Dear Olivia

by Mary Contini

  News from abroad, all’estero, of families who had emigrated, was top of the list, keenly devoured. The Crollas had made a fortune in Manchester, Valvona from Atina was selling tons of pasta in Edinburgh, Angelo Conetta from Perella owned a factory in New York.

  The truth was less impressive. The Crollas were renting a shop, Valvona was almost bankrupt and Conetta had been laid off as factory foreman. But only success stories were welcomed. The dream of emigration and its seemingly unlimited rewards was precious to them all. As long as some of them were successfully on the ladder of success, those left behind could live in hope.

  The women thrived on scandal and intrigue, bad news preferred to good: Donato was in prison, Mena had died of pneumonia, a young Italian girl had burned to death in Edinburgh, Eduardo had two wives, one in Paris and one in Ponte Melfa. What fool of a man would want to keep two women? Surely one is bad enough! Word spread of babies born out of wedlock, adulterous wives, and priests with mistresses. The men discussed politics, business and war with shrewdness, cunning and bravado.

  In the last few years, for the first time in Italian history, most of the young men like Alfonso and Cesidio had been called up for National Service. Some of them had also unsuccessfully fought in Libya, a war they didn’t understand and certainly didn’t want to fight.

  Garibaldi was the great hero of the unification of Italy. The modern leaders were a mixture of incompetents and opportunists. Out-of-date newspaper reports told of pacts with Germany and Austria–Hungary or Britain, France and Russia. Europe was unsettled.

  There were other rumours that the villagers found simply unbelievable. They say there’s a school in London for Italian children, set up by our government. That’s surely impossible since there are not schools for all the children here!

  And most alluring was the myth of untold wealth, tales of roads paved with gold. It was true, more and more families were receiving letters with English notes and American dollars. Most people knew of someone who had seen the evidence, though fewer than expected had received such letters themselves.

  This generated mixed feelings of envy and ambition. When no one had anything, the community spirit had been fierce. Everyone could depend on the family, on mutual support. Now that some had more than others, the balance was changing. It was bad enough to be poor among the rich, but very disconcerting to be rich among the poor.

  As the flock weaved its way up towards Picinisco, it was not unlike a long white snake of gossip and intrigue it had picked up along the way. Higher and higher they came, causing great excitement as they passed. Wives ran to embrace husbands they hadn’t seen for months, sweethearts dragged along aunties as chaperones to get a sight of their betrothed, fidanzati. Asses, cockerels, hens and goats created a great hullabaloo running up and down, worrying the poor sheep.

  The families that lived in I Ciacca joined the trail. Up, up the sheep came until they ran through the very heart of Picinisco, jammed from wall to wall of the narrow streets, not unlike the procession of Sant’Antonio, except this time the sheep were real.

  Don Dioniso joined the tailback of stragglers at the end. Every year he blessed the shepherds and their flocks before they went up to the highest, cooler pastures for the summer. In truth he would have liked to go up to the Prato di Mezzo with them, but the climb would surely kill him. He was tempted. The villagers said that the ricotta the shepherds made there in the mornings was the sweetest, creamiest, most delicious cheese you would ever taste.

  Nearly all the people of Fontitune ran down the hill to greet the sheep. The whole entourage made camp in and around the piazza, sheep spilling out at both ends of the village. They would spend a last night together before the final leg of the journey. There was a lot to do but the women in Fontitune had prepared, cooking big pots of pasta e ceci, frittata with potatoes and onions, and guanciale con piselli, pork cheek cooked with spring peas, served with a rough home-made pasta. Extra loaves of bread had been baked, and the children had collected misticanza of salad leaves and herbs full of nutrients.

  Emidio and Pietro had gone down earlier to Picinisco to get two young lambs, abbacchii. They had carried them up on their shoulders ahead of the shepherds. After they had been born, the abbacchii had been strapped to the bellies of the sheep so that they had only been milk-fed, making their flesh tender and sweet. They had already been slaughtered and butchered. The men had dug a pit in the earth and covered the base of it with glowing embers.

