Elegant, fashionable though this resort might be, I did not stop to find out; this was not the Sardinia of ancient olives.
I had ample time to spare before my meeting with Antonio and decided, as I had been unsuccessful in hunting down a cup of coffee, to flip off the beaten track. Soon lost, I pulled up in a small village and requested the best route to Santa Teresa. I did not specify ‘de Gallura’. The man, a maintenance gardener, the only soul about, stopped digging and thought for a while – clearly not in any rush – and then pointed out a road, left and then right, that seemed to promise north. Either there was a miscommunication – the Sardegnan language is closer to Latin than to modern Italian; it has also been hugely influenced by Catalan, due to centuries of occupation by both the Spanish and the Catalonians – or I miscalculated the left/right turnings. Whichever, I found myself climbing a winding, dusty track that within no time led me to a high, deserted zone of pines, cacti and boulders. It was a wilderness landscape of maquis and stones, many of the latter resembling megalithic dolmens; curious, strange, prehistoric. Less than two hours off the boat and I already had the notion that this was a land with mysteries where flora and rocks possessed lives, spirits of their own. The higher I climbed the less accommodating the sand path became and I began to question whether the tyres of the hire car were up to it. Once or twice they skidded, refusing to grab, but there was nowhere to turn round. When I eventually reached the end of the road, with stupendous views down to a cobalt-blue sea clustered with islets, I found myself at a meteorological station where iron steps wound to the summit, to mounds of smooth, round, pinky-granite stones upon which the base had been constructed. There was no transport, no signs of a presence. I called out, wandered to the entrance, but the place was locked, deserted. And such a silence, save for a high-altitude, wind boom.
I was obliged to turn the car on a sixpence and retrace my steps all the way back to where I had asked directions of the fellow working in the street. He was gone and I was lost. Eventually, having found my way on to a more public road, still hoping for coffee – it was now after nine thirty – I passed a garden centre where nothing but olive trees were on display. The gates were locked. As in Puglia, the pruning was unique, but here the plants took the forms of primitive beasts or their thick, ringleted trunks looked like colossal barley sugar sticks; lopped branches reshooting, turned full circles, resembling magnifying glasses. I pulled over and took some shots but beyond a shallow ditch the grassed area had been enclosed with barbed wire so I could not approach.
After the mainland, all was eerily silent and deserted. It was tipping the third week of May. I would have expected to see more travellers. Next to Sicily, Sardinia is the second largest island in the Mediterranean, but its population is only 1.7 million compared to Sicily’s over five million.
Santa Teresa was an arrival spot, a stepping-off point for sea travel and an easy-going, manageably sized town with yellow and orange houses and few signs of resort tourism. It had a sixties feel about it, which rather endeared it to me. I knew nothing about Antonio, my contact. His name had been given to me in Positano as a fellow who ‘knew the geography of his island’. He was late. I hung about in front of the WWF offices, a temporary looking wooden establishment that, though bearing a Closed sign on the door, was actually unlocked. I had been inside twice, calling into absence. Chaotic piles of books, papers, posters and disks lay everywhere. Anything could have been stolen and I liked the idea that whoever manned the place trusted their material would not be going astray. Outside, I settled on a wooden bench beneath a tree reading up history of the island. My mobile rang. It was Antonio.
‘I was wondering if you would like to meet up today,’ he said.
‘I am waiting for you,’ I replied, surprised, and confirmed my position.
The twentysomething who stepped out of a battered old car clutching fast to a mobile was sheepish and frowning. He did not strike me as a ranger, more a civil servant. He suggested coffee and led me to a local bar where he shook hands with just about everyone. He listened politely while I gave him a swift résumé of my journeys so far and what I might be looking for: historical trees, Mediterranean olive links, folkloric tales connected to the olive tree …
‘I am an accountant,’ he apologised after several moments of reflection. ‘You should meet my grandfather, perhaps, but he is very old, eighty-four. Or Andreo, he fights for trees.’
