‘Something has to be done about this place before the whole blooming side of the house caves in.’ This was Quashia’s gloomy forecast for the condition of our garage. There had been an overnight summer storm, violent and splendid, and the water penetration was visible, stressing and splitting the precarious hold of what little plaster remained. Added to which the humidity was damaging the tools and equipment housed within there.
‘We’ll have to start covering everything in plastic sheeting or find somewhere else to park it all. Come on, let’s get to work.’
The issue of insecticide usage had become a bone of contention yet again, but I could offer no concrete alternatives and they were unwilling even to hear me out now. We had lost our entire crop the last time we had chosen to follow my hands-off route. Eventually, I gave up arguing and returned my thoughts to my journeys while the protection of our fruits continued, drenched by the same unsatisfactory system. On the days such as today – once every twenty-two – when the machines and pesticides were hauled out and the liquids mixed into containers and readied, I took myself off the premises, muttering that I almost wished the garage would cave in and crash down upon these obnoxious poisons that hung in the air smelling foul for hours after the work had been completed. I dared not dwell upon the risks to the wellbeing of my husband and gardener, even protected by face masks. I began to feel isolated by this dilemma. How could I, recently returned, remain on this olive farm while our methods for its fruit production troubled me so profoundly? As I could offer no sound alternative, I silently questioned whether we shouldn’t simply sell up and leave our beloved Appassionata.
The fact was that I was unsettled. I was restless, bearings askew. I was physically home, but I was still everywhere, hopping between images, trying to make sense of a mass of material: photographs, notebooks, yes, and the arguably more powerful, frequently haunting, images in my head.
To counter the doubts, I took delight in the humming perfumes of the mountain-growing garrigue. I documented every flower and weed that passed underfoot, most of which had by now been cut back due to the fire risks, leaving the hillside a mass of felled weeds and grasses. I stared in dazed amazement at the silhouette of every tree, absorbing its form, comparing it, always recalling other trees more ancient, different, pruned in creative and curious fashions.
The history of the olive tree, its undiscovered origins, remained swathed in mystery, obscurity. I had not returned with the Holy Grail, the jewel box that contained the rarest, most precious of testimonies, tantalising clues from shadowy, unrecorded pasts. Those elusive records had evaded me, which was partially why my quest remained incomplete and why I was feeling rootless and routeless. But I had gathered together a million stories from manifold pasts and I wanted these to be the links for a new project I was growing excited about. The creation of an Olive Heritage Trail. It was to consist of voices, songs, witness statements, olive presses, farmers, scientists, museums, manuscripts, texts, photographs, footage, long-forgotten particles of stones, wheels, jars buried in fields and deserts; a broad range of links reconnecting a fast-disappearing history that embraced the Mediterranean. Sailed by galleons, trekked by caravans, walked by beasts, herders, labourers, crisscrossing waters, sands, deserts, mountains and coastlines; traces of the human passage connecting disparate elements from this small sea and the civilisations that have inhabited its rim – and every one of these clues pointed to, or claimed at its core, the olive tree. It was indeed a treasure chest and I was attempting to prise it open, to reveal its contents as a jigsaw puzzle, or many jigsaw puzzles, to be pieced together, to paint pictures, conjure up scenes, scenarios to please the viewer, the visitor of today and tomorrow; to honour the olive tree and its workers and players, to dust them down and bring them back to life, risen from their yesteryears.
All this was a long way from real life and domestic responsibilities.
Added to which, another portfolio of images, a twenty-first-century map of the Mediterranean, was painting a more troubling scenario. It was this file, these discoveries along my journeys, that was causing my inquietude, possibly overwhelming me. My quest had set course for the past, but I had also encountered the future, drawing closer by the day, threatening a bleak tomorrow. It was studded with warning signs, arrows pointing to desiccation, desertification, signalling an unproductive, unpropitious tomorrow. The Earth’s Destruction. And I did not wish to be a contributing factor to that scorched earth.
By now it was cicada-rasping August: bone-dry days, the crisp perfume of pine, a state of abandoned lethargy. Guests arriving, departing, sinking themselves into the fraîcheur of the pool, shaded lunches that extended beyond the soporific hours of the siesta through to the next round of aperitifs. Out of the blue, a call from René. He was proposing an invitation to Raymond’s homestead, the wealthy business tycoon who had turned water diviner and olive farmer. They had much to celebrate, René bragged.
This was the René who once upon a time had been my teacher, our guide in all matters concerning oléiculture. I had bowed to him as my olive guru until eventually his practice of using excessive quantities of chemicals had driven us apart. René sat most firmly on the side of those who sprayed without concern and happily killed off anything if he thought it would deliver him larger returns. On this issue, we had always been at loggerheads. He, like Quashia today, judged my methods and ideologies as ‘naive, impractical’.