  Filomena pounded garlic, wild rosemary, thyme and preserved anchovies with green cloudy olive oil in a wooden mortar. She rubbed the mixture all over the lamb then laid it on a grate over the embers. Covered with twigs, the lamb roasted slowly. Occasional whiffs of rosemary and garlic and sparks of burning splinters of wood escaped with the smoke, creating an extraordinarily good aroma.

  Once they had secured the sheep safely for the night, everyone sat round the fire to eat and gossip. Both the food and the chiacchiera that night were magnificently juicy!

  With plenty of wine and the first coffee they had had for months, the night was long and merry. They played music on the pipes and sang ballads, happy to be together again. Most slept that night camped out under the stars. Even Don Dioniso slept in the open, though he did snore quite heavily and had to be prodded awake more than once. Oblivious, he dreamt that the last of the snow that capped the mountains was ricotta dripping down into his mouth. He would follow the sheep tomorrow. He must taste that ricotta.

  Alone in the house Alfonso passionately made love to his wife, holding her as if for the last time. He was leaving at dawn. As soon as she slept, he kissed his child and went to sleep outside alone with his thoughts.

  Maria woke as soon as the first light appeared through the narrow slit in the wall. She left the baby slumbering peacefully and climbed downstairs. The piazza was almost empty. A small fire had been lit and some women were making cheese. The milk from the sheep had been warmed with salt and some rennet from the abbacchio’s stomach. The women were scooping the solidified curds out with their bare hands, packing them like soft cotton wool into reed baskets to make pecorino.

  The pale creamy whey that dripped through the baskets was collected in a pot and would be warmed again just to simmering. It would solidify again, producing soft grey-white curds that would be packed into smaller baskets to make the ricotta. The whey that dripped from these baskets would be collected and heated a third time. The spring milk was so rich that another curdling would produce even more ricotta.

  The very last of the whey that wouldn’t set was collected again, this time for the lucky pig which was already snorting around the women, nuzzling the ground, waiting for his treat.

  Maria looked up to the hills. She could see nothing: the sheep and the shepherds, the dogs and the donkeys, Don Dioniso and his ass, had all disappeared. They had left well before dawn, driving the flock up to the pastures before the day was awake. She walked slowly to the small wall at the edge of the piazza, her heart thumping in her breast.

  Away down in the distance, just past the third bend in the track, she could just make out the two men. Their heavy packs were strapped to their backs, their jackets were slung jauntily over their shoulders and their hats were pushed to the backs of their heads. Alfonso and Emidio had gone.

  She put both hands to her mouth and called out as loud and long as she could. She waited. After a long minute, once the sound travelled down the valley, she saw one of the men stop. He turned round and looked back up to Fontitune. Seeing the figure waving at the edge of the village he took his hat in his hand and waved wildly back. Maria was sure she heard Alfonso’s call carried on the wind as he turned and walked away.

  Alfonso felt no apprehension. He was convinced he had to go and he trusted that Maria would follow him as soon as he asked her. He was in fact very excited, optimistic, full of expectations. Life was going to be good.

  Travelling on foot was natural to these two men who had trekked with the sheep all their lives. They followed t
he tratturi north as far as they could, then made their way to the coast. The roads were busy. They passed shepherds and farm workers going up the mountains towards the pastures. In the lower lands, peasants were working the fields, ploughing with oxen up and down, up and down, sowing seeds and pruning vines.

  They met soldiers returning from duty, guns strapped to their backs, keen to talk of what they had seen. Other men were moving north, towards Roma and Genova, taking their chances on finding work in the cities. They came across whole families, grandparents, fathers with battered suitcases and women with cloth bundles piled on their heads, young children carrying babies, making their way south.

  ‘Are we going the wrong way?’ Emidio asked Alfonso, doubting his brother’s lead.

  ‘A do vai? Where are you going?’ he asked one of the men as they passed by.

  ‘A Napoli!’

  The man’s dialect was different from theirs and they found it difficult to understand.

  ‘Perche?’

  ‘Per la nave per l’America.’

  These people were heading for America. What strange times they lived in, thought Alfonso. It was as if the world was upside down and back to front.

