Another throwback to the Arabs: citrus plantations were known as ‘gardens’, to celebrate the ambrosial scent of orange blossom. Aside from their fruits, the orange gardens were to be enjoyed, dallied in.
The irrigation systems within the valley were ingenious. Interlocking conical terracotta tiles, unchanged since Roman times, used on roofs all round the southern Mediterranean in an under and over fashion, had been upturned and dovetailed one upon another, in linear chains. In this way they created open channels, conduits for free-flowing water, similar to the clay canals used by Lahrcen’s in-laws in Morocco. I took dozens of photographs to show Mr Quashia in the hope that he could set up the same arrangement for us. Cheaper than a plumber and possibly more efficient. Elsewhere, rainwater was gathered in mud tanks known as gebbies. Also a design inherited from the Islamic world.
Wheeling a barrow along one of the sand tracks, a gardener, a retired local man, stopped at my side. He seemed fascinated to know why I was snapping the tanks and seemed ready to pass a little of the drizzly morning in conversation with this lone stranger.
Had I known that the European Grand Tour had ended here at Agrigento, and that the region was as renowned for its almond blossom as its temples? From December to March, they flowered and they were the reason for Sicily’s eternal spring.
‘We have as many almond blossoms as stars in the Milky Way,’ he boasted, waving a stubby black-fingered hand about.
From my new Sicilian friend, Tommaso, I also learned that the country people had grown their vegetables in the citrus and olive groves and they carried their loads to market in coffe, bags made from woven Mediterranean palm leaves. Once upon a time, these gardens grew mulberry, plums, medlar fruits, myrtle, pear, pistachio, figs and almonds as well as varieties of olives that have since disappeared from the island altogether. The olives and almond fruits used to be beaten from the trees with long, dry canes cut from cane thickets. I asked Tommaso about the Mafia and its hold over the island’s olive industry, but he shook his head vehemently. ‘Not in this region.’
When Bernardo Agostini eventually found me in the centre of Ragusa waiting for him in the rain outside a lingerie shop, it was late in the afternoon on the eve of the public holiday weekend. The municipality was closing down and he was leaving for his country estate, to spend the next few days with twenty members of his family. He had called on ahead to his wife to make up one more bed, but the request had not gone down well.
‘Basta!’ she had cried. ‘Enough!’
‘We’ll talk at my town house,’ he said apologetically, ushering me into his four-wheel.
He had telephoned a cousin in Siracusa to come over and translate for us. Bernardo had fallen for olive oil, ‘quite literally’, he told me as he negotiated the slow-moving traffic while everyone waved, hooted, called out to him or peered in through his open window to shake his hand, when, as a boy, he had watched his father decanting olive containers. He had badly wanted to taste the golden liquid and had stooped in over a vat and tumbled into it. The memory caused him to laugh out loud.
Bernardo was ‘wickedly gorgeous’, I had been warned by Julia, a mutual friend from Malta who had put me in touch with him, ‘a real Italian charmer’. With his open-necked check shirt, gold chain, slacks and quality leather loafers, he was not quite the olive producer I had been expecting. I had pictured an older man, not the fellow at my side who was possibly mid-thirties.
What were his thoughts, I ventured, on the Mafia opening up American awareness to Sicilian foods, particularly olive oil?
‘It was good,’ he felt, returning the attention of a group of pedestrians calling to him. I was puzzled. It was rare, outside the world of entertainment, to come across anyone with such a high profile.
‘What can you tell me about Coldiretti and olive oil?’
‘The Farmers’ Union. They fight for standards.’ He shot me a glance, then shoved his arm out of the window, squeezing someone’s hand.
‘You seem to be very well known, Bernardo.’
‘Of course.’ He slowed the car and leaned over to open the rear door behind me. ‘Ciao, Rafael! Vieni qua, vieni con me! He can help us,’ he said as a whippet-thin, bearded individual in glasses and corduroy cap climbed in, bringing with him a stench of alcohol that almost turned my stomach. Rafael had the fear of the hunted in his black beady eyes, puffing on a roll-up that looked as if it was about to collapse.
‘Rafael speaks French and English,’ explained Bernardo.
