Seasons in Basilicata (49 page)

“Great!” I said and tried to mean it.

“
Va bene,
David.”

“
Va bene,
Massimo.”

It occurred to me that I could pretend I'd misunderstood the date. Or come down with the flu. Or suddenly had to go to Potenza. Or Naples. Or anywhere.

But, “No,” my conscience told me. “One of the reasons you're living here is to try and record and understand life the way it is lived in these wild hills, and if that means having to watch a pig being decapitated, then that's what you have to do.”

 

“A
CTUALLY
,” one of Massimo's English-speaking friends told me after I'd arrived promptly at Nicolà's farm on a bright blue and unseasonably mild February morning, “we don't cut the heads off until later on.”

“Heads?”

“Scusi?”

“Heads. You just said ‘heads.' Plural.”

“Yes. That's right. There are three pigs to be butchered this morning.”

“Three.”

“Yes. And not too old. Only eight or nine months. About eighty kilos weight each one. Not like the big adults. They can weigh over two hundred kilos.”

“These are not suckling pigs,
porchetta
? The meat that almost melts in your mouth?”

“No, no.
Porchetta
is very young pig, maybe only two to three months.”

“So, that's around a total of two hundred and fifty kilos. Well over five hundred pounds. That's a lot of
prosciutto
and salami to make.”

“Well, no,” my informant said. “They're too young for that. The meat is too small for
prosciutto
and
coppa
and all those things. There'll be plenty of sausages though. The women will be cleaning the intestines in the main house, and they'll stuff them with chopped-up meat for sausages later. Most of the meat will be used for cooking—stews, roasts. That kind of thing.”

“I understand. And you were saying about not cutting heads off…”

“Well, not at first. That's not the way. First you have to cut the vein in the neck and drain off all the blood. And the heart has to keep pumping, otherwise the blood stays in the body, and that is not good for the butchering or for the meat.”

I considered this for a moment, trying to envisage the upcoming ritual. “So, the pig, it stays alive while the heart pumps and you drain out all the blood from its neck?”

Massimo's friend, a tall, swarthy man with the build and earthiness of a real
contadino
, which, of course, he was, looked at me closely and then smiled. A rather paternalistic smile. “Ah, your first time, eh?”

I was tempted to deny what to him must have been glaringly obvious. (Sometimes I got tired of being the eternal neophyte, always on the learning end of things.) But I just nodded and grinned. A little sheepishly, I guess.

He nodded back and patted my shoulder, which felt a little odd as I was sure I was a good decade or so older than he. But he had the advantage of years of this kind of rural rite, and I was standing there, worried about the poor pig with its throat cut but not being really dead.

“No, no. Don't worry. The pig's brain is dead. There's no blood going to it, so it dies very quickly. But the heart keeps pumping.”

“Okay,” I said uncertainly.

And it was then that the squealing began.

There were eight of us altogether standing at the base of Nicolà's huge two-storey stone barn, once used as the original farmhouse, until the new farmhouse was built in 1820, immediately across the
courtyard. Four of the men were there primarily for their renowned strength in holding down extremely nervous and energetically flailing pigs. Massimo was playing his usual run-around, do-whatever-is-needed role. Nicolà, the eighty-five-year-old grandfather patriarch, was also present to observe, criticize, and praise where appropriate, and generally to keep an eye on all the flurried activities of the morning.

Marcello was the key man responsible for overseeing and undertaking most of the actual butchering. (“You must watch him when he halves the pig,” Massimo had told me, his voice resonant with respect. “He is like a surgeon. Right down the backbone. Straight line. No wobbles.”) And indeed, Marcello had something of a surgeon's aura about him, too. His fine-featured face; prominent, aristocratic nose; thin pianist's fingers; and lean, muscular body—all made him stand out from the bulky, farmhand appearance of the other men, who seemed to regard him as the natural leader of this little throng.

And then there was me, relegated to my familiar role as observer, recorder, photographer, and “occasional helper,” if help was ever needed, which turned out to be almost never and which was fine with me. The things I was to experience that morning had a strange effect on my body, which became progressively drained of energy, doubtless a result of symbiotic identification with the draining lifeblood of the three pigs.

 

I
T ALL BEGAN
with squeals from the first pig being pushed and dragged from its sty down the sloping, hay-littered cobblestones to the massive, thick-legged slaughtering table set in a walled yard at the low side of the barn. Nearby were a handful of cows, a five-hundred-kilo bull, two donkeys, a baby donkey called Jacob, and numerous sheep and goats, all occupying the various stalls and byres in the lower level of the barn. And, just like me, they too seemed to demonstrate symptoms of symbiotic reactions as they added their brayings, mooings, and
baa-
ings to the increasingly high-pitched scream of the pig.

The poor animal seemed all too aware of its impending fate. I wished someone would stun the thing and let it meet its end in a blissfully unconscious state. But in this scene of almost medieval intensity and seeming barbarity, the pig, flailing and contorting, was hoisted by the four burly farmers onto the table, with its head projecting off the edge. Massimo was kneeling directly below with a huge bright yellow plastic bowl.

Marcello stepped forward with a knife, a remarkably tiny knife—more like a pocket device than the massive cleaver I'd expected. He waited patiently while the men struggled to restrain the pig's movements and at one point I saw him very briefly, and very gently, stroke the pig's head and cheek with his delicate, long-fingered left hand. I don't know if it was some kind of ancient
pagani
tradition—a sort of blessing of the animal for its bounties—but I felt a lump gather in my throat at the sight. Just about the same time, the pig must have felt Marcello's other hand stroke its throat, gently searching for the primary artery.

