Extra Virgin

by Annie Hawes

  The famous damp-proof course turns out, disturbingly, to be nothing but a giant sheet of that plastic that is also used for May Day shelters; it is simply laid on the original floor and has gallons of concrete thrown on top of it. Seems much too simple. Can this be a proper, official building technique? It takes Rob, whom we suspect of being in love with his new friends and prepared to lie and cheat on their behalf, some time to convince us that this really is what a damp-proofing course means. Even in England.

  No one expects us females to do anything – not even make tea and coffee, since of course more than one coffee in an afternoon will make you nervoso and stop you sleeping at night, while tea is a drink for intellectuals and eccentrics. Although we are rather pleased to have nothing to do in this summer heat but lounge about, we have been brought up in feminist times and feel rather ashamed of not participating.

  Eventually we go off round the back of the house to where the hammock now lives, well away from the shouting radio and the alternating roars of delight and groans of despair from our workforce, to hide our guilt and our paperbacks from view. Most satisfactory. Even our own brother, who would normally be complaining loudly about sloth and women wanting to have it all ways round, has been overcome by an attack of Italianness, laid aside his feminist (or is it anti-feminist?) training, and is keeping his mouth firmly shut.

  Better still, when suppertime comes, no one trusts us to make a decent plate of pasta either. Ciccio and his cohorts, all in joyous mood because Juve has won, do that too, using a good six packets of spaghetti. The football experience has been so overwhelming that nobody seems to have noticed having done a hard afternoon’s physical labour at all. While the others clatter about with saucepans, Paletta settles down to show us the amulet which, he claims, is largely responsible for Juve’s great series of goals this match: it is a Mother of Vinegar, he says, handing us a shrivelled ring of leathery woody stuff, something like a very sturdy pencil sharpening, which he unthreads from the gold chain round his neck. He dried it out himself in the sun; a very delicate operation.

  But what on earth is a Mother of Vinegar? It is a kind of rootless wine-eating fungus, circular and seaweed-like, six inches across in hydrated life; you pour all your lees of wine, leftovers, stuff that has gone sour, dregs from the bottom of bottles, anything, into the container in which you keep this monster, and it transforms them into a particularly tasty type of vinegar. If you are very lucky, it will reproduce; once it has made a baby, you can carefully remove the adult from its bottle and dry it out. Worn round the neck it will not only bring you good fortune, as demonstrated by this afternoon’s football result, but will protect you from the Evil Eye into the bargain. Don’t we have them in England? How do we make our vinegar, then?

  Lucy and I are kindly allowed to make the tomato and basil salad, and do our best not to be offended by being complimented on how like a proper tomato and basil salad it is. Meanwhile our multi-talented builders, shouting, bouncing, chopping and frying, adding a bit of white wine here and some garlic and peperoncini there, transform our odds and ends, a small chunk of smoked bacon, a tin of peas, a couple of onions, and a tube of tomato paste, into a dish that makes the tastebuds leap. A Sicilian winter dish, they say. Fine in summer to us. Mmmmm! says Rob as he ladles his first forkful into his mouth; and is mystified when we all roar with laughter.

  After dinner we go to inspect the works: our downstairs floor is smooth as a ballroom, tidy and level and with no insect potential whatsoever. We bless those wise footballing authorities who so thoughtfully keep strong young men’s Sundays free with their no-TV rule. A tradition has been born. From now on we will save all heavy tasks, leave all heavy objects hopefully at the end of the path, for the Sunday afternoon football gang. They will be back in a couple of weeks, when the cement has cured, to put up the brick partition for us, says Mimmo.

  Great, I say, thank you very much… And, says Ciccio, would we mind if he cooked everyone a fish dinner outside, alla brace, if they’ve caught a decent amount of fish that week? Maybe some mussels alla marinara to start, then for the primo piatto, spaghetti al nero di seppie, black with squid-ink… a few grilled fish… or maybe roasted under sea-salt…?

  Why not? I say, inwardly gloating. Wonderful, yes.

  Then, says Paletta, when next they have some free time they ought to start helping us sort out the upstairs – get rid of these horrible old terracotta tiles and put in some nice modern kitchen units instead of that scruffy old marble sink. Concrete over the patio cobbles too, maybe, to stop all that messy grass growing up between them…

  Lucy goes cross-eyed with horror.

  Maybe, say I, noncommittally.

  Great though the improvements to our home may be, the same cannot be said of Diano Marina beach, these days transformed into a kind of maritime parking lot, deckchairs in serried ranks covering every square inch of sand, a folded sun umbrella sprouting at the side of each one. Some of the umbrellas have large brown luggage labels tied to them. This, Caterina explains, means that they have already been booked by the week. Or even, maybe, the month. Agh!

  So isn’t there anywhere you can just sit on the sand and do what you like any more? Yes: a handkerchief-sized square halfway along; this is, it seems, the only public beach. We resolve to start a hunt for small secret coves immediately. Easy, says Caterina, just go along the Incompiuta: the new, flat coast road to Imperia, started forty years ago and still unfinished. It is a standing joke round here; as you can tell by its nickname. The Unfinished Symphony, too, is called the ‘Incompiuta’ in Italian.