In fact, the poor fellow was so drunk he could barely articulate his mother tongue. What came out of his mouth was little better than gibberish.
Bernardo’s oil was organic and its label carried a DOP, the Italian equivalent of an AOC.
‘How many trees do you have?’
Rafael behind me seemed to be engaged in a conversation, half sung, with himself. He was wittering away while my contact was trying to park outside an ice-cream parlour.
‘There’s someone I want you to meet. Andiamo, Rafael, let’s go!’
Out we piled, or staggered, into the coffee shop. Bernado was on his phone again while Rafael, who had ordered himself two beers, was firing slurred questions at me in a French that made little sense and I was beginning to think I’d better drive on to Siracusa and find a hotel.
We sat and waited.
‘How many trees do you have?’ I persisted.
‘Seventeen hundred but farming is not my business. I am a transformer. Ah, Dottore, Dottore! Carol, please meet Dottore Carini.’
Into the establishment walked a short, dark Sicilian, elegant, handsome, preoccupied and seemingly not too pleased to have been called to the meeting.
‘I’ve just flown in from Sardegna,’ explained the doctor, shaking my hand with barely a glance in my direction. ‘What is this about?’
‘Carol is making a study of Sicilian olive oil,’ explained Bernardo. This, albeit untrue, aroused the interest of the dottore who, it transpired, was the island’s leading specialist in oil tasting. It was upon his recommendation that a farmer was or was not awarded the coveted DOP.
‘Ah, I have been in Sardegna judging at an international olive oil competition,’ he explained while Rafael called for another beer.
‘Who won?’ I asked.
‘Sicily took first prize. A producer from this region.’ The dottore pulled out a bottle from his briefcase and passed it across to Bernardo who nodded, making hand gestures that suggested he was impressed.
‘Bravo,’ cried Bernardo. ‘Ah, but wait! Carol, now I see who you must meet. There is a man, the finest olive producer in our region. Well, now we have many – me among them – but old Bernardo, a saint of a fellow, was the first.’
After a telephone call, it was settled that we would continue on to what I understood was the prizewinner’s farm and that the farmer, another by the name of Bernardo, could tell me everything. Rafael was to accompany us and translate. The poor fellow could hardly stand but both men indulged his weakness and acted in a kindly, almost fatherly manner towards him. We piled back into the black four-wheeler and set off out of Ragusa into the hills. The cousin up at the town house who had driven from Siracusa was cancelled. Both men were telephoning their wives every few minutes to pacify them and explain their delays.
‘It’s a big holiday here,’ explained the dottore. ‘Where will you be spending it?’
‘I’ll drive to Siracusa.’
‘But no, you must stay here. You must see Noto, it is exceptional. You must see the tuna factories down at the coast.’ The doctor was now on the phone to his wife. ‘We have an extra guest, please make up a bed.’
‘Who is it?’ I heard from the other end.
‘A woman, a journalist. I have no idea. She is writing an article on award-winning Sicilian olive farmers.’
‘No, I’m not and I’m not a journ—’
‘Have you ever heard of the London Sunday Times?’ he asked, palm of hand over the phone. His wife was still begging for some identification
or reason for the late arrival of ‘a woman’ to their family weekend.
‘Yes, of course, but please, I’m not a journalist.’
‘It doesn’t matter. Our country home is simple. I reconstructed it with my brother on land that has been in our family for several generations. We have olive trees. You must stay the night with us. Do you have a car?’
I nodded.
‘We will drive to my country house in your car.’
By now we had arrived at a very humble abode in the middle of an olive grove. A bent old man in slippers with nobbled face and a true Sicilian mamma of a wife, rotund in black dress, black rolled-down stockings with her plump arms folded across her apron, were waiting outside in the fading light for us. The dottore and Bernardo embraced the veteran and his lady. Rafael was tolerated while I was ushered, as though royalty, into a small office with a fax machine, many pencils, stacks of labels with an olive sprig design and more holy statues and burning candles than the Vatican. I was given a rush-matted chair while everyone else stood congregated around the desk and stared at me. I felt guilty, a shocking fraud. A conversation was rattling on in Sicilian. I could not understand any of it until I caught the words Sunday Times and all heads turned to me and nodded in that traditional peasant way that means mightily impressed.
