The Olive Tree (The Olive Series Book 2)

by Carol Drinkwater

  Once on the Italian peninsula I stopped to buy petrol and a map and learned that the drive to my destination in Bari was close to six hours. It was now pitch dark and after nine. As I pulled away from the pumps, wind dust gritting my eyes, I saw the same Polizia Penitenziaria van and another, a black saloon car with smoked windows alongside it. Dozens of fellows, twice as many guns, four more men in dark suits and one sallow convict whose features in slashed shadow I could not see, but chained, both ankles and wrists, encircled by the law. Was he off to incarceration on this leg of land or was he to be exchanged? I hit the accelerator and shot away, reluctant to find myself witness to any incident. Rain began to splotch the windscreen. I hurtled forward along the autostrada, anxious. I had not planned to drive on the mainland but the inaccessibility of trains to Puglia from this dark toe of Calabria – my destination was Bitonto where no railway line existed – and the rattling gifts in my boot had altered my decision and now I felt ill-prepared and afraid, irrationally so. The officialdom and the notion that someone, whoever, was clanking about in irons in the twenty-first century, soon to be interned, had unsettled me. And this, Calabria, was the domain of the ’Ndrangheta, the deadliest of Mafia set-ups.

  I was not planning on driving all night. I would stop when I found somewhere, when I felt tired, but I was on an autostrada hundreds of giddying metres above sea level in the darkness with Italian cars racing at my rear and flashing me furiously. The landscape was threatening, Junoesque with its precipices, peaks and pointed mountain summits, dragon shadows draped in starless night, and my mind whirled wildly with thoughts of ’ndranghetista bandits waiting to ambush.

  Reality was less dramatic but scary all the same. A long stretch of roadworks had filtered the traffic into one lane; all the others closed off. The wind was spinning furiously, the car vibrating. I glanced down alongside the viaduct, staring into a plummeting abyss and was gripped by panic, by vertiginous horror. I slowed, clutching at the wheel. Cars were banking up behind me. I felt sure that I was going to make a mistake and nose-dive off this neverending bridge. A flashing sign informed me that the roadworks would end in ten kilometres. TEN kilometres! I feared I could not continue but there was no way out or back, no other lane, no turnoff, nothing but a death drop. Eventually an exit arrived, and I followed directions to Bagnara Calabria; a painstaking snaking descent, mile after mile to the craggy coast, arriving into a seaside municipality of illuminated Virgin Marys and fishing boats. The place was dead and a dead-end. I stopped and asked a young man, the only soul about on the blustery esplanade, if there was a hotel, un albergo, per favore. Fortunately, the town possessed one, and I eventually found it. Even better, across the street was a makeshift pizzeria, empty, Il New Yorker. Although it was now gone ten, the family seemed happy to serve me. Alone with a glass of wine, the tarpaulin roof beating like a carpet sweeper above my head, I tried to calm down and understand what had spooked me so. Two young men, late twenties, entered, glancing constantly, curiously, conspiratorially in my direction. One unshaven, vulpine-featured, in a slick blazer and revealing, figure-hugging jeans; his companion round and soft, long-haired, glasses, sneakers and baggy, ill-fitting denims with dozens of zips. They ordered plates of chips and beer. A call from a girl to one of them seemed to be their evening’s amusement. Both leaned in to the mobile, giggling like schoolboys behind cupped hands, masking their lasciviousness.

  How do people entertain themselves here, I wondered. How easy is the relationship between the sexes? How rigid the mores of Catholicism? In the Islamic countries, with the women locked indoors before sunset, the males kill time at Internet points. Catholicism here might be equally constricting, equally narrow. I could not follow their conversation. They spoke a Calabrian dialect, thick and lazy.

