by Annie Hawes
Not, says Antonietta, horrified, before we’ve gathered in all these olives though? We can’t just let them go to waste… we should pick them now before they all fall of their own accord, get them potted – do some of them oven-roasted with chillis, some cracked and boiled with garlic, some in salamoia…
We’re not entirely sure, we say nonchalantly, that we remember exactly how you make a salamoia. We have forgotten that we are dealing with a woman who has been mother-in-law to an ignorant Foreign Female for a good decade. Don’t make me laugh, says Antonietta (or words to that effect), you’ve never prepared an olive in your lives. The first two are, in any case, Southern Italian procedures, which we naturally could know nothing of, being Northern folk ourselves. We should begin with the simple salamoia, which goes like this:
First leave your olives for four days under plain water, changing it every day. Now put them in a big jar or pot with just enough cold water to cover them, and add whatever gusti, you fancy – thyme, rosemary, bay-leaf, garlic. You can add a chunk of lemon if you like. Olives, being full of oil, will try to float on the surface of the water; you must add just enough salt to make them sink. Too little salt and the top layer will be in contact with the air, making the whole jarful go off instead of pickling nicely. On the other hand, too much salt in an olive is horrible, so you must keep stirring, letting the salt dissolve completely before you check for float-or-sink. Now you lightly cover the jar, nothing airtight, while the olives soak up the brine and the flavours, and lose their bitterness into the water. Forty days and four salt-water changes later your olives are ready for eating – or for sealing in airtight jars to be stored for the rest of the year.
Okay. First we’ll pot the olives, then we’ll prune. We’re beginning to see that the earth is, indeed, a bit on the low side. Still, we’ll get our own terraces sorted out, just like this, and never need to go down the hill ever again. Except for the odd yard or two of sausage, maybe. Or could we get ourselves a pig? Go, as you might say, the whole hog?
Paradise complete. All those succulent vegetables burgeoning at your feet, the oil to cook them in dangling above your head, endless chatty passers-by who like nothing more than to share a recipe or two with you… and in the crook of the hill, just below us, a large vineyard: you even get the wine to wash it down with.
Is that where your wine comes from, then? asks Lucy, pointing at the vineyard, evidently thinking along the same lines as me. Domenico’s brow darkens. Not the right thing to ask. Sadly, it is not theirs. It used to be; they wish it was; it ought to be. They rented it by the three-year period until two years ago, when its old owner died. Then his inheritors decided to sell up. And somebody else, a newcomer to the place, offered a ridiculous amount for it. Much more than them: much more than it was worth. After all the work they’d put into it, they lost it. Worst of all, the sellers were neighbours of theirs down in San Pietro, so-called friends.
What do you expect? says Antonietta, with a sly look at Domenico. Ligurians’ only loyalty is to their pockets.
Yes, says Domenico. And the idiot who bought it at that price is a Southerner like you. A cretino of a Sicilian.
Antonietta points out the place where their own vineyard really is these days, in the middle distance, snug in an elbow-fold of the next curve but one inland. There are vineyards, in fact, tucked into every possible south-facing elbow of this valley, sucking up the sun, curving rows neatly regimented, stripy brown-and-green patches amongst the silvery-grey of the olive terraces. This new vineyard is another rented one, and they have to go all the way down to San Pietro and back up again to get to it. Still, you can see even from here how well-kept it is, compared with what that fool of a Sicilian’s done to theirs… see how he has reduced it, how incompetent his weeding, how badly pruned his vines!
I’m sure you can, if you have an eye for that sort of thing. What can we do but agree wholeheartedly?
Their tiny rustico at the far end of this model campagna has newly added metal bars fitted across its tiny ground-floor windows; its aged olive-plank door, sufficient to deter tramps and thieves when the hillsides were more thickly populated, now leans against its side wall: Domenico has replaced it with a great slab of iron, incongruously cemented into the thick stone walls and sealed with a huge padlock. A defence against drogati, he says.
So have these drogati actually pinched anything from them?
