Extra Virgin

by Annie Hawes

  Motorway? Is there a motorway above? Squinting upwards into the sun, we see that indeed there is; we are right down in the bottom of the valley, in the river bed, and the motorway is so far up on its immense viaduct, its supporting concrete stilts fading off into the distant skies above, that you don’t even notice it. How could anyone survive a fall from right up there?

  Amazingly, the would-be suicide managed to hit the roof bang in the centre of one of the three-foot gaps between the beams; we all troop in to look at the hole where the sky shows blue through the shattered terracotta tiles. Having miraculously evaded being smashed to pieces on a beam, he now needed only to avoid hitting the stone flags below to survive. Which he did by landing in the lorry full of sansa that cushioned his fall and saved his life.

  Euh! says everybody, including us.

  But there is more to the miracle even than this, says the miller. The driver usually parks the lorry a few feet back from where it is now. He shows us, to a great chorus of incredulous Euh! s, Porca-Madonnas and Porca-Miserias, the iron spikes which stick vertically up just behind its cab, on which the would-be suicide would have impaled himself if it wasn’t for the inexplicable forces that made the driver park that bit forward last night.

  Everybody crosses themselves and mutters more Porca-Madonnas and Miserias. And we all stand around agreeing, Ah, sì, sì, that when it’s not your time to go, it’s not your time to go. Euh! Nothing to be done about it. Niente da fare!

  Is there no end to the versatility of the olive? What, I wonder aloud as we stand about in the yard waiting to get our turn on the wind-machine and blow the leaves and rubbish out of our crop, is the story behind this life-saving sansa stuff? We’ve heard about the second pressing no one admits to doing, but we didn’t know you got oil out of the stones as well.

  Of course you do: you crush whatever’s left over after that, pulp, stones and kernels, mix it up with some kind of acid to dissolve the olio di sansa out. Why do we think people make such a fuss about cold-pressed extra-virgin oil? The oil from inside the stone, olio di sansa, also counts as olive oil, and cheap olive oil is very likely to have this chemically recovered stuff mixed in with it. The sansa, drained of its oil, gets used for fertilizer next; though some people have specially designed heating systems that run on it. Frantoiani, millers, mostly.

  Paletta decides to tell us yet another use of the olive, one that he thinks I may need to try. In the hands of an expert, he says, olive oil can remove the malocchio, the evil eye. Adepts in matters mystical – he is thinking of a particular old man in Diano Borello, though there is a woman they say is OK down in Diano Serreta – will float a layer of virgin oil on clear spring water in a glass. You will kiss the glass. The expert will murmur certain words, make certain mystic passes over it, while you concentrate with all your power on the oil and water chalice. If the malocchio-removal charm works, you will see the oil suddenly break up on the surface of the water and fly dramatically apart into globules. You are free at last from the sfiga.

  Sounds like a drop of washing-up liquid on the fingertip to me, I say. I bet I could do that. Paletta is disgusted. Why does he waste his breath on me? Later, I will demonstrate this trick to him, mystic passes and all, without managing to shake his faith in the old man from Borello one jot.

  Fortunately, I don’t have to go all the way to Borello to get my luck restored for now. Healthy roaring noises are coming from within the mill, and malocchio or not our olives will be pressed today. We finally get our turn on the olive-cleaning machine: a sort of mini conveyor-belt with a huge fan blowing up from beneath it. Cicio and Paletta are not at all pleased to discover that in this neat concreted yard you have to sweep up all your own twiggy bits and remove them, leaving the yard clear for the next customers. In San Pietro you just leave them lying about to biodegrade into the cobbles. A lesson to us all, I point out smugly, not to go foolishly cementing over cobblestones.

  The boys stomp off for a chat with their mate the miller’s son – another run-through of the suicide story, no doubt, but with more genealogical detail – while Lucy and I carry on a-shovelling, a-winnowing and a-sweeping up. And so it happens that when a big fat shiny so-called off-road vehicle pulls in alongside us bearing a Milan numberplate, complete with cow-rails and rows of spare petrol canisters and all the survival gear, we alone are in charge. A pair of sleek Plainsmen sit in the front – fully macho Outdoor Wear-ed up – their Barbour-clad wives in the back. The driver, in emerald-green Arran-knit – is it a political green, Northern League, or does he just like the colour? – addresses us in a most patronizing ‘my good woman’ manner.

