Cristo si è fermato a Eboli is the notest book of Carlo Levi, where the author tells the story of his exile in Lucania and the meeting with the South country reality, undeveloped and forced to live in conditions of poverty and ignorance.
“We are not Christian, we are not men, we are not considered as men but beasts, burden beasts, and still less that beasts, the fruschi, the frusculicchi..., because we have instead to suffer the world of the Chrisians, that are beyond the horizon, and to bear its weight and its comparison”
For this poor people, forgotten by the civilization and by the social progress, Christ has really stopped to Eboli, leaving those populations to the state of their prehistory and of their superstitious paganism. The whole book must be read in this double key: that linguistic, typical of the northern literate that first of all discovers an entirely new language and stranger to the civilization, and of this language he underlines all the bitter and ironic and sometimes grotesque and animal charge (on this subject we are seem to be useful the stylistic structural observations of Falaschi that underlines the ideological value of the human attributions to the animal world: “teeth of wolf”; “red eyes of rabbit”, etc.): and the sociological-political one, according to which it is denounced and underlined through the descrptive realsim and the objective analysis of the story, the condition of poverty and desperation in which they live in those abandoned lands either the gentlemen (that is to say the owners) that the poor men. But really they are all poor because who is not needy is neurotic, he curses his permanence in an unfortunate country, in which the physicians are pacifiers and ignorant people, in which they are hated and bombarded by the envy and by the atavistic and instinctive grudge.
The first meeting of the doctor Levi, political confined, with the farmers of Cagliano happens the same day of his arrival; and it is immediately characterized by the sign of death. Infact he had entered in the house of a widow, near which he would have provisionally found lodging, waiting for a definitive arrangement, when some farmers come to call him because a relative of theirs was dying for an attack of malaria. Levi kindly evaded them, alleging the fact that from a long time he didn’t manage his profession fo physician; but those insist, saying that the two physicians of the town are rather physicans of dunces than physicians of Christians. From that first meeting the farmers understood the deep pity and the comprehension that this northern physician has for the poors. He, infact, hastens to the bedside of the dying poor man; but the sick’s conditons are such that nothing can be done for him anymore, and soon after he will die.
To the children, as to the farmers, Levi will be approached with deep comprehension and liking, so much that they will warn his big humanity and they will call him confidently as doctor and as teacher that can teach them to read and to write. The big appeal of this book is just in the discovery of a new dimension of the human soul, that till now entirely unknown, of the southern farmer irreparably closed in a destiny of poverty and in an internal dignity.
After the first night spent in Cagliano, Levi warns the noise of the daily emigration of the farmers. They make three or four hours of walk to reach the distant fields and the same hours to return back home in the evening. The earth that they work on the shingles of the Angri and of the Sauro is infested by the malaria; and from the malaria they are infected since their infancy. Nothing strange, therefore, if a morning he is waked by the cries of women that confident wait that northern physician that can take care of their children.
Levi tries to avoid to deal with sick, declaring his little competence, but he understands that he cannot withstand their prayers for a long time, “those women prayed me, they blessed me, they kissed my hands. A hope, an absolute trust was in them”.
Levi spends his days of confinement between walk in company of the dog Barone in the confinements imposed by the authrities, the hours devoted to the painting and to some medical practice, that despite the prohibitive suggestions of the two physicians of the country he continues to practice.
A pleasant parenthesis is represented by the arrival of his sister, that has come to stop with a special permission of the fascist authorities to Cagliano for four days. Here Levi gathers the occasion to describe us, through his sister, Matera, the ghost city all contained in the abyss of the Sassi, from the residences dug in the caves and superimposed the one to the others in layers rushing on the Basento. With the description of the bare and burnt by the sun landscape they are also harmonized the crowds of the undernourished, skeletal children and convicted to the malaria and to life of inhuman sufferings since their infancy. In Matera his sister won’t succeed in finding in the pharmacy a stethoscope for the medical brother; on the contrary, she will hear answer: “The stethoscope? And what is it?”
Forgotten by the State, by the civilization, by the religion, the farmers of Lucania consider magic as a mean of defense against the physical evil that torment them in every part, and at the same time they cherish it as extreme illusion to dominate the events. And Levi enters in that mysterious world of the magic too, discovering better the country desperation. But the incomprehension of the bureaucracy, instead of curing, sharpens the dissension and the distrust of the farmers; infact the police office of Mater, for instigation of the two physicians of the country, prohibits Levi to practice his medical profession; and a sick, that needed urgent cares, was going to die, before the authorities granted him the permission to visit him.