They’re not sure. But they don’t keep their olive nets in there any more just in case. Somebody pulled up a good dozen of their onions last summer, says Domenico. Could have been Franco’s poor neglected cowherd, though, says Antonietta.
I have been fiddling with the bottle of that respectable and time-honoured drug we have just been given, and now having got it unscrewed I try to do that clever olive oil removing wrist-flick. Hopeless. I shower my sister’s T-shirt, dribbling wine all up my arm. Have you actually seen any drogati, though, I ask, because we haven’t. What do they look like?
But no, they haven’t come across any either – though Domenico has heard that some have been spotted recently going around on big bikes, driving hell-for-leather around the valleys, looking positively ferocious.
We are perplexed. We, who undoubtedly have more experience of such matters than Domenico and his comrades, would find it hard to tell whether a person who whizzed past us on a motorbike was, or was not, on drugs. Moreover, we’re sure we would have spotted at least one drogato by now if there were any – if, that is, we’re really talking about heroin addicts from big cities. Even without their bikes, surely they would look rather noticeably different from a resident of San Pietro? Are these drugged city folk masters of disguise? In all our trekkings to and fro up in these hills we have met nobody who wasn’t handkerchiefed and overalled and generally immediately identifiable as San Pietro born and bred.
We will begin to see the light when we’re told in all seriousness by a bunch of the more hoary card-players down at Luigi’s that any young male person wearing an earring is by definition a drogato: otherwise they wouldn’t wear one, would they? The term drogato, though its main meaning is ‘addict’, or rather ‘drugged one’, gets applied indiscriminately to any young person who openly breaks the rules of peasant respectability. Frequenting the so-called English Pub in Diano Marina, we soon discover, is another major index of drogati-hood. Otherwise they wouldn’t go there, would they?
Strange. Nothing much goes on in this pub, although it does hold a mysterious attraction for our Diano Marina friends, who, according to the San Pietro definition, must all be teetering on the brink of addiction. Horrible place, the diametrical opposite of the wide-open and transparently public ordinary Italian piazza bar which we foreigners love: the sister and I do all we can, against great odds, to resist being made to go there by Caterina’s Diano compagnia. Why do they want to sit in this place which keeps its doors firmly shut, has only one window, done in panes of dimply yellow glass you can’t see through, and is dark, gloomy, and airless? Why not sit outside in the pleasant evening breeze on a lovely terrace instead?
We finally learn our lesson when, having won the argument and got the Company to join us for an after-dinner drink on the terrace of the Bar Marabotto in the town centre instead, we witness poor Alberto (aged twenty-six) having to explain to no less than three family members who happen to pass by, the last of them a very perturbed mother, what he is doing here without Anna, to whom he is affidanzato…?
He is having a drink with friends, he snaps at the mother. Has she not heard that these days you are actually allowed to have friends of both sexes? Why doesn’t everyone leave him alone?
What will Anna’s mother think when she hears about it? She asks, going off all hurt and upset.
Who’s going to tell her? Why don’t you all try minding your own business! Alberto shouts after her, at the end of his tether.
Minutes later he collapses into a puddle of guilt, good Italian son that he is, and has to rush off home to apologize and set things right.
This, our f
riends point out, is all our fault for making them come here; of course we think it’s great, all the traditional Italian stuff, piazza life, open bars, multi-generational festa nights. It’s fine for us, we’re not part of it and its social sanctions have no power over us. For our friends these are the loci of oppression, places where the smallest deviation will be noted, commented upon by the entire community, and traditionally, if you’ve embarrassed your family badly enough, punished with threats of removing your future livelihood by leaving the land and the piante to your sisters. Not much of a threat these days, as luck would have it.
The whole point of the pub is its oddness and foreignness, off-putting to all these old-style village judges and town social commentators, who wouldn’t dream of going in there. The pub is a hotbed, in fact, of social change: change which (if there was any in the good old days) must have moved at a snail’s pace under all that constant surveillance. You wouldn’t even have dared nip off to the countryside for a quick snog, riddled as it is even now with hunter-gatherers, orto-improvers, bean-stick guardians and olive inspectors: just think what it was like in those more heavily populated times. Piccadilly Circus. You’d be lucky if your snog didn’t end in a shotgun wedding.
