Don Fels, Wesleyan ’68, and father of Benjamin Fels ’06,was an American Studies major at Wes, one of the first two to graduate. He put together his major from English, History and Art. Half a century later, he still is very much involved with all three disciplines. A visual artist and writer, he is based in the Pacific Northwest. In September he and his architect wife Patricia (Berkeley ’69) left for Central Asia, where Don had a Fulbright to Uzbekistan (his third, previously they were in Italy and India in Italy and India). They caught the last flight out for Rome in February, and have been in Puglia, in lockdown ever since. This first ‘dispatch’ from Italy was written for himself, but Benjamin suggested sending it to friends, they in turn encouraged him to keep sending them. Please enjoy this excerpt from Don’s first dispatch from La Puglia in the time of coronavirus: “Tragic Beauty”: (full text available from donatofels@gmail.com)

Tragic Beauty                                                                                                             03.21.20

 

Being in the midst of Italy in the midst of the pestilence is to be in the middle of many profound contradictions. We’ve lived off and on in the country for nearly half a century, and never have we seen it so terribly stricken and so starkly beautiful. In our small Pugliese town, it as if suddenly for reasons that we can’t understand, everyone has left. The streets are deserted, a few cars pass occasionally but that’s it, there are no people out, none taking the sun perched on little chairs, no knots of men standing on street corners or women talking across balconies, nobody walking. They must have been here very recently, because laundry still flutters on lines hung outside shuttered windows.

 

Bernardo Bertolucci made a film from a Borges story, The Spider’s Strategem, which he filmed in the height of summer in the north of the country and you can feel the heat, hear the bugs, but you see almost no one. He spends most of the movie panning the wonderous old walls, leaving the viewer ample time to take in the color and patterns stained into the old stucco.

 

In this ancient town, where nothing connects to anything else in what might seem a rational way, now it all feels purposefully off-kilter. As if it were made this way so that when the town emptied it would seem even more incredibly strange and beautiful. Of course, everyone is not gone, but holed up in their small flats, staying at home, as they have been ordered to do. Somehow, Southern Italians, the most boisterous and opinionated of people, have managed not only to leave all public spaces, but to stop yelling and screaming at one another. Perhaps they’re still shouting through the masks they’re wearing and it’s all muffled inside. Or maybe the ancient thick masonry walls just keep the sounds locked in. Either way, it’s eerily quiet.

 

From our terrazzo looking out over the thousands of olive trees that march to the sea, we can tell the trees are still getting care. Every day plumes of smoke rise up from different places as piles of the unusable tree prunings are being burnt. This is when the trees must be pruned so that they put their work into fruiting olives, and so, invisibly, except for the smoke, the work goes on. Beyond the olive orchards the Adriatic shines its clear and polished blue, unless it is covered with fog, as it was this morning, and like the people in the town, completely disappeared.

 

We have been eating up on the terrazzo as much as we can, which is often. The bracing moist sea-scented air is a fine tonic always, but having spent half a year in the incredibly dry air of the Central Asian steppe, it is particularly refreshing. There is usually a breeze, sometimes a wind, and it too, like the small fires, is reassuring, letting us know that we are still connected to the rhythms of the earth. We read that vitamin D can build immunity and the sun delivers it in big doses, so we rationalize our lazing on the roof getting our medicine. Maybe even more, the terrazzo transports us over and out across the landscape, and we need that in our souls.

 

This afternoon as we took our cafe up on the terrazzo, it was literally dead silent. We heard nothing but the cooing of a pigeon, saw no vehicles on the roads that wind gently through the olive groves, heard no conversations from anywhere, no footfalls on the many limestone stairs climbing up the hill town beneath us. There are no ships or boats on the sea. Bees were buzzing the deep red flowers blossoming more with each day on the pots of succulents across the terrazzo. Their noise seemed really loud.

 

When we bought our 15th century place here some years ago it was a complete wreck and an absolutely insane project for us to undertake. But with Patricia’s inspired guidance and a team of eccentric, handsome and wonderfully skilled stone masons, it all came back together beautifully. Literally, it is a thing of beauty, mostly because this former peasants’ place was built originally with simple grace from the local limestone, which became its floors, walls and vaulted ceilings.

 

The blocks of stone were quarried just down the hill, where the olives grow and thrive on a thin layer of red earth that spreads widely over deep limestone strata. Before it housed large families of farmworkers, the lime itself was created by billions of tiny inhabitants, working and living in the ancient Adriatic seashell bed. Once much closer, the sea is now 3Kms away. The stones were brought up on the backs of donkeys who steadily traversed the switchbacks on the way up here.

 

The donkeys are gone, but from the terrazzo we heard one braying at the silence the other day, or maybe we just imagined it. When we bought the place the centro storico was deserted, it was winter and all but one of the old inhabitants had died or left. Other places are owned by summer people, mostly Italians who come, or came, from the North to experience the Italy that they remember or fantasize about remembering.

 

Caterina, the old woman who watched us sharp-eyed like a hawk as we first visited the place and returned a couple more times to look again, said nothing, as she leaned on her cane. But then one visit, I ventured over to her. She smiled her toothless smile as I asked if she thought we should buy the place. Si si, she replied immediately, and told me, you will always thank Caterina for telling you to do so. She died this fall, and we will always always thank her for her sage advice, about the house and so much more.

 

Now that Caterina is gone, there is nobody here in the winters, our favorite time to visit, despite the cold winds and not being able to swim in the sea. But this year we were delayed in coming because we were out in the steppe. Now it is late March, it is gorgeous out, and there is still nobody, and won’t be for many months to come. 

 

Ask to join Don’s mailing list at donatofels@gmail.com, to see the full text of “Tragic Beauty” and all of his weekly dispatches.  You can also see his website at www.artisthinker.com.