Extra Virgin

by Annie Hawes

  And here we still are a sweaty hour later. Now, as we bend over our Dirt in the heat, our blades chop heavily and lethargically where once they flailed and slashed. Blisters blossom on our palms. Rivulets of sweat run unappealingly down our noses, trickle out from the roots of our hair to sting our eyes, as, bent double, we contemplate the lowness of the earth. What a boringly literal metaphor that’s turned out to be. As if all this wasn’t enough, Lucy manages in an overheated moment to embed the point of her sickle in the end of her big toe. So, when Domenico comes along the path on his way to an afternoon’s Cleaning, brushcutter on shoulder, he finds us crouched on the ground inspecting a serious wound. Blood is pouring from it; the nail is threatening to come off. We couldn’t have arranged things better if we’d tried.

  Seeing he’s here with his decespugliatore, he says, he may as well give us a hand with the worst bits, the stuff that’s really hard to do by hand, the rest of those strangling brambles invading us from Franco’s unused orto, for example. (Yes, there are some people so irresponsible they haven’t done any pulizia for years. Naming no names.) And he could just as easily give a quick swipe over the rest of our land while he’s at it really, there’s not a lot to it…

  But, we say hypocritically, he’s got enough of his own land to clean, we can’t let him do it, maybe we could just borrow the brushcutter for an afternoon, get some petrol, do our own Cleaning?

  No, we couldn’t. We would be much slower than him, novices as we are, and he needs to be finished here and up at Castello doing his vineyard tomorrow. Anyway, like Pompeo, he feels that we are too small and delicate to be left in charge of such a powerful machine. Have we seen the huge bundle of protective gear he’s brought with him? Mask, gauntlets… and in any case the weight of it would break our spines. Ah, si, sì. Most importantly, when it breaks down we won’t know how to repair it.

  Does it always break down, then? we ask.

  Euh!!

  The terraces below us break out into even closer than usual ear-splitting buzzings and roarings, alternating with relatively peaceful bits in which, we guess, the thing has broken down as predicted, since they are punctuated with loud mutterings, fierce metallic bangings and clangings, and, at short intervals, cries of Porca madonna! or Porca miseria! Disappointingly, the Lurid Cow does not seem to feature in Domenico’s repertoire. The atmosphere of tension is too powerful for us to be able to get on with much else, while the awful knowledge that we are more likely to be a hindrance than a help keeps us from going down to share in Domenico’s sufferings. We stay up by the house and mess about with our sickles, potter around our embryonic garden.

  We really have managed to create something quite impressively garden-like from the wilderness. Above us, where there are no olives, only wild hillside, we have just pruned back the great yellow-flowering broom-bushes, not chopped them down to ground level like everyone else; and we’ve kept the best clumps of bright-pink valerian and the wild thyme with clouds of tiny mauve flowers, the trailing asparagus fronds and some pretty, round, bright-green bobbly bushes, name unknown. On the steep sloping rocky bit and terrace wall which supports our higher patio-with-cherry-tree area, we’ve carefully sickled away all the messy tangly trailing stuff and the long grass and left the pretty flowering things and the tiny tenacious rock plants sprouting from crevices; while on the narrow level below is a proper wildflower garden, more lacy valerian, creamy-yellow wild snapdragons, pale lilac scabious, a kind of shrubby rock-rose with a yellow heart and pale pink petals, wild sweet peas that twine up the rock, big ox-eye daisies and delicate harebells. We have left the grass high at the edges of the patio and on the next half-terrace down so as not to disturb the stunning wild lilies, now easily three feet tall, which are just beginning to open their white waxy flowers under the nearest olive trees. All rather tastefully pallid, undeniably more English country garden than Italian eye-boggler, so I have stuck cuttings of more luridly Mediterranean stuff into the ground along the edges of the pathway-terrace below the house, varicoloured ivy-leaved geraniums from Antonietta’s garden, rooty bits of that violently violet-blue morning glory which spreads like a weed along the riverbed in the village, some seedlings of a three foot tall busy Lizzie-like plant called bella di notte, beauty by night. Hopefully all this will start to sprout as the laid-back wild flowers die down, and bring us at last into primary-colourful line with San Pietro.

  After an hour or so of high-drama sound-effects from down below, we are called to the well-terrace to inspect. It is twice as large, twice as long as before. The vicious flailing nylon cord of the decespugliatore, aided by a fabulous rotating saw-blade attachment which Domenico now demonstrates, making us jump out of our skins, has reduced the evil jungle of waist-high brambles to a stringy mush, right down to the bare earth. Brilliant.

  Unrecognizable too is the hero Domenico, who looks like something out of Star Wars behind a huge green-spattered protective visor (carefully arranged over the knotted hanky), his torso festooned with the machine’s great criss-crossing padded straps and buckles, a long leather leg-protecting apron, huge padded gauntlets; the motor sprouts behind his right shoulder, orange handlebars and long metal proboscis dangling from their harness over his chest, sprouting curly bright-green plastic antennae at the tip. Every millimetre of which accoutrements is lightly coated in clinging damp green shreds. How can he stand it in this heat?