Still, we had remained firm friends, but friends who met infrequently. I was extremely fond of him and, ironically, held a rather soft spot in my heart for him and his Provençal wiliness, which, under different circumstances, I might have described as downright trickery. René was well practised in the arts of artifice.
‘Raymond wants to host a lunch party in your honour. We want you to see the trees, to photograph our triumphs.’
Before the Second World War, when Raymond and René had both been little more than a pair of nippers, they had attended the same village school, not a hand’s throw from our farm, and at that time they had become fast and firm buddies. Beyond those kiddie years, life had sent them off in very different directions and had never reunited them. Until five or six years before this conversation, they had not clapped eyes on one another for more than seven decades. After Raymond retired from his hugely remunerative hardware business, he decided to concentrate his energies on his untapped talents as a water sorcerer and to consider the potential for farming the trees that had lain idle on his olive farm for generations. His dominion – attractive homestead, gently sloping fields a few miles inland of us – had boasted five hundred mature oliviers. Raymond openly admitted that he had known nothing about any form of farming and, to obtain the best returns possible, he required expertise. That was when René fortuitously walked back into his life. The two old-timers shared between them well over one hundred and fifty years of memories, and they hit it off at once. René, when asked by Raymond his thoughts on how best to manage the groves, had cleverly advised: a) the pruning of the old masters, b) an extension of the plantation. Raymond grabbed his childhood friend’s advice with enthusiasm and together they planted up another two hundred trees. These, of course, required husbanding in a way that the elders did not. Thus René had placed himself in the position of becoming indispensable to Raymond.
A short while back, a year or so after their reunion, they went into partnership together. René took over the reins of Raymond’s olive farm and, it had to be admitted, he had done his bit towards metamorphosing the moribund estate into a highly respected and lucrative oil business.
‘Bumper crops, that’s what I’ve given him. Bigger fruits and more of them. Aside from all this good fortune, I’m also celebrating my good health,’ he said to me on the phone.
He had recently undergone a rather complicated operation on his right eye, which had, fortunately, been entirely successful; all anxieties about blindness or visual impairment alleviated.
‘Yes, I’d heard about it and have been trying to contact
you. Neither of your phones are functioning.’
‘Blasted nuisance, the mobile dropped out of my shirt pocket and fell into one of the clay trenches where my vegetable beds are placed – wait till you see the size of those beauties, Carol! I didn’t notice it and drenched it along with the marrows and broccoli when I was watering. I have a new phone and a different number now.’
‘And your wife? Is all well at home?’ I always held my breath after such an enquiry. Cécile was hitting eighty-seven. (René joked that he was her toy boy.)
‘Oh, nothing wrong with her. The blasted squirrels have been a problem though. They ate right through the France Telecom cables outside our bedroom window. It was weeks before I discovered it. Just assumed no one had made contact or that Cécile’s hearing was getting worse.’
After a mere five weeks’ convalescence beyond his resoundingly successful optic-nerve operation, René had returned to work, masterminding Raymond’s olive farm once more.
‘It has grown into such a mighty concern that my presence has become indispensable.’
‘Well, congratulations, René, on all fronts.’
‘No, but it’s getting too much for me now. I want to think about taking retirement next year when I hit eighty-five. We’ve employed a manager. Raymond has built the fellow and his family a house on the estate and I am teaching him everything, passing on my many years of expertise. Do bring your camera,’ begged our silver-haired friend. ‘My vegetables are a sight to record. I have tomatoes the size of footballs. None weighs less than three kilos.’
I agreed that we would bring a camera, though I recognised yet another of René’s tall stories.
‘You have to photograph the olive trees as well. Last winter, we delivered fifteen tons of olives to the mill. We are expecting an even heftier crop this year. Wait till you see the olives on them! How the branches are bowing low. It’s a sight to behold.’
‘Are you still spraying?’ I asked.
‘Of course. Why wouldn’t we be? And we’ll be watering all the trees old and young on a twice-weekly basis.’
This was completely unnecessary and a saddening misuse of water.
Raymond had sourced such rich flows beneath the surface of his land that he simply did not know what to do with it all. So he had dedicated a substantial plot of land to René’s spectacular vegetable garden, and they had been extending, yet again, the olive groves. On top of the original five hundred older fellows, plus René’s suggested two hundred trees – the returns for which had been staggering – since I had last bumped into them at the mill, another one hundred trees had been added to the groves in the early spring.
‘We have our very own olive industry. Eight hundred oliviers now; what do you think?’
‘Splendid.’
‘Raymond has no interest in making money out of all this. He has more than he could ever spend. He is, after all, eighty-four years old. Precisely the same age as I am. Well, a few months younger, and he always says he has to do what he is told because I am the senior partner in this team. But I’m making a centime or two, I can tell you.’
