POMARICO JOURNAL: A town full of wild men, all speaking in dialect
POMARICO, Italy — Slowly, as though my eyes are gently acclimating to the diminishing light at dusk, I am beginning to identify the characters who populate this small southern town where my grandfather was born.
A month after I first arrive, I remain a novelty, a large, loping bowlegged American in Ray Ban sunglasses and shorts who is gradually becoming a fixture here.
There is a woman, and I’m not yet sure whether she’s of her right mind, who stops me each time we pass on the Via Roma, the street where I buy my bread and vegetables, speaking to me in rapid-fire Italian about how she always sees me walking.
She makes a motion as if to imply that I am keeping fit with all my steps. Or she comments about the hot weather. And then she waves and walks on, smiling, gesturing, without ever waiting for my reply.
There’s the flower shop owner named Cosimo who always stops me to chat. One day, he announces that his cousin knows Francis Ford Coppola, the famous American film director, who opened a swanky hotel and bar in nearby Bernalda, where his grandfather was born.
He shows me a photo of Coppola with his cousin. I tell him I love his films. Then he surprises me.
“He’s a bum!” the Flower Man says. “He’s done nothing for Bernalda but make money off its back.”
For Italian-Americans, it's not enough to reconnect with a particular town in the home country, you apparently have to give back as well.
There’s the roustabout known as the pediatrician (nobody knows why), who just can’t seem to stop talking, most of his banter busting your balls. And Rocco, the sweet soul who watches the world pass from inside his window.
And Francesco, the near-toothless man with the wooden cane who comes in for his morning espresso at bar Madness about the same time I do. He must be in his 80s, stooped and frail, always smiling gently when he sees me.
The first time we met, he motioned to his legs, as if to say, They don’t move like they used to. He worked hard all his life in the countryside. His body did not hold up.
He sits in the same chair every day, orders his coffee and is gone in a few minutes. He’s a gentle presence and my morning is not considered complete unless I see him, raise my coffee cup in a form of salute, and wish him another good day in Pomarico.
Then there is the man I call Il Postino, the postman, a reference to one of my favorite Italian films, made in 1994, starring Massimo Troisi.
It’s a fictional tale about a simple mail man living on a small island off the coast of Naples who meets real-life Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and learns to love poetry, which he uses to woo the woman of his dreams.
But this version of Il Postino is a much more tragic tale.
He’s a bulky man, red-faced and he walks the town’s streets, ghostlike. I turn and suddenly he is there, smiling. I ask my cousin Giovanni about him and he tips his hand up to his mouth as though taking a drink.
As the postman, he walked his route, announcing the letters he delivered to the women in town. “Can I offer you something, some coffee,” they asked, delighted.
“Perhaps a bit of Amaro (Lucano),” Il Postino said, referring to a potent local alcohol.
Soon, he was drinking the Amaro even when he didn’t deliver any letters.
I ask my cousin about the story.
What about wife? Doesn’t she keep him in line?
Giovanni shrugs his shoulders, as if to say, What can you do?
So Il Postino walks, like he’s back on his old mail route, appearing out of thin air, stopping only to stoop and pick up a discarded cigarette butt to bring to his lips.
One afternoon, after I leave Madness bar, he follows me up a narrow street, and motions me close. He holds out his hand, and utters something I don’t understand.
He’s panhandling.
I slip him a one-Euro coin.
And he raises his finger to his lips, as if to say, This is our secret. And indeed it is.
Now I donate a bit of change whenever I see him, hoping against hope that he will find his own poetry.
There are two distinct sections of Pomarico, the old and the new, each with its own piazza and bars where the men congregate. My haunts are in the old town, the historic district, with its piazza in front of 400-year-old St. Michael’s church.
Across the square from bar Madness is the evening’s social center of town.
Bar Reagan.
Then I meet Vinnie. Wearing his apron, Vinnie is always out back in the kitchen, serving up pizzas and sandwiches on order, while quiet Maria works the bar and tends to a collection of outdoor tables.
Like a few other folks here, including my friend Mike, Vinnie lived in New York for a few decades before returning home.
His father ran this same bar generations ago, and the inside contains black-and-white photos of the regulars who once congregated here, making their own trouble, shouting out their own tales, in dialect, of course.
Vinnie returned to the U.S. and bought back the bar his father once owned. He arrived back in Pomarico during the Reagan administration and quickly picked up the nickname, which he bestowed to his newly-opened bar.
He speaks perfect English, albeit with a Brooklyn accent. Many evenings, I’ll walk into the restaurant side of the establishment and call out his name.
“Hey Vinnie, what’s good tonight?”
I’ll hear his voice from the other side of the swinging doors, back near the ovens.
