by Annie Hawes
This sounds very convincing to me. Especially the bit about sensible peasants emptying a well to make sure it really still functioned. We, of course, hadn’t thought of any such thing when we were buying it. Our minds turn to Franco’s well-reserving document: what did he reserve the right to, exactly? Are we dealing, not with water-thieving, which would be bad enough, but with an actual legal competitor for our precious water supplies? Pompeo, like us, thought he was reserving the other well, the muddy hole, since Franco was talking about watering beasts; but none of us recalls any very specific description being made at the notaio Alberti’s. And we all know how slippery the law is, says Domenico. Not to mention how slippery Franco is, says Pompeo.
Domenico is still not entirely sure Tonino isn’t lying through his teeth. Franco may be a devil: but on the other hand, water stealing is just the sort of behaviour you’d expect from Sicilians. Or, as it were, people from Alassio. Especially ones with no qualms about buying up vineyards to which they knew perfectly well other people have a moral right. Knowing that he had only two defenceless foreign females to deal with, Tonino could easily have made up this Franco story to cover himself…
The two of them put their heads together and confer privately in impenetrable dialect. We can detect only the name of Franco, repeated in tones of ever deeper outrage. Eventually we get the translation. Franco is probably just trying it on. Probably he wants to sell his rights, but not necessarily to Tonino at all. More likely, we are his targets. He’s realized, what with the drought, that we would probably pay the earth to secure our water supply. And Tonino just happened to be there, useful as competition. More power to Franco’s arm, up the price and panic us. Wait and see if he doesn’t come and offer to sell you your own well soon, now he’s softened you up.
No, we say, that can’t be right.
Yes it can, says Pompeo. That’s Franco for you. Low cunning, and let the weak go to the wall.
Let’s ask him, I say, maybe he just meant the water-hole and Tonino misunderstood – or maybe he really has got another well down on his bramble terrace, and it was all a mistake…
Pompeo and Domenico aren’t listening. They are off, tight-lipped, on a mission. They will be back later.
Lucy and I sit there dismally contemplating all the horrible possibilities. Truth to tell, we’ve already had nightmares about that well-reserving clause, especially since we were reduced in the drought to using the mud-hole as well as the proper one to water the vegetables. We certainly need both of them. And by now, if experience wasn’t enough, we’ve seen Jean de Florette: we’ve watched Gérard Depardieu, in a very similar setting to this, being driven to despair, madness and eventually death by the machinations of a cunning peasant – who, as chance would have it, looked remarkably like Franco – over his water supply. How lightly, how ignorantly did we sign that document!
Some hours later, Pompeo pops back alone, looking mightily pleased with himself. It’s all sorted, he says. We will hear in a day or two that Tonino is no longer interested in buying the well, nor Franco in selling it. Nothing to worry about. And, apart from a few obscure remarks about Franco, double-dealing, and irresponsibility, he will say no more.
A few days later, Tonino comes up to apologize, and to offer us a demijohn of this year’s wine to make up for the trouble. He really, really didn’t know it was ours. His own well has been dry as a bone since July, he’s had to give up on his orto for this year, leave everything he’d planted to die a miserable shrivelled death, Franco’s offer seemed like a gift from heaven…
We forgive him immediately. Now he tells us a very strange story. Someone has come in the middle of the night and emptied all the water out of his two vasche, every drop just poured out on to the ground: not only this, but they have also pumped his own well, which was beginning to fill up again, completely dry. There are footprints everywhere in the mud around the vasche, it looks as if a good half-dozen men were in on the attack. Someone, he says, looking at us out of the corner of his eye, does not want Franco to succeed in selling his well.
Tonino, distant though his Sicilian connections may be, is only too able to recognize this kind of hint. Faced with such odds, he has no intention of buying such a troublesome item, whoever it may legally belong to. He will just build a bigger vasca and replant his orto next year, he says, resigned. Thanks to our own profound lack of Italian training, we do not grasp the finer points of what has happened for some time. Then we realize that we have not only been saved from the immediate danger of Tonino buying the well, but that our powerful and unknown protectors have scared Franco off ever trying to sell it to any other neighbours, who in any case wouldn’t buy it for fear of meeting the same fate as Tonino. Our water supplies are permanently secured. Partisan heroes indeed.
