Extra Virgin

by Annie Hawes

  Sympathy having been established, Domenico spends the next five minutes in morbidly intense speculation about how much more per kilo Patrucco will be getting for his useless roses than a good honest olive farmer gets for his fine and nutritious crop. He is certain that we must have some insight into this matter, and our ignorance is a great disappointment to him. But there it is: we have never, so far, thought of roses in terms of their net weight. I offer, foolishly perhaps, to let him know as soon as we’ve wormed the information out of Patrucco.

  Brava! Brava! he says, giving me a conspiratorial pat on the knee. I realize, too late to back out, that I have heedlessly taken sides in some as-yet-uncomprehended battle between the Olive and the Rose. Further conversation becomes impossible as the asphalt ends abruptly and we begin, with much first-gear roaring, grinding and jolting, to breast a series of scarily steep hairpin bends out of the olive terraces and on to wild broom-clad mountainside. Ten minutes of this, and we stop, shaken and deafened, at the top of a ridge mysteriously wreathed in smoke and fumes.

  Eccoci! Here we are! announces our chauffeur gaily. Are we? We don’t seem to be anywhere in particular. This is a bit of mountainside like all the rest. No buildings, no machinery, nothing at all reminiscent of a rubbish-disposal plant. We stagger down from our seats; Domenico stays in the lorry battling with its controls. What is all this smoke? Is there a forest fire? Lucy and I peer cautiously over the shrubby vegetation to the landward side of the ridge. And a hundred feet below us is a scene from hell: a stinking slow-burning virtually vertical cascade of a dump. Around its black and smoking heart the whole side of the hill is a seething chaotic mess. The odd fragment of charred fridge or washing-machine, half buried under years of carbonized household waste, rotted cardboard boxes, tangles of mattress springs, peer out here and there from amongst fire-reddened rocks, while limp curls of half-hearted smoke rise from the remnants of tables, rabbit-hutches, bits of sofa and iron bedsteads which stick out at unlikely and vertigo-inducing angles from the occasional clump of broom or juniper or gorse.

  Clearly the people of San Pietro have not yet got to grips with the non-biodegradability of modern rubbish. We watch open-mouthed as Domenico manoeuvres his decrepit machine back and forth on the narrow rock-strewn road until its rear wheels are balanced on the brink of the precipice. Then, at a casual flip of a lever, nine villages-worth of garbage plummets crashing off the ridge. We gaze with new respect at our driver. Hard to believe that such a small, shy, innocuous person, impressive though his moustache may be, could be the single-handed author of this gigantic natural disaster. The job well done, he fishes a squashed packet of cigarettes from his breast pocket and a bottle of wine from somewhere below his seat, deep within the chassis of the lorry.

  Un po di riposo, he announces, lighting up and settling down to repose himself on a handy rock, gesturing hospitably towards another smaller pair of rocks for us to follow suit. We sit down obediently. He has only the one glass, which he is now wiping out on his vest-tails. We will share that, and he will drink from the bottle. I try to read what’s left of the scuffed and greasy label.

  Colli Pia… something, it says. Impossible to make out. Is it from round here? Domenico lifts the bottle up and looks at the label, vaguely surprised by its presence. Colli what? No, no, this is his own stuff, vino d’uva, wine made of grapes.

  Are there places where they don’t make it out of grapes, then?

  Domenico laughs uproariously at this. Apparently I’ve made a great joke. Still chuckling to himself, he twists the screwtop off and performs a violent wrist-flicking movement with the bottle, momentarily giving us the impression that it too is being hurled off down the hillside. No: he has just sent the first inch or two of the wine flying out over the valley. My capacity for amazement exhausted, I gaze on and ask nothing. The sister has more stamina. Is the top bit no good, then? she asks.

  No, that was only olive oil, not wine, says Domenico, pouring out our glass, on whose surface, confirming his words, the odd flattened globule floats greasily.

  Saves wasting time with corks, he adds. Seal it with a dash of oil instead.

