Extra Virgin

by Annie Hawes

  We wonder whether to suggest a staircase project to our football-listeners for their Sunday-afternoon divertissement. But on second thoughts, no. We have ended up tiling the new floor downstairs ourselves because our kind-hearted helpers were too appalled by the scruffy old second-hand hexagonal slate tiles from Giacò’s yard that we were going to use, and kept telling us to wait until they found us some nice new ones to make a decent job of it. You can’t very well ask people to do jobs for free and then start nit-picking about exactly how you’d like the work done – especially not if you want something odd and old-fashioned that goes against all the local modernizing instincts. We will have to do the staircase ourselves if we want it to be even faintly curvaceous and stony. And we’ve done all right on the tiling considering we’d never mixed a bucket of cement before in our lives. The bedroom and bathroom floors have ended up slightly irregular, but then the rest of the house is slightly irregular too, so it all looks fine. We can surely do a slightly irregular staircase ourselves.

  We have told our most recent guests from England of this plan, and thanks to them and the Intermediate Technology Bookshop in Holborn we are now the proud owners of the best building manual in the world. Some time in the late forties a certain practically minded priest, the Reverend Harold K. Dancy, noticed that a would-be spreader of the Word looked a bit of an idiot arriving in some Third World spot, where even the most benighted know how to build their own homes, claiming to represent some superior culture and world-view yet not having the faintest idea how to build his own shelter, superior or otherwise. If you want to convince your parishioners that you know something they don’t, you must, reasons Harold K., be able to supervise in all its detail the building of a full-blown mission house, and a small church to acompany it.

  After poring over the book for some days, we conclude that the thing to do, to make up for our lack of muscle and the difficult terrain, is to abandon drystone arches (just for the moment) and build our staircase with a nice modern heart of concrete and steel reinforcing rods, with only the visible bit, the treads and risers – as we professionals call them – made of stone.

  We proceed to expend much sweat and blood on this staircase, and give many hours of entertainment to the staff of the Giardino dell’Edilizia builders’ yard. Thanks, perhaps, to the disgraceful history of women in the Garden of Eden, it is, if anything, slightly harder to extract information about building materials, techniques and products from these men’s men than to actually make the stairway. If it wasn’t for the Reverend, whose advice allows us at least to give a semblance of having some idea of what we are about, the natives would have had us beaten into submission in no time.

  Once we have the system worked out, and great piles of gravel and sand, sacks of cement and reinforcing rods are finally sitting at the end of our path, it is all just hard slog – endless amounts of nasty heavy stuff to be carried along our hundred yards of up-and-downhill path. By hand, too. A wheelbarrow lent by Helmut/Mario, our only sympathizer in the matter of weird old-fashioned home improvements, turns out to be worse than useless on this terrain as far as we are concerned. Downhill it runs away with us, uphill it grinds to a halt and then rolls back on top of us; worst of all, on curvy bits it tries its damnedest to tip over sideways and dump its contents irretrievably on to whichever olive terrace is below at the time. Ruining Nino’s nets into the bargain. We don’t have enough biceps to control it; we are wasting huge amounts of energy for nothing.

  In the end we break the sacks of cement in half, load the horrible itchy powdery stuff into carrier bags – not buckets, which wear out those hardly existent biceps twice as quickly – and drag ourselves along the path with it as if it was particularly heavy shopping. Ditto the misto, the sand and gravel mixture. Interesting sidelight here on why those milkmaids of yore used wooden yokes to dangle their buckets from – if your shoulders aren’t wider than your hips, you can’t simply hang the weight of a bucket neatly from the shoulder the way men do. You waste lots of arm power on holding the things out away from your body to stop them banging against your legs at every step. Fortunately, thanks to the inventor of the carrier bag, we don’t have to waste time carving ourselves a pair of yokes.

