by Annie Hawes
Not too, surprisingly, by lesson three, there are only three members of the older generation left in the class to keep us younger folk company as we hear the latest in the battle against fungal infections and parasites; pesticides versus organic solutions. Ciccio’s father has refused categorically to come and listen to arrant nonsense for a whole hour and a half after dinner, when he could be using his time more fruitfully and profitably playing petanca with his mates on the esplanade as usual. But his second-eldest daughter Rosi has come in his place. She was so annoyed by her father’s Luddite attitudes, she says, that she decided to come herself to show him. She has just bought herself a piece of land a few valleys along, with vineyards and olives on it and half a rustico, and she wants to know all there is to know even if her father’s determined to stay ignorant.
We are following with interest the fortunes of the Anglo-Saxon concept of country living, which seems to be slowly making some headway in this land. Is she going to build herself a house on it? She doesn’t know. Maybe. It’s right near Civezza, a lovely little walled town along the coast a bit. The place is beautiful, has a tiny river full of fish running through it, and if she didn’t buy it she knew some Plainsman or German would. That, really, was the only reason. A bit childish, she says with a grin. She will wait and see.
In lesson four, called The Market and Financial Incentives, a new and dynamically besuited person explains to us very longwindedly that The Family down here on the coast is admirably placed for Economic Diversification, able simultaneously to take advantage of the full-time employment of the summer tourist season, and of their traditional links to the Land. We knew that already, thanks.
Not only this, but new legislation allows us to band together in cooperatives as long as there are at least twelve landowners among us; we will get EEC grants too if our cooperative can rake together more than some huge number of hectares. (Aha! I spot yet another attempt to consolidate this absurdly sub-divided land!) He waves a leaflet at us; we should pick it up at the end of the class. It explains everything.
In the last lesson Mr Suit gets very excited about the new Public Relations initiatives being taken. The world’s attention is to be drawn to the fact that olive oil, like wine, has a myriad of different flavours and styles. Hopefully, there will soon be an outbreak of olive oil connoisseurship, just as in the world of wines; the public image of olive oil will go upmarket and stay there, and we, a couple of dozen sons of hanky folk, one daughter of ditto, and a pair of foreign females will reap the benefit.
To celebrate this, and the end of the course, we take Rosi and her brother for a mostly-female-olive-owners’ coffee, where we pore over our Financial Incentives leaflet. We are all much inspired by the Future of the Olive, and Rosi is cock-a-hoop to find that she has made a wise business investment in her bit of land, and not just a childish up-yours gesture to putative holiday-home owners. She wants to go over there as soon as she can with Ciccio and his chainsaw and get on with some drastic pruning. Should we try to form a cooperative? Twelve people with bits of land shouldn’t be too hard to find. Her family plus us two already makes nine. But would Salvatore come in on it? There’s no chance he’ll let anyone drastically prune his trees, though. Far too much of a dyed-in-the-wool old-timer.
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When Ciccio’s father won’t (as predicted) let him do any drastic pruning on his own land – certainly not, have you taken leave of your senses? – he goes with Rosi to do hers and then, with the passion of a new convert, demands to be allowed to come up with his chainsaw to do ours as well. Fine, we say, as long as Domenico doesn’t hate the idea – we’d have to ask him first, out of respect. Domenico, who refused even to consider coming to the course, proves surprisingly open-minded on the matter. Is there, he asks with a meaningful wink, more than meets the eye to Ciccio’s interest in the welfare of our groves? I am, as it happens, rather fond of Ciccio. But I’m certainly not letting on to Domenico – not after the two-husbands outrage. In any case, Domenico is intrigued to see the outcome of these newfangled ideas. As long as we don’t touch his own trees, that is. You never know with these university intellectuals and their mad experiments: remember Mussolini and his grape-less wine?
