Extra Virgin

by Annie Hawes

  Franco, Defender of the Good Old Ways, is busy looking unimpressed. More trouble than it’s worth, the nets cost a fortune, it takes a whole day to spread them, they get ripped on brambles… a bit of old sheet thrown on the ground is just as good.

  Iole tells us, sotto voce, that the men have a fine old time up in the trees bashing about with their bastoni; scrabbling about after the olives is a woman’s job. She can’t wait for the day Franco sees sense and gets some proper nets.

  The only thing we’re a bit worried about is the loo. Is there one?

  Pompeo points to a small wooden shed away under the olive trees, level with the house, which seems to be constructed out of a selection of old doors and slatted green shutters.

  But where does the sewage go? we ask.

  It doesn’t, it’s an earth closet.

  Do you have to empty it, then?

  No, it just goes away by itself.

  We are perturbed. How, exactly, could it go away? And doesn’t it get a bit smelly in the height of summer?

  No. Not at all. (Franco again) Strange to relate, you just need a bucket of lime…

  Pompeo finally grasps that we are actually thinking of living up here, not just farming the land. He is appalled. It is too far from the village, he says, we can’t possibly do such a thing!

  We are confused; it’s only a twenty-minute walk, we say. Franco leaps into the breach, tells him it’ll only be for the odd week or two in the summer, a holiday place. We’ve never said any such thing to Franco, as it happens, but Pompeo is so relieved that we can’t contradict him. What is this country-living phobia they’ve all got round here? Very odd.

  Does it get very cold up here in winter or something? we ask. Weather being a topic as dear to the heart of a Ligurian as to any Englishman, this unleashes a torrent of dialect. Pompeo, we gather, once saw snow actually settled on the ground up here, a good inch thick, one January when he was about waist-high. Not something we two Northerners can get seriously worried about.

  All right: done. The moment has come. We shake hands and the place is ours for four hundred pounds up front. We can scarcely believe it. We will just stay up the mountain and ignore everybody. We will make the place a paradise, turn into old hippies, outpeasant the peasants. Maybe you can make money out of the wine? And just think of the money we’ll save on our year’s worth of olive oil! At the very least we will sort the house out, have cheap holidays for the rest of our lives. Could we turn it into an Inn for Displaced English Folk and never have to work again? A snail farm? A Wildflower Theme Park?

  We pack up and start to leave but the thought of Ape-lurching round all those hairpin bends after all that wine with extremely full stomachs is most unattractive. We need peace and quiet. We need to think. After a short but spirited battle, we are permitted to walk back down to San Pietro. Off we go through the moon-bright night along the muletrack now stippled with eerie twisted olive-tree moonshadows. The Ape wends its weary juddering way downhill before us, back and forth across our path, illuminating random, shifting patches of the hillside below, picking out a terrace wall here, a treetrunk there, now in the red of its tail lights, now in the silver of its headlights, until it is just a vague glow through distant branches. At last it vanishes, swallowed up by the warm leafy darkness of the village down below.

  It will turn out to be harder to make a living in these parts than we think. Wildflowers are ten a penny round here, and no one knows what a theme park is, or wants to find out. Snail breeding is a non-starter; there’s nothing the locals like more than hunting down their own free-range slimy creatures. And the house is way too small for a decent inn. Not that that will stop us putting up any amount of displaced English people over the years. The vineyard isn’t up to producing our own year’s supply of wine, never mind any to sell, as we’ll find out come September. And, of course, nobody wants the olive oil. Not yet, at any rate: not for a good few years. For now, even people born and bred in this valley can’t find work round here, and apart from the pruning season at Patrucco’s there’s no chance at all for us.

  Still, this act of folly has knocked a good few of those paralysingly endless possibilities firmly on the head. Once I’ve installed myself up this hill, I will lock immovably on to the place: home-base at last. Although I may go on for years yo-yoing back and forth to England to re-stock with money – even end up with something vaguely resembling a career there – this place is my fixed point. But I shall leave the English bit out of it. This is, after all, a Ligurian story.

