Extra Virgin

by Annie Hawes

  So, next morning when I am awoken by more rumpus up the hill, I shoot out of the door.

  Buon giorno! I cry, squinting up the hill with the sun in my eyes. I wonder if…? I break off. There is something very odd about this workman. Is he lying down? What has happened to his blue boiler suit? And his mate? A moment or two of focusing work later, I am appalled to discover that the blur above me is not even human. There is a large brown hairy pig-thing staring at me from the spot where the workmen were yesterday. A dark ridge of bristles along its back is erect with rage… or does it, perhaps, always look like that? Its face is hugely bristly too, its lips drawn back in a horrible sneer. Its head and shoulders are much too big for its body, which trails off to nothingness at the hindquarters. The abomination stares on, evidently as appalled by me as I am by it. It wags its head slowly from side to side. It flicks its strange stubby tail over its back, lifts a foot and paws the ground…

  After a long moment of open-mouthed paralysis, I decide it is best not to wait to find out what its intentions are, and hare indoors to wake Lucy and Tom to come and look. By the time I get back out again it has disappeared, probably to warn its own family, au contraire, to avoid coming to look at us. Lucy, too closely related to me for respect, refuses to believe that there ever was a boar here at all. By the end of the week, though, complaints about orti being dug up, reports of other boar sightings, are coming so thick and fast that even she no longer dares deny my sanity.

  A week later a party of twenty men is to be seen tramping grimly off up the track, bristling with guns, on its way to eliminate the deadly creature. They manage, we hear, to catch a cinghiale; but there must have been more than one. Since then either it or one of its relations has been back several years running, snorting, rooting and trampling in the early mornings, digging deep holes under the olive trees.

  Our bit of mountain is officially called Monte Quaglia, Mount of Quails; still, we have only recently seen our first quail. Not one, in the end, but a whole troupe of the things running along the road in front of our car, too daft to turn aside into the undergrowth. We have eaten one recently, too, in our antipasti at Sergio and Lilli’s. Sergio was cock-a-hoop about his quail; though it was not the hunting season, he had managed to run it over accidentally – and who could complain if you accidentally killed a quail on the road out of season, and why shouldn’t you eat it? What were you supposed to do, leave it lying there to rot? The thing to do was to leap out of your jeep and snatch it up quickly before anyone saw you. By the time we met it, Lilli had transformed it into a tiny pâté of an elegance undreamt of, surely, by any crude Ligurian peasant.

  In the darkness a line of men wearing camouflaged hunting-jackets, shotguns cradled in their arms, stand in a small clearing in the oak trees on the edge of a high ridge, casting enormous shadows in the greenish glare of a pair of huge searchlights that rake the tree-clad valley and light up the night sky ahead of them. Giant mountain moths, big meaty creatures four inches long, attracted by the lights, flap around scarily, crash loudly into the searchlights, into the silent men with the guns; and, hair-raisingly, into us as we crouch nearby, watching and waiting under a stand of young oaks. The man at the right of the line raises his gun to his shoulder, sights down it, and roars a meaningless guttural sound into the darkness, echoing down the valley. Uuhh! A luminous yellow plate hurtles out from the bowels of the hillside below him and spins across the starry skies. The gun leaps back against his shoulder. Missed. Another bang and leap, and the plate shatters into hundreds of tiny luminous yellow shards that scatter their way down to vanish in the pitch darkness below. Now, in unison, each of the men takes a step to the right: while the one who has just fired leaves the line, slinging his gun over his shoulder and walking silently round behind the others and back to the end. The next gunman steps up, sights. Uhh! Another plate skims out over the valley. Bang! Bang! All step to the right, except for the last shooter, who leaves the line…

  This is the Gascio, and the Hunters’ Festa is under way. We are watching phase one of the tiro al piattello competition: plate shooting, or as we English eccentrically call it, clay-pigeon shooting. As Domenico has warned us, this is no frivolous night out. It will go on for three days; over in a clearing under the trees is a makeshift stand on which are arrayed the fifteen or twenty elaborate Hunters’ Cups for the winners.