  We accept a cigarette and settle in for a chat, sipping at our wine made of grapes and complimenting its maker. Delicious. Here on the seaward side, vague through the sun-haze, a vista of silver-green olive terraces dotted with cream and ochre hilltop villages stretches down to the azure bay of Diano. No hint of the horror at our backs, the black choking smoke from the rubbish down the other side of the ridge. Domenico, outlined against the sky, elbows on knees, puffs away at the Superking cupped in his hand, serenely undisturbed by the occasional small but ferocious explosion as an aerosol can from our load finds its way into the heat and blows up down the scree behind us.

  Ah, sì, sì, he says, exhaling with a deep sigh. He, unlike many people in San Pietro, knows quite a bit about foreigners. He has even visited foreign lands. His first son left home almost a decade ago, married a Dutch girl and set up a hairdressing salon in The Hague. His daughter, must be about our age, is a nurse in Buffalo, New York.

  In America? we say in chorus, somewhat taken aback, brains working overtime at reinventing what we now see are absurdly inadequate stereotypes of Italian hairdressers and Italian-American nurses. Why do they not include very small vest-and-hanky-clad olive-farming fathers?

  Yes, says Domenico patiently, New York, United States. He hasn’t been there, it’s too far and his wife Antonietta is scared of flying. But he went to Holland a couple of years ago, for a whole six weeks.

  How was that? we ask.

  A long pursed-lipped pause while Domenico considers Holland. He lost five kilos in those six weeks, he says. He was very impressed by the land – all that pianura, that flatness. But what use is good land if you don’t grow decent food on it? Which they don’t. Everything tastes of nothing. Worse still, you never get any bread with your meals. Unless you ask for it, that is, which he didn’t like to do in case the daughter-in-law took offence. Not more than a couple of times, anyway, he adds darkly.

  Like England, I say. That’s how we eat. It’s not too bad once you’re used to it.

  Domenico shudders. He has seen enough of Holland. Nowadays they see their son just once a year, when he comes down to collect his share of the olive oil. To think how he and Antonietta scrimped and saved, wore themselves out to buy up their few extra plots of land, a few more olive trees, give their kids a bit of security! For what? No security there any more. No kids either. Their grandson hardly speaks a word of Italian, never mind Ligurian. What does he care about a few dozen olive trees up some foreign hill? Nothing. And who knows what his mother does with all that good oil? She certainly doesn’t use it in her cooking: not as far as Domenico could tell. But that’s life these days.

  Sounds terrible, we say, on cue. But he said that was his first son – what’s happened to the second?

  Nothing yet, says Domenico, not sounding much cheered by the fact. He’s only a baby. Suddenly, at forty-six, his wife found herself pregnant again, and Maurizio was born three months ago. (Aha! Here is the explanation for all those jokes in the bar.) He knows it is the destino that has sent him Maurizio. But destiny knows nothing of fair play. He and Antonietta were looking forward to a peaceful middle age and a bit of spare cash for a change. Magari! (Chance would be a fine thing!) Luigi and his Communists are right: sweat blood to bring up your kids, feed them, clothe them, educate them – and send them off as a free gift to America or Germany or somewhere. Or Milan and Turin, come to that. No justice in it. Maurizio will go like the others. He was born hating the land – screamed his head off the whole time they were getting this year’s crop in. The right sort of baby would have lain quietly watching the sky through the branches, let you get on with the job. Domenico is disperato. There is no longer any tranquillity in his home, he says. And in the bar, he adds with a small sidewise grin, he gets no peace either.

  We part soulmates. Domenico, with a grasp of local customs infinitely superior t
o anything the Blue Guide can tell us, is unperturbed by our desire to walk back down the muletrack from here instead of riding in his lorry. Domenico has known all along, of course, that we were off hunting and gathering, foraging for food. Walking about villages may be distinctly odd behaviour, but walking about hillsides, we see now, is fine. There should still be some wild asparagus left, he says, though we’ll have to get well off the path to find a decent amount. We’ll find no funghi though, except maybe a few oyster-mushrooms on some treetrunk – we’re too close to the village. As for snails, no chance. We’ll have to wait till next time it rains. Domenico provides us with the carrier bag we have unaccountably forgotten to bring with us – never mind, he has plenty in his wine-cache under the driver’s seat – and roars off, raising a hand in salutation. No, we won’t forget about the price of roses…