We began with Andreo though Antonio had no number for the conservationist. I suggested we try the office of the World Wildlife Fund. It was now occupied by a woman who put me in mind of someone who had been left behind at Woodstock, years after the concert, an ageing spinster with beads and flyaway hair. She knew Andreo and telephoned him immediately. After a series of calls it was arranged that I would go to Andreo’s farm later in the afternoon. In the meantime, Antonio invited me to lunch and called his parents to ask permission! Over an excellent pasta and glass or two of Sardinian white, my new companion spilled the troubles of his broken heart: a feisty woman in Rome. The patron and chef was introduced to me because he had run his own business in Stoke Newington, north London, while Antonio was still fretting about love and how best to assist me.
‘I very much want to help,’ he repeated anxiously, as though his life depended on it. He was still trying to reach his grandfather who lived some distance from Santa Teresa, but concluded that the old man was probably out in his fields. Even at eighty-four he worked the land from dawn till dusk.
My guide shook his head, clutching and staring at his phone as though begging it to ring. The woman in Rome had promised to contact him. There was to be a family party the following weekend. She had promised to fly over. Poor Antonio’s woes felt insurmountable and I was concerned that I was burdening him, making his situation worse.
‘Look, why don’t we meet Andreo as planned and then I’ll head off,’ I suggested, without wishing to give offence.
‘But where will you go? Where will you stay?’
I assured him that it was not a problem. I had not been expecting him to organise hotels or my itinerary. The situation was settled. After the tree-guardian, I would move on, so Antonio’s remark, spoken almost as an apology, nearly knocked me off my feet.
‘I don’t suppose you’d be interested in a three-thousand-year-old olive tree? I know it’s not as old—’
The tree was growing some distance across the island. Antonio’s car would not make the journey, he feared.
‘But the hire car will,’ I cried excitedly.
We had no time to make the excursion and be back before our meeting with Andreo. In any case, Antonio was not sure where this venerable was situated. He had never seen it. We decided to set off directly afterwards.
‘But what about my grandfather? I want you to meet him.’
‘You haven’t managed to contact him yet. The tree first.’
*
Andreo’s croft, on sun-drenched farmlands, was in remote countryside, far off any beaten track. We bumped along a winding stony lane until we reached a crooked, wooden gate. Dangling from it were horseshoes and a rather spooky goat’s skull. Alongside it, an assortment of curled horns nailed to a flagpole. From there we continued by foot. The man I was about to meet, I learned, had saved a peach tree from extinction, the sole remaining example of its species growing anywhere in the world. Long-haired goats were grazing in a neighbouring field. Cairn configurations of local stones were piled two or three high, resembling phalluses or sacred totem poles. Renato, Andreo’s son and only child, big and gawky, came pounding up the lane to greet us. His hair was as black as a gypsy’s and he had buck-teeth. He pointed out a rare flowering wild gladiolus, spoke to the lizards, fell upon a tortoise nestling in the undergrowth and lay at its side, whispering. Richly coloured wild flowers were in blossom everywhere. The afternoon had turned embracingly warm and I knew by the fluttering silences and the perfumes that I was deep within the Mediterranean.
Andreo, with an olive-wood cane, came t
o greet us, waving us onwards into a garden that was organically chaotic and lush with life. Painted hand-made chairs, a wooden swing that could seat a family, string ladders climbing overgrown trees, butterflies, an amphitheatre of nightingales singing their hearts out. In mid-afternoon!
‘They must be in love,’ grinned Andreo.
Nothing had been pruned, nothing seemed structured. In spite of the heat, our host, late sixties, wore a thick-ribbed brown wool cardigan. He spoke as though his tonsils had been sandpapered and had a carved face like one of his poled effigies. It was an eccentric free-for-all environment with tiny inventive arrangements made from barks, stones, sticks, skulls, bones, dotted everywhere. Fringed hammocks hung beneath the spread canopies of trees.