The results on our landscape of the full drastic attack are not, it has to be said, immediately inspiring. Where once our trees stretched elegant fingers right up to the height of the house, veiling roof and sky in shimmering silvery leaves, there are now ugly bald stumpy things with only a few downward dangling branches left, looking stupidly out of proportion to their great twisted trunks. Is it really worth it just to earn a few bob? Worse, will the trees ever recover from this savage treatment enough to make earning a few bob at all likely? The slides on the course showed beautiful healthy weeping-willow trees on the third year, but the fools haven’t put the photo in their handbook for us to show Domenico; he can’t believe any good will come from such a massacre. We’ll be lucky if we see another crop in less than a decade, never mind the year after next, he says. Even Pompeo the modernizer – who was very disappointed that Bacalè, to whom he’s now handed over most of his olives, didn’t bother to go on the course, and has been making us tell him all about each lesson in great detail – is seriously taken aback when he sees what his ex-trees have been reduced to. Are we sure Ciccio’s done it right? He wasn’t just after an extra few winters’ worth of firewood, was he? Guffaw.
But by the end of the summer, they do look as if they’ll recover; they’ve each grown a round head of fluffy stalky branches, which at least conceals the havoc we have wrought, even if their new pom-pom tops still look ludicrously out of place at the top of those noble trunks.
Alas, when spring comes, we have to cut almost all of them off again: we are only allowed to leave the downward-hanging ones, the man said. We almost rebel in the interests of aesthetics; but pride, and so many interested parties, makes us stick to our guns. By the end of the second year, the difference is stunning. The one tree we’ve left in its old shape to shade the back terrace from the sun now looks like the sickly cousin of the rest, which are bursting with health and energy, trailing fat green branches so loaded with fruit they almost touch the ground.
Pompeo, irritatingly, claims to have known it would be a success all along. Domenico refuses to be impressed: he’s not sure whether losing two years’ harvest is really worth it. He’ll know when he sees whether the crop goes on being this good next year. And the year after.
But alas, he will not live to find out. This autumn a black-edged card arrives in London. Domenico’s dodgy heart has finally given up the struggle, to Antonietta’s overwhelming grief. He was only sixty-four. They had just got their first phone installed: mainly because Antonietta feared something like this. But the instrument was useless, it was all over in a matter of seconds. No time to call an ambulance. At least, she tells us when we ring her on it, the long-awaited tragedy came while he was sitting peacefully at home with her and Maurizio, watching the evening news on the telly. He’d just got back from putting the nets out with Compare Gianni; they were going to do ours next day. It was always Antonietta’s great fear that he would be left lying suffering and alone up on the land: thanks to the Lord it didn’t happen like that. And he was universally loved. The whole of the valley turned out for his funeral to prove it.
On Domenico’s grave in the walled cemetery in San Pietro you will find, high above your head, a little oval enamelled photo of him, moustache brushed and bristling, hair neatly parted and slicked back, looking most ill-at-ease and un-Domenico-like in a tidy jacket and tie; something he can’t have worn more than half a dozen times in his life. His poor thrush lives on in the bath in his memory. It always lived there while Domenico was alive, says Antonietta: she can’t free it now. It will stay there in its white enamel coffin, no more yearly outings, until it too gives up the ghost.
As if the loss of Domenico wasn’t enough, the Grim Reaper now cuts a swathe right through the Diano valley. The first hint we get is when we hear tha
t Erminia’s junkie grandson has returned home: not as a reformed character come to work the groves and support her at last in her old age, as everyone hoped, but to die in Imperia hospital, much to her distress, of a mystery disease. Soon others begin to be diagnosed HIV positive – people who experimented with heroin in their late teens and early twenties, some in the big cities, some right here among the olives, gaily sharing their needles. I find it hard to imagine any of these people, reliable and lucid since I’ve known them, ever having stuck needles in their arms: but stick them they did. Just a bit of teenage-rebellion fun. Now, all these years later, the thing has come back to haunt them.
Anna and Tonino lose their eldest son, who’s been in Turin for the last five years, within months of Giovanni; then Paletta’s big brother Batista is diagnosed positive too; he is married with a two-year-old. His wife and child are negative, at least. And, one by one, a whole collection of people I only know vaguely, sons and daughters of respectable village folk, friends and relations of the Diano company, people who’ve left to work away in the big cities, fall victim. Every couple of months there is another whispered name to add to the list. Our friends are distraught.