Up at Moltedo Ciccio and his partner Franchino have been suffering the torments of drought, too. The water from the Moltedo standing tanks, according to Ciccio, makes his pasta taste vile, and he insists on going to collect buckets of mountain water from the little cascades that feed the rock pools above the village instead. Franchino, desperately worried about what could happen if the health inspectors find out, did his best to convince his partner to use bottled mineral water instead, even if it would bankrupt them. But the bulging and temperamental artist of the pasta machine refused. He had tried this in the past, he said, and mineral water has no bite, makes a limp and insipid pasta as bad as the brackish standing-tank version. Upshot: Ciccio won, and for several weeks a bucket party has set off from the restaurant at dawn for the waterfalls, Franchino lurking, twitching, at the restaurant windows until the pasta is made up and the danger of detection over.
Franchino’s anxiety about the forces of law and order is understandable – scandal has hit the restaurant. Franchino was, to his eternal shame, caught smoking a spliff on the beach at San Remo: the news was plastered all over the local papers. The restaurant proprietors were well known, of course, to be ‘sons of immigrants’; that, if the food was good, could be coped with. But as far as the dinner-going citizens of Diano were concerned, a drug connection on top of the Calabresi connection was the last straw. The cooking might be excellent, but who knew what went on behind the scenes? Might you not get caught up in some drug-dealers’ shoot-out, hit by flying bullets as you worked your way through the antipasti? Might they not lace their sugo with Class-A drugs so you would become hopelessly addicted, unable to function without a daily dose of Moltedo pasta?
Their friends, us included, were rather surprised by the calm and relaxed way Ciccio and colleague took this undoubtedly heavy blow. Nobody left to cater for but Plainsfolk and Germans now. Oddly, they seemed almost pleased by it. Eventually they came clean. Did respectable Diano but know it, this petty drug scandal, by attracting police attention in however small a way to their restaurant, saved them from a genuine and serious attempt to get them involved in organized crime. This too, of course, based on their Southern origins. Franchino wishes he’d thought the thing up intentionally – it couldn’t have worked out better if they’d planned it.
For some time a mysterious men-only group of unknown Southerners had been booking their whole restaurant up once a month: men in expensive formal suits and rather exclusive jewellery, men who did not live anywhere local and yet who expressed the heartfelt wish to go on holding their regular grand reunions in tiny lost-in-the-hills Moltedo.
Was it the excellence of the cuisine? Ciccio and Franchino had indeed provided on request – booked well in advance, naturally – an array of luxurious twenty-course themed dinners: seafood, wild mountain game, Ligurian specialities, all washed down with oceans of high-class wines, seas of grappa. They were hugged and slapped and kissed by these unusual and slightly scary customers, complimented largely on the food, and several times left enormous tips which amounted to even more than the already princely bills for these sumptuous meals. After the first few visits, the approach they had been beginning to expect was made: a dinner of Southern Italian dishes was requested,
and much was made of the ‘brothers from our own land’ aspect of things. Once the company was on its digestivi, a simple proposition was put to them. Their turnover might gradually, and over a period of some months so as to avoid suspicion, be made to grow to double what it really was. They would pay taxes on these earnings; everything would be above board; except that a large percentage of the extra money would be regularly returned to the kind investors who had supplied it. Ciccio and Franchino sweated blood over this one. If they got involved at all, might they get dragged in deeper, blackmailed into doing jobs less simple and possibly more distasteful than mere money laundering? Might something nasty happen to them, though, if they refused? What about the Finance Police, who were quite capable of coming and parking outside the restaurant for weeks on end if they felt like it, monitoring the true numbers of clients in the place and comparing this with what was being declared on their tax-forms?
In spite of the proud to be Calabresi bravado that Ciccio and Franchino have (perforce) adopted so as to be able to hold their heads high, the fact is that the intricacies of Mafia manners are as much a mystery to them as to their Ligurian cousins. Should they take at face value their new friends’ protestations that this was entirely a matter of free will and their own good judgement? Would some relative of Al Pacino appear a week or two later if they turned down the offer, and firebomb the place?
