Book description
CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI- THE STORY OF A YEAR by CARLO LEVI. Because of
his uncompromising opposition to Fascism, Carlo Levi was banished at the
start of the Abyssinian War ( 1935) to a small primitive village in
Lucania, a remote province of southern Italy. In this region, which
remains unknown not only to tourists but also to the vast majority of
Italians, Carlo Levi, a painter, doctor, and writer, lived out a
memorable time. Many years have gone by, years ol war and of what men
call History. Buffeted here and there at random I have not been able to
return to my peasants as I promised when I left them, and I do not know
when, if ever, I can keep my promise. But closed in one room, in a world
apart, I am glad to travel in my memory to that other world, hedged in
by custom and sorrow, cut off from History and the State, eternally
patient, to that land without comfort or solace, where the peasant lives
out his motionless civilization on barren ground in remote poverty, and
in the presence of death, We're not Christians, they say. Christ stopped
short of here, at Eboli. Christian, In their way of speaking means human
being, and this almost proverbial phrase that I have so often heard them
repeat may be no more than the expression of a hopeless feeling of
inferiority. We're not Christians, we're not human beings; we're not
thought of as men but simply as beasts, beasts of burden, or even less
than beasts, mere creatures of the wild. They at least live for better
or for worse, like angels or demons, in a world of their own, while we
have to submit to the world of Christians, beyond the horizon, to carry
its weight and to stand comparison with it. But the phrase has a much
deeper meaning and, as is the way of symbols, this is the literal one.
Christ did stop at Eboli, where the road and the railway leave the coast
of Salerno and turn into the desolate reaches of Lucania. 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
pene trating the mountains and forests, nor the Greeks, who flour ished
beside the Gulf of Taranto. None of the pioneers of Western civilization
brought here his sense of the passage of time, his deification of the
State or that ceaseless activity which feeds upon itself. No one has
come to this land except as an enemy, a conqueror, or a visitor devoid
of understand ing. 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 pov erty. We speak a different
language, and here our tongue is incomprehensible. The greatest
travelers have not gone beyond the limits of their own world; they have
trodden the paths of their own souls, of good and evil, of morality and
redemption. Christ descended into the underground hell of Hebrew moral
principle in order to break down its doors In time and to seal them up
into eternity. But to this shadowy land, that knows neither sin nor
redemption from sin, where evil is not moral but is only the pain
residing forever in earthly things, Christ did not come. Christ stopped
at Eboli. I ARRIVED at Gagliano one August afternoon in a rat tling
little car, I was wearing handcuffs and I was escorted by two stalwart
servants of the State with vertical red bands on their trousers, and
expressionless faces. I arrived reluc tantly and ready for the worst,
because sudden orders had caused me to leave Grassano where I had been
livin