  We wander off down the muletrack, detouring along the groves every now and then to see if we can spot some asparagus – the only item on Domenico’s menu we feel at all comfortable with. Snails, definitely not. Mushrooms maybe, but we wouldn’t trust ourselves to recognize an oyster-mushroom. As it turns out, we can’t trust ourselves to recognize wild asparagus either. We prod hopefully about against terrace walls, by the roots of olive trees, but find nothing at all asparagus-like. Nobody around to ask, either. The hills are deserted this high up, it seems, though we can hear the odd voice of peasants a-peasanting on the terraces below. We do, however, come across our best abandoned house so far: not a two-roomed stone bothy, one up, one down, like a lot of the hillside rustici we’ve come across, but double-size, a proper cottage, with a kind of huge vaulted alcove built out from one side where some enterprising peasant architect has incorporated one of the ancient roundhouses into its walls. The real-estate yearnings I thought I’d put so firmly behind me surface again, double strength. How could anyone leave such a lovely place to go to rack and ruin? It looks as if no one has been near it for decades, its lands untended and its olive trees unkempt. I want it very badly. It ought to be mine. Two big lemon trees, a lovely little cobbled area on the higher terrace by the upstairs door, shaded by a ramshackle bit of tiled roof; by the lower door a small cherry tree which, thanks to the weird semi-tropical climate in these parts, is already fruiting at this unlikely time of year. We gather and guzzle. Delicious, though not exactly the wild mountain provender we were supposed to be after. The sister being fully occupied with the cherries, I go off for a tour of inspection, find a window whose olive-plank shutter is hanging off its hinges half-open, and naturally, with nobody around to know or care, can’t resist climbing inside to check out the facilities…

  Did I say there was nobody around? Did I call these hillsides pester-free? If we are still here all these years later, that lady in the green eyeshadow and her fellow devotees at the altar of Italian health are to blame. Preventing us, as they did, from lounging innocently by the sea of an afternoon on that wide sandy beach – a beach free of cunning peasants and their machinations – they drove us instead straight into the waiting arms of a certain Franco, otherwise known as ‘Il Coltello’: Frank the Knife, local property speculator extraordinaire. Who has spotted us now; and will soon be hot on our trail.

  Follow the wide and shallow riverbed a little way up the valley from Patrucco’s business premises till it comes out on the other side of San Pietro, and you find a rambling shed-festooned house with a roof-high hammer and sickle daubed on its side wall in what must once have been blood-red, nowadays weathered to a tasteful dusky orange. Its owner, Giacò, is a large, loud and laughing person who augments his dwindling olive-income by dealing in second-hand goods, his home surrounded by chaotic heaps of irresistibly fascinating ancient hardware, a junkyard terrain stretching a good quarter of a mile among the tall clumps of wild cane and the smooth pale stones of the dried-up banks of the river. Not really a river, in fact, but a torrente, which means that it is almost completely dry for most of the year, just a trickle amongst the pebbles, and only fills up when there’s a big storm, or when the snows melt somewhere high in the hills. We are getting everybody’s gifts from Italy here at Giacò’s: strangely shaped ancient espresso pots, fat round-bellied saucepans with Bakelite handles, pre-war fashion catalogues, earthenware tureens for pasta al forno, intriguing twiddly glass light fittings from the 1950s. Most of which will never see England. Destiny has other plans for them.

  Intimacy between us and Giacò has grown rapidly, thanks to our frequent lunchtime visits as we work our way slowly and methodically through these delights; and to his sympathy for our plight as exploited migrant workers oppressed by the heartless profiteer, Patrucco. It has even reached the point where we get invited out of the heat into his cool, dark stone-flagged kitchen once we’ve selected our bargains of the day, to be given various wines, grappas, types of olive marinade to try; or give our opinion on the merits of goat cheeses made respectively by his sister and his mother. Today we check out a remarkable bottle of whisky which Giacò bought last night from a Moroccan travelling salesman at a most reasonable price; a whisky bottled, according to its label, in the Highlands of Scotland, and going under the long-established name of Crazy Glen.