  We have in fact noticed the existence of this almost-road, at the bottom of a dead-end off a side-road at the far end of the bay, and wondered where it led to. Huge rusty iron gates have been put up by the Comune to prevent access to it. Ten foot enamelled notices in four languages tell you that entry is forbidden, and warn you that rocks will fall on your head if you pass the gates; and moreover that the Comune will accept no responsibility whatsoever if they do. Indeed, you can see through the gates that what appears once to have been a roadway is now strewn with huge boulders, some of which, on the tarmac sections, have sunk right through the asphalt and are beginning to sprout small rock-gardens – positively post-holocaust. Strange to discover that it has never actually been a road at all. Anyway, it hasn’t entered our heads to try going along it. We have not yet learnt the machiavellian thought processes required to decipher notices from Italian town halls. Of course, our friends explain, the Comune only disclaims responsibility for insurance purposes: it knows perfectly well that everyone will use the road anyway.

  Citizens of Diano have to go regularly to Imperia for work, for shopping, for matters medical and bureaucratic. It is the regional capital of our province, a real small city with a commercial shipping port and olive oil and pasta factories, as well as the region’s main hospital, all the official buildings, land registers, and suchlike. It also has two market days a week instead of one, and even a genuine supermarket – only one in the province so far – with air-conditioning and shining metal trolleys. But the only drivable road to Imperia from here is a steep and wildly curving corniche, always blocked by some slow-moving vehicle or other; an Ape on its way to market, a lumbering tourist coach; and is made terrifying by the hair-raising attempts of drivers in a hurry to overtake these obstacles on blind bends. Three miles of traffic jams, wracked nerves and danger when down below there lies a flat, wide, safe mile and a half, unfinished.

  Taking a closer look, we realize that this pseudo-ruin, or folly perhaps, is regularly used as a foot and bicycle path; ten minutes to Imperia instead of a likely half-hour by bus or car. The resourceful citizens of Diano have added to the gates, in one not-very-hidden corner behind a trailing clump of old man’s beard, a few extra wired-on horizontal bars here, removed a spike there, and ecco!, a fine little ladder to elegantly overcome the annoying municipal obstacle: a ladder so well-used that its footholds positively gleam, silvery and rust-free. As we arrive, a pair
of bicycles are being lifted over the top by a perfectly respectable looking middle-aged couple. The Comuni at both ends, having put up their ten foot official disclaimers, are happy to turn a blind eye to all this lawless behaviour, and the cycling couple tell us that the people of Imperia have done something similar to the gates at their end so you can get out.

  As you walk along this pleasantly traffic-free coast path on the way to a peaceful swim, marvelling at the house-sized rocks that have occasionally fallen from above and sit deeply embedded in its surface at unlikely angles, you cannot help but notice that every one of the false starts has been made with seriously sub-standard materials and equipment. Bribery and corruption, we gather, with contractors and sub-contractors skimming off extra bits of profit at every level of the enterprise, have led to this state of affairs. Great broom-bushes, grass and weeds have burst right through the too-thinly-asphalted bits; the concrete bulwarks supposed to keep the hillside above in check are riddled with great cracks here, or crumbling to dust there, depending on whether the builders were trying to make savings on the metal reinforcing rods or on the cement to sand ratio. An iron handrail on the cliff side, presumably intended by the architects to stop pedestrians hurtling down a couple of hundred feet to their deaths on the rocks below, has mostly either rusted away or come entirely adrift from its moorings as the concrete in which it was once embedded has fallen away into the roaring sea. The miserable remnants of bent, rusty tubing rattle, dangle and squeak in the coast breeze.

  What was once going to be the pedestrian footpath by the side of the road is bedecked with specimens of a very entertaining plant with fleshy seed pods that fly off spectacularly with a loud pop at the merest touch, bursting and landing several feet away. Hours of fun. The beaches, we discover, are rocky, and delightfully deckchair-and pay-desk-free coves way down below the road, inaccessible except by clambering down the deep and echoing shafts which once were going to be storm drains. The ingenious local beach users have overcome this one too, no problem. They have shoved makeshift wooden walkways of left-behind builders’ shuttering down them, and bob’s your uncle. A lovely peaceful swim.

  15

  We have fraternized with the enemy. Anna and Tonino, the new owners of the vineyard that should be Domenico’s, have popped up to introduce themselves: we have been down to admire their Adjustment to its rustico. They have added an extraordinary flying roof of corrugated-iron sheets, fixed to cemented-in scaffolding. Immensely cunning, explains Tonino, a man with a powerful Roman emperor-style nose and bushy curls that make his hanky sit oddly high on his head. This way, you don’t need to bother with the Comune and planning permission and all that nonsense. Luckily for us, enough olive trees grow between us and this newly towering structure to prevent its figuring in our view as more than a faint blur through the greenery.

  They have heard, they say, that we have planted some strange foreign herb up here; a herb that sells for astronomical amounts in Switzerland, where it is used to make an incredibly expensive perfume. Can they have a look at it?