‘I have no time,’ growled the man. He wore a wedding ring on a leather strap round his neck. ‘You must speak about water shortages. It is as dry as a bone here,’ he yelled while his son, who had left the tortoise and joined our tour, continued with the fabrication of a bow; his arrows were of bamboo shoots.
‘Yes, of course, ma certo, I know the millennia olive tree. It dominates a wild olive forest, near a tiny church.’ He danced from language to language, rattling away in a local dialect to Antonio who seemed a little less down in the mouth since we had arrived here, then on to Italian, then another Sardegnan dialect peppered with a few words of English and French. Antonio’s English was stilted so I was constantly lost and begging for explanations. A rare lizard was spotted scuttling in the undergrowth, ‘Ziricuccu! Ziricuccu!’ cried both father and son at once and shot off after it.
‘I built my house,’ announced Andreo, ‘without plans, following only the spaces without plants.’
It was the craziest, quirkiest of homes, more like a series of shacks piled one upon another, with plants climbing everywhere.
‘What do you want to know? Our language comes from the Phoenicians and then a cross-fertilisation from every other invader who has walked our soil. You know, in the coastal town of L’Alguer over on the western side of the island, face to the Balearic isles, Catalan remains the spoken language. A thousand different peoples have left their mark here. It is a chain that they say began with the Greeks and Phoenicians, but it is also older. Much older. Pagan settlements, traces of life, exist here that reach back hundreds of thousands of years.’
Andreo bemoaned the fact that the Sardegnans don’t love their land, that they have not been educated to respect it and protect it.
‘This is a mysterious, magical island,’ he claimed. ‘Each year around thirty-two million acres of natural forests are lost worldwide through illegal logging and bad management. On this island, we have some of the oldest Mediterranean specimens of olives, oaks and cork trees but does anybody care? Ogliastra, the name is born of the wild olive. It is a magnificent region in the south but are there wild olives? Precious few. Do you know about Santa Maria Navaresse?’ He was almost shouting.
I shook my head. ‘A fishing village in the south?’
‘Go there!’ he cried dramatically. ‘A dozen giant olive trees survive but the town’s tradition is to cut one down every year and burn it on a ritual fire.’
‘But why?’
Andreo lit another cigarette – for an ecologist his habit surprised me – and shrugged. ‘Every year, I battle with their mayor but he tells me it is a pagan tradition to chop the biggest surviving tree in the neighbourhood. Have you ever heard anything so foolish?’
I scribbled the town’s name in a notebook.
‘You can’t go there,’ interrupted Antonio. ‘How will you get there? It’s very far and there are bandits, shepherds everywhere. It’s famous for kidnappings.’
Andreo waved young Antonio silent with a dismissive arm. The wind was picking up. It was the Punenti, a westerly force, I learned, whistling through the bamboo shoots growing along the banks of a brook that ran through the property. Alas, the stream was drying up; its bed nothing but mud and stones.
‘Our water shortage is critical,’ Andreo muttered. ‘Our harvests are ending up shrivelled, undeveloped. I collect rainwater in this barrel for washing purposes. See for yourself. It’s dregs only. Week after week of dry skies.’
‘Climate change?’
‘We fell the forests and shower the razed grounds with pesticides, what do we expect? Go to the three-thousand-year-old olive tree and then move south.’ Andreo was banging his fist against a wooden table where his wife had just served up a pot of green tea and a plate of cream biscuits. ‘Do you know what is happening on this island of remarkable, mystical stones?’
I shook my head, no inkling where this new turn in the conversation was leading.