  7

  What difference does it make to me? Pompeo says gloomily when we ask if we can start using the place before we’ve officially become its owners. He’s not using it for anything, is he, and who knows how long Alberti the lawyer will keep us all hanging around waiting? As far as he’s concerned, it’s ours already. We remember to ask him the name of the bit of mountain it’s on, to avoid further humiliations. Several people have asked us this already and we’ve had to admit to having no idea. Truth to tell, it hadn’t occurred to us that bits of hillside might have names of their own. Besta, he says.

  Does that mean anything? Of course it doesn’t. But we’re pronouncing it wrong. It’s a dialect word, even if meaningless, and you have to pronounce the ‘s’ very soft, as if you were a bit tipsy. (Have I mentioned that Ah, sì, sì, favourite local expression after Euh!, is really pronounced Ah, shi, shi?)

  ‘Beshta,’ we say dutifully. The nearest table of card-players cracks up laughing. Have we said it wrong again? No, it’s just utterly hilarious to hear us speak dialect. How irritating these old men can be.

  There is only a week left to go before we finish at Patrucco’s and have to leave Luigi and Maria’s. We’ll camp in the place for the weekend, we say, while we clean it up. Maria is convinced that all alone up there we are bound to be set upon and murdered by the Milanese biker drogati. Make sure to keep a sickle at least upstairs with you, says Maria, and check that Pompeo hasn’t left any tools lying about outside, anything they might use as a weapon. She has loaded us down with tons of home cooking, including a whole spinach tart, two-feet across, all neatly packed up in paper and foil, with which we will certainly be able to appease any bloodthirsty junkies if we don’t manage to scare them off with our antique agricultural implements. We ask if she’s got any toothpaste we could take up with us; we’ve run out. No, says Maria, but she’s got plenty of baking soda. Baking soda? We try our best not to snicker at weird peasant ways. In a decade or so, of course, exciting new baking-soda-based toothpastes will appear in our own land; now, the laugh is on us.

  Maria, surveying our muddy overalls, scruffy travelling gear and general unkemptness, is suddenly seized with a fit of nostalgia for the beautifully groomed English of her childhood. When she finally gets to look her fill at a pair of real English girls, see what a state they’re reduced to!

  When she was a kid, she says, in those long-gone days before the war, we English were magical apparitions, lovely ladies with pale, pale skins in floating silken dresses, gentlemen tailored in fabrics impossibly light, promenading out on Diano Marina’s seafront – fairy-tale princes and princesses, accompanied by our ethereal delicate children. Children of Maria’s own age, but nothing like her; their fair hair always smoothly combed and dressed, their linen snow-white and immaculate, and on their feet tiny, perfect replicas of the impossibly fragile shoes of their parents. Here in San Pietro, says Maria, you didn’t get shoes at all till you were grown up enough to need them for work. Then you would get a pair of lumpy lace-up boots made by the village cobbler. You just wanted to stare and stare at those angel children; but it wasn’t easily done. There was always some eagle-eyed adult busy protecting them from contamination, keeping off the ragged thieving Italian urchins. Maria and her barefoot friends, trying to creep closer for a better view, would be loudly driven off as soon as they were spotted.

  Poor Maria! We are horribly ashamed of our vile forebears. What a revolting bunch.

  Maria laughs
at our expressions. It was a good game, though. Especially if you got close enough to touch one. You’ve never seen anyone so terrified! Mamma mia! Not just white, but transparent. Scared to death!

  Ah. Not so much the tragic victim, then.

  Never mind angels, pronounces Luigi. Those English were just the rich, the privileged few. Some features of capitalism are, in fact, progressive. These days even the poor can travel. Our presence here is the proof.

  Euh! say I, trying out some of my newly acquired Ligurian.

  Ah, sì, sì,, says Luigi, without batting an eyelid.

  Luigi contributes a huge bottle of his own vino d’uva, not the wine he sells in the bar which he makes from bought grapes, but his special reserve from their own vineyard. We will sleep so soundly after a couple of glasses of this, he tells us with a heavy wink, that we won’t even notice the drogati. At the last moment, we are not quite sure why, he makes us a present of a pair of binoculars. Something to do with his seeing us as partners in the quest for knowledge, though. We are honoured.