  Is this, he wants to know, a traditional stone-grinding mill?

  Yes, it is, we say.

  Then, says he in a conspiratorial hiss as if he was after some Class-A drug, will we sell him some of our oil?

  The marketing-plan of the bearded olive adviser and his besuited colleague has begun to work: these are tourists of a new breed, olive-oil tourists, who these days will travel hundreds of kilometres along the terroni-built motorways down from the North, now well-worn, to be sure of getting the real thing. Make a holiday of it, visit some lovely old hill-villages, try out the country restaurants, explore the rugged hairpin-bending tracks in your safari mobile, grab yourself a bunch of wild mountain thyme as you go, and pick up a selection of olive oils, a taste from each valley. Directly from the mills to be sure of what you’re getting.

  There have been rumours (probably untrue, of course) of Greek, Spanish, North African olive-oil tankers creeping stealthily by night into the port at Imperia, full to the gunwales with oil from those dry and overheated climates, oil whose acidity level is all wrong; which cargo they pump under cover of darkness straight into the town’s oil-processing plants to be used to water down, or is it oil up, the genuine Taggiasca. There is a lot less danger of that sort of thing if you go straight to a mill in the entroterra, where the locals get their own oil pressed: a place, moreover, where there is no seaport, only a dry torrent along which dubious foreign olive-oil tankers could never penetrate. Unless, that is, they sat and waited for a chance temporale in the hills.

  These Milanesi have gone a step further: they don’t even trust the country miller. You never know, explains the putative Greenshirt, what millers may slip into the bottles they make up to sell to stranieri. How would you know if it’s fresh? If it’s really stone ground? If it’s been adulterated with second-pressing? With olio di sansa even? We, on the other hand, look like good honest folk. Will our husbands sell him a few litres?

  Are we flattered to blend in so well with the surroundings these days? Or annoyed by the assumption that our own personal olives are the property of some invisible male? Will we just laugh at your man for a paranoid nutter? Anyone can tell if oil’s fresh: it’s all green and cloudy. And if he asked the frantoiano nicely, instead of creeping about cunningly out here in the yard, he could stand right there in the mill and watch it trickle straight out of the press and into his bottle.

  Still, maybe a Plainsman in this steep and hilly land is right not to trust the miller. Or anyone else. I remember Pompeo’s friend Fabio, one of the last few fishermen still working out of Diano Marina harbour, telling us with great glee how, during the tourist season, he always stows a fridgeful of frozen items away in his hold before leaving for his night’s work: you don’t know how bad your catch may be at sea, but on land for sure, as you roll back into port at breakfast time, you’ll hook a bunch of soft-in-the-head Torinesi and Milanesi queuing up to buy your just-caught fresh fish at a premium. A quick dip in the sea and the gente de Pianüa never know the difference.

  Blameless though this man may be, I can’t help it: I have taken a dislike to him. I am horribly prejudiced against the weekend driving owners of these squeaky clean off-road vehicles, which creep along our road at a snail’s pace, trying not to spoil their nice new suspension and carrying on as if they were on some particularly perilous Himalayan goat-trail, so busy with their Great Adv
enture that they don’t notice the Brazilian Uno behind them, chafing at the bit. Why don’t they get off the road, then, if it’s a darned off-road vehicle? I’ve taken to hooting childishly long and rude at them, overtaking them with as much dramatic roaring as I can get from my scruffy tropically deformed machine, smothering them, where possible, in a cloud of genuine Ligurian mountain dust.

  Not to worry: the trusty sister has devised the ultimate humiliation for our would-be client. She turns to me and, laughing gaily, addresses me in fluent English. Your man is mortified: he has been addressing another Superior Northern being like himself as if she were nothing but a lowly Ligurian peasant.

  A few weeks later we hear the latest news on the would-be olive-mill suicide. Returning from hospital, the grapevine tells us, he found in his post a hefty fine from the Traffic Police. He had, in the heat of the moment, Abandoned his Vehicle on a Motorway. He went straight off and hanged himself – from an olive tree of course. And this time he succeeded in his mission.