  Seeing us arriving for yet another exhaustive investigation of his wares, Giacò comes puttering alongside us through his rubble-strewn terrain seated casually sidesaddle on his aged Vespa, his several rolls of grizzled chin unshaven, wearing the usual San Pietro tattered vest and Giacò is a bit of a rebel – men’s legs here usually remain firmly under cover – a pair of battered army surplus shorts. Dismounting when we’ve selected the area we’ll be concentrating on today, he takes a seat in a shady spot and looks on with sharp-eyed bristly benevolence while we sort through the mounds of kitchenware cunningly concealed amongst stacks of old doors and windows, under reclaimed rooftiles, behind piles of those iron-and-chainmail bed bases dating from the days when the average height of an Italian must have been about five feet.

  Giacò chats on, plying us with sips of his lethal homemade grappa, with tales of his life and times, of his wartime Partisan deeds and the collapse of his marriage, apparently utterly absorbed in his stories, casually announcing a price every now and then off the top of his head with hardly an interruption to his flow. Nazi reprisal killings in the piazza of San Pietro… his best mate’s grandad about to be shot… the Nazis were fools – five thousand lire – new lads would flock to join the Partisans after every reprisal… We even know all about Giacò’s wife running off with the bus driver to Venezuela, and how the bus driver’s wife blamed Giacò for not keeping his own wife satisfied, and how he was scared that this might be true and so never found the heart to try courting again…

  So, of course, when we bump into Giacò back at Luigi’s bar taking his before-dinner aperitivo, we say Ciao to him and ask how business is doing. Not the right move at all. The cheery, talkative Giacò of the junkyard, he who has shared his cheese, his whisky and his innermost secrets with us, shrinks to a hunted shadow of his former self, casting around wildly for some means of escape. Muttering something inaudible he leaps from his bar stool with an agility startling in one so large and shapeless, and makes for the safety of the card tables.

  Is mateyness with females in the bar not done? Can’t be that, there are always a couple of overall-clad women in here, shouting in dialect, cackling and card-playing with the best of them. They’re at the next table to Giacò now. Soon though Domenico does a runner on us in a strangely similar fashion. We spot our tiny friend at his after-dinner espresso and digestivo, bounce up to him and sit down at his table, looking forward to a chat about rubbish disposal technology and the price of roses and the wife and the baby and whether its attitude to olive trees might be said to be improving, and suchlike. A pair of white-haired Godfathers are looking on beadily from the Methuselah corner: Domenico glances over at them, opens and shuts his mouth a few times, turns tail and shoots into the loo, whence he emerges shamefaced some time later to scuttle straight out of the bar and off into the starry night.
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  Next time we pass Giacò’s yard, we try haltingly to apologize for whatever it was, hoping for a clue. Mah! How could we have offended him, whatever are we talking about? he says, getting out the Crazy Glen and settling down for a cosy chat. We retire to our beds some hours later, weaving horribly, much better informed about the history of the local Partisans and the struggle against Nazifascist Barbarism, but otherwise utterly unenlightened.

  How to account for the apparently random mood-swings of these olive-farming folk? Away from the bar the men of San Pietro will lay down their ferocious sharp sickles and roaring chainsaws to press swigs of wine on us from the bottle-in-a-sack they all keep handy in the hollow of a nearby treetrunk, bare their hearts to us about their joys and woes, their love lives, their worries about aged parents or wayward children, their secret desires to dump everything and run away to Paris, as if we were their long-lost sisters. Or their therapists. In the bar, though, they determinedly blank us.

  Maybe, I suggest to my sister, the essential feature of the relationship is that we aren’t really part of their lives, so they can say what they want, about anything, like people do with their analysts. But by the same token, in the eyes of the village, a therapeutic distance must be maintained: glowering must prevail. Why shouldn’t the menfolk of ancient olive-farming cultures have developed, over the aeons, the habit of using any strange females who happen to pass through their villages as unpaid therapists? Seems quite likely to me. Peasants are, after all, famous for their thrifty ways.