  At the back of the clearing under some pine trees a kitchen has been set up. Iole is helping with the cooking; they’ve had to buy in the rabbit and boar from further up in the entroterra, she says. Not like the old days: the whole point of the festa was that these were the heartlands of the hare and the boar. It isn’t seven o’clock yet, but the tables under the trees are already packed with hungry hunters and their families. Crunchy deep-fried ravioli for starters, wild mushroom sauce on the pasta, roasted rabbit or wild boar alla Ligure, with lashings of red wine, thyme and the mottled Taggiasca olives.

  Further inland, in another clearing along a broad and surprisingly well-kept cobbled track, is the tiro alla cartolina, the target-shooting competition. Luigi is over here, in the lead by several dozen points. He is in two minds whether to be proud of his prowess or ashamed of it; being a man who keeps abreast of his times, he is well aware of the criticisms being aimed at hunters by the eco-lobby; he has not failed to notice the disappearance of the wild creatures that were once so plentiful in these hills. He can’t help being good at shooting, he says hastily, he learnt when he was just a kid. Nowadays he would never dream of shooting at anything except a bit of cardboard, or a flying plate.

  We go off down a side-track on which a bunch of small children are squeaking over the scary, suicidal giant moths, terminally wounded from hurling themselves into lights. The kids are collecting them up into empty cartridge-boxes to take home. All around us in the darkness those woo-hoo-hoo-hoooooing owls have started calling. Down here, in a long narrow clearing, we find Pompeo refereeing the Moving Target event, in charge of a piece of machinery that would surely have delighted the heart of Heath Robinson. A motorino motor operates a concatenation of old wheels of various sizes, meshed into a bicycle chain-operated gear mechanism which in turn is hooked up to an immense length of wire cable, its far end just visible among the low-lit branches at the other end of the clearing. Pompeo attaches a printed cardboard target to the wire; the marksman gets himself and his gun ready; Pompeo shifts a lever, and the target heaves clanking slowly off into the distance. Once it has got about twenty yards away, it gives a great jerk and suddenly changes direction, whisks horizontally across our line of vision: a rather convincing impression of some startled wild creature hurtling panic-stricken out of a clump of trees. At this point the competitor gets a few seconds to take a potshot or two at it; the target changes direction again, comes lumbering and squeaking back along the other side of the clearing towards us, ending up back here with Pompeo and the Heath-Robinson machine from whence it started. Only this time, the marksman hopes, Pompeo will find it full of holes.

  When friends come visiting these days, keen to get jollily off their heads trying out the local vintages, we tend to take them travelling, hairpinning up and down the valleys, lurching to and fro along the coast – a seaside bar here, a far-flung hanky-headed mountain gambling den there, an accordion-swirl around some village festa, tourist-guiding them up hill and down dale around the many and various orders of local nightlife. Not entirely from generosity: we like to spread ourselves so thinly that the local gossip machine will be unable to collate our outing into the night of scandalous behaviour it really was.

  How much easier and more discreet it would be, we catch ourselves thinking, if our guests really must go out and get tiddly, if we could just take them to the so-called pub, where nobody – nobody who counts, that is – would ever get to hear about it.

  No! How have we sunk so low? This awful degeneration is, we have to face it, the flipside of the coin of Belonging: the horrible pay-off for integration – even if, in our case, only part-time and honora
ry – into local life and community. Driven to yearning for the privacy of the English pub. No chance, though. No one is going to come all this way to see the charms of peasant Italy, only to spend the night in a place called Excalibur, a place where they sell pints of bitter on tap. Even if it has got vaulted arches; even if you don’t pay till you leave, the Italians still not having got their heads round the barbaric notion of making you pay drink by drink.

  Zoe and Christina have walked down to San Pietro bra-less in string vests, drunk vast quantities of spritzers – or rather white wine with fizzy water, which was the best Maria could do for them – and thumbed a lift to Diano Marina. Nine out of ten Ape-drivers, they say, slowed down to two miles an hour, boggled at them, and drove on past, craning round once the danger of being accosted was over to have another look and make sure they weren’t just imagining it. Horrible, disgusting old men.