  It was raining, raining hard. After such marvellous days with laundry-blue skies and spring flowers! I traipsed in the downpour, wet-haired, wet-shouldered, back to the albergo where I must have been the only guest because a striated mamma, the chef and one scrawny waitress stared at me with rural watchfulness, stipulating documenti with stabbing fingers as though I were a criminal. I fell into bed exhausted, bereft, and left after an early breakfast of dry biscotti and coffee so strong I could have stood my pen in it. As I drove out of town, the catch was being dragged ashore: nets tangled with silvery swordfish as big as children. Who could say if there was not a body or two tangled within the bloodstained cargo? Bagnara Calabria was, as I gave it my final glance, like a town nobody had ever left, so remote and inbred did it appear to be.

  Rugged was the nature, the way of life as I ascended through untouched, stony villages where rotund widows still passed their lives plumped on steps, preparing vegetables and knitting, and groups of ruddy-faced, worked-to-a-bone men in caps sat smoking together, playing cards. It was hard to believe that the Romans referred to the calabresi as Sybarites who slept on beds of roses. More accurate was the fact that cocaine- and weapon-smuggling gangs inhabited these mountains. Born from the dire poverty that had ruled over this area for centuries, the ’Ndrangheta’s drug operations were believed to have surpassed both Sicily’s and South America’s.

  Onwards to the precarious perches, crowned with clouds, that were to lead me through Calabria to the coastal instep of Italy. I passed goat-faced pensioners filling entire crates of plastic bottles with crystal water free-flowing down the mountainsides. Families were out working in their modest olive holdings where a few peaches added a vibrant verdancy and young vines climbed hand-cut canes. They cocked an eye my way whenever I pulled over to shoot the scene, but no more. So many industrialised olive businesses had I encountered over the last months that the simplicity, the rude rurality of this Calabria, lacking the classical beauty or design of Sicily, touched my heart. When the peaks opened to the distant sea, even with brewing storms on the skyline, the views were quite remarkable. Without the skilled engineering of viaducts and suspension bridges – each giraffe-legged, kilometres in length, traversing impenetrable valleys – these peasant peoples must have been entirely cut off. Save for sea access, the ingress of conquerors. Still, coastal Calabria was hardly dizzy with activity, whatever the crime reports logged, and I wondered just how profoundly modern Italy had impacted here. It seemed to me during this briefest of first encounters that their existences literally hung off the cliffsides and had not altered in a millennium.

  Before leaving this forgotten corner of old-world Italy, I drove by statuesque olive forests with trees as lofty as eucalypts and canopies spreading like oaks. I had to stop to reassure myself that these were olives. Were these wild oleasters, growing to such a measure? If not, could it be possible that here in Italy, the historical olive capital of the world (whatever position Spain might currently hold in terms of production), such vast tracts of trees could be left uncultivated, unpruned, unharvested? There was not a soul to be seen anywhere so my question remained a puzzle.

  The Gulf of Taranto, a 140-kilometre stretch beside swelling turquoise waters and deserted windy beaches. Magna Graecia was here. Four Greek colonies were founded: Croton, Heraclea, Thurii and Sybaris (home to the Sybarites. In the sixth century BC, Sybaris was the richest and most envied city in the Hellenistic world. Nothing of it remains today). I dawdled by, Ry Cooder on the radio. To my right, sparse constructions fringing the gulf waters of the Ionian Sea, to my left, an extended cradle of olive trees sweeping all the way to the distant mountains. From my map, I guessed these were the Appennino Lucano ranges.

  Taranto, touching the stiletto of Italy, western-side, which I did not enter, once an ancient city on an island attached to the mainland by two bridges. An ideal placement for the Phoenicians, thought I, but it seemed that it was the Spartans who first staked their flag here in 707 BC and christened it Taras. Today, it is a military port, specialising in the construction of warships; all offshore islets are off-limits and strongly fortified.

  I parked close to the exit of a busy bypass beyond Taranto’s suburbs and got out. The weather had cle
ared up and it was spring again with small birds chirruping and feeding in the grass. All around me olive trees, but these were extraordinary and new to me. My contact, Francisco, was running late so while I stretched my legs in the sunshine I photographed them, their silhouettes; thick, woody limbs reaching heavenwards and then tumbling from on high, putting me in mind of witches or crazed big birds with wings extended, ready to alight or swoop.

