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Village Elegy Un Paese
appeared at a confluence of currents in my life. When I first looked at it, I
thought: American English does not hold a word or even a phrase to render paese easily, not as the word had entered
my world. Village, hometown — yes — but the Italian word also holds the sense
of belonging to a place and to the other lives of that place which twentieth
century American life, built on a trust in transience, lacks. Except — as I looked
around at the faces of the old men and women who had come to the funeral home
after my father’s death, I thought: oh, the village has come to say good-bye. Un Paese is
a documentary work, with photographs by Paul Strand and interviews collected
by Cesare Zavattini, an Italian screenwriter who worked in the neo-realist
mode. It was first published in Italy in 1955; an English translation,
published by Aperture, appeared in 1997.[1] The photographs were taken in 1953 in
the village of Luzzara, where Zavattini was born. Luzzara lies along the Po
River, and many of the photographs and the comments placed around them
reflect the life of the river, which is inescapably the life of the town. In moving through the
book we are taken back, again and again, to the river. One of the residents
of Luzzara, a pharmacist: “The Po is what I love most. . . .
Many a time I’ve seen people from Luzzara, who seem hard-hearted, arrive at
the Po close to evening, on their bicycles, spend five minutes standing in
silence before the water, then return pedaling slowly, as if they were in
church.” Strand worked in the
village for a month taking the photographs and Zavattini followed him later
to talk with those who appeared in the pictures. The names of the
photographed sometimes emerge in their comments, which are juxtaposed with
the photographs, as do the names of acquaintances and family members,
descriptions of their work, passing references to politics and hopes, still
fresh memories of the war, threads of old gossip and envies. Strand
photographed the residents of Luzzara in their doorways and on the street, in
the life of the town, with their bicycles and their tools. The idea common in
Islamic countries that a photograph steals something, takes something of the
person photographed, is not wrong. But here, the men and women are aware of
the camera; there are no stolen shots and no attempts to enter the intimacy
of the family circle — to go, without invitation, beyond the doorways. The
residents look straightforwardly into the camera or reflectively off to the
side. To elicit the honesty and forthrightness of these images, Strand must
have given something of himself to the people he photographed — however
fleetingly. Zavattini was a paisano, who
understood and spoke their dialect and could transcribe their words
faithfully. This is a conversation between the residents and visitors to the
town — a long talk, with much of every day in it, and much of the
conversation concerns the nature of work. According to
Zavattini and to the evidence in the images themselves, Strand moved openly
and carefully; in photographing the residents of Luzzara he seemed to want to
capture the nature of their daily labors while engaging them with his own.
The men and women appear in their working world, with their tools near them —
sickles, pitchforks, washtubs, ledgers. And to Zavattini they spoke of their
work — sharecropping, knife-sharpening, braiding straw for hats, shoe-making,
cheese-making. Their words and the
pictures of many reveal deep poverty, a daily concern with getting enough to
eat — “When we had the pellagra epidemic they said it was because we ate only
polenta” — “But there are many people who work less than seventy to eighty
days per year, of course this gets rough . . . in twenty years I’ve
never managed to work more than four months a year. This year I didn’t even
have ravioli on Christmas day” — “There’s nothing you can do to raise the
price of straw braid. You work your fingers like a machine for hours on end
and wind up with enough money to buy a kilo of bread.” In one photograph five brothers appear with
their mother in the entrance of their house. Three of the young men — who all
work on the family land — are barefoot. Another man, whose frail, elderly
wife stands next to him with her hand on his shoulder, reports that she has
had only four pairs of shoes throughout her entire life “and even in town she
goes around holding her shoes in her hand. She has never been to the movies,
but she likes to dance and would like to keep dancing.” All the residents,
even the very young, comment on costs. A sharecropper who works a piece of
woodland with his brother, earning 2,500 lire a day to support a family of