“Hey, John,” he’ll say.
In English. Music to my ears.
I’ll share my daily adventures and then decide what I’m having.
This is simply great pub food, whether it’s Napoli-styled pizza or a sausage sandwich. The other night, he served me a warm cold-cut sandwich which changed my life.
And I told him so. Vinnie smiles and wipes his hands on his apron. He must hear this sort of compliment all the time, but I feel compelled to pay my respects.
You know that comfortable pizzeria in your urban neighborhood with the red-and-white checkered tablecloths and friendly owner?
That perfect home away from home? It was based on Bar Reagan.
With my large-sized bottle of Peroni beer, I’ll take a seat outside among the bar-side regulars.
At first, they all wanted to hear me say my name in dialect, how I’m a Ciupuddone. Now I’m an accepted, if reserved, member of this rowdy fraternity.
There’s the guy everyone calls Mike Boo Boo, (from a phrase his father once uttered) a husky gregarious man with a booming voice who always offers to buy me a beer or coffee.
There’s also another Mike, much younger, with long hair tied back, Haight-Asbury style. He’s constantly accompanied by a small dog named LuLu. The first time we meet, I reach down to pet LuLu and Mike intercepts my hand.
No, he says. She’ll bite.
She was abused as a puppy (not by Mike) and protects him with Doberman-like ferocity. Whenever I hear her growl, I know someone has come too close to him.
Mike is intelligent and sensitive, a bird-lover, and he shows me pictures of chicks he has rescued. He works as a carpenter and blows off steam each night at Regans.
In these first few weeks, Vinnie’s bar has been scene to two of my most memorable experiences here. The first happens one night when a man with oversized glasses and wild graying hair, motions me over to the table where he’s drinking beer with a friend.
I haven’t seen you in so long, he says in Italian. What’s it been, thirty-five years?
My jaw drops.
I first came here in 1987, thirty-six years ago.
I remember you because of the size of your feet, he said, motioning to my shoes.
Luckily, I’m able to pull the precise Italian word from my meager repertoire.
I guess I do look a little like a pagliaccio, a clown.
Still, I figure he’s pulling my leg, that the beer is talking and that we’d never met, that he’s just heard I’d been here long before.
What he says next floors me.
How’s your brother? Does he still hang out with that skinny guy with the long hair?
He was referring to my brother Frank, and his friend, John, who both frequented this bar when Frank lived in Rome in the 1990s.
I call my brother with this strange tale. We agree that either this guy is some sort of savant or that so little happens in Pomarico that guys like us are memorable.
We decide it might be both.
The very next night I have an encounter where it might seem as though I have consumed too many Peronis.
I am sitting outside, when I notice Mike talking to a man who seems to belong here perhaps even less than I do.
He is from the India, his skin dark, yet he speaks fluent Italian.
The juxtaposition seems so jarring, I just have to say something. But I can’t explain the words that come out of my mouth. I have never uttered them before here in Pomarico.
They come, almost without thought. They are guttural.
Che cazzo fai in Pomarico? I say. “What the fuck are you doing in Pomarico?”
Both Mike and LuLu look at me, their jaws dropped.
“This is Don Roberto, Mike says, “the new priest here in town.”
I blush a deep red, like the color of the label on my Peroni bottle.
But Don Roberto is cool. He speaks fluent English.
Yes, he’s a bit of a stranger in a strange land. His goal, he says, is to get more of the Bar Regan rowdies to attend Sunday mass.
I wish him luck with that, with a toast, draining my bottle of Peroni.
****
It's a Saturday night and I am sitting on a wooden bench in the piazza outside St. Michael's Church. I'm waiting with my friend Mike, who spent time in Brooklyn, and we're looking for Bruno, a cop and photographer, to have a beer together.
Bruno is a big man, a distant relative, with a boyish outlook. He's curious about life, a man of a thousand expressions. He always makes me feel young again.
To one side of Mike and I sits Bar Reagan, that rowdy outpost, and on the other side is Bar Madness, more the haunt of couples and families. I turn and tell him something I have just realized.
This little square, in this tiny hill town in Southern Italy, is really a stage populated by many actors, each seemingly written into life by the hand of a great novelist, all drawn by the brightness of the theater lights of the public piazza.
We're here for only a few moments, Mike and I, but a revolving cast of characters stops to pay their respects, have a laugh, and then move on.
First it's the Flower Man, then Il Postino. Then the Pediatrician.
I tell Mike that one could never have a moment of peace here.
There's too much life, too much energy, too many extraordinary, near-mythical characters, all packed into this little church square, in this little corner of the town where my grandfather was born.
I could not have dreamed of anything better.