In the pub, though, lurking far from prying eyes under the traditionally English low vaulted ceiling, until the traditionally English closing time of four a.m., you can enjoy several hours of traditionally English anonymity. Naturally, as far as the older generation are concerned, this modern desire of the young to hide away from their elders is disturbing and inexplicable. Why would you want to hide yourself away unless you were up to something? You are undoubtedly in great danger of turning into a drug-crazed onion-thief.
Just past the church at the Colla, the one dedicated to the Madonna of the Snows and decorated with Pompeo’s bizarre approximation of a pair of forks, there is a large round patch of smooth concrete under the trees whose purpose has so far eluded us. Not for parking cars: it has a steep little flight of steps leading up to it on one side, and on the other an abyss. Now we know. It’s a dance floor. And suddenly a bar and restaurant has sprung up alongside it in the wide clearing under the olive trees: tables, chairs, strings of coloured lights and all. Under which we find ourselves sitting, as dusk falls, surrounded by thirty or forty other tables of San Pietresi all become unwontedly gay and sociable, shouting and chatting to the strains of a rumpety-pumpety band, all saxophones and accordions. And on the dance floor, doomladen string-and-hanky folk magically transformed. Men we have only seen looking lumpy and shapeless, burdened with agricultural uncertainties, dumpy trudging women always loaded down with those vast piles of shopping or garden produce – now all combed and ironed and natty, metamorphosed into these lively fleet-footed dancing couples, polkaing and mazurkaing and waltzing and flirting the warm night away, lighthearted and light-footed, stepping and half-stepping, forwards, backwards, side to side, trotting, twirling, jigging… cackling with laughter as a huge fat moon slowly moves from horizon to horizon across the purple-black sky. We watch spellbound for some time, sipping wine and munching olives, before we notice that, disturbingly, the band appears to be resting on nothing, balanced over the abyss to the other side of the dance floor. A quick reconnoitre round the back reveals that they are in fact perched on a wooden platform supported by an immensely complicated scaffolding structure cantilevered out over the precipice. Nothing to worry about, then.
Meanwhile, back against a terrace wall, lit by a tremulous generator, the cooks, a good half-dozen of them, move busily to and fro behind a long trestle table, chopping and stirring, spooning and serving; huge cauldrons bubble, fat hisses, a dozen industrial-sized gas-jets roar bright blue at their backs. You buy a different coloured raffle ticket for each dish you want from a young girl at a little side table, who has a chalked-up list of the night’s specialities nailed to the trunk of her olive tree: and you hand the ticket over to the cooks, who are thus saved the bother of handling money. We go over to see what’s on offer. At the bottom of the list is something called zuppa inglese, English soup. Of course I can’t resist getting one of these for my starter, just to see what it is, even though the look I get at the serving-bench – if not the position of this soup right at the bottom of the list after the desserts – should have warned me I was setting myself up for a brutta figura.
Am I sure I want it now? I am. A large serving lady, damp with the rush and the heat, kindly tries not to look at me as she hands my order on. A few minutes later, in amongst everyone else’s sensible antipasti – vegetable fritters or bowls of broccoli soup or plates of cundiun, the local salad of tomato, peppers and olives – appears a plate filled to overflowing with a rich creamy chocolatey and seriously alcoholic trifle. Yes, it’s mine.
English soup! I can’t help feeling that it is not entirely fair of the Italians to call it so. True, we English are not a nation of gourmets; but, Italian public opinion to the contrary, we can tell the difference between sweet and savoury. This English-soup calumny, however, is all of a piece with people here insisting that we eat jam with our meat in England – a notion that must stem from some garbled description of roast pork and apple sauce, or maybe beef and chutney? – and is not helped at all by black propaganda such as we found on the back of the packet of so-called cornflakes we bought down in Diano where the illustrated serving suggestions on the back included, I swear, a fried egg balanced on top of the bowl of cereal.
