Helene Stapinski - Murder In Matera

Contents

For Wendell, Dean, and Paulina

Baby Plays Around:

A Love Affair, with Music

Five-Finger Discount:

A Crooked Family History

And in that place of abundance

Believing he had been wronged...

He ate the fruit to his great regret, his eternal damnation.

SERAFINO DELLA SALANDRA,
ADAMO CADUTO (ADAM FELL), 1647

NOW

HELENE

MA: Helenes elderly mother, the keeper of family legends, who travels with her to Bernalda, in the province of Matera.

DEAN: Helenes firstborn.

PAULINA: Helenes young daughter, also known as the Secret Weapon.

WENDELL: Helenes husband, whom she leaves behind in New York City.

BEANSIE VENA: Helenes career criminal grandfather, who tells the story of Vita to Ma.

ANGELO TATARANNO: Bernaldas town historian, who helps search for the murder.

ANTONIO SALFI: Bernaldas genealogist.

MARIA GALLITELLI: A neighbor and possible long-lost cousin.

MARIA NATALE: The kind downstairs neighbor, a widow who is best friends with Miserabila.

MISERABILA: The unhappy, unhelpful woman who lives around the corner.

LEONARDANTONIO GALLITELLI: Another possible relative and disgruntled neighbor.

CARLO LEVI: Physician and author of Christ Stopped at Eboli, Helenes bible and guide.

LEO: Beach bar owner and distant cousin.

FRANCESCO: Local lawyer whom Leo enlists to help find the murder.

IMMA: Young Bernaldan writer hired as a researcher.

GIUSEPPE: Farmer from Marconia also hired as a researcher.

MIMMO AND VIRGINIA: Immas parents.

CARLA: Italian friend from Jersey City who introduces Helene to Giuseppe.

ANNA PARISI: Italian writer who knows the history of Bernalda.

EVARISTO: Policeman in Pisticci who helps with research.

THEN

VITA GALLITELLI: Helenes great-great-grandmother, alleged murderess from Bernalda.

FRANCESCO VENA: Helenes great-great-grandfather and alleged murderer.

TERESINA: Vitas mother, a weaver from Bernalda.

DOMENICO: Vitas father, a peasant farmer.

LEONARDO VENA: Helenes great-grandfather and Vitas son, who traveled to America with Vita as a boy.

VALENTE VENA: Leonardos brother and Vitas eldest son, who also traveled to America.

LEONARDANTONIO GALLITELLI: Vitas brother and Francescos friend.

CESARE LOMBROSO: Italian nineteenth-century doctor who studied physical traits of criminals.

GRIECO: The landowner.

FRANCESCO MIRALDI: Bricklayer and Francescos friend.

ROCCO: Vitas firstborn son.

NUNZIA: Vitas daughter.

ANTONIO CAMARDO: The deceased.

V ITA WAS A MURDERESS.

She took a life and ran.

Maybe she shot. Maybe she stabbed. No one was sure. But she took a life and ran.

She left her husband behind and crossed the Atlantic Ocean with her little boys, running from the crime. She made a home in the first place she foundan industrial city of train tracks and smokestacks and horse-drawn carriages with manure in the streets, where the bonfires burned as high as the rooftops on election night.

In the end she got hers. Boy, did she get hers. She paid the ultimate price.

Ma would tell me about Vita as we sat in our bright yellow kitchen in Jersey City, New Jersey, circa 1969. As she spoke she cooked sauce on the stove, slowly turning the red bubbling lava inside the pot with a big metal spoon, meatballs bobbing at the top. Shed dip some crusty Italian bread in the pot and give me a taste, the hot sauce burning and shredding the roof of my mouth because I was too impatient to let it cool off. Between bites, I listened, and nodded and colored in my coloring book.

It was before I had started school; those stories were my first lessons.

I saw Vita in my head: her wild eyes, her passion, long hair whipping in the wind off that ship on the blowing ocean as she held her boys tight.

Ma was a great storytellerbut nothing compared with her father, Grandpa Beansie.

Hed spent time in Trenton State, the Big House, and loved to tell us about prison life: guys who liked to crochet, guys who kept mice as pets on little leashes, men being carried off to the electric chair. His hands would shake and his knees would buckle and he would pretend to cry, as if making his way down the last mile, the long corridor to the execution chamber. He was a real charmer, Grandpa.

But most of all, he loved to tell stories about Vita. And he told them to my mother.

Ma could have been a writer. She had studied journalism in high school, but never went on to college because she had to work to give her mother money and then decided she wanted a family of her own (a good, criminal-free family).

So Ma didnt tell her stories to a wide audience. She told them to anyone who would listen. And that anyone was me.

She told me everything she knew about Vita, and that was as much as anyone knew. Vita couldnt read or write. No letters or diary entries. I had never met anyone who couldnt read or write. Reading was important in our apartment and a great escape from the realities of Jersey City.

Grandpas parents had passed the story of Vita down to him and hed told my mother. Like a game of telephone, it was repeated from mouth to ear and mouth to ear, through the generations, changing, shifting, breathinguntil it landed, finally, in my little ear. My orecchietta.

VITA GALLITELLI WAS MY GREAT-GREAT-GRANDMOTHER, THE FIRST on the Italian side to come over to America. She came in 1892 with her two teenage sons, Valente and Leonardo, my great-grandfather. Vita had had three boys, but Ma said the youngest was lost on the way over. Ma had no name, no proof. Only the story.

The myth, really.

They left for America because Vita and her husband, Francesco Vena, had murdered someone back in Matera, a province tucked away in the farthest reaches of Southern Italy. It was a place my mother and I knew nothing about, filled with such intense poverty that no one really liked to talk about it. The name Matera came from the Latin word for mother. It was the motherland, but no one in my family ever considered going back there. Tourists didnt visit, and even Italians from other parts of the country barely knew where it was on the map.

I looked in the atlas and found Matera at Italys instep between Puglia and Calabria, in the region of Basilicata.

My mother told me the story of Vita over and over again. She would tell it to me when we went to visit my great-aunt Katie, who would fill in some blanks with her own details. She would tell it to me as we walked over to church for Mass, which we attended dutifully every Sunday at noon. She would tell it sometimes on weekday mornings before I went to school, dressed in my blue checkered uniform, while braiding my thick, dark hair.

I figured Ma told me the stories to kill time and to distract me while combing the knots out, to stop me from flinching and screaming to high heaven as she stood over me in the shag-carpeted living room. Dont cry, Ma would say. Vita had it so much worse. Poor Vita.

She told me that Vitas husband, Francesco, stayed behind in Southern Italy, though his last name, Vena, traveled with my family to America. In Italy, maybe because of all the red tape involved in changing their maiden names, women kept theirs. But the children took the husbands name. In our case, Vena.

One detail stuck in my head: my mother said the murder had happened over a card game.

It was unusual for a woman to travel to America without her husband or without him having gone to America first to scope things out. So just the fact that Vita went solo with the kids was a sign that something was a little crazy