The Tao of Travel

If the picture on the river during the rainy season at Kishorganj was the Deluge and the Ark made homely, gregarious, and sociable, we were no less steeped in the spirit of water on land. Everything was wet to the marrow of the bone. Neither we nor our clothes were ever properly dry. When we were not slushy we were damp. The bark of the trees became so sodden that it seemed we could tear it up in handfuls like moss. We could not walk from the hut which was our bed- and living-room except on a line of bricks laid at intervals of about two feet or on a gangway made of bamboos, and the meals were more often than not held up by unseasonable showers. Little rills were running off the road, cutting miniature ravines in its side. Our servants were always wet, and their brown skins were always shining.

The tremendous drenching power of the rain was brought home to us by the dripping coming and going of our father and of our visitors, but above all by the sight of the birds. The ludicrously pitiable appearance of the crows in the rainy season is so notorious that the phrase "bedraggled crow" has become a figurative synonym in the Bengali language for an untidy and disheveled person...

But one of the most attractive and engaging sights of the season was to be seen in the inner courtyard of our house, when there was a heavy downpour. The rain came down in what looked like closely packed formations of enormously long pencils of glass and hit the bare ground. At first the pencils only pitted the sandy soil, but as soon as some water had collected all around they began to bounce off the surface of water and pop up and down in the form of minuscule puppets. Every square inch of ground seemed to receive one of the little things, and our water-logged yard was broken up into a pattern which was not only mobile but dizzily in motion. As we sat on the veranda, myriads of tiny watery marionettes, each with an expanding circlet of water at its feet, gave us such a dancing display as we had never dreamt of seeing in actual life.

Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi

THIS is ONE of those important books that, after I'd read it, compelled me to go and see the place for myself. I visited Aliano (Levi calls it Gagliano) in Lucania, in southern Italy, when I was on my around-the-shore-of-the-Mediterranean trip. It was a detour from the coast, but a memorable one. I wrote about it in The Pillars of Hercules. "He wasn't Italian," an old man told me in the town, speaking in Italian. "He was a foreigner—a Russian." I questioned this. " "

'Breo," the man said. At first I didn't understand, and then I guessed at the word, Ebreo, a Jew. So everything Levi experienced in 1935, and wrote about in 1943, was still true in 1995: these people were remote, mentally and geographically, off the map in every sense.

The book describes the oddity of this educated Florentine among the peasants of a remote village in the deep south of Italy—a forgotten people, hardly Christian. Christ didn't get to Aliano, they explain to him; Christ stopped miles away, at Eboli. "We're not Christians," they say. They are superstitious, violent, passionate, mercurial, secretive, with a greater belief in dragons than in any saint.

I was struck by the peasants' build: they are short and swarthy with round heads, large eyes, and thin lips; their archaic faces do not stem from the Romans, Greeks, Etruscans, Normans, or any other invaders who have passed through their land, but recall the most ancient Italic types. They have led exactly the same life since the beginning of time, and History has swept over them without effect.

Among other things, this is one of the great studies of modern European peasant life, written by a highly intelligent and sympathetic alien, resident in a rural village. There is one toilet in the village, "and probably there was not another one within a radius of fifty miles." Werewolves lurk nearby, the villagers say. Unwritten but arcane laws govern the behavior of men and women. When Levi's sister visits, she is forbidden to live with him; no man can be left alone with a woman who is not his wife. Levi spends his time in the village painting, writing, and healing the sick.

Christ never came this far, nor did time, nor the individual soul, nor hope, nor the relation of cause to effect, nor reason, nor history. Christ never came, just as the Romans never came, content to garrison the highways without penetrating the mountains and forests, nor the Greeks ... No one has come to this land except as an enemy, a conqueror, or a visitor devoid of understanding. The seasons pass today over the toil of the peasants, just as they did three thousand years before Christ; no message, human or divine, has reached this stubborn poverty.

Before he died in 1975, Levi gave instructions that he be buried in the cemetery of Aliano. And there he rests, in the dust among the pines.