Domenico, accompanied by his wife, catches me as I arrive back at our table with the offending item, to the great entertainment of my evil sister, who is already munching her way happily through her cundiun and fresh roll. Needless to say Domenico doesn’t bat an eyelid. He already knows all there is to know about vile foreign eating habits. But Antonietta is not about to let my English soup starter pass unnoticed; fifteen tables of San Pietresi are soon rocking with delighted laughter at this confirmation of all they have ever heard about the English. I confound them all by putting the thing firmly to one side, to be eaten later, and nipping back to the ticket girl; a few minutes later I am stuffing myself like a normal person with cuttlefish stew in a rich wine-saturated sauce. When I finally get round to the English soup course, it is fabulous; but I certainly don’t let on to the interested spectators that I’ve never tasted a soup half as good back in my homeland.
That dancing, though! We yearn to join all those people moving in time with one another, bouncing and twirling, laughing and chatting, hardly needing to concentrate at all. What we have until now thought was dancing is, it is blindingly revealed to us as we watch the syncopated San Pietresi swirl round their dance floor, nothing but waggling our arms and legs pointlessly and individualistically about the place. Whole families take to the dance floor together, the tiniest tots whirled around in the arms of parents or grandparents to get the feel of the thing. Maurizio, in his father’s arms, is already jiggling a tiny fist in time to the music. By the time you can toddle you are already deep in advanced footwork training with older brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, grannies and grandads. Is there any hope for beginners of our advanced age?
Domenico and Antonietta, Franco and Iole, Luigi and Maria; even these last two large and ungainly folk take on a mystical glow of grace and bravura. As the evening wears on and the wine goes down, Luigi and Maria even get up for a tango, strangely unfamiliar when performed not with the wild sexy abandon of its Latin American originators, but with a cheerful Ligurian matter-of-factness. The only bit we can participate in is the gap in the middle of the festa, the point at which the band plays a few pop songs and kiddies’ favourites to entertain the youth: one of which songs, astonishing in this idyllic olive-grove setting, is the awful ‘Birdie Song’, known and loved here as the ‘Qua Qua’. Now all the real dancers sit down for a good gossip about the children and the price of olives and other matters of importance, while a motley assortment of teenagers, toddlers and foreigners (us) stand up and jiggle tediously about, racked with anomie. The foreigners are racked, that i
s; the teenagers and toddlers can already do proper ballo liscio, ‘smooth dancing’, as it is called, if they want to, and are not suffering. They are just at that weird age where they actually want to dance the ‘Qua Qua’.
This festivity is officially billed as a Festa dell’Unità, a Communist Party party. But – coincidentally? – it falls on the day officially allocated in the church calendar to the Madonna of the Snows, patroness of this neighbourhood, the Colla, topmost frazione of San Pietro. As the band struck up at the beginning of the evening, a dozen or so ladies of advanced years were to be seen scooting out of the church sacred to this Madonna’s name, straight past Pompeo’s painted forks and round into the olive groves to join the queue for godless Communist boar and polenta and a night of pagan dancing. Meanwhile a small beleaguered priest, having done his best for Christianity and abandoned by his flock, snuck off alone in the opposite direction, towards the many hairpin bends that take you to downtown San Pietro. Whose own Festa dell’Unità, it will turn out later in the summer, just happens to fall on Saint Peter’s day. A cynic might suppose that the Communists were taking a leaf out of the Romans’ book, lazily naturalizing already existing deities rather than devoting their energies to uprooting superstition in the interests of progress.
The fascinating pair of young men who drive the red lorry are here too, eating at Franco and Iole’s table and, rather disappointingly, showing no signs of dancing. Or perhaps not so disappointingly: we wouldn’t be able to dance with them anyway, unless it was to the ‘Qua Qua’. Franco calls us over to be introduced: they are his nipoti, Carlo and Nicola, who work with him up in the high meadows with the cows and horses. Nipoti could be grandsons or nephews; with all the excitement we don’t manage to find out which. Franco has interrupted them in mid-flow, busy telling some long tale in dialect which seems to involve horses and police stations. Everyone roars with laughter at the punchline, and Franco insists that they tell it again, in Italian, for our benefit.