The Pillars of Hercules

“Oh, sure,” Francesco said. “Before that it was just candles, and getting water from a well. That meant a long walk down the hill.”

“I didn’t mean to say that Aliano was a prison.”

“Not a prison at all. Just far!”

“And full of Fascists,” I said.

“Yes, it was all Fascists,” Francesco said. “But I’ll tell you one thing. The police liked Levi a lot.”

This was not true, according to the book, but if it allowed the men to take pride in the village and not be ashamed, that was all right with me. In fact, the police had from time to time made life difficult for Levi, who was prohibited from leaving the village. This was enforced. The limit of his world was the boundary of Aliano. “The surrounding lands were forbidden territory, beyond the Pillars of Hercules.”

Meanwhile we were still at the table, in the little wine cave, drinking and talking. Levi himself had spoken of the hospitality of the people, how they would share whatever they had, how attentive they could be in the presence of strangers.

“Was he tall or short?” I asked. “What was his face like? Very kind, I imagine.”

Giuseppe considered this. He said, “A strange face, of course.”

“Why strange?”

“Well, he wasn’t Italian.”

“Yes. He came from Florence.”

“No. He came from another country—far away.”

People in Aliano looked upon strangers from the north as though they came from another world, Levi had written, “almost as if they were foreign gods.”

“I’m sure it was Florence,” I said.

“He was a Brega,” Francesco said. “He had a foreign face.”

What was this “Brega”? I tried to think of a country that it might apply to, but I drew a blank. I asked each man to repeat the word. Still it sounded incomprehensible to me.

“If he was a Brega,” I said, using the word, “then where did he come from?”

“From far away.”

“Not Italy?”

“No. Maybe Russia,” Giuseppe said.

This seemed pretty odd. His Italianness was the whole point of Christ Stopped at Eboli: an Italian from Florence was exiled to a village in the south of Italy, and living with such a strange breed of Italians, he felt as though he was “a stone that had dropped from the sky.”

“This word Brega, is that his nationality?”

“Yes,” Francesco said, and he could not imagine why I did not understand him.

Then the light dawned. I said, “Are you saying Ebraica?”

“Yes.”

Two syllables, four syllables, what was the difference, the word meant Jew, like our word Hebraic. He was no Italian—he was a Hebrew!

And so sixty years and twenty-three printings of the book in English, and twice that in Italian, and fame, and literary prizes, and a world war and the fall of Fascism—none of these had made much difference. The man who had suffered exile and made Aliano famous in this wonderful book was not an Italian, after all, but just a Jew.

These two men were not anti-Semites. They were villagers. Everyone who visited was measured by the standards of the village, and when it came to nationality the standards had strict limits.

By this time all of us were full of wine. I stood up and staggered and said, “I have to go. I want to see Levi’s house. And then I want to go to Sant’Arcangelo.”

“A lovely place.”

“There are said to be the horns of a dragon in the church.”

“That’s true. A lovely church.”

Francesco stacked the tumblers that we had used for the wine, and outside he used his enormous key to lock the door to the cavern.

“I imagine this historic part of town is old,” I said.

“Very old,” Giuseppe said.

“Probably fourteenth or fifteenth century,” I said.

Francesco laughed so hard I could see his molars and his tooth stumps and his tongue empurpled with his own wine.

“No! Before Christ!” he said. “Some of this was built in the ancient times.”

And walking back up the narrow road to the piazza and the edge of the ravine, they went on encouraging me to share their belief that the village of Aliano—many of these same buildings, in fact—had existed for the past two thousand years.

Because of our drinking—almost two hours of it—the lunch hour had passed. I was dazed from the alcohol and dazzled by the sun. They pointed me in the direction of Levi’s house, and there I went and found it locked. It was high, at the top of a steep street, off the crooked Via Cisterna. It was signposted Casa di Confina, and it had not been renovated, only preserved, with a crumbling wall around it, the shutters broken and ajar, facing south. There were two small hilltop villages in the distance, Sant’Arcangelo and Roccanova, each one “a streak of white at the summit of a bare hill, sort of miniature imaginary Jerusalem in the solitude of the desert.”

I sat on Levi’s porch in the shade, among the broken chunky walls of stucco and brick, the tiled roofs sprouting weeds, broken paving stones and ceramic shards and dusty cobbles. It was all poor, and lovely, and primitive, with no charm but a definite warmth of a savage kind. Its height was part of its beauty, so close to the blue sky, the clouds, the enormous view across the ravine to the sea.