The Woman in Black

Notes from Italy. 2024

Pomarico, Italia — I call her the Woman in Black. 

She is an aging survivor of the harsh post-war era here in the small southern Italian village where my grandfather was born. Quietly, without fanfare, she manages to maintain her individual strength and dignity. 

I pass her house each day as I walk to the village center for my morning cup of cappuccino. She’s there on her porch, tending to plants or hanging clothes. She in her 90s, petite and frail. 

Her all-black attire, worn even on the hottest days, suggests she has prematurely lost her husband. I later learn that it’s not just her spouse, but two sons as well.

She’ll never again wear the bright colors of her girlhood. Yet her eyes are alert. She sees me each day. At first, we merely wave, but I eventually become more bold. I say hello and I hear her voice for the first time. 

It’s soft, melodic, like birdsong.

I make pleasantries in my limited Italian. One day, a lumbering construction truck blocks the way, the crane on its back making a godawful racket that drowns out our conversation. I cover my ears as I walk by. She does the same. We nod.

The following morning, feeling particularly spirited after bolting down two cappuccinos, I see her in the distance as I approach and emphatically raise both arms in greeting.

She looks at me, and then turns away, checking to see if there’s someone else behind her. There is no one there. My emphatic wave is meant for her, and her only.

For The Woman in Black.

Then our eyes meet and I point at her, to say, it’s you. She beams a grin that’s girlish and bright. Suddenly, if just for a moment, she isn’t old and frail, mourning the memory of the men who left her behind.

The smile vanishes quickly. But while it is here, it is so radiant it hurts my eyes to see it.

Women in southern Italy have traditionally been considered a lesser species. Old photos show peasant farmers riding atop mules while the wives stagger behind, plodding like livestock, attached by a rope or holding the animal’s tail.

For generations, a wife’s role in the Italian countryside was always to serve her man, raise his children (hopefully boys) cook his meals, sew his clothes, clean his house and help harvest his yield. Women followed a strict moral code based on family loyalty, deference to male authority and an ability to work from dawn to dusk. 

And, God forbid, if a wife ever affronted her husband’s dignity, she was dispatched harshly, sometimes even fatally in so-called “honor killings.” Over her life, a woman served a master she was expected to obey whether he was gentle or cruel, whether he treated her as an equal or merely grunted in her direction.

In Pomarico, most girls were denied any education past the eighth grade. The high school is located in Matera and most fathers demanded that their daughters remain at home and learn to become housewives. Only the sons went off to school.

Emancipation came fitfully. In 1874, women were allowed to attend high school and university. In 1902, they earned a set minimum wage but were still barred from better paying factory jobs. They only earned the right to vote in 1945, nearly a century after Italian unification. In the heady 1970s, divorce and abortion became legal. But it was not until 1981 that the Italian government finally outlawed honor killings and the custom that had established a husband and his family as judge, jury and executioner.

Recent decades have brought new protections against discrimination and domestic violence. Nowadays, women mostly have equal rights to men. They can pursue a career to become both mothers and entrepreneurs. 

Those opportunities have been slower to reach the rural south. Still, like the Woman in Black, many stake out a stalwart place in this agrarian society, carrying themselves with pride and dignity. And young women are gaining power. 

Each new generation demonstrates its own brand of fierce independence.

Still, there are some things you can’t get back, once you’ve lost them.

I have a cousin in town. She’s younger than me. But her father forbid her to attend school past the eighth grade. She is lovely and smart and perceptive. She has fashioned a life for herself here in Pomarico.

But the possibility of “what could have been” still gnaws at her. The other night she sent me texts that broke my heart. Her words spoke of existential crisis. 

“Not everyone can understand the huge cyclone that I have inside!!!” she began. “At a certain point you take stock of your journey and I realize that I have wasted my life. Sure I have a job that satisfies me, wonderful children but a part of my heart is empty.”

Her pain still haunts me.

One morning, gazing out onto the church courtyard from Bar Madness, I see the Woman in Black walk slowly past amid the morning hustle-bustle. In her funeral attire, she keeps her head down and carries a small shopping bag. 

I suddenly I feel the urge to invite her inside for an espresso, to try and make her comfortable, and perhaps get to know her better, ask her a bit about herself.

I realize that I don’t even know her name and begin waving my hands.

“Mi scusi, signora,” I say. Excuse me, ma’am.

She pauses and, for the briefest of moments, peers towards the coffee bar. Perhaps this a place where she has never before set foot. The morning sun in her eyes, she can’t make out who is summoning her.

Then she freezes. Her face falls into a frown and she waves her hand dismissively in my direction before walking off. Perhaps, in this town, a few pleasantries uttered between two strangers in passing is one thing, sitting down for coffee is quite another.

I see her again in the days to come. Neither of us mentions what to me is a lost opportunity. I still wave and she waves back. 

Sometimes, she smiles.