ten: “My wife makes my clothes, and they last me eight years on average. But
when it’s time to get new ones, it’s a big bite out of our income. I just
bought some material, and I spent 20,000 lire for fabric and lining.” This
man, whose face is intelligent and sad, concludes, “My wife and I have been
waiting twenty years to take a honeymoon, if we can put aside the money.” A young girl, pretty,
with a scarf tied over her hair under the straw hat, states, “I would like to
get engaged, because I’m fifteen years old. My father isn’t happy about this
because in just a few years he has had to put together dowries for my three
sisters. . . .” And the work of most
of the residents demanded hard, long hours of physical exertion. Strand
seemed to want to emphasize both the toll and the achievement of time and
work on bodies and cloth and iron and brick. But Strand and
Zavattini did not condescend to these people. The photographs and quotations
present the poverty but with neither pity nor sentimentality. Their book
does not say: we have captured rural Italian types before they are lost to
change. The two did not set out to illustrate a tale of woe or sentimentalize
a way of life, but rather to let people show themselves in ways that would be
individually true. For most of these people, the texture of their lives
emerges in their descriptions of their work — its rituals, profitability,
burdens, confinements and pleasures. And for some, the work, however hard,
has opened onto a rich intimacy. A cheese maker — “The
milk from two animals, one that is about to give birth and one that is five
or six months along, doesn’t combine well, but they mix it just the same, and
then the cheese emerges from the forms with defects. Milk from a cow that has
just given birth is leaner, and that’s why winter cheese isn’t as good; the
best cheese is made in the autumn .” His comments are placed above a photo of
a latteria — a dairy, a simple
squared building with a strongly arched entrance and shuttered windows. Just
above the entrance, painted on the stucco, is a faded picture of Christ on
the cross. In front of the building are benches on which lie aluminum milk
canisters and buckets. Pots holding leafy bushes stand next to the benches. These men and women remind me, glimpsing
their lives over forty years later, that most people throughout history have
been poor in this way. The residents of Luzzara describe lives in which the
most ordinary items are thought of carefully, with a knowledge of their
cost, but the lack of wealth does not automatically entail shame or meanness.
The individuals show precision of perception, depth and receptivity, so that
the poverty becomes incidental, historical, marking their lives and bodies
but not identifying them and not totally consuming them. Over a scene of a
crowded street: “This winter they started a film club for showing films you
would otherwise never get to see, somewhat problematic films, and they said
for sure, no one would go. But there were 350 people, and afterward, they
were walking beneath the arcade until two in the morning talking about the
film.” And Strand, in his
careful selection of images, also caught the sturdy beauties which were
interwoven with the poverty — the pleasing, solid domestic architecture of
Italy with its stucco-faced brick, wood shutters and tiled roofs; a vine
espaliered against a wall; rows of trees carefully trimmed and tied; a tumble
of handsome hats made from straw braid. Women dressed in black sit outside
their houses on straight-backed chairs and weave the braid. A young woman
reports that, after working with her father all day on the land, she too
makes straw braid in the evenings so that she can buy things for herself — a
lipstick, a little container of face powder. Bicycles are
ubiquitous, their presence lending a note of common gracefulness. Even the
very poor could afford them, as one resident noted. There are boats and carts
and harnesses and references to buses and trains, but it was a world without
automobiles. And the comments of the farmers and sharecroppers make clear
that the land was worked by oxen, and by human hands. Movement through time
and distance was still marked closely by the body, just as language changed
noticeably from village to village. Even seventy miles
away the dialect would have begun to be less comprehensible. Language was
intrinsic to the paese. In his introduction
Zavattini remarked, “When I return home, as soon as I touch foot on my native
soil I begin to speak in dialect without realizing it. No one will believe
that I once had a sudden urge to eat some bread from my town and so I left
Milan on foot, and I fell asleep that night with my bed full of crumbs.” These are very quiet