  25

  When we first arrived here, the countryside was strangely silent; only in early spring did you hear birdsong in the trees. Now feathery things tweet, meep and krark all year round. As the numbers of hunters shrink, the numbers of the huntable have built up to levels unseen, I daresay, since the invention of the shotgun. We’ve seen not just boar and quails, but pheasants and badgers, pine martens and hoopoes, and even, further up in the hills, a couple of chamois. Some kind of eagle has reappeared from the high mountain fast-nesses to take advantage of the newly snack-packed hillsides, gliding and swooping above our valley, screeeeeeing through the sky all summer long, snatching, ripping and guzzling the small birds and mammals now left in peace by humans. The Hunters’ Festa has gone for good now: you will find only the odd blackened ring of stones in the grass up at the Gascio, bonfires built by lonesome hunters with no place to go.

  Nowadays, with Saints, Communists and Hunters all fallen by the wayside, only food is left as the excuse for a village festa. Still, that will do just as well. You hold a sagra, these days, of some particular foodstuff. Luigi, his moustache now iron-grey, insists that the sagra is more ancient even than Christianity: a remnant, he says, of Primitive Communism. When a village had an extra-large harvest of something or other, more than it could possibly eat, dry, bottle, or preserve, rather than throw the stuff away, it would invite the other villages around to come and share in Nature’s bounty. Thus was the sagra born.

  In these modern times of plenty, though, a village can sagra anything it fancies, however unlikely. We have attended a dried cod party, sagra del baccalà, at tiny Villa Faraldi up at the head of the next valley – a place whose connections with the Atlantic cod-fishing industry must surely be rather tenuous. We have participated heroically in Moltedo’s sagra delle rane ed anguille, frog and eel party, which took place, somewhat alarmingly, on an improvised dance floor in the middle of the torrent-prone riverbed. Borganzo’s sagra was held in honour of the snail, a delicious creature as long as there’s enough garlic in the sauce and you can manage not to think about what it once was.

  The women of Diano Borello pride themselves on their fresh cheese-filled ravioli al pesto; we recently sagra’d an abundance of that in their lovely piazza under the Romanesque church, to the accompaniment of an extraordinarily loud and literal-minded band which called itself Rosa dei Venti, Rose of the Winds, and blew great blasts of some supposedly rose-flavoured perfume at us from a wind-machine as we ate. Until, that is, agitation and heated debate broke out in the cooking zone. The chefs had rebelled. No politics, no religion, OK; but at least some respect for the food. How could anyone appreciate the subtleties of the cooking against such competition? The sindaco, the mayor, was called over. Although he had personally booked this band, to whose members he was (naturally) distantly related, the palate comes first: the winds were turned off, not to rise again until dinner was over.

  These days a sagra, if you can come up with an excuse to hold one during the summer season, will attract large numbers of visitors from the coast, sometimes as many stranieri as villagers. A fine way to fill the village coffers, money to spend on asphalt or on fixing those eternally crumbling terrace walls, and nobody much minds this, apart from a few hidebound traditionalists. Even Pompeo, soon to hit ninety but still going strong, has come round to the notion that if you can’t keep the Deutschmarks at bay, you may as well do your best to grab a share of them.

  The inhabitants of Diano Marina, meanwhile, are becoming ever more overweening. We have recently been obliged, along with many other right-thinking people, to abandon the Bar Sito, once a favourite aperitivo spot, for ever, in protest against a disgraceful attempt by its proprietors to turn the May Day up-the-mountain festivities into a California ranch-style barbecue party. Right there in the middle of the meadow – on the wide flat bit where everyone usually potters about and plays petanca and socializes, a kind of Bar Sito compound mushroomed up at crack of dawn, a dining table for thirty-odd topped with a great frilly shade canopy, which took up twice as much space again, along with hordes of folding chairs and sunbeds. This swish seating area was fenced off from us lower mortals with an array of off-road vehicles and a selection of immensely sophisticated and expensive-looking cooking equipment. Among which was a red and silver rotating eye-level barbecue bulging with gyrating chickens and rabbits, running off a whole array of gas-bottles and operated with pride by Franco’s old enemy, Federico the cab-driver, kitted out for the occasion in a cashmere designer jumper. The womenfolk of the clan set off the scene perfectly in sequin-butterfly-appliqué tops and yards of make-up. The centre of the prato was thus out of bounds to everyone else for the rest of the day, while the poor old Bar Sito dad, aged innocent, sat in his folding armchair in a corner of the canopy looking bewildered. Wondering, I dare say, what had happened to May Day. Rumour has it that the boycott has worked: the Bar Sito folk have repented of their sins. We’ll see next May Day: till then, we can be found taking our aperitivi at the Bar Nelson instead.

