To the World of the Dead

CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI (268 pp.)--Carlo Levi, franslated by Frances Frenaye--Farrar, Straus ($3).

On a summer day in 1935, in the little village of Gagliano, Fascist guards took the handcuffs off bullheaded Painter Carlo Levi's wrists and drove away. Levi's crime was anti-Fascist opinions. His sentence: three years' exile in southern Italy's barren, unhealthy province of Lucania.

The peasants of Gagliano crowded around the exile with friendly curiosity, helped him find lodgings, shook their heads sympathetically. They pitied him for being out of civilized circulation; they and their forebears had lived thus for untold centuries--since the legendary days when Prince Aeneas and his Trojan followers founded the Roman race. "We're not Christians," the peasants gravely told Painter Levi; "Christ stopped short of here, at Eboli"--the point at which the highway leaves the blue Gulf of Taranto and loses itself in Lucania's arid wastes.

Painter Levi spent only one year in Gagliano, because he was one of the political prisoners to whom the triumphant Fascists granted amnesty after the fall of Addis Ababba. Christ Stopped at Eboli, a best-seller in Italy, is Levi's account of this year of exile. It is another instance of an able, discerning painter taking up a pen and thereby putting professional writers in the shade.

Pigs & Guardian Angels. Exile Levi was not permitted by the local authorities to go beyond the village limits, to stay out after curfew, to speak to the few other political prisoners. But his sharp, painter's eye missed little in the shady, shadowy life of Gagliano.

The underfed, malarial peasants flocked to his door. In his youth he had taken a medical degree and still knew more about medicine than the aged, bored, local physician and the two half-educated druggist-sisters who filled prescriptions out of any old mixture of powders that happened to be in stock. Soon Levi had a large medical practice.

Most Gaglianoese, he found, lived in three tiers: the parents slept in the one big bed; the children slept over it, in cradles suspended on pulleys; the pigs and chickens slept underneath it. Always, "two inseparable guardian angels" looked down from the bedroom wall: "on one side was the black, scowling face ... of the Madonna of Viggiano; on the other . . . the sparkling eyes, behind gleaming glasses, and the hearty grin of President Roosevelt. ... Sometimes a third image formed, along with these two, a trinity: a dollar bill . . . was tacked up [between the Madonna and the President] like the

Holy Ghost or an ambassador from heaven to the world of the dead."

Promised Land of Gold Fillings. Not Rome or Naples but New York, says Levi, was the capital city of these poverty-stricken Italians, who lived on an unvarying diet of black bread, garlic, olives, peppers, tomatoes. In 1935, while 1,200 Gaglianoese lived in Gagliano, 2,000 were living in New York. America was simultaneously the Promised Land and a steel-and-concrete hell; it was the prison house of cruel labor from which came marvelous scissors, razors, blue-bladed axes and dollar bills--the rich wasteland into which Gagliano's sons and husbands often disappeared without a trace, or died of exhaustion, comfortless and forgotten.

Gagliano had a handful of so-called "Americans"--men who had come back home after the crash of 1929. Within a few months of their return, these native sons were indistinguishable from the other villagers--save by the gold fillings in their teeth and their endless lamentations for the riches they had left behind them. "The people here are donkeys, not Christians," explained Gagliano's disillusioned, degenerate priest.

Fascist Progress & Witches. Fascism was a meaningless word to everyone except the mayor .and his cronies, because nothing had ever come to Gagliano from Rome except the tax collector and, astonishingly, "the most modern, sumptuous [public] toilet that can be imagined." Painter Levi peeped once into this concrete expression of Fascist progress and saw "a pig drinking the stagnant water at the bottom of one receptacle; two children . . . floating paper boats in another."

In the old days, Gagliano had been a center of banditry; now there were no bandits, and Gagliano was devoted to witchcraft. Werewolves, gnomes ("the ghosts of children who have died without being baptized"), devils in goat form, witches, magicians--all these were far more real to the hapless peasants than were Garibaldi or Mussolini.

Painter Levi's housekeeper, one of the most popular witches in the district, liked him so much that she gave him her very best recipes, including love-philters (made of female blood), incantations for bringing faithless husbands back from New York, spells for killing rivals and seducers, chants for ridding children of malaria and worms. No one doubted that another woman in the village was the daughter of a cow.

Concept of the Individual. Levi sees a dark future to the ugly present of Gagliano and Italian villages like it. They will continue to suffer, he thinks, under the hands of local petty tyrants directed by unimaginative bureaucrats in Rome. "It is probable, alas, that the new institutions arising after Fascism . . . will maintain the same ideology under different forms and create a new State equally far removed from real life, equally idolatrous and abstract, a perpetuation under new slogans and new flags of the worst features of the eternal tendency toward Fascism."

Somehow, Levi feels, the peasants of Gagliano must be given a kind of autonomy, so that they can feel that to some extent their fate is in their own hands. "We must make ourselves capable of inventing a new form of government, neither Fascist, nor Communist, nor even Liberal, for all three of these are forms of the religion of the State. We must rebuild the foundations of our concept of the State with the concept of the individual, which is its basis. . . . And [this] is the only path which will lead us out of the vicious circle of Fascism and anti-Fascism."

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