  You’ll need to start planting right away if you want to get any vegetables worth having this summer, says Domenico sternly, refusing to take any notice of our joy and excitement, or indeed of our thanks. They might still have some half-grown seedlings down at the Cooperativa Agricola, he adds. If you’re not too late. And he stomps off, huge and clumsy under all the protective gear, down to finish off his own olive terraces.

  At six o’clock prompt, the hour at which work must cease and the digestive system be seen to, he comes striding back up our path, heading for his Ape, brushcutter still roaring, Cleaning generously as he goes. He zigs and zags back and forth along all of our eight terraces, eliminating the last hint of scruffiness, the stuff we’ve lazily left along the edges of the terrace walls. Not good enough, obviously. We are a bit sad about this. We rather liked the tall frilly bits. Too late. Anyway, it’s probably better for the olive trees or the walls or something.

  We start to panic when he is almost at the house and he still hasn’t turned the Infernal Machine off. We can’t shout to him; he won’t hear a word above his roaring motor. He reaches our wild-garden terrace: great swathes of our carefully preserved wildflowers fall before him, flayed to the root. Right up to our downstairs door he lays the ground bare, reducing all the vegetation around – including a great clump of the beautiful lilies – to a few damp mulchy shreds. I jump around on the terrace above, waving my arms and shouting at him to stop. But there’s no way he can hear a word, or spot my desperate semaphore through that blurry sap-smeared visor.

  Ecco! he shouts above the ear-hammering racket as he passes along the path below us, still strimming, mangling the baby morning glory, the next bunch of lilies and all the cuttings I’ve just planted. Bello Pulito! Lovely and clean!

  We stand helpless and despairing on the patio. There’s no point in complaining now; the worst has already happened. But no, it hasn’t. Turning and raising the thing’s flailing proboscis unexpectedly to shoulder height, as if to wave farewell with it, Domenico gives a last gay swipe-and-roar at the patch above him, just below our feet. Our lovely trailing rock-face plants, the only bit of greenery left in the wreckage, disappear damply. Domenico vanishes off cheerily round the modesty rock, full of the joys of a job well done, strimming as he goes, all the way along the path to the parking place at the hairpin bend and his Ape. Tomorrow, Castello.

  Lucy and I glumly survey our almost-garden, reduced in a matter of seconds to a horribly convincing mock-up of a Scorched Earth Policy.

  Next morning, though, when we step out as usual with our breakfast coffee on to our very Clean land, despair
in our hearts, no more considering of lilies to be done, we realize that things aren’t as bad as we thought. At least the bits round the patio and above the house are still there. And apart from the missing downstairs garden, now reduced to bare stone and earth, the rest of our land does look rather lovely. In this neatly shorn state the lines of the terraces, till now fluffy and blurry under their grasses, weeds and flowers, have been magically transformed into smooth, pure, architectural-looking horizontals and verticals, revealing the way the drystone walls follow, row upon row, the curves and contours of the hill. Beautiful after all.

  Inspired, we will return proudly from our next trip to England with a small and (comparatively speaking) ladylike petrol-driven strimmer purchased for a mere eighty pounds in a catalogue salesroom. Domenico’s verdict: Don’t make me laugh!

  And indeed, after a fortnight or so of playing up horribly over simple grass and weed, the puny plainsfolk’s thing we have bought collapses terminally at the first sniff of a serious Ligurian shrub.

  14

  Great hollow metal objects of some unimaginably large kind – outsized oildrums? worn-out water tanks? – are rolling and crashing, bounding and rebounding, down through the oaks and the pines above the house, heading, it seems, straight for us and our suddenly fragile home. Knowing as we do the eccentricities of local rubbish disposal habits, cascading old iron seems only too likely an explanation of the outbreak of terrifying rumblings and clatterings from above. The skies turn black, blinding flashes of lightning erupt over the mountains opposite; still it takes some effort of the will to seriously believe that no human agency is responsible for the solid-sounding thudding and booming above us. The lightning zigzags wildly over the other side of the valley; each thunderclap echoes and re-echoes, crashes round the valleys for so long that the next flash comes before the sound of the first has worn itself out. The impression is of total, terrifying chaos: the house is being shaken to its very roots, every lovely new pane of glass in every lovely new window frame nerve-rackingly rattling its heart out. At last the downpour starts. Just a thunderstorm.