  Poor old San Peotti. Our hearts sink. What San Pietro ladies do when they want a lift is get themselves to the official waiting-for-a-ride spot, the stone seat where the road passes the church: here they sit sedately, clutching their empty shopping bags to their bosoms, and raise a majestic hand when any suitable vehicle passes Diano Marina-wards. Of course anyone who goes past is bound to know who they are, be it a friend or relation or acquaintance of an acquaintance, so it’s a perfectly ordinary favour to ask. Round here, that thumbing a lift action is unknown, something only seen on foreign TV shows: the very sight of it will suggest to our Ape-driving neighbours that the hitchhiker is either a maniac killer or a loose woman out for some wild sex. Or both, maybe. What respectable contadino would take all that on board? Even a daring mould-breaker like Frank the Knife, or a kind-hearted Domenico, would hardly dare pick up a pair of strolling wild-haired thumb-wavers with the eyes of the village upon them: they would never hear the end of it.

  Our friends agree, provisionally and doubtfully, to try the whole-hand church-seat system out. They are amazed. Every person they hail stops immediately. And they are all really sweet.

  The string vest question is harder to resolve. Zoe and Christina feel that it is good for olive-farming communities to face up to modern post-feminist realities. Why should women have to cover their bodies when men don’t?

  Men do, though, I say: the rolled-up vest is the height of nipple-concealing modesty. But, say our friends, the beaches at Diano are full of topless bathers, and people from San Pietro go there every day. It’s not even two miles away! Not just two mutually incomprehensible cultures, but three to explain – starting with the Olive Curtain between San Pietro and Diano Marina. In the village our friends are creating an effect of calculated rudeness, not unlike walking into someone’s living room and baring your bum at them. How will anyone know it’s meant to be a political statement? Unless, maybe, we print a manifesto for the poster wall: Why We Insist on Behaving as if We Were in Central London. Though, come to think of it, I don’t recall many scenes of mass toplessness there either.

  We are by now – as you may detect – caught up willy-nilly in the web of obligation and respect that local culture imposes on its citizens. Any bad behaviour on our part – from causing fire hazards through lack of Cleaning to drinking an unseemly amount of wine at a festa, never mind being responsible for semi-naked Jezebels swilling litres of the stuff in mid-afternoon – will, we are horribly aware, not only be reported on and discussed in much detail all over the valley but, here’s the rub, will reflect badly on any local person who has adopted us as friends, embarrassing them deeply and casting doubt upon their judgement in associating with us in the first place.

  Trapped. On the positive side of the Belonging business, whenever anything goes wrong, someone we know, or someone who knows someone who knows us, is always there to help. If our car breaks down or our bike won’t start, half a dozen people will help us to fix it, or take us round to their mate Bad who knows all about these matters and will give us a nestful of fresh eggs from his chickens round the back while we wait. Someone else will give us a lift home if it won’t be ready till tomorrow. If we’ve run out of cash and need a loaf of bread or a gas-bottle, we can always get it on tick. When we lose (as we have done recently) a pair of non-Italian speaking teenagers down on the coast, can’t find them anywhere and are worried sick – it’s nearly midnight and they’re riding motorini for the first time in their lives; have they had an accident, fallen off a corniche road into the sea, decided to go for a joyride on the motorway? – within twenty minutes of asking at the Bar Marabotto if anyone’s seen them we have a full report on all their movements over the last five hours. They have had several beers and a pizza at La Briciola; a game of pool and more beers at the Bowling di Diano; and were last seen leaving the Sito with even more beer, hair wet as if they’d been for a night-time swim. We will track them down within the hour to a corner of the public beach, where they are lying in a drunken heap. Meanwhile a clever second-string posse has found the motorini, driverless, and knowing that these youths are in no condition to ride them, fearing that they may take off again before we catch them, has chained the things together for us with a lock from one of their own bikes – key thoughtfully left in nearest bar – to prevent accidents. Very pleasing to their parents, our guests, and a fine story for all to tell. Still, what a level of surveillance! You could certainly never manage to die and not be found till you were black and flyblown the way people so regularly do in England: but you might be driven to suicide anyway by the relentless pressure. Or be driven to escaping to Milan, Turin, or heroin.