  Magari, say we.

  Evidently, at the hands of the San Peo gossip machine, Pompeo’s speculations about our plans for his land have burgeoned into towering fantasy. The information we have about the so-called Sicilians isn’t a lot more accurate. They have moved here, in fact, from Alassio, ten miles down the coast. The best they can do for us is a Sicilian grandparent. Oh, and they own a couple of hectares of woodland down there, supposedly, though they don’t think they’ll ever get to see it. Sicily’s a long way away, and everyone of the grandparents’ generation, anyone who might have been able to pinpoint exactly which bit of forest it was, will be long dead by now.

  Upon reflection, we decide not to mention this new friendship to Domenico, who is already having some trouble getting over our wanton transformation of the downstairs space, which any right-thinking Ligurian would use for a cantina, into a pair of bedrooms and a bathroom. Our constant messing about Adjusting the house instead of Getting On is absurd: and this last bit of messing is not only foolish but counter-productive. Where do we think we’re going to keep our year’s supplies of everything? At the very least, even if we decide wastefully to buy everything else in shops, like so many of the thriftless Youth of Today, we’ll still need to keep our wine and our olive oil somewhere, won’t we? Or are we never going to get ourselves organized at all? And what about our olive nets, brushcutters, wine press, the chainsaw for our pruning and winter firewood? Have we thought about that? he asks us. No, we haven’t! he answers on our behalf.

  We are much less sure than Domenico, truth to tell, that it is one of our life’s major objectives to get our groves and orto in full working order within the year: this, he kindly explains to us, is because we are still young and inconsciente – unconscious. You must look to the future! he keeps telling us, as if a Europe-wide famine was likely to break out at any moment, in which all who do not have their subsistence farming systems efficiently in place will perish miserably. Youth and unconsciousness also explain our wasteful predilection for spending time at beaches, rock pools and bars now that July is here and the heat building up. All is not lost, anyway: the thing to do, he decides, to ensure that we haven’t entirely burnt our bridges by the time we achieve the full use of our wits, is to put a good stout door on to our ancient stone igloo down on the well-path. We can use that as a cantina instead.

  We have, we are beginning to see, been adopted: America may have taken his daughter, Holland his son, but we are the living proof that staying in San Pietro really is best. Or we will be, if he can just get us organized. He’s got himself something back out of the senseless chaos, the random gyration which is the modern world, at least. We, in return, have got ourselves a guardian angel. Domenico has begun to creep up on us gradually, over the months, edging inexorably towards takeover. At non-rubbish-collecting moments he is always up here on his land, beavering away with the tools and equipment of the season, tut-tutting and tugging his moustache desperately at the sight of us doing everything all wrong. He can’t resist overseeing our efforts to get the orto going. Seeds must only be sown when the horns of the moon are pointing to the left, never to the right: the waning not the waxing moon. Our attempt at building a cane frame like his for our runner beans mysteriously transforms itself overnight into a new and infinitely more stable structure: it would never have withstood a full-strength temporale, he explains, so he has dismantled it and put it back up again for us. We get lessons in where to plant what, and why. Which bits of what plant to pinch out to get more crop. How to water zucchini: you flip the water horizontally out of your bucket, so it all goes under the forest of umbrella leaves without touching them. If droplets get on to the surface of the leaves, they act as magnifying glasses for the sun’s rays and your plant will be scorched.

  Spotting us up our trees with a handsaw, doing our best to prune, Domenico stands around looking anxious for a while until he can bear it no longer and sends us packing. A good dozen trees sorted in no time at all. Now he shows us how you use a machete to strip off the twiggy and leafy bits from the branches you’ve cut down. You have to burn them straight away, even in this heat, or some horrible maggoty creature which lies dormant in the young living wood will be activated as the prunings dry out, pupate and turn into a farfalla – a butterfly/moth – and lay millions of eggs that will infest the tree and ruin all the year’s olives. The bigger wood now gets sawn up into neat logs for the winter stove. Our wood-piling technique is hopeless, so we get a quick lesson in that.

  By August our vegetable garden, supervised closely by Domenico, is looking pretty impressive, and is also saving us no end of trekking back and forth carrying heavy shopping along our squiggly path. A good thing too, says Domenico. You don’t want to go eating vegetables from shops. They are all smothered in roba chimica – chemical stuff – and may quite possibly be even worse for the health than wine not made of grapes. Domenico, rather than use pesticides, spends hours picking off by hand any i
nsects that threaten his vegetables. Those too large to be lightly crushed between the fingertips go into an old tin mug with a small quantity of diesel fuel in the bottom of it. You don’t set it on fire, he explains when we look alarmed; the stuff blocks up their air-holes and they die anyway. You can kill thousands and thousands of beetles with one cupful. But, he points out, he only goes to all this trouble for his own family; even he, if he was growing stuff for sale to sconosciuti, persons unknown, would use pesticides. We gather that even Signor Ugo-the-grocer himself, most of whose stuff is labelled nostralino, home-grown, is not above suspicion in this matter.