But how come? Why here? I ask. Why should such a senseless plague be visited upon a small quiet valley in Liguria? But of course, it’s not just here: I should read the newspapers. It’s happening all over Italy.
Their nation’s leaders may be aiming these days for clean-cut rationalizing modernity, but our neighbours Sergio and Lilli are heading resolutely in the opposite direction: they have moved into a positively Gothic phase. We are warned by Carlo and Nicola, who stop their cow-lorry for a chat once we’ve reversed round two hairpin bends to let them past, to steer well clear of our neighbours if we don’t want to get embroiled: things are looking bad.
Just before we arrived, the brothers tell us, there were a few snowstorms which, higher up, actually settled on the ground. At crack of dawn Carlo and Nicola were driving up in their lorry to check on their beasts when, passing the end of Sergio and Lilli’s track, they saw a figure lying, apparently unconscious, under a tree in the snow well away from the roadside. Had there been an accident? Stopping to investigate, they found Lilli, rolled up in a wet duvet with a small overnight bag at her side, claiming to have left home because her husband was treating her cruelly. Lilli did not seem entirely sober, and had no very definite idea about any alternative destination: just kept insisting regally that they drive her to Rome, where they would be well rewarded for their pains. We would never have stopped if we’d realized what was going on, says Carlo: fra moglie e marito/non metter’ mai il dito – between husband and wife/never put your finger. But there was nothing for it now; and finally they persuaded her to go home instead. Home to a pale tense Sergio who thanked them in a studiously casual manner, as if losing wives in the snow was an ordinary everyday occurrence up here, while looking daggers at Lilli whenever he thought they wouldn’t notice. Then he offered them a choice of half a dozen malt whiskies from a selection on the sideboard, as if this was some kind of social occasion. Before breakfast! says Nicola, shuddering at the memory. They wondered whether they oughtn’t to stay in case Sergio murdered her as soon as they left, says Carlo. But it would just as likely be them who got it in the neck for having witnessed his brutta figura.
Sergio and Lilli’s two daughters, Paola and Alessandra, now at the brink of teenagerhood, have severely shaken any conviction I may ever have had about the importance of parental influence in child-rearing. There is no way you would ever guess what a pair of nutters had brought them up. Sergio does all he can to draw both girls into sniggering conspiracy against their mother: how hopelessly incompetent she is, how pointless her beauty routines. Lilli meekly puts up with this, stays slightly drunk if possible so as not to notice. Alessandra, tall with long wavy blonde hair, was the apple of her father’s eye until she reached puberty, when he began to call her testa di merluzzo – cod features – especially when there was company around – and complain that she wasn’t pretty any more. Now he swapped to Paola, small, dark and intense, for Best Girl. Recipe for mental illness and general derangement in later life, you’d think. But the girls are cheerful and outgoing, the best of friends in spite of Sergio, and gently indulgent to their batty parents.
Now they appear at our house on their pair of large motocross bikes to tell us that their mother has disappeared again: this time she’s made it out of the valley. They have just heard from her, from a nunnery some way along the coast, in Savona, where she has taken refuge. She refuses to return.
A nunnery?!
His wife’s escape to the Bosom of Christ combines with his nation’s battle for probity to have a most unfortunate effect on Sergio, never the most stable of neighbours. He appears, seriously manic, some time later to tell us that he has abandoned chicken farming for ever. Everyone has ganged up to ruin him, his wife, the benighted peasantry of Liguria, and the State, the whole lot of them. Someone in Castello has started a rival egg business, and since Ligurians all stick together like glue he now has hardly any customers left. He’s virtually bankrupt anyway, and if he’s going to have to pay taxes the game isn’t worth the candle. His aged mother, says Sergio, can only just manage the girls, chicken rearing is beyond her, and Lilli refuses to return from her nunnery for at least six months. By which time he will definitely be ruined.