  Secretly, thanks to our city upbringing, we are much more scared of marauding peasants than of heroin-addicted drogati. We have several times crossed paths with a seriously scary looking man who wanders the hills, cross-eyed, filthy and dribble-stained. He has stopped dead each time we’ve met him, and stared unnervingly at us in a definitely mad and probably lewd and salacious manner. Hard to tell with those wobbly eyes. Luigi and Maria think, from the description, that it’s probably only Franco’s intellectually challenged cowherd, wandering down from the top of the mountain because he’s often left on his own up there for weeks on end and gets disperato. Though they seem sure he’s no threat, we don’t find this explanation at all comforting. What sort of desperate do they mean, for example?

  On the other hand, the only evidence of drug-use we’ve come across so far has seemed pretty harmless; a roofless rustico on an abandoned patch of hillside filled with rows of tiny peat pots, each one containing a fledgling marijuana plant. We couldn’t imagine why, in what we ignorantly thought of as the middle of nowhere, the marijuana growers hadn’t just planted their crop straight into the earth instead of putting it in pots where they’d have to water it all the time. We are still unacquainted with the eagle eye of the peasant for any unusual and obviously tended vegetation, have no idea how intimately every inch of these hillsides is known, olive land or wilderness, constantly criss-crossed by obsessive hanky-headed hunters and gatherers. The peat pot owners had to be from round here, anyway. How would they have found the place? Nobody, surely, could be biking the 150-odd miles from Milan a couple of times a week to water the things.

  We too have got ourselves a pair of bikes: not Milanese biker jobs, but motorini, ancient motorized bicycles found for us by Giacò, proper respectable things just like the ones all the San Pietro ladies have, on which they whizz up and down the hairpin bends, bescarfed and be-aproned blurs of speed, with heavy shopping baskets wedged between their ankles and enormous bundles of unidentifiable greenery bound to the luggage racks over their back wheels. Do we know, asks Giacò when we go to collect our motorini, how the first ever motorbikes arrived in these parts?

  No, we don’t. So Giacò tells us.

  They were, it seems, dropped from the skies by compatriots of our own, dangling from parachutes. They came in crates, and were folded in half. The British, who seem to have been busy round here at the end of the war, perhaps supporting the Partisans or perhaps stealing their glory, depending on who you listen to, informed the local peasantry that it was their patriotic duty to recover these crates from among the olive groves where they landed. They were to load these unwieldy objects on to their mules, and bring them down to British HQ. Once people had seen the use of their fascinating contents, though, they began to find it altogether much easier and more entertaining to open the crate, put the bike together, and ride the thing down the hill instead. After a while, naturally, the crates became more and more difficult to track down: a surprising number of them, says Giacò, placing a finger under a rheumy eyeball, were lost among the olives, never to be found at all.

  We are already sick of the walk up from San Pietro and back down, which we have naturally done many times since that first evening to make sure the house really exists. We are looking forward immensely to the internal combustion engine, which we hope will solve the problem of the wild variations in the distance between our home-to-be and the village. Sometimes it is so near you can pop up and back, no problem. Sometimes it is ludicrously far from civilization, and we wonder what on earth possessed us to think we could live in it.

  We will eventually learn to abandon any notion of using ordinary terrestrial measurements for calculating the distance between our house and the village. Miles or kilometres mean nothing. You have to use a complex equation based on time, not space, to plan any trip on foot in these hills, along with a set of other variables: height of sun, quantity of shade on chosen route, and steepness of ditto; wind speed, muscle tone, how much you’ve eaten and drunk recently. Distances multiply or shrink exponentially depending on these factors. Going down to Diano San Pietro by the muletrack takes fifteen or twenty minutes: that remains pretty constant. But going up? Anything between twenty minutes and an hour and a half. The muletrack is so steep and steppy that once the sun strikes your heart will explode if you don’t stop every fifty yards for a break. The dirt road is less steep, but a psychological disaster with its hairpinning to and fro, back and forth over the way you really want to go. No shade, the sun beating your brains out, an eternity of dry dustiness. Unless you’re suffering from those just-arrived-from-England atrophied leg muscles, the cross-country lumpy cobbles win every time, however steep.