  Faced with the impossibility of getting a cement-mixer down the stupid path, we devise a superb girl’s blouse of a cement-mixer out of a large square of that thick building plastic. You chuck all the ingredients on to it, hold two corners each, and then take turns at heaving, right arm, left arm, bit of a flip-over from the foot beneath the plastic… saves any amount of wasted energy manfully lifting wet sand about on the end of an already absurdly heavy shovel. Even if football fans do chortle annoyingly at the sight of it.

  Five curving quarter-circle steps are at the bottom of our staircase, fitting neatly round the corner of the house at one side and resting on a rock at the other, so you can choose whether to head right for your bedroom or left for your motorino; and six straight ones continue on to the upstairs door. The most we can manage to build without killing ourselves is a step a day, what with the unexpectedly huge volume of concrete that goes to back-filling the hidden support-raft on its steel rods. We have got the biggest two, the bottom curvaceous ones, done already, and they look perfect. We are about to begin number three when, with all the ingredients mixed and ready to go, I am suddenly seized with a powerful notion that something is horribly wrong with our design.

  I don’t know what the matter is, I say, but we can’t go on till I’ve worked it out. I stare and stare at the space where the step is meant to go. Ten minutes later I am still staring, and Lucy is starting to get annoyed. According to the Reverend, she reminds me snittily, all concrete should be in place within an hour of being mixed. Forty minutes to go. Could I just try to explain what I’m worrying about?

  No, I couldn’t. So much for not needing an architect: I wish one would materialize at my side right now. Without the words, the concepts to give form to my unease I can’t even think about it properly, never mind say it. I am groping blind at the Intangible. The sister, sick of being lumbered with a ditherer, and one with Speaking Difficulties into the bargain, storms off to sit on a nearby hillock, where she snaps on a pair of impenetrably black sunglasses and boycotts me, muttering crossly.

  Just as I too am beginning to think I must be mad, revelation strikes. What we have done wrong is to take the corner of the house for the centre of our curve; if we go on symmetrically, step number five will be at vanishing-point. Our staircase will come to an abrupt end halfway up the house. We should have measured out in mid-air the width of an as-yet non-existent step and taken its (invisible) centre as our mid-point. I manage to express this – at last – in words, and the sister forgives all, solves the problem with a rapid on-the-spot redesign: steps three and four will not be symmetrically placed over steps one and two after all, but will each shift artistically a foot or so to the right.

  Once we have finished this lopsided creation, it turns out to look more like the local architecture that inspired us than our original plan did. We congratulate one another; evidently we are not the first people to have changed plan mid-staircase in these parts. Just one of the everyday hazards of architect-free building.

  Finished! No more the mountain goat. We walk sedately up and down, down and up, marvelling at how much more often you can be bothered going downstairs to your bedroom to fetch something you’ve forgotten when the terrain is so regular. We marvel still to this day, as we endlessly stumble, spill coffee, and curse on arriving at the bottom step, at how right our priestly helper was to insist on the immense importance of every step being exactly the same height. One of the marvels of the human brain, Harold K. points out, is its capacity to adjust itself instantaneously, without need for conscious thought, to even a completely unknown set of steps; an adjustment entirely based on the notion that every step will be equal. For reasons we can no longer remember, connected either with mathematical incompetence or the drooping terrain down below, we built the bottom ste
p half-an-inch higher than all the others. And though the staircase is by no means unknown to us after all this time, that extra half-inch goes on baffling our marvellous human brains.

  20

  This year’s rules and regulations for the hunting season have appeared at Luigi and Maria’s: a large notice – black on white to show it’s Comune business, immensely long and complicated, in tiny print like something off the back of an insurance policy. Another decorates the poster wall in the piazza. We are surprised to see that to hunt a wild boar you have to go in a party of at least twenty. Opinion at Luigi’s is divided as to whether this is a measure to protect humans from wild boar, which will shred you limb from limb with their razor-sharp tusks given half a chance, or vice versa, to protect the cinghiali from being devoured down to the last boarlet by humans. Probably the latter, though, since everyone agrees there are no cinghiali left in this valley. You have to go right up into the mountains, they say, twenty or thirty kilometres, maybe even as far as the Piedmont, to find a wild boar these days. There are hardly any hares left either; the only thing left moving are the birds. But not for long.