  Off on our motorini once the sun’s come out again, we find the whole road has turned to thick skiddy mud. The rain begins to pelt down again once we’re at the Colla church. Too far down to turn back. And at least no thunder and lightning. As we negotiate the hairpin bends of San Pietro, though, our hair-products are slowly rinsed off into our eyes, blinding us so completely that we are entirely unable to distinguish between road, rock and mudbath. We have to stop and clean ourselves up at Luigi and Maria’s before proceeding to Diano Marina; the sun is out again, though the sky is still rather an odd colour, by the time we leave, slightly less bedraggled. We have received much intensive advice from Maria on how to avoid the bad cold which is almost bound to be our lot after this drenching: we have turned down the grappa, but agreed to go very slowly on our bikes to avoid the colpo d’aria, a kind of deadly air-wallop, which will be caused by too much cool breeze on our damp clothing. But by now the asphalt is steaming again under the broiling sun, though the sky is still dark over the sea. We’re soon whizzing along as fast as our tiny motors will take us, drying out and cooling down at a stroke. Not for long. Just as we arrive in Diano, the wind rises, the sky turns black, the world explodes into thunder, lightning and wild wind. The palm trees along the seafront whip to and fro as if in a hurricane; shopkeepers race to drag their stands of tourist goodies indoors; and we are now bombarded not merely by fierce bucketing rain, but by oranges flying off the trees all along the main drag.

  Drenched to the bone again, we take refuge in the Bar Marabotto, whose barside experts, snug and dry on their high stools, are already deep in intense weather talk. From them we glean much useful lore which, had we but known it in advance, could have saved us this soaking. The thing to watch out for is clouds attacking from France or Spain – the south and south-west. These foreign clouds are the ones that cause the trouble. Natch. Native Italian rainclouds up in the hills to the north or east may look menacing, but will bear no consequences for us sheltered folk down on the coastline. They will just vanish harmlessly off up into the mountains to drench the people of the Pianüa, for whom we do not give a fig. Or, as we say in Italian, a dry fig. (We will all be less smug about this rain on the plain, of course, in years of late-summer drought when our orti and our olives are shrivelling for want of water. Now we will all sit sulking outside our parched bars, gazing at the useless north-east clouds and willing them to veer round to the south and save us, cursing those fat cats of the high plains whose pockets are filling as ours empty; their sunflowers, their corn and their cows lazily fattening through no merit of their owners.)

  Confirming the Marabotto experts’ prognosis, an hour later we are still, whenever we poke our heads out of the door, being bombarded by oranges. Water is still falling in sheets, great trees of lightning are crackling and crashing over the sea. We can’t possibly bike home in this; the steep bits will be a torrent of mud and stones by now. No one we know well enough to blackmail into risking life, limb and suspension on our horrible road has appeared, and we are becoming desperate. Will it ever end? How many more cappuccinos can our constitutions handle?

  Even when the rain does stop, our weather advisers point out, the road beyond the Colla will be part river, part quagmire for the rest of the day; we may as well abandon the motorini for now – we can walk down to get them tomorrow – and get the taxi from the Bar Sito to take us up. The Bar Sito’s son-in-law and resident cab driver, Federico, who not only wears repellent low-cut Gucci loafers with white socks but will turn out later to be a heartless and cruel man into the bargain, is summoned in his shiny black Mercedes. For ten minutes we cruise in snug luxury, leather upholstery, bump-free suspension round the San Pietro bends, warm and dry in the teeth of the driving rain, booming thunder, crashing lightning; it’s getting worse all the way. At the end of the asphalt Federico takes one look at the river of mud which at that moment passes for a road and claims not to have understood where we wanted to go. He refuses categorically to take us any further; his valuable car might be damaged by the rocks which will have been washed down on to the road, he says. Or get stuck in the mud. At the very least it will be covered in filth, and he’ll have to stop work to get it cleaned.

  Alas, foolish nose-cutting-off Northern folk that we are, rather than making a fuss and insisting on being taken either all the way or back down to Diano, we simply pay up in a cold and superior manner and tramp off stiff-upper-lipped through the storm, heads held high – until the enemy is out of sight, at least. Next, a very British fifteen-minute passeggiata through a solid wall of water only broken by the occasional terrifyingly close clap of thunder and flash of lightning. By the time we get home we are drenched to the skin again and our shoes have collected great clogs of mud that must weigh several kilos each.

  We realize later, with just a bit of prompting from the Italian point of view, as represented by Franco and Iole, how senseless a piece of behaviour this was. Did we think he would feel guilty? I don’t suppose Federico suffered for a moment. But thanks to Franco we discover the true identity of this evil taxi driver. None other than the very Federico who once had the nerve to try to get off with Franco’s beloved sister Silvana! We see now that he certainly was not good enough for her; and we are pleased to know that he and his family have been thoroughly humiliated for their sins by the Horseshit-in-the-Bar episode of the good old days; even if the punishment was somewhat in advance of this particular crime.

  What we need of course is a covered vehicle of some kind. Preferably with four wheels, preferably free. And one comes our way: an aged Morris Minor which some friend in England is about to throw away because it has failed its MOT test miserably. Handily for us, no one in Liguria is much interested yet in such nit-picking nonsense as vehicle safety checks, so it is perfectly useable here. Heroically, our brother Rob drives it all the way across France to our very door. The Morris, as the long-suffering brother points out, is an em
barrassingly hippyish sort of vehicle. Still, we refuse to look it in the mouth. Fortunately most olive farmers are unaware of the connection between Morrises and hippies – in fact, I think they were too busy, with the earth being so low and all the upheavals going on in the Communist Party at the time, to notice hippies at all.