It all happened so quickly, I'm not sure I really saw it. Maybe I closed my eyes for an instant. But the knife cut a knick—quite small, barely a couple of inches across—the pig gave one last piercing shriek, then its head fell and its blood gushed in deep red spurts into Massimo's bowl…and continued gushing as the heart pumped on.

Steam poured out from a dark, cavernous room at the side of the table, where an enormous witch's black cauldron of water was boiling on a crackling log fire. And to complete this Macbethian witchy diorama, a wizened old woman sat in the shadowy murk, stirring the steaming water with a metal rod, with what can only be described as “an evil grimace” on her face. Upon reflection I'm sure she was merely expressing her pleasure at the upcoming cornucopia of sausages, skin, trotters, fatback, bacon, and numerous other bits and pieces that would soon be the result of all these ritualistically bloody processes.

I wondered if they planned to parboil the pig (the cauldron seemed large enough to hold the whole animal), but then Massimo
delivered the bucket of blood to his mother, who was in charge of the innards aspect of the gory procedure, and then scurried back and forth carrying huge jugs of boiling water from the cauldron. These were poured carefully over each section of the carcass as the men meticulously scraped off all the hairs with more of those small, ultrasharp knives, revealing a detergent-white skin with a soft, cushiony-smooth texture.

The next steps were the removal of the head; gutting of the now-pristine animal; careful removal of the intestines, liver, kidney, heart, and other delights; and meticulous cleaving of the carcass into two neat halves for delivery to Massimo's hotel kitchen and its final butchering into roasts, joints, and sausages. I mention these tasks rather hastily and objectively as I don't think a cut-by-cut description of all the various processes is really necessary and, having seen them performed on two pigs (I'd had enough by the third), I'm not sure I'm up to regurgitating all the grisly details.

Suffice to say that at the end of the morning there were three gleaming-white, hairless heads on display, ready for some medieval-style bacchanalian feast, and three meticulously halved carcasses prepared by Maestro Marcello. And of course a mass of all that inner stuff, which the women whisked away to the house for cleaning and chopping and other messy but meticulous processes of sausage-making and the like.

Nicolà seemed a little weary, too, by the time the third pig was hoisted onto the slaughtering table, so we strolled together around his farm as he told me tales of his life, his pride in his family (“Eight! I made eight fine children!”), and his and his wife's ability to live an almost totally self-sufficient life on his one-hundred-twenty-acre estate. His wife was sitting on a chair out in the sun knitting a sock (“from our own sheep wool,” insisted Nicolà). She smiled as Nicolà took me inside the farmhouse to show me his racks of salamis,
coppa, soppressata,
and other pork products dangling from the high ceiling over the stairwell.

“We used to have a small inn here a few years ago. And a restaurant, too. Before my son Angelo and my grandson Massimo opened
up their new hotel and restaurant in Accettura. We were quite famous, I think. People wrote about our traditional dishes and described all the things we made here on the farm—all the different salamis and things, our own olive oil, our wines, our bottled sauces, our fruits and vegetables, our own
burro
[butter], ricotta and
scamorza
cheese, pecorino cheese, too, from our own sheep, and provolone, which we aged for more than a year. Delicious! Oh, and our own wheat, too,
grano.
We have more than forty hectares of wheat
that we used for our own bread and pasta. We hardly needed to buy anything. People bought from us instead!”

T
HE PIG SLAUGHTER

We strolled slowly uphill on a rough track and turned to admire his estate. It was set in a beautiful bowl-like enclave, bound along the high, enclosing ridges by parts of the Montepiano forest. The steeply sloping hillsides were now all meticulously plowed wheat fields just beginning to glow a soft emerald green as the furlike shoots of winter wheat, planted in October, were beginning to grow in preparation for the July harvest. The farmhouse itself, strangely evocative of Andrew Wyeth's paintings of the Kuerner farm in Pennsylvania, sat like a sturdy, square fortress halfway down the folding contours of the fields. Its windows, cut into two-foot-thick stone walls, were small and few. The even older barn across the cobbled courtyard took advantage of the slope of the hill to create entrances on each of its two levels. Echoes of the shouting and laughter of the men completing the slaughter of the third and final pig wafted up across the wheat fuzz on the fields.

Nicolà smiled. Farming was his life, and he obviously loved every aspect of it—even his memories of the old days when he and his family plowed these steep slopes with hand plows and oxen. In fact, he was so fond of his ancient, primitive plows and other museum-quality equipment, that he still kept them, rusty but intact, in a shed by the side of the barn. Pride of place was given to a “French reversible plow,” which he tried to define for me. He laughed when I indicated my confusion.

“What will you do with all these things when you retire?” I asked.

Nicolà's laughter increased. “Retire?! I'm eighty-five now and have no plans to retire! The day I retire will be the day I am dead!”

I laughed too. I'd heard that kind of “retire from what?!” response from so many people in love with their lives and their work to the point where they saw no difference between the two.

“And what happens to this beautiful farm then?”

I wished I hadn't asked that question. His mood changed faster than Basilicata's spring weather, and a look of frustration or anger flickered across his face. He sighed. “I hoped some, one, of my
children or grandchildren would…” There was a long pause. “But, they have so many other things they want to do with their lives.”

And then came the anger, suddenly and in a flood that made his bronzed, stately face go steel-hard. The lines on his forehead looked aged and tormented, but his eyes were moist. “It will be a desert!” he said loudly. “All these villages around here. No young people left. No one on the land. No one proud of land. All full of old people. Dying, dying. All dead soon. And this land, all the lands. Back to forest. Or desert…”