Now, thanks to Franchino’s well-timed drug-arrest, the problem is solved. There will be no more approaches of this kind. Once you have blotted your copybook with the police, you have lost the essential qualification for the job.
Our part of the hillside becomes a hive of activity again once the heat of summer finally begins to die down. There are people putting out olive nets early, grape- and tomato-harvesters, people sawing up the logs saved from their olive pruning into stove-sized pieces, loading them up into their Apes and carrying them home for the winter; also snail gatherers, mushroom hunters, and men in splendid hunting outfits, all belts and straps, getting their dogs into training for the opening of the hunting season in a few weeks. A whole new wave of passers-by find some excuse to pass close by and inspect us and our doings; some so far behind in the gossip that they seem to be checking down by the well for signs of our mystery Swiss Herb crop.
Lilli becomes one of our most prominent poppers-in as this September wears on; appearing several times a week on foot, desperate, it seems, for company. After a while an ulterior motive is revealed. There is a wine famine up at her house. The chicken business is not going as well as it could be, probably due to Sergio’s amazing ability to offend and enrage the local populace; he blames San Pietro in general, the Evil Franco in particular, and endlessly plots revenge. Lilli feels that wine is an essential nerve tonic under these stressful conditions, but Sergio has decided she’s drinking too much. He has won the argument by main force; just refuses to keep any wine in the house. This, in an Italian home, is an unheard-of state of affairs, and Lilli is understandably outraged. She has never learned to drive – Sergio has always interpreted her requests for driving lessons as a slight on his manhood: why should she need to drive when she has him to look after her? – so she can’t go down herself. Or rather, she can go down all right, on foot, but she certainly couldn’t carry enough supplies back uphill to make the trip worth while.
Sergio himself goes out for a soothing digestive drink most days – not, of course, to San Pietro among the benighted peasants, but to Diano, to the classy yachtsmen’s bar down by the port. He even takes his daughters to play with the other kids on the promenade while he sups; but he refuses categorically to take Lilli. So we find ourselves providing both wine and company. Pray God we don’t become Sergio’s next targets. Judging by the amount of wine Lilli gets through, though, and we’re talking wine drunk without so much as an olive to justify it, Sergio is not entirely wrong to be worried about his wife and alcohol. Still, try though she may, Lilli has hardly made a dent in our wine supplies. We have Tonino’s water-ransom, delivered good as his word and already decanted into fifty-five one-litre bottles, stashed away in our stone roundhouse. Proving, as Domenico points out, that he was right about our needing a cantina.
Moreover, vendemmia – grape harvest – time has come, and with Domenico’s help we’ll soon be making our own year’s worth. The crossroads on this side of Diano, before the level-crossing, are jam-packed every morning with grape-laden lorries from all over the country; from Tuscany and the Piedmont where the nobler grapes are bred, from the South where they’re cheaper and sweeter. If you don’t grow enough for your year’s supplies – and many people don’t – you buy them in now, in September, by the lorryload or the quintale, the hundred kilos. Lorries lurk in every patch of shade while their drivers wait for a good offer; the ones to go for, says Domenico, are the lorries with the most insects buzzing around them. Only fools – people from Diano Marina, for example – prefer the more sanitary looking and fly-free loads. An ounce of sense will tell you that these have either had Chemical Stuff sprayed on them, or are so low in sugar you wouldn’t get a decent strength of wine out of them anyway. The lorries are surrounded by swarms of three-wheeled Bees too, whose owners, thoughtful men in hankies, knowledgeably squeeze, bite and sniff at the wares, seeking just the right qualities to blend with their own year’s grape harvest for the perfect vino d’uva. The roads are full of them, trundling slowly and noisily homewards to the Diano villages loaded down with the year’s selection, grape-juice dribbling from their truckbeds.
Domenico should have known better than to try to have a serious wine discussion with us. We have vaguely heard of the varieties of grape he’s talking about – Ormeasco, Dolcetto, Sangiovese. The cheapest is Nostralino, which is just the local ‘bastard’ grape; the most expensive, nearly three times the price per quintale, is Brunello, which is used to make high-class wines like Margaux. If we want to make some white, too, we could get Lumassino, Vermentino, Pigato.