photographs — and their stillness became greater for me when I noticed the
absences. There are no shots of parties, festivals, or sports, few images of
animated conversation or argument, no images of eating or mothers with
babies. Sound and motion are suggested indirectly, almost as a function of
stillness — the violin under the arms of its owner, bicycles propped against
walls or left unguarded at the edge of the woods. In the background of
the comments is the war, still present after eight years with the absences
it created: fathers, husbands, sons. Many of the
photographs are of the elderly or those on the brink of old age — men and
women Strand’s age — and all of the photographs mark the passage of time. For
the old there is still the poverty: “For fifty years I worked as a cleaning
woman at the kindergarten . . . I have always been afraid I would
end up at the old people’s home and that’s just what happened recently,
because of my paralysis. What I want is to go back home.” Above an image of
elderly men sitting on chairs outside a cafe: “I want to die the very day I
can no longer dress and undress myself on my own.” In one wrenching
juxtaposition, a woman’s words appear above a photograph of her son: “I am
the widow of Giovanni Benatti, I’m sixty years old, a farmworker, but almost
always unemployed. . . . An American gentleman [Strand] took
this photograph of my son Girolamo, before he went to France to work
. . . and in May he died at his workplace . . . I still
don’t know the real cause . . . I was always hoping he’d come home
but he never did.” The widow does not appear: she is defined by absence and
loss — father, son, work, years. The mood is, after
all, elegiac, which is perhaps why I associate the book with my father’s
death. My father was the son of Italian immigrants; I grew up in a community
defined by immigration. Everyone came from immigrant families, primarily
Italian, from all over Italy, from Calabria, the Abruzzi, the Friuli and
perhaps even from the Po River valley in Emilia-Romagna, from some of the
dozens of villages like Luzzara. We in the third generation were no longer
poor, but we knew deeply and forever that our families had come from another
place because of poverty. The dialects changed, blended as the immigrants
formed the community in which my father grew up. He died at 76, having lived
in the same Midwestern city his entire life — except for the war, of course.
I returned home. They all came to the funeral home — the people of his
family’s neighborhood. The carpenters, the stoneworkers, the postman, the
car dealers, the baker, the widow of the family doctor who had grown up with
my father and died just two months before, the milkman from my childhood whom
I recognized immediately despite the passage of thirty-five years, the faces
from poker games. Against a wall, on a straight-backed chair, sat a woman,
not quite old, dressed completely in black. I did not recognize her. When I
went over to speak to her, in English, her companion explained, “She doesn’t
understand you; she doesn’t speak English.” The cousin of a cousin, perhaps;
I did not pause to sort things out; I accepted without even thinking about it
until later that she was there because she was part of the village. I discovered Strand
and Zavattini’s book several years later, when my feeling for reporting and
interpreting had begun to merge with a search into Italy. The paese of their book became part of the
larger world, the world from which Zavattini had returned with Strand and his
camera. The book closes with quotations from journals written by
schoolchildren. They are placed next to a photograph of a young girl, in a
worn cotton gingham dress, standing just beyond a doorway of evenly nailed
wood planks. On her head is the ordinary broad-brimmed straw hat. She is
perhaps nine or ten; her face is lovely and soft, her skin perfect. Her image
is followed by a print of slender silvery trees reflected in puddles of water
on what may be a path in a woods. But it is an earlier
comment that stays with me more strongly when I reflect on the world in this
book. The speaker is a middle-aged man with silver hair and a thin perceptive
face. He is a civil servant working at the Protocol Office, and, better-off
than most, he is dressed in a dark suit with a tie and a watch chain. In his
hands he has some notebooks — “I like my work a lot because all the
correspondence allows me to glimpse the life of the town, to sense the
movement. For example, today’s letters link us to Mantua, Cremona, Reggio,
Bolzano, Rome, and there is also one from abroad.” University
of Alaska Anchorage |
[1]Paul Strand and Cesare Zavattini, Un Paese: Portrait of an Italian Village (New York, NY: Aperture, 1997). ISBN 0-89381-7007.