  A series of loud pops from somewhere uphill: and Franco the Knife appears from the wild land above us, wearing a mysterious bulge down the front of his vest and looking very pleased with himself. He insists on giving us a quick and furtive look down his cleavage. Yes: a collection of very small, very dead and very bloody birds.

  Are those tiny things worth all the trouble to cook and eat? we ask incredulously. Of course they are; you just crunch them up, bones and all. Delicious. Iole will be cooking them tonight, if we fancy popping in to try some… The hunting season isn’t due to start officially till tomorrow, but Franco couldn’t resist going out just the one day early. That’s why his dinner is down his vest. It’s hard to believe that any Forest Guard he happened to meet along the way would fail to spot the strange excrescence above his belt as easily as we did; or indeed the large something-in-an-old-sack whose form is oddly reminiscent of a shotgun. Still, going by experience so far, Forest Guards round here are blind as bats. Who could imagine Pompeo arresting Franco, anyway?

  We now find that the pathway over which we have built our fabulous staircase forms part of some kind of hunters’ right-of-way for getting round the back of our house and up into the wilderness. Or have our hunting neighbours just made this up? Every day more and more hobnail-booted men trudge up our virgin steps and right past our door, handkerchiefs swapped for camouflage caps, corduroy jackets protecting them from the dangerous autumn aria, dogs leaping excitedly around them, their owners festooned with belts and cartridges and yards of webbing. And, often as not, small caged birds on their backs.

  Signor Ugo turns up with a lovely dog that looks, to our ignorant eyes, like a mongrel, a spaniel crossed with a retriever maybe. He is most offended. It is a pedigree English setter; the Rolls-Royce of hunting dogs. We are, it seems, casting aspersions on its breeding by being English and not recognizing it. As the hunting season wears on, we will see more and more of them: soon I can spot one at thirty paces.

  The solidity and stylishness of our new staircase naturally comes in for a good deal of praise from these gun-toting English-setter owners. But the one-off appearance by Helmut with the wheelbarrow has been blown up out of all proportion by the gossipmongers of San Pietro. Helmut, as far as the village is concerned, built the thing: the compliments are all aimed at him. Fancy a wee skinny runt of a city-bred German being so proficient at staircase building! say our staircase admirers. Or words to that effect.

  Naturally we huff and puff and insist that we did it all by ourselves. But far from complimenting us in Helmut’s stead as we expect them to – only more so, you’d think, since we are novices and women into the bargain – Nino, Ulisse, Mr Beard, Signor Ugo, just look uncomfortable and change the subject when we insist that it was us, not Helmut, who did all the work. Finally we get it. Our do-it-yourself-ing is not something to be proud of; on the contrary, it is a tragic admission of our failure as women: of our inability to get ourselves a man to do the job.

  Soon Domenico too arrives in hanky-free Official Hunting Mode, a small felt hat covering his head against the potentially violent air instead. That poor thrush is strapped to his back in its cage, chirping away for joy at being out of the bath. Doesn’t he think it’s a bit mean, using it to innocently lead its relatives to their deaths? Domenico will have none of this nonsense. Do we know what you use to trap robins with at Christmas? he asks. No, we don’t.

  A tomato! And do we feel sorry for a tomato? Do we think the tomato is bad? No, we don’t.

  Against our own better judgement, we are intrigued. Is it a joke? What do you do with a tomato?