  Suddenly, I remembered the obnoxious fellow in Cádiz, weeks and weeks back, who had spoken of the passion, creativity with which the pugliesi tend their farms. I could see it. The pruned shapes gave the groves a vigour, a sense of life and movement.

  ‘Fantastic trees,’ I grinned as Francisco pulled up in a small Fiat.

  ‘They are unique to this region,’ he told me as we, strangers, embraced.

  Francisco was a virologist specialising in vines and olives. His wife, Dora, was a laboratory scientist who ran her own olive oil business. Her family, I learned later, were wealthy landowners. I had never met anyone who studied plant viruses before and I was not certain in what way this man could help me. Also, I doubted whether I would know the right questions to ask of such a formidable scientist, but he was yet another colleague of my miller friends from Malta, Nat and Julia, and they had insisted I should talk with him. It was Francisco who had recommended a nursery in Bari where Nat’s slender young sprigs plucked from the only Roman grove still surviving in Malta, near the tiny hamlet of Bidnija, could be grafted, and the grafting had proved an enormous success. The potted saplings had been fruiting when I visited Malta, sweet olives they were. After I returned from my eastern Mediterranean travels, I stayed in touch with Nat and Julia and we invited them to spend New Year with us at the farm, bottling oil, making marmalade, cooking endless mouth-watering meals. I was eager to learn about grafting and Julia had been adamant that Fransciso was a man I should meet when I made this western Med circuit. Fortunately, he had agreed to be my guide and had arranged a visit to the specialists for the following morning.

  After checking me into a hotel in his home town of Bitonto, before our olive tour began, Francisco wanted to show me a very special sight, a ‘pugliese originality’. Passing through the Valle d’Itria, where a red olive grew, our first port of call was Alberobello.

  ‘Albero bello, beautiful tree?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘Does the name originate from one particular tree?’

  ‘I think not. It probably refers to the forests of bizarrely shaped, towering olives that grow beyond the small town. Or the oaks. There remain a few stands of an oversized oak that exists only here and in the Balkans and no one knows how they first arrived in the area. But the groves later, Carol. First, let us visit the trulli.’

  A trullo was a traditional drystone dwelling with a conical roof. It resembled a giant white beehive.

  ‘Their original purpose has not been discovered but it is probable that they were used as simple habitations or possibly storehouses.’

  Each trullo was round, constructed without cement or mortar, and lime whitewashed. Drystone, like the walls surrounding the fields in which they had frequently been erected. Atop each domed roof was a pinnacle, decorated with a symbol. Many of the roofs themselves also had symbols painted on them in white. No two were the same. The symbols were to ward off evil spirits, the evil eye, malocchio.

  ‘Amazing, I’ve come across evil-eye superstitions in Turkey, Malta, Tunisia, Greece …’

  Such idolism might have originated with ophiolatry, snake worship, in Egypt and was carried west with the Phoenicians. Other roofs were daubed with stars and crescents and I wondered if these might have borne an Arabic influence.

  ‘These mortarless, limestone trulli can be found nowhere else in the world,’ Francisco claimed. ‘Based on prehistoric building techniques, erected before architects existed, they offer examples of “vernacular architecture”.’

  I was ignorant of the term ‘vernacular architecture’.

  ‘Ah, buildings constructed purely to meet man’s requirements, when local traditions ruled, when no thought was given to design. Before “noble architecture”,’ explained my learned guide. ‘Here, for example, the trulli walls are drystone and the roofs are an assembly of grey stones. No cement, nothing permanent. They could be taken apart in minutes. When enemies approached, the residents just dismantled their homes and secreted themselves in deep wells until danger had passed.’

  They were not entirely dissimilar to the cruder drystone huts I had seen in northern Spain or the less conical bories in the Luberon. Borie is a Provençal noun meaning ‘ox stable’ and was frequently a refuge for the shepherd and his flock.

  ‘Well, these trulli might also have been for storage of wine, grain, olive oil or used by shepherds and farmers as temporary accommodation, shelter from the heat.’