Domenico expects us not only to know what all these taste like, but to have some idea of how we’d like to mix them up and in what ratios. He retires frustrated. We will just have to have the same as him: Nostralino with a touch of Dolcetto. Though of course ours won’t be as good as it could be, he says pointedly, with hardly any grapes of our own to add.
Yes, we’ve let Domenico down again. We still haven’t got to grips with the lowness of the earth, and though we’ve managed to quell most of the old man’s beard that was threatening to overrun the vines, we haven’t pruned them properly – you’re supposed to prune them right back practically to stumps, to get a decent crop. Pazienza.
Back in San Pietro, just to walk down the central muletrack makes you feel drunk. Heady fumes from the fermenting grapes crushed into the great wooden vats in the murky depths of everyone’s cantine fill the air, trapped in the village’s narrow passageways. Giacò invites us in to have a look at his cantina – not the one beneath his home near Patrucco’s, which he uses for tools and olive equipment only, but another one he happens to own halfway down the village, for reasons connected with the complex system of interrelationships and inheritances hereabouts. A good wine eats fire, he says, shepherding us into the warm spicy gloom, did you know that? We didn’t. We are busy putting our ears to his row of head-high vats, amazed at how loud are the gurglings and simmerings going on in their bowels. Giacò steps up showman-style on to a stool, lights a match and brandishes it, burning brightly, in front of our eyes. Watch! he says, and slowly he moves the flame towards the mouth of the reeking barrel. The second it meets the fumes from the grape-broth, it is killed stone dead. He lets us have a few tries just to prove there is no trick. There isn’t. It really does eat fire.
Our wine supply may be well in hand, but the same cannot be said for our water. We’re not short of the stuff any more, but the whiff of rancid pond down our well is getting even stronger. Something needs to be done, urgently. We decide to boldly go for the lime down the well project.
So, a bucket of lime; add water,
stir well. The stuff is horrible to mix, fills the air with choking dust instead of sinking in; suddenly goes soggy, does a strange lumpy fizzing. You beat the lumps to pieces with a stick and throw your bucketful of unpromising-looking thick white soup into the well: Butta! Butta! shout our advisers – Chuck it in! – and you are amazed. The whole well seems to boil up, frothing and bubbling. The water goes pure opaque white and stays that way for hours. Once the stuff has settled, a day or two later, there is a beautiful snowy-white coating all over the inside of the well, any organic detritus has vanished without trace under a nice antiseptic coating beneath which it can no longer rot or breed bacteria, and the water is clear and fresh; not a hint of pond-perfume in it. Brilliant. Sadly, you’ve now added your own limescale to what once was soft water, and your kettle furs up abominably. Still, that’s nothing compared to rancid pondwater.
The lime saga continues thus: some time later we go on a trip to Rome with visiting English friends. They have brought a guide book written by a fine woman who tells you all sorts of fascinating anecdotes about the city. We love her and her book, shower her with praise. Until, that is, our friends read out to us a passage dealing with the enormous destruction wrought on Roman remains over the centuries by the Italians (who are unconnected, it seems with the Romans, as if there had been some total genetic and cultural discontinuity the day the Empire fell) who have, she tells us, dragged tons of marble away over the centuries – columns, architraves, whole buildings – ‘for no better reason than to burn it in lime-kilns’.
Lime! Not a good reason! Lucy joins me in a chorus of outrage. Does this woman, who until now has seemed such a kindred spirit, not realize the importance of lime to civilization? We have no doubt, we tell our friends heatedly, that the people who had the nous to burn chunks of Roman masonry will have been the most advanced and progressive section of the populace. We would never, we add with great feeling, blame any inhabitant of medieval Rome for preferring a cleansing, life-enhancing sack of lime to a useless old marble column! The real vandals will have been ones who sat gazing nostalgically at the ruins of their lost greatness while their water grew pond-stink and pollution, their walls seethed with vermin, their shit lay around spreading disease, and people dropped like flies around them from cholera.