‘Translate, please, Rafael,’ commanded Dottore Carini. He had taken on the air now of the professional, the mighty olive taster, pulling from his briefcase once again the award-winning bottle, which had not, as I had originally understood, come from this farm. This producer, though, old Bernardo, was south-east Sicily’s first and most accoladed patriarch.
Rafael looked bemused. He had not followed any of what had been said. ‘Do you have any questions?’ he slurred, peering at me, popeyed.
‘Could you explain, please, that I am not from the Sunday Times?’
‘No, you are from France. You write in French? They know that. When you write the article will you give my parents a mention? My father was an author and my mother a concert pianist. I want the world to remember them.’
‘I am not writing an article,’ I insisted.
The others were growing impatient now and confused. Mamma was sitting back against the far whitewashed wall beneath her holy statues, clutching rosary beads and, judging by her almost imperceptible lip movements, reeling off a few prayers.
‘What is being said?’ snapped the dottore. ‘Translate, Rafael, if you will.’
Rafael began a rush of speech, spitting all over the place, mainly at me, hysterical nonsense. He was glistening with sweat. Nobody could follow his reasoning.
‘This won’t do. I will contact my cousin.’ Young Bernardo then telephoned the forgotten woman who had journeyed from Siracusa to meet us. She was driving home. The phone was passed to me. Rafael grew petulant, rejected. He was almost slobbering, teary-eyed.
‘What do you want?’ sighed the young woman as though bored with us all.
Hastily, I cobbled together a question, requesting the history of this old farmer and his rise to international fame.
‘In 1968, I began working with olives when I bought a plantation with two hundred and eight trees.’
His father had owned about forty trees but he had never learned to farm them. ‘It’s all down to God,’ was his explanation. ‘God, in his wisdom, led me to olive farming.’
His wife was nodding proudly, shifting her sausage fingers along the beads while the small metal crucifix swayed.
‘And now I am the most famous olive farmer in the world,’ he boasted. He claimed to have a ‘sympathy with olive trees’ and received letters from all over the planet complimenting his oil.
The dottore was sneaking glances at his watch, worrying about his wife. Rafael was begging a glass of water while the rest of the assembly watched me expectantly. I thanked everyone for their time, assured them that it had all been most informative and wished them a pleasant holiday. The old couple seemed deeply relieved but first we filed through to an adjoining room containing stacked cartons of bottles, all ready for shipment. I was given a bottle, as a sample. Which I would have preferred not to accept, then Rafael insisted that he wanted one and, finally, we were on our way.
Returning to Ragusa to collect my vehicle, I learned that Bernardo, the one at the wheel, was vice chief of the region’s police squad. This explained his popularity, or notoriety. He was a ‘transformer’ in the sense that he transformed olives into oil. Or in my terms, he was a miller, albeit on a very large scale. His state-of-the-art machinery could press up to 2700 kilos of olives per hour. He ran a syndicate of organic olive farmers and he assisted them in making contacts abroad, to sell and promote their oil. He was selective. He did business only with those who had been awarded a DOP (Protected Denomination of Origin), and this was where the dottore came in. It was he who put in the recommendations for the local farms to the Italian governmental body based on the mainland and it was he who frequently travelled abroad to sit on panels where olive oil was tasted and graded, and awarded. It struck me as neat, but I kept that to myself.
‘Each of my farmers targets a market and does not tread on the toes of his fellow producers. We sell to California, France, Sweden, Malta, Canada and mainland Italy.’
‘Mainland Italy?!’
‘Predominantly Tuscany. Tuscan oil is the most famous in the world and they cannot produce sufficient quantities to meet their markets so they buy from us and sell it as Tuscan.’
I had to contain my amusement. The entire world bitched about the Italians selling on foreign-produced olive oil and here was a Sicilian admitting that elsewhere in Italy the scam was operating.
‘But the experts have declared that Sicilian oil is better than Tuscan,’ he crowed.
I looked to the dottore who was on the phone in debate with his wife. Was he the ‘expert’ in question?
Bernardo and I were now at the rear of his jeep, the door open. He dragged out a carton of a dozen bottles of his oil. It was a gift for me. ‘You’ll see how excellent it is.’ I had no idea how I was to transport all these bottles but I accepted the present graciously and thanked him for his time.