Next time we see him, things are at crisis point. Sergio is positively wild-eyed. Lilli is still refusing to come home, and the State bandits in Rome, not content with destroying his egg business, are conspiring to spoil his leisure time as well. They’re after his boat now! Ironic that it should be a Roman who has ruined his home-life too: why didn’t he do as his mother said and marry a nice steady Northern girl? He doesn’t care about the death of the chicken farm – he’s decided to go into gold, anyway, he says enigmatically – but this boat business is going too far. Even comradeship is being undermined by Roman decree! Now corrupt Rome wants him to pay up in hard currency for his berth!
(Thanks to comradeship, we discover, Sergio has for years just handed over a small consideration in kind every now and then to some mate in the Capitaneria of the Port, the harbour master’s office, to pay for his mooring-place in Diano Marina harbour – chickens perhaps, or eggs. Or even, who knows, gold. Comradeship, of course, is entirely unconnected with nepotism and corruption.)
This time they have gone too far! What use will the State make of all this money it’s extracting from innocent citizens like himself? It will end up lining Roman pockets! Or be sent to the South, supposedly to rebuild its economy or help earthquake victims or some such thing, straight into the coffers of the Mafia! Who are in cahoots with government anyway!
They may attack Sergio, as he has mentioned, from all sides, but they will not defeat him. He is planning a heroic last stand at sea. We must come down to the port tomorrow afternoon, when his mooring-rent is due to be paid, and we will see him give it to them up the culo!
I am sorry to say that, not realizing quite how spectacular Sergio’s last action as captain of his ship is to be, we don’t make a note of this appointment. In fact we only remember it at all when, in mid-shopping, we spot an unusually large number of people leaning on the wall between the Via Aurelia and the harbour, commenting animatedly on something that’s going on down below in the port.
Squeezing between them we see Sergio standing shouting on the quayside, wearing a bright green shirt and surrounded by a gaggle of spectators. Next to him is the empty space where his boat once was: an empty space from whose depths huge bubbles gurgle to the surface every now and then. The bystanders, keen to share the experience with us, say that Sergio has made a lengthy and impassioned speech from the rear deck of his boat on the topic of the government embezzlers in Rome who don’t care if they grind the small man into the dust. He has emphasized each salient point, and there were many, by bringing a large crowbar smashing down into his fibreglass hull, so that the boat slowly sank under him as he ora
ted, the seawater rising up to his knees, up to his thighs; till he had to climb on to the cabin roof for his closing remarks, making his final leap to safety on the dock at the last moment as his ship finally disappeared heaving, frothing and groaning beneath the waves.
Our informant and his cronies, however, suspect that Sergio had secretly removed a bung or something from his boat before he began the spectacle: it couldn’t have sunk that quickly, not with just those few holes he made in it… They find these practicalities much more gripping than Sergio’s actual motive for destroying his boat, and we make our way to the hero of the hour, who luckily for us latecomers is still orating, brandishing the crowbar.
Any Italian up here in the North who shows the smallest sign of industry or initiative will be destroyed, taxed dry, he shouts, while the feckless South won’t lift a finger to help itself. Or to root out dishonesty from the body politic! Down with crooked Rome! Independence for the honest North! They won’t get a lira in mooring fees out of him!
Some time later, we will discover that Sergio didn’t necessarily think up this inspiring speech all by himself. (Except, perhaps, the bit about the mooring fees.) His outpourings bear all the hallmarks of the rabble-rousing set-pieces of a certain renegade ex-MP, Umberto Bossi, who is at present gathering around him a Movement of disaffected Northerners. A movement whose preferred shirt colour is bright green; and whose insignia is a Nordic warrior of the Heroic Period brandishing a huge broadsword: a figure modelled, maybe – who knows? – upon Sergio and his crowbar. Soon Mr Bossi will be calling for regional autonomy for the prosperous North, for Milan, Turin and the surrounding fertile plains, the Pianura Padana. A new Plainsfolk-only paradise will be created, to be named, naturally, Padania. Degenerate Rome will be left behind to stew in its own juice, along with its rotten progeny, the poverty-stricken crime-ridden South. And, of course, all those backward, work-shy, short, dark terroni.