  Wait till after seven p.m. though, when the sun’s going down and the evening sea breeze rising, and magically the muletrack is a pleasant stroll again. Just the one rest halfway by a small pond on a fine double-width bit of muletrack with a sea view, under a particularly large and shady olive tree; a spot evidently used for centuries for this purpose. Where some witty muletrack-repairing San Pietro person with time on his hands has incorporated a central line of white cobblestones into the path, dividing the lanes up, highroad style, to avoid head-on mule crashes.

  Our trips to the house have been informative, if hard on the legs. On the first, we have met Franco’s Mad Milanese on the way down with his eggs, at the helm of his misguided city person’s tractor. (About five years on, we will meet Franco himself driving one of these useless and inappropriate things, spanking new; we will tactfully refrain from commenting on it.) The Milanese stops and bounces at us; we must be the English girls, he has heard that we’re going to be neighbours, we must come to him if we need any help, there are many things it is convenient to learn about this place before we get the wool pulled over our eyes by some cunning peasant, he will be happy to give us any advice we need… when are our menfolk arriving?

  His name is Sergio, he is in his late thirties or early forties, and he looks as if he’s just wandered off the set of some Fellini film, tawny and leonine with a compellingly high energy output, carelessly swept-back hair and intense golden-brown eyes. His wife Lilli, perched next to him, also has more than a hint of 1960s Cinecittà about her – aquiline-featured with dark hair pinned up in a complicated structure of backcombed loops, huge almond eyes outlined in something black and shiny which extends dramatically into sharp points a good half-inch beyond their outer edges. Noting our stumbling Italian, she addresses us in perfect French, in case that makes things easier. We must come up and visit them, she will introduce us to Italian food as it ought to be cooked, we must be so tired of crude Ligurian peasant fare…

  We have also twice met a large red lorry driven at breakneck speed by two gimlet-eyed Heathcliff lookalikes, the only San Pietro residents not over forty or under eighteen we have seen so far. This intriguing pair, all wild dark curls and alluring five o’clock shadows, do not stop to offer us a lift or to find out who we are, unlike everybody else o
n these roads. They don’t even wave or say ‘Salve’. This makes them all the more fascinating, and we can’t help but hope that they are unencumbered by wives or girlfriends.

  Today, as we set off up the hill riding our new purchases, rattling our way heavily burdened up the boneshaking road, we are rather keen not to meet anybody at all. We wobble about on our bikes a lot, feeling remarkably silly; everyone over the age of ten in this country can ride these things expertly, and somehow it hadn’t occurred to us that there was any learning process involved. Their motors are tiny, but you can pedal-assist them when the going gets really tough. With all the weight of our curvaceous espresso pots and our saucepans with Bakelite handles, our pair of roll-up camp beds, Maria’s snacks and Luigi’s wine, not to mention the binoculars, our motorini only just make it round the steeper hairpin bends, even with maximum throttle and fierce and furious pedal-assistance. We are utterly humiliated when, just as we are making a big fuss about a particularly rocky section of road, stalling for no reason and squeaking soppily and generally carrying on like a pair of big girls’ blouses, a stony faced old man on a Vespa, with a large dog balanced casually on his footplate, zooms nonchalantly past us, his lip curling (or so it seems to us) with scorn as he skims lightly over the boulders in his path.

  Still, after a couple of weeks we’ll be resting our feet casually on the chassis, local-style, instead of the pedals. Returning home after dark on two wheels along our rock- and pothole-strewn road will never stop being horrible, though. You can’t learn this road, because every winter its configuration changes, one rock covered up, another revealed. The slower you go on your bike, the dimmer your headlight becomes. Speed up and the potholes show up beautifully, but now you’re going too fast to swerve and avoid them. Slow down again, and you don’t see your obstacle till it’s already upon you… Sober, we creep along in the gloom trying to remember where the pitfalls are this year; after a couple of drinks we throw caution to the winds and fly boldly over the rocks, brilliantly illuminated and clinging on for dear life. There is obviously no correct method. The trusty motorino will bring you safely home, no problem, whatever insults and injuries you heap upon it.