The Pillars of Hercules

“So who was this wise doctor?”

“Just a traveler!” Giuseppe beckoned me into the dark room.

It was cool inside, with a musty earthen smell of stale wine and damp dust and decayed wood. As I asked what it was my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness and I saw some large wooden casks set on racks.

“It is a cantina,” he said, gesturing in the vinegary coolness. He was using the word in its precise sense, for cellar. “In the Aliano dialect we call this una grota”—a cave.

Apart from the six wine casks, there was also a wine press that had been taken apart, and a great deal of dusty paraphernalia—rubber tubes, glasses, bottles, pitchers, buckets.

“What do you call this?” I said, tapping a cask.

“In Italian it’s a botte, but we call it a carachia,” Giuseppe said, using a word that was not in any Italian dictionary. “Please be seated.”

Francesco drew off a pitcher of wine and with this he filled three glasses. We toasted. Francesco downed his in two gulps. Giuseppe and I took our time.

Sitting at a rough wooden table, in the semi-darkness of the little cave, the bright white day glaring in the doorway, I asked the men their ages. Francesco was seventy-two, DeLorenzo was seventy. They were little boys at the time Carlo Levi had lived as an exile in the village.

“You must have seen Carlo Levi,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” Francesco said. “I remember him well. I was a small boy at school.”

“Have you read his book?”

“Yes, yes,” both of them said.

I had a strong feeling this was not true, yet as it was the book that had put Aliano on the map, they had a civic duty to say that they had read it, even if they had not.

“He was a doctor,” I said. “Did he ever take care of you or your parents?”

“Doctor? He was no doctor,” Francesco said, and poured more wine for us.

We toasted again, and I recalled how on his first day in the village, and almost the first page of the book, Levi was asked to cure a man stricken with malaria. Levi asked why the man was in such a bad way (he died soon after) and he was told that there was no doctor in the village. So, in addition to being an exile, he was Aliano’s doctor.

The men smiled at me.

“Carlo Levi was a writer,” Francesco said. “A very intelligent man. He was writing most of the time.”

“We saw him writing!” Giuseppe said.

According to the book, which Levi began (so he said) in 1943, some seven years after leaving Aliano, Levi sketched pictures, and went for walks, and tended the sick. Because of his status, an antifascist political prisoner in a village whose mayor boasted that he had been described as “the youngest and most Fascist mayor in the province of Matera,” Levi was hardly likely to be seen writing in public.

“We would see him walking up and down.” Francesco got up and walked a few steps, swinging his arms. “He would be writing the whole time.”

“What did the village people think of him?”

“We put up a statue of him!” Francesco said. “That’s what we thought of him!”

“Thanks very much,” Giuseppe said, as Francesco filled his glass again. “He’s buried in our cemetery! You can visit his grave!”

Francesco was urging me to finish my wine so that he could fill my glass again. It was red wine, strongly flavored with a dusty aftertaste, and drinking it in the cool shadows of the cantina, with the full glare of the doorway in my eyes, I quickly became dizzy. Nonetheless, I obliged, because I liked talking to these two hospitable men.

They were recognizable from the book. It was the first feeling I had had when I encountered the woman with the buckets toiling up the hill. She had looked at me as though at another species and had turned away. The men were small and compact, the old Italic round face and large eyes and thin lips. Their language was different and they were proud of that. But there was something more, a greater difference, the very thing that Levi wrote about. The sense in which the villagers felt they were regarded as not Christians, not even human; “we’re not thought of as men but simply as beasts, beasts of burden, or even less than beasts, mere creatures of the wild. They at least live for better or worse, like angels or demons, in a world of their own, while we have to submit to the world of Christians, beyond the horizon, to carry its weight and to stand comparison with it.”

Levi had written a great deal about the language. Their word crai, for tomorrow, was a version of the Latin cras, but it also meant forever and never. Yes, Giuseppe laughed, that is our word and he was delighted that I used it.

“This is a lovely village, not a prison,” I said, my happiness fueled with wine.

“Who said it was a prison?” Francesco said.

“For Carlo Levi it was a prison,” I said. “He was sent here by the police.”

“Because we are so isolated,” Francesco said. “There was no road, nothing at all, just a path. We had no water, no electricity.”

“I remember when the electricity came,” Giuseppe said. “And the water for drinking.”