Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When Life Gives You Lemons…

The Arum Lily sends up its menacing red ‘Lords and Lilies’ flowers only after all its leaves have died. The more delicate Ithuriel’s Spear does the same with its pale blue Mogen David’s. Some things appear dead when they are most alive. Perhaps because I read Christ Stopped at Eboli in my garden, I find a similar pattern in its subtle structure.

When Levi arrives in the village of Gagliano (Aliano), after having been incarcerated and then judicially exiled in another remote Southern Italian place, he is understandably depressed. The sharply eroded slopes and ravines of white clay support little vegetation. The village is crushingly poor, the only real connection to the rest of the world (aside from the barracks of the fascist-led carabinieri) is the post office. The place it seems survives solely on the intensity of the universal hatred of each of the inhabitants for every other. “Here they had hated each other for centuries and would go on hating, among the same houses, before the same white stones of the Basento Valley and the same caves of Irsina.”

The prospect of spending three years in such desolation is harrowing. To escape the unremitting sun reflected off the white clay and the equally unremitting sight of the squalor and emotional force of the enmity, Levi takes refuge in a newly dug grave in which he can read and rest in relative comfort. It is here in the story, and through his conversations with the ancient gravedigger, that the tone of his writing shifts. He has an epiphany about these country people, these pagani, that is touching but unsentimental:

“They can not have even an awareness of themselves as individuals, here where all things are held together by acting upon one another and each one is a power unto itself, working imperceptibly, where there is no barrier that can not be broken down by magic. They live submerged in a world that rolls on independent of their will, where man is in no way separate from his sun, his beast, his malaria, where there can be neither happiness, as literary devotees of the land conceive it, nor hope, because these two are adjuncts of personality and here there is only the grim passivity of a sorrowful Nature. But they have a lively human feeling for the common fate of mankind and its common acceptance. This is strictly a feeling rather than an act of will; they do not express it in words but they carry it with them at every moment and in every motion of their lives, through all the unbroken days that pass over these wastes.”

Levi has found something more than a physical and cultural wasteland in Gagliano. And something more than an example of repressive 1930’s fascism. The national politics and violence (the war in Ethiopia had just begun) that had been his main concerns are relativised amidst these people. He does not romanticise their suffering but he does understand what it takes to endure it. They, the pagans, don’t have the capacity to articulate what they experience; he does.

Looking at the village via Google Earth today, it seems a rather pleasant place. Not as prosperous as a hilltop village the South of France but certainly quaint and somewhat charming. One has to conclude that the populace is significantly better off than their forebears were eight decades ago. The leaves, like everything else then, were certainly desiccated and brown, much like my Arums and Spears. But now, if not particularly flowery, the place seems at least habitable. Perhaps Levi anticipated that kind of transformation as he became aware of these people as fellow human beings.

As I mentioned, my garden does exercise a substantial influence on my life - for better and worse. All fanciful judgments are mine, however, not the plants’.

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