Once There Was a Woman

TORREGRECA by Ann Cornelisen. 335 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $7.95.

Rounding a certain curve along the Appian Way, a modern traveler in the Basilicata region of Southern Italy easily imagines himself in the Middle Ages. On the hill opposite, like a romantic vision, sits an amphitheater of golden-tinted houses with red-tiled roofs rising row upon row to the double crown of a ducal palace and a Norman tower.

Rattling past this bend one June day in 1959 came the incarnate spirit of the emancipated and emancipating 20th century--a bright and determined Vassar girl in a Jeep. Neither the girl nor the town has ever been quite the same since. For between Ann Cornelisen and "Torregreca," the false name under which she has concealed the town's identity, a foreordained contest of wills took place. Chronicling this confrontation, the author might have been expected to produce another bumptious account (subtitle: The Triumph of Progress) of New World ways v. Old World meanies.

Instead, she has made out of her culture conflict an exquisite nonfiction novel of sensibility. As a documentary study of human beings in adversity, it deserves a place next to Oscar Lewis' The Children of Sanchez. As an artistic creation, Torregreca'?, eloquence often matches an even greater book, James Agee's enduring Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

Change as Ruin. In Torregreca, no undue sentimentality was shown on either side. By 1959, beneath her Poughkeepsie patina, Miss Cornelisen had become a five-year veteran of Southern Italy, working for a British charity called the Save the Children Fund, bent on setting up nursery centers in recalcitrant mountain villages. Torregreca was the intended scene of her greatest triumph: a new master center where teachers could be developed and experiments initiated. Thus trained and dedicated, she soon found that the town's aura of Romantic gilt was misleading.

Along the walls of the piazza, a sadly dated message could still be read: WE WILL CARRY EVER FORWARD THE FORCE, THE CIVILIZATION AND THE CULTURE OF ROME: BELIEVE, OBEY, FIGHT . . . DUCE, DUCE, DUCE. Yet modern history, Mussolini included, had passed Torregreca by. The imposing ducal palace was actually chopped up into "a squalid maze of schoolrooms and government offices, each with a stovepipe sticking drunkenly out of a window." Change was the shallowest of facades, mostly visible as ruin. A "cardboard democracy" allowed Communists and Christian Democrats to succeed one another monotonously in the mayor's office. But the real power still rested with the bishop in his diocesan quarters--marble floors, red plush draperies, gold-framed loveseats--and with those few petty officials, from policeman to tax collector, anciently privileged to corruption.

Wide-Eyed Rage. The profound and largely negative brooding strength of Torregreca rose from an older source: the narrow, intense soul of the peasants, still sullen as the donkeys they lead, timelessly trudging to and from their fields. Giving off frustration like a musk--a "physical miasma"--they found no refuge even at home, where the household, confined to one windowless, 8-by-10 room, was likely to include as many as eleven people, two goats, and the inevitable anachronistic radio. Naturally, the Torresi stared at life as at the enemy, with a "wide-eyed look of rage." Even when asking the time, they sounded "as though they were in the midst of a violent argument." Geniuses at suspicion, they hid amulets in their mattresses and sprinkled salt on their bedsprings to ward off evil spirits.

Under the Arms. With a sure, primitive instinct for the foe, the Torresi set themselves against their would-be reformer. Inevitably, to create a nursery, Ann Cornelisen had to take on dirt, superstition, fatalistic inertia--the medieval heart of Torregreca--as well as the townsfolk's ritual incantation, "It can't be done." She proved a formidable adversary. The only Protestant in town, she overcame the initial hostility of Torregreca's nuns. In fact, she had to cope with the hulking "crush" of one nun whose hostility became infatuation ("Sister Clemente's come a-courting again"). She survived flea bites and skillfully parried the advances of local lechers. She learned to save her strength by bypassing such leading questions, provocatively posed by local ladies, as whether shaving under the arms costs a woman "her sexual powers." Under all circumstances, Ann Cornelisen kept her serietd--a combination of propriety and "cool." Gradually, she earned a pair of grudging nicknames--"La Brigadiera" and "The German," the latter a backhanded tribute to her powers of methodical persistence.

In the end, Ann and Torregreca acquired a new nursery center. Other things happened too. A hospital was built, and the school system expanded.

But the author would be the last person in the world to claim that medieval Torregreca had undergone a renaissance. Recollecting her own struggle from Rome, where she now lives, she seems to be in the predicament of the doctor who was her closest ally in Torregreca: "He cannot leave it; he cannot reform it. Defeated he flees, bound forever to his failure by his love and his hatred."

Full of an orphan's love for her adopted town, equally full of wry knowledge of herself, the author has turned her documentary into the unflinching autobiography of a divided heart. For as this pained and loving memoir shows, progress is not as clear-cut, light and darkness are not as easily distinguished as we like to think. Meanwhile, the Torresi have taken a benevolent revenge upon their Vassar-girl savior by weaving her into the tapestry of their folklore. They "tell me of things I said or did," Ann Cornelisen concludes ironically, "things which only I know I never said, I never did. I can imagine them with the wind rattling the windows and driving the smoke back down the stovepipe, saying 'Once there was a woman . . .' "

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