  We wandered through cobbled, whitewashed-walled lanes in this small town of one thousand trulli. It genuinely was a unique sight.

  ‘Many of the trulli have been sold off to foreigners or transformed into hotels.’

  To protect those that remained Alberobello had been designated World Heritage status.

  The place was a touch wedding-dress touristy for my taste, but it was remarkable that the dwellings were not only intact but occupied. Alberobello was a prospering community, albeit with dozens of trinkets shops and southern Mediterranean types standing in doorways offering to show us their home, a ‘trullo tipico’, for a few euros.

  Once out on the open roads, we spotted many more trulli abandoned in fields. These I found more pleasing, more authentic.

  While we drove, Francisco, a physically small man, in his mid-thirties, early balding, rimless spectacles, features that were not memorable or remarkable but sensitive, spoke to me about his life and work. He lived in Bitonto, one of the ‘most important centres for the production of extra-virgin olive oil in Italy’. His grandfather had graduated in agriculture in 1927 in Napoli. Oil was in the blood. When he, Francisco, was a child he had worked on the family’s farms. He studied at Bari University. Having specialised in entomology, he took his doctorate in virology. While he was a student, he had bolstered his grant with a small income from the Puglia agricultural department by taking on thirty olive farmers in the Murge Hills, advising them on the health of their trees.

  ‘A vet for olive trees,’ he joked.

  His laboratory was in the historic port city of Bari, lying on the Adriatic Sea, housed within the university, though he was employed by the state and not the municipality. As a viral specialist, he researched existent diseases as well as potential threats to vines and olives.

  A scientist, I judged silently, whose work could be a gift to the major chemical companies.

  Puglia produced 10 per cent of Europe’s wine, which surprised me. Until recently, the majority of it had been for local consumption or sold across Italy to cut with more esteemed labels. The same was true for its olive oil. Pugliesi oils had been a dilute for oils from elsewhere, particularly Tuscany. Tuscan oils were renowned for their soft sweetness. They were judged the finest in Italy and they fetched the highest prices abroad, but a behind-the-scenes problem existed: ‘They had no shelf life. Just months after being pressed, the oils were losing flavour, oxidising.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They are low in polyphenols,’ explained Francisco.

  Polyphenols created a pungent oil, the best. Tuscan farmers with their sweetish crops looked to Sicily or Puglia to redress the balance. From the farmers of the Mezzogiorno, they purchased olives. These they combined with their Tuscan harvests. This gave them two advantages: an oil with a gutsier palate and one that corroded less swiftly.

  ‘Polyphenols also give protection against heart diseases and cancers, correct?’

  The man at my side nodded.

  ‘Are these mixes sold as Tuscan olive oil?’ I wanted to know.

  I felt Francisco elusive. He stated that the identification of produce for the international market was str
ictly regulated. If a label read ‘Italian olive oil’, then its provenance was strictly Italy.

  ‘But if the oil is not 100 per cent Tuscan, not 100 per cent Italian?’ I pressed.

  ‘Every olive oil is improved by being mixed with another,’ he added a little testily.

  ‘Not ours,’ I countered. ‘In order to maintain our AOC, ours must be of its single variety and pure,’ I explained. We cannot add any fruits from any other variety. ‘Only the cailletier olive gains the “Olive de Nice” ticket.’

  What was Francisco’s response to the accusation that Italy was involved in fraudulent olive practices? Oil that is not 100 per cent olive?

  He frowned.

  And what of the possibility that oils with higher acidic levels were being sold on the international market under the guise of Extra Virgin?

  He knew of no such malpractices. European regulations stated clearly that to meet ‘Extra-Virgin’ coding, the oil must have acid levels of 0.8 per cent or less. He was sure this was adhered to.

  What of the local Mafia, the Sacra Corona Unita? Did they have fingers in olive pies? Was it not true that modern Mafia organisations were spreading beyond drugs and protection to embrace the food industry, cutting fine quality comestibles with barely edible ingredients?