It was late, night had fallen.
‘I’ll drive,’ announced the doctor, now my host, as we piled into my car, thirteen bottles rattling in the boot along with both our suitcases. Off we shot into dark, Sicilian rurality. He was roaring forth, penetrating lanes narrow as pencils with stone walls on either side but an inch from the car with wild rose briars and brambles scraping the bodywork. I could not help but reflect upon the moment. I was in my hire car, a complete stranger at my side, going I had absolutely no idea where except that it was some country location south of Rosolini and he was at the wheel and punishing the vehicle as though it were a Ferrari. His telephone rang. Pronto? He was now steering with the palm of one hand. I took a deep breath.
It was his wife again. ‘I don’t know who she is,’ he was repeating. ‘She works for the Sunday Times. It’s good publicity.’
‘I DON’T!’ I muttered between clenched teeth.
He leaned over and whispered, ‘Don’t be nervous. I know this route like the back of my hand. I could drive it blindfolded.’
‘Please don’t,’ I mumbled.
The country estate was no real distance, thank heavens, and we were parked up behind two other cars and pulling out our luggage in no time. The world was perfumed with blossoms and tranquillity, not a sound, though I could see little if any of it, save for an expansive starlit sky.
‘Quite a spot, eh?’ bragged my host as a swarm of women, daughters and mother, charged out of a door and hung themselves about him. I felt awkward, an intruder, and saw that his wife was eyeing me with suspicion. She showed me to my suite, a private apartment attached to the main house. It was a no-frills arrangement, unpretentious but perfect. The double bed had been made up, soap and towels laid out for me, water at the bedside; generous consideration given to the arrival of the unanticipated stranger. His wife, thick-hipped in denim
s, full-lipped, sensual with lovely green eyes, accompanied me, explaining the workings of the rudimentary shower.
‘How do you know my husband?’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t. I met him in an ice-cream parlour a couple of hours ago.’
This did not please her. ‘Come through when you are ready. Dinner has been waiting for over an hour.’ And with that she was gone.
The family meal in the kitchen consisted of a variety of pasta dishes followed by Sicilian goat’s cheese and home-made bread. It could not have been simpler. There were two other guests at the table: a heavily made-up young woman, friend of one of the daughters, who lived in Palermo and was visiting for the weekend, and an avuncular bald-headed fellow who had arrived with half a dozen unlabelled bottles: consecrated wine purchased on the quiet from a church in Noto. The man, a close companion of il dottore’s wife, though I failed to understand the precise nature of their friendship, was drinking heavily and talking incessantly, explaining that because he preferred to drink wine that had been blessed he had struck up a deal with his resident priest, who kept him well supplied at a very reasonable price.
‘Holy wine is better for one’s health,’ he declared.
Il dottore pooh-poohed such a notion and with pantomimic flourish reached into his briefcase and pulled out the prize-winning oil.
‘Now this is good for your health.’
Instantly, he began to play act a display of professional tasting insisting, after he had shown us all how, that we give it a try. Everyone assented, rolling a spoonful of the oil round their palate and offering suitable compliments until from the far end of the table the young girl from Palermo screwed up her face and said, ‘Ooh, I think it’s ’orrible. Real sour.’
Dottore Carini, it transpired, was a man of steadfast vision. The region of Mont Iblei, south-west of Noto, south of Rosolini, but still five kilometres from the sea as seen from the flat roof terrace of the doctor’s country residence, was the setting for our talk and not one to be easily forgotten. After coffee the following morning, he invited me to ascend, up through the family’s unmade bedroom, to the roof where the view was a 360-degree spectacle. The doctor was in navy slacks and a short-sleeved hugging T-shirt. He was a handsome, sexy man but, though more casually attired, one who maintained a level of formality. He had called for a family relation, a young nephew, to drop by and translate for us. He wanted to be sure that the information exchanged between us was accurate. Chairs were arranged in a circle. The swallows were flying so low they swooped and tacked beneath the empty laundry lines. So close were they, it would almost have been possible to catch them in a butterfly net.
The Olive Tree (The Olive Series Book 2) Page 33