  They too had thought about going to America; a lot of men they knew had. They had heard mixed reports, talk of people dying on the ships. It was a long journey. The thought of being on the sea, away from land for a whole month, was too much for them. They would not risk that. Also it was not as easy to get into America as it had been. They had heard horror stories of gangsters and shootings. They had heard that the Cosa Nostra had already taken a hold.

  ‘A cousin of De Marco went all the way to New York only to come all the way back because they said his eyesight wasn’t good and would not let him enter.’

  ‘I’ve heard of children dying on the boats with typhoid and cholera.’

  ‘Never mind typhoid. What about that ship that went down when it hit ice! Thousands of people drowned! That would put me off ever going to America.’

  Only the year before, the news all over Europe had been of the Titanic sinking in the freezing water of the Atlantic. They had never really thought much about the sea but after that story they were both secretly afraid. Neither of them could swim. Living on a mountain why would you need to? America! They were not tempted. My God, Scotland was far enough!

  It was lovely weather, sunny and warm, with a cooling breeze from the coast. At night they slept in fields or in the pineta, pine forests that stretched up the west coast of Tuscany at the edge of the beach. When they could, they washed themselves and their clothes in streams. They enjoyed the luxury of sleeping in the sun while their clothes dried. Now and then they worked on farms, helping with spring chores for a few days, in exchange for some provisions or a lift further north.

  They made a handsome pair these two southern Italian boys, singing as they walked along. Emidio looked very like his brother, a softer, gentler, rounder-faced man with very dark brown eyes. He was slightly shorter and perhaps more reticent. He admired Alfonso and was happy to share this time with him.

  They ate simply: bread and cheese, some salami or salsiccie, marvelling at the different types they were offered as they moved north. They ate cheese made from cow’s milk, Parmigiano Reggiano, and mortadella, a huge pink salami studded with pistachios: good food but different from their own at home.

  The countryside was also groaning with free food: glorious pink-red cherries, juicy and sweet, and the first golden apricots. There were plenty of wild greens and herbs, which they picked as they walked. If they were lucky they spotted spring funghi, spiky hedgehog or field mushrooms. Emidio carried a small frying pan in his pack. They lit a fire and cooked the funghi with some lard, strutto, wild garlic and eggs collected from a nearby farm. When they could, they bought some local wine, though it never tasted as fine as their own.

  They heard talk of war. As they approached the main cities on the way north, they were aware of a political tension that was not as apparent in the south. Men in the street told them the news. They would be allowed to vote for the first time, a reward to all the men who had fought in the war in Libya. The next general election would not be until October. They would be far away by then.

  They planned to get as far as Torino in the north, then stop and work for a few weeks to earn some money for the rest of the journey. As they approached the city, they hitched a lift from a farmer. His horse-drawn cart was piled high with boxes of his produce, which he was taking to market. He took them right in to the market, at the Porta Palazzo where the Via Milano meets the Piazza della Republica.

  What an abundance of food! They had never seen anything like it. There were stalls upon stalls piled with all the produce of the surrounding countryside. Trestle tables and boxes piled on the streets, carts acting as impromptu shops; everything was for sale. Gnarled pepperoni, green, golden yellow and garnet red, were piled precariously in three stripes like an edible tricolour. Glorious golden trumpets of zucchini flowers, cranberry and white spiked radicchio and dozens of types of herbs in bunches and in pots.

  There were leaning towers of wooden crates of carciofi, purple bulbous artichokes, and small delicate artichokes on long stalks, competing with creamy white bulbs of fennel with delicate green fronds. Cardoons and chicory, puntarelle, were being prepared for cooking by a gnarled old crone, sitting with a basin of water between her legs, trimming the vegetables to size, nothing better to do with the day.

  Pock-marked Amalfi lemons and oranges were stacked beside gleaming ruby-red cherries, all brought up from Naples by a couple who looked like they needed a good wash. They aimed to sell their southern produce to these northern bandits and get out of there as fast as they could.