  Orti covered not in vegetables but in roses are a surprising new feature of our landscape. The EEC is not doing so well by olive farming as it is by cows and flowers, and you need an enormous number of trees to get help with modernizing and upgrading – enough for your olive farming to count as a full-time job. Roses being more labour-intensive than olives, it is easier to get support for floriculture. As you can tell from Patrucco’s empire, which now takes up a good square mile of the riverbed lands and boasts a whole fleet of refrigerated lorries bearing his name and the legend ‘Rose d’Autore’, which translates roughly as ‘Roses by Design’. Not to mention the evidence of the new rooftop swimming pool. So, we are told, the thing to do is plant these EEC roses – you have to do that, they come to inspect them, but you can always root them up after a year or two – and then use the money for stuff that is also handy for your olive farming, new mini-ploughs, fertilizer, winter-proof reinforced terrace walls; or some of those status-symbol olive nets, bright orange ones that cost a fortune but are twice as strong as the old white ones and don’t start biodegrading after a few years. Then there’s that wonderful new invention, the hand-held sewing machine for stitching your nets together in situ, saving hours of fiddling with dishcloths, string and nails. This, you can claim, is vital floricultural equipment: how else can you protect your budding roses from the ravening flocks of birds that have returned to the hills?

  Chomping their way down towards us from the top of the ridge, gigantic against the blue horizon, have come a clutch of startlingly huge and lop-sided bulldozing machines, Mad Max post-holocaust transports. They have dug their way over mountain and valley a thousand miles and more, leaving a massive three-metre deep scar of a trench behind them; straight as the crow flies across rock and scree, olive grove and wilderness, up and down almost vertical hillsides, bringing piped gas to Italian homes. One day there will at last be an end to the dragging of heavy gas bottles to and fro, in and out, up and down staircases, shop to home and
back again…

  The trench passes just twenty yards from the end of our path, slowly crunching its way downhill, flinging great grey rocks carelessly hither and thither. One of the drivers, alerted to our presence by the large collection of transport on our bend, pops along to visit us. Four men have died on the job so far, he says; the machines occasionally topple over and off into gorges and abysses, in spite of being designed supposedly to do no such thing. Heroic deaths in the interest of progress, these days, get hushed up rather than noised abroad. Not like in the days of the Roman Empire, when you’d get a statue put up to you where you fell. No indeed.

  Sympathetic though we may be to the plight of bulldozer drivers lumbered with dodgy technology, we cut this conversation short: we have learnt that this sort of remark about the Roman Empire more often than not leads inexorably on to how Mussolini wasn’t all that bad and Fascism did a lot for the Italian people… This driver, like the carabinieri before him, greatly appreciates our lovely shack and lands, and stays for a tour of our orto and a cup of coffee.

  Down in San Pietro many hanky folk are cheerfully awaiting their compensation cheques for olive-tree disturbance, and debate has been raging in the bar about these earthshaking machines. Have they, as some assert, ground their way up from Sicily to bring us gas from the deserts of Algeria in a pipe under the sea? Or from Russia, to bring it from Siberian wastes across the frozen Caucasus? Here, we think, is a source of hard information at last. But the driver doesn’t know either. He only took over somewhere in Umbria. Moreover he doesn’t really care. This job, he says, is worse than his last one, which was in the middle of the Saudi Arabian desert. There, you were rescued from desert solitude by a helicopter that came to whisk you off on a Friday night to the fleshpots of some big city for the weekend; here in Italy, since the operators are presumed to be somewhere civilized already, they are left to get what entertainment they can in miserable mountain villages, places where the nightlife consists of one bar and a bunch of old men in hankies playing cards. We know what he means.