‘Granite quarries. Everywhere, the talk is of cemento. The young men are not being reared to work the land but to go into the cement businesses. More lucrative. At Monte de Messudi there was a piece of granite, a monster specimen, which used to light up. How would you say? It brillianted itself through the sunlight at midday. It was famous the island over and there were many traditional fables about it. In Sardegna, our predecessors believed that every stone, rock and tree was imbued with a spirit, a god-like life force. Some of us still believe it. Well, this piece of granite was chosen for someone’s kitchen by a local architect and he ordered it to be cut up into pieces. God knows if he had the right to do so, still he did it. But when the architect saw the mutilated offerings, he decided against it. The quality was not good enough for the blasted kitchen he was designing. Today, those drilled fragments lie on that hillside. The dull remains of a massacred spirit. Gone is that once brilliant stone that inspired stories and poetry.’
The island was too large to cover in the short time that remained to me. The Phoenicians had created some excellent trading stations here, both in the south around Cagliari where they had mined salt and in the west on the Spanish side, but I would have needed weeks to cover so much ground. Better to concentrate my energies and, in that respect, Andreo’s suggestion seemed as good as any.
It was close to four when we said our farewells.
‘I never wear a watch. It destroys harmony with natural time,’ he warned when he glimpsed me checking mine.
Antonio had finally made contact with his grandfather who had agreed to welcome us on our return leg from the olive tree, which was due west, somewhere off the road to Sassari. We returned to Santa Teresa to change cars. Antonio suggested cutting through the interior, off the beaten track, to afford me the opportunity of glimpsing the majesty and authenticity of the island.
Our meandering route brought us, eventually, to Tempio Pausania, capital of the Gallura province, and from there the landscape changed. We were entering extensive wild forests of Quercus suber, cork oak trees, many of which had recently been harvested, stripped of their lower barks. Brown-legged cork trees. From young, heartbroken Antonio at my side whose phone had not rung all day, I learned that there remained about 120 cork-oak stations on the island. The cork harvest traditionally took place between May and September. Once stripped, the lower trunks were left naked with a reddish, almost raw-flesh look to them. The harvest had been achieved early this year because the spring had been unseasonably hot and dry. I had not known that each tree can only be stripped once every six to nine years. Sardinia’s hinterland, rocky and infertile, has the ideal soil for these trees and the best cork comes from wild trees rather than those grown on plantations.
I knew precious little about the production of this crop. Antonio was not an expert, but he was able to tell me that after the bark had been stripped off the tree, it was taken to the factory where it was left for up to two years to drain, releasing almost all its moisture. Only about 25 per cent of all harvested cork is of a sufficiently high standard to be used as bottle stoppers. The rest is sold off for industrial concerns. The cork forests are vital for birds because they are organic, never are pesticides used, but the drought conditions, a direct result of global warming, were causing deep concerns. And two other as yet inexplicable threats had occurred to damage
these trees: recent infestations of gypsy moths and an unidentified fungus. No one was sure yet whether these were also caused by the environmental changes taking place.
This oak is native to the western Mediterranean. The South of France has plenty of Quercus suber trees though it is the lowest producer of cork in the Med basin and I had no idea where any of their cork stations were.
Who had discovered such an ingenious use for this bark and what had they used the product for before stoppers were required? Of course, the millions of terracotta jars, the amphorae that I had come across everywhere, required a sealing component, a stopper, both for safe transport and for storage, so cork would have come into its own at a very early stage in the story of Med agriculture. Cut marginally larger than the inner diameter of the neck of the amphora and then squeezed into it, the cork sealed the wine or olive oil, protecting the liquids from air and contaminants. Antonio had no answers to my out-loud musings but he had an uncle who owned one of the island’s most productive stations. He offered to telephone him but I sensed that what he was really desirous of was to kick-start his blasted phone into action in the hope that the Roman girlfriend would pick up the vibes, his energy.
And then he took me completely by surprise.
‘The Greeks called the tree phellos,’ he said. ‘They soled their theatrical boots, kothornos, with cork for their Greek dramas. These elevated soles raised the stature of certain actors so that they were Greek gods in the company of their fellow players.’
The Olive Tree (The Olive Series Book 2) Page 38