s, before the sea of workers began flooding into America.

  The luckiest had a mule, who slept at the back of the house. He would trudge along with his master to the farm each morning, both man and beast practically sleepwalking.

  But Domenico was too poor to own a mule. Maybe a chicken or a goat.

  Because they lived and slept so close to their animals, the braccianti smelled like them and were considered barely human by the landowners—the padroni. In the summer, the animals stayed inside, while the family slept out on the cool cobblestones on the street, sometimes on a bed of straw, to avoid the stench and the body heat of the animals.

  If he found work for the day, Domenico would walk alone the two or three miles to the farm. Sometimes farther. If it was raining when they got there, the braccianti were sent back home without pay. If the weather was good, they worked all day—even on Sunday—and then were fed a lunch of cornmeal polenta.

  When work was more than ten miles away, Domenico would spend half the month in a tiny country hovel provided by the padrone. And when they were desperate, Teresina would go, too. Sometimes the workers would all live together in a larger house, a masseria, locked in at night, sleeping on the floor like animals, with a piece of canvas to cover them all, a tarp separating the men from the women.

  In the cold months, from November through March, they would eat bread soup cooked by the women. In the hottest months, they ate bread with a crushed-up tomato or pepper, some olives. Maybe a little cheese.

  Domenico worked like a mule all day in that punishing sun, beside a real mule that didn’t even belong to him, but who recognized him, who saw in him the same weary look. The two of them worked the fields together, with a small wooden plow that barely scratched the surface, and depending on the season, sowed wheat or harvested it, or sowed tomatoes or harvested them, the mule stopping every few minutes in his stubbornness and Domenico waiting, always waiting, never hitting him or yelling at him. With the patience of his patron saint, San Domenico, the Italian monk and healer of snake bites. This mule was his partner, his friend, and Domenico even had a name for him. Though that name has been lost to the ages.

  Just because you worked like a beast didn’t mean you thought like one. Domenico—whose nickname was likely Mimmo—had hopes for his children. He worried about them and prayed Vita’s life would be better than his had been. It had to be. It couldn’t get much worse. Or so he thought.

  Like most of the farmers, Domenico was kind and gentle, his face creased and tanned, a tan so dark and deep that it reached down to future generations, guaranteeing they would never burn.

  Vegetables, fruit, and citrus were grown on what was called the corona, a small area surrounding the lattifondi, and were harvested in winter for the padrone’s personal use. Winter was also hog-slaughtering time. Domenico killed the pigs, even though the pork wasn’t his to keep.

  On the larger parcels of land, Domenico planted tobacco, dried it on huge wooden frames, then threaded the leaves for hours, until his fingers bled and his eyesight started to go. In fall he harvested the grapes in tight bunches and turned them into wine with the other men on his crew. They sang songs while they worked, about sneaking to a lover’s window in the night, or about meeting a pretty girl in the fields, or about being in love with three sisters, each one prettier than the last. Anything to take their mind off their grueling job.

  Then came olive season. Domenico built a lunetta—a half-moon wall of stones—around every single silver-leafed olive tree to protect it from erosion. He placed a blanket under each when harvest time came, and shook the olives from the branches. You never picked the olives off the ground that were there before the shaking of the tree, because that meant they were old and dead. That is, you never picked them for the padroni. You picked them for yourself and your family. The freshest olives made the best and longest-lasting oil, since they were ripe with natural preservatives. The older the olives, the lower the quality of the oil. Your oil.

  Domenico pressed them with the other farmers, using a mule or cow to turn the huge stone wheel that squeezed out the precious golden liquid. When there was no cow or mule, the men used their own strength to push it, singing a rhythmic call and response to help them move in unison, grunting after every erotic line to push harder.

  Come on

  Another press

  Come oooooon

  See how it comes out

  Press gently, like a kiss

  Give another press

  So that the young girl can marry

  DOMENICO AND HIS FELLOW BRACCIANTI WERE PAID IN WHEAT, olive oil, or wine, sometimes a little salt, rarely actual money. And on feast days and holidays, Domenico had to bring an offering to his padrone, hat in hand, to thank him for the work he had given him throughout the year. It was usually some produce or cheese. Some even gave sausage, those lucky enough to live with a pig or two in their own house. It was outrageous, really, having to give gifts to the rich padroni. But you had to show the proper respect. Those who didn’t could be beaten or whipped. Or worse, not chosen to work the lattifondi, their families left to starve.

  If a husband had any money at all, his wife and daughters didn’t work the land, but rather stayed behind in town, since women could get into all kinds of trouble on the farm. But Vita’s family had no money. Teresina often worked in the country and would sometimes bring Vita along, especially during the wheat harvest, when everyone worked—men, women, children, animals.

  Domenico and Teresina couldn’t read the newspapers from Naples, so they usually had no idea what was really happening on the rest of the peninsula that would soon become Italy. But they heard the gossip. Beyond the farms where they worked, they knew that changes were coming that might one day affect little Vita’s life.

  By the 1860s, a bearded man named Giuseppe Garibaldi was leading something called the Risorgimento—or resurgence—out of Sicily, employing a mighty army of volunteers known as “the redshirts,” who fought their way to Naple
s and beyond. They were victorious in their battles, uniting the north of the peninsula with the south and creating one nation, called the Kingdom of Italy.

  They were promising a better life for the peasants, fewer taxes, land for everyone. Maybe soon, Vita’s life wouldn’t be so hard.

  WHEN VITA WENT TO THE COUNTRY TO HELP HER MOTHER WORK, she wore long skirts and woolen stockings, even though the heat was so hot and the sun so strong that it felt like it might crack your skull open. If your legs were bare, the wheat sliced them like a razor, like the one the local barber used to shave the galantuomini—the gentlemen in town.

  Vita helped her mother bundle the wheat, using a long piece to wrap around and tie each bunch. The wheat was tricky because if you didn’t harvest it fast enough, it would overripen and burn. Her mother never planted, since it was thought to be unlucky for a woman to sow. But she would harvest. Everyone harvested, from the end of May sometimes until the end of July.

  The wheat was cut by many hands, then taken to the aia, the square on the farm bordered by bricks, where it was beaten with sticks to separate the chaff. The straw was thrown to one side and the grain to the other. Then it was placed in the granaio, the open-windowed building used to keep the air flowing onto it and keep it dry.

  Teresina made flour at the communal gristmill using the small bits of grain Domenico was paid, and then baked the family’s homemade bread—pane casareccio—in the communal stone oven in town once or twice a week, gossiping with the other women as she waited for the loaves to be done. Then she carried them home on her head on a big wooden board. The dough was stretched to feed the whole family with anything she found that week—some corn, chestnuts. The most desperate even used sawdust. Salt was used sparingly because it was highly taxed. The children were given bread according to how big they were, another inch for every inch they grew. Tiny Vita prayed to the saints that she would grow faster.