  There is no denying that all this weighs more heavily on the female sex. Oppression lurks horribly unreconstructed amongst all the cheerful nosey-neighbourliness. Men’s duties may involve a lot of spanners-by-the-side-of-the-road camaraderie, and the carrying of many back-breakingly heavy objects: women’s are much simpler. Do nothing worth remarking upon, ever. And, remember, hardly anything round here isn’t worth remarking upon.

  The behaviour of Zoe and Christina, alas, is extremely remarkable. Antonietta soon takes up the cudgels on our behalf over them. She has seen those Ones we’ve got staying, she tells us one afternoon down at the orto, keeping her voice low in case they’ve crept back and are eavesdropping from the terraces above. Every time she comes along the path to her campagna, she sees them lounging around reading books on the terrace and trying to get a suntan at a time of year when they ought to be wearing their woollen underwear. If, that is, they aren’t out gyrating, still seriously underdressed. She has noted their long fingernails, their weird purple nail varnish. Evidently they can be of no use to us round the house: they couldn’t even wash the dishes with nails like that, never mind help with the cooking or the orto or the laundry in their fancy outfits. How long are we going to let them stay? We are too kind. We shouldn’t let people take advantage of us like this.

  We have got used to Domenico taking offence at the laziness and incompetence of the various male friends who come and stay; why do they not get on with the Men’s Work that needs doing about the place, a bit of pruning or Cleaning or putting back up bits of terrace wall that have fallen down? (Useless to say that they are on holiday: Domenico and Antonietta’s only holiday ever was that one to Holland, and doubtless they drove their son and daughter-in-law mad by getting on with helpful things all the time they were there.) Only our concreting, fire-fighting brothers have so far found favour in Domenico’s eyes. But who would have guessed how easy it was to spot that our female guests, too, are lacking in the domestic virtues proper to womankind? Nobody even needs to actually come inside your home to find out: they just need to take one look at their fingernails to Know All.

  No, no, we say feebly, as we do about the limp-wristed men we invite here: they do help, honestly they do. And anyway we’ve invited them here to have a holiday in the sun, hang out, go for walks on the beach…

  Antonietta gives us one of her long, sharp looks: she doesn’t believe a word. It is obvious to her that we are being taken for a ride, a pair of gutless Cinderellas
battened upon not just by useless parasitic men but now by these dolled-up Lazy Sisters too.

  The respectability question will come to a head over the matter of my Two Husbands. On the second year of our sojourn in these hills I have done a very foolish thing and introduced my first official visiting boyfriend, who shall remain nameless, as my ‘marito’, my husband. Or rather, Domenico and Antonietta have presumed he is a husband: and, with some vague idea of not shocking them by denying it, I have gone along with the idea. They only meet him this once; we split up within the year. But, used to the impermanence of London, the constantly shifting populations of friends and acquaintances in a big city, I have not yet grasped that in a place like San Pietro, a word once spoken stays with you for ever, graven in stone. Or, if you’re unlucky, multiplies and is fruitful, and grows into a great tower of San Peotto fantasy, as it will in this case.

  Domenico and Antonietta, understandably, have seriously believed that Man Number One was my husband. They’ve concluded, from the way I never mention him these days, the way he’s never turned up here again, that we must be separated, and that the subject is a painful one. Some years on, I have forgotten all about this husband episode; I have arrived, planning to stay for the rest of the year, with the current man in my life. When we meet Domenico and Antonietta, with, I suppose, the same vague idea as before, that they may be shocked at the idea of my cohabiting without being married, I introduce him as my marito.

  Out of consideration for my feelings, they have kindly refrained from asking me anything about my earlier marito; but of course they remember his features perfectly well. They are startled when I claim that this completely different person is him. Do I really think they can’t tell the difference? But, in the best traditions of omertà – silence – they say nothing. They don’t want to embarrass me in front of this husband by mentioning the last one. And I, stupidly, don’t even notice that anything’s wrong. We go down to eat a gargantuan dinner in the smallest flat in the world, together with Domenico, Antonietta and Maurizio, who by now is seven or so and, along with his comprehensive collection of plastic Master of the Universe models, makes the place seem, if possible, even smaller. We eat, we drink, we chat, we inspect the Masters of the Universe, Antonietta’s orto and the cantina; and not a word is spoken about my dubious marital status.