  Other stall-holders looked more like zoo keepers, with cages of wild sparrows and starlings, live frogs and snails. A pig, just like Pietro’s, had a price tag round its neck. Ducks and chickens, cockerels and geese were all wandering around pleading to be bought and cooked; surely anything would be better than the stench and chaos of this animal hell.

  In the covered market, stalls were piled with pork and beef, horse and lamb, heads and tongues, tripe and trotters. Almost every part of every animal on God’s Earth was there to be sold.

  Alfonso and Emidio had been to the fish markets on the coast at Mondragone and Formia. They were familiar with dry cod, and with fresh-water trout caught in the lake high in the mountain. But here it looked as if all of the contents of the sea had been slapped onto the marble slabs. They heard the fishermen calling out the names and prices of the fish. Shiny purple-scaled spigola and bright-eyed dentice. Buckets of squirming cuttle-fish, seppie, squid and octopus, fighting for attention among luminescent, black slimy eels. Blushing, pink-red mullet, sensitive to the company of the ugly and surely inedible cat-fish, with its gnashing teeth.

  The customers were as varied. Chefs and cooks fighting and arguing over quality and prices; sophisticated ladies with gentlemen on their arms, their feathers and plumes as exotic as any on the pheasants they wanted to buy. Their noses were affronted by the basic smells that assaulted them. They pushed past the workers, afraid of being contaminated. The wives of workers from the south laughed at them; dark and rough, full of a lust for life, they were the antipathy of the pampered rich signoras.

  Emidio nudged Alfonso when a particularly buxom Sicilian woman passed.

  ‘Guarda, Alfonso. Vuoi due meloni?’

  Alfonso blushed at his brother and turned his head to look round his shoulder, sure that Maria was watching him. He slapped Emidio, good-naturedly.

  ‘Emidio! Fai bravo!’

  ‘Ciao Bella!’ Emidio called after the girl. You never knew. He might get lucky.

  The men took any jobs offered: unloading carts, lifting boxes and setting up stalls. Horses had to be fed and housed, straw and sawdust spread over their muck on the market floor. They worked from early morning to late at night sweeping away the debris that was left after the produce, live and dead, had been bartered and
sold.

  They felt at home here. There were plenty of Abruzzesi and Neapolitans working alongside them, peasants like themselves, desperate to find work. Many had come north after being in the army. It was in the army that Alfonso had heard the wonderful stories of the Fiat factory that was making more and more stylish automobiles, methods of transport that would one day take over the world. Many men came north to find work in Torino, dreaming of getting a job working in the factory. Most ended up just like them, sweeping up and carrying boxes.

  The market was staggering. The abundance was incredible, the prices astronomical. Alfonso had no experience of city life. He was astonished to see so many lire changing hands for tomatoes and verdure, herbs and fruit, produce that they grew every year or harvested free. They talked in the dialect of Fontitune so that no one could understand them.

  ‘Emidio, guarda qui. La rucola costa soldi. Imagine paying for rocket. It costs as much as cigarettes in Naples. And look at the price of the pecorino. It’s five times what they give us in Picinisco, and it’s not a patch on ours.’

  ‘Mannàggia! We could bring our cheese here to the market and sell it. But, Alfons’, even if we came by donkey the ricotta would be sour once it arrived.’

  ‘Don’t you see, Emidio? It is only a matter of time. Once we make money we can buy a horse, then we can bring Pietro’s formaggio north and make a fortune.’

  ‘If they built decent roads for us then we could buy a Fiat and drive the cheese to Torino! We could barter our cheese for cars!’

  They loved this idea. It was a joke. The old bus that wound its way up to Picinisco twice a week usually broke down half-way up the winding dirt track because of the steepness of the climb. A Fiat car up to Fontitune! That would be the day!

  They hadn’t noticed a Neapolitan listening to them.

  ‘Ei, ragazzi, you’re dreaming. The North will never build roads to the South. They want to keep us down. They want to get rid of us, not help us get organised and work. And here in the market, what stall-holder would sell cheese from Abruzzo instead of from here in Lombardia or Piemonte. The people here wouldn’t take your cheese even if you were giving it away.’