  You build a trap, or just use a cage with a nice wide entrance. You put it in a place where there are plenty of robins – a bit higher up near the Giacomassi cowshed is a good place. You put the tomato inside – best to use a round tondo liscio, not a plum tomato or a cuore di bue. Now you just wait. Robins are such warlike creatures that they’ll do anything to get at your tomato, which looks to them like another male robin insolently displaying its breast, claiming territory. In the heat of the moment they will completely overlook your trap or cage. You grab your robin. You wring its neck, chuck it in your sack (or down your vest) and wait for the next customer. Simple.

  Domenico is wearing his wooing-shotgun slung over his shoulder on a leather strap, gleaming in the sun: a beautiful thing. He gives us a hold of it. The action, all engraved scrolls and curlicues, has ‘Sheffield’ stamped on it. Sheffield!

  Of course, says Domenico, all decent shotguns are made in Seffyelda. He is amazed to discover that Seffyelda is in England. The stock is Italian though. Would we like to take a potshot? Of course we would. Then, says Domenico, snatching it out of my hands and slinging it on his back again, we must come to the Hunters’ Festa in a couple of weeks, up on the Gascio, the scrubby pastureland just above Sergio and Lilli’s. But, he warns us, no music, no dancing. The Hunters’ Festa is serious business. He sets off serious and businesslike up the hillside.

  There may be a wild boar shortage now, but in a few years’ time things will have changed so dramatically that I will personally meet one: not in the Piedmont, but just outside our own house, where it is masquerading (or so it seems at the time) as a workman from the Electricity Board. I will say in its favour that although it gave me a nasty shock, considering I had heard so much about wild boar ferocity and was expecting it to be a human anyway, it seemed to be a relatively peaceable, if quite scarily ugly, creature. Luckily the encounter took place at the crack of dawn, before I was awake enough to be thoroughly alert to my peril. I certainly did not have another nineteen people to hand if the worst came to the worst. There was only Lucy and her boyfriend Tom, not at all the boar-hunting damsel-defending type.

  The day before this boar encounter, I had been rudely awoken early in the morning by the sound of much shouting and carrying-on just above the house. I am quite used to being awoken by shouting and carrying-on: but usually from below the house where there are vineyards, vegetable patches and olive groves to saw and strim and blaspheme and rev your motor in. At this time of year the goats, our only likely visitors from above, are far away up in the hills. And they don’t shout anyway.

  Dragging on a dressing gown I go out to investigate. Once I’ve succeeded in focusing, I spot two men in tidy bright-blue boiler suits in the scrub oaks beyond the water tank, busy grappling with an unwieldy tripod thing. They are shouting because it won’t balance properly on the steep and rocky slope. It looks as though they are trying to triangulate something. Unnerving: we’ve never been sure where exactly our land ends in the uphill direction. Surely nobody could be planning to build something just above our house, and on an 8-in-1 slope, when they have the whole of the rest of the hillside to play with?

  I speak: and once they’ve got over the shock of meeting a foreign female in a dressing gown in this place where only men in hankies ought to
be, they explain that they are from the ENEL, the Electricity Board, and are marking places where concrete footings need to be built so that electricity poles can be erected. This is unnerving too. We’ve never asked for an electricity supply, what with our gas fridge and our generator and our solar panel plan which is being hatched round about now: and the fact that we’ve been told we’d have to pay the cost of putting in the pylons ourselves.

  We don’t need electricity, I say. We already have our own, thank you. We haven’t asked for it, even.

  Don’t worry, say the ENEL men. They have been told to say, if anyone asks, that it will be at least three years before anything happens. But, they tell me privately as one human to another, I can rest assured that this will be an optimistic estimate, designed to defuse the rage of customers who actually want electricity. Realistically speaking, we will not be pestered by unwanted electricity for five or six years, if ever. And perhaps it’s only supposed to go straight past here anyway, down to some Germans who have just bought and started to do up one of the small clump of rustici further down the hill (estate agent, a certain Franco). I stomp off back to bed, to dream fitfully of a small Disneyland opening just above the water tank.