I was straining not to burst out laughing.
‘So, we’ll see you next Friday, then, for a barbecue.’
The family living next to Quashia’s cottage, she who had been so abrupt with me in the lane before the party, consisted of a curious ménage à trois: Moroccan mother, French-Moroccan teenage daughter and a French male, thirties. Within weeks of their arrival, they had set about chopping down a dozen pines and oaks on their land to make way for a marquee. Now Quashia climbed the drive with more worrying news. It seemed they had turned their attentions to a lone olive, a fairly ancient fellow that grew on a small rug of land between their fence and that of Quashia’s (our) cottage. This no-man’s-land was the entry to a steep track that led to the valley where the water houses for both properties were situated. Over the years we had harvested and cared for this solitary although it did not belong to us any more than it did to them.
I went in search of the new mistress of the abutting establishment anxious to return a little olive harmony to the hillside and found myself face to face with the ‘boyfriend’, though to which of the women I was not entirely sure. He was on his haunches outside their wooden gate in drainpipe jeans, polishing a pristine Harley-Davidson. To the right of him lay puddles of fresh creamy sawdust. I took one look at the tree. He had lopped off one of the olive’s forked trunks entirely and had left the other three-quarters slain. The tree was now lopsided, deformed. Because it was an olive, I did not doubt that it would rally but the damage wrought would take several years to amend.
‘I’m sorry to trouble you.’
He rose to his feet, unsteadily. His breath was like that of a wild beast. His bleached hair fell in a slick over his forehead. His eyes were set deep, blue and furious. The cut of his face, vulpine-featured, reminded me of Johnny Hallyday.
‘I wonder if we could discuss the olive tree.’
He was bemused, unfocused, drunk. His response was to threaten to slay our animals if they set foot within an inch of his fence. They owned a Rottweiler, he informed me, thrusting his arm vaguely back towards the junkyard of garden where a Mike Tyson of a beast was padding about, enclosed behind a meshed fence. To and fro it trotted, encaged, spoiling for a fight.
‘He has been trained to disfigure all canine relatives and competition.’
‘I see. Well, I assure you I won’t let our three anywhere near him. I only wanted to discuss the olive tree,’ I attempted again.
‘Fuck off.’
‘Sorry?’
‘You heard me, lady.’
I saw trouble ahead.
We had hit a spell of almost intolerable heatwave temperatures; la canicule is the French term for what in English are the dog-days of summer. On the date prearranged for our lunch with René, Michel and I drove through upland country lanes to Raymond’s farm. His property had not been constructed out of limestone mountainside as ours had. It lay on flatter ground, gently sloping, like the spill from a higher lying plain. The placement was a good fifty metres in altitude above ours and it was possible to drive the twenty minutes’ distance winding into deeper countryside, buried away from the busier routes, and find yourself in a cooler, more refreshing climate.
Raymond’s property was fenced in with white pickets and resembled an American ranch. It was parkland, a greensward without terraces. This gave the place a more modern feel, in sharp contrast to the spread of our labour-intensive terraces hewn from rising acres that bore the prints of the traffic of generations upon them. Our site was of soft limestone, trodden by innumerable feet. No gentle gradations and no flat areas except where the drystone-walled terraces had chiselled them. Water tumbled southwards at our olive farm, a swift downhill flow, but Raymond did not have gravity working for him in the same way, so he was obliged to invest in expensive pumps, waterspouts, a gallimaufry of plumbing where every conceivable piece of machinery or equipment required was present on his land.
As soon as we stepped from the car, we were taken on a tour by René who was wearing a black patch over his right eye. Raymond had not yet shown himself. René said his colleague was sleeping. ‘He might be my age, but he doesn’t have my stamina, can’t tolerate the heat or the pace.’
Raymond, tycoon turned water diviner after his retirement, had detected three generous, ceaseless sources beneath his fields, all of which he had deployed. Once the drilling had been completed and the wells had been opened up, they had each been furnished with an electric pump. Ground-level piping was everywhere. Several of these fed or were fed by what Raymond claimed was ‘the largest private water basin in Provence’. Built by him, it held ten thousand cubic metres, and all this water was free. He paid only for the electricity. It was a complex and ingenious system that would have cost the average lay person many thousands of euros, but Raymond’s father had made his fortune in agricultural machinery and hardware and even today the family owned the largest outlet in southern F
rance, supplying farmers, industries and individuals with all that was required to irrigate, plant, construct, sunbathe, barbecue, build swimming pools – every aspect of living or working in the South of France.
I did not record the precise number of gallons that Raymond, when he did appear, proudly boasted he was drawing up on a daily basis. It was a staggering figure. Since I had returned from my travels, I had begun to appreciate a little of the water and environmental issues facing the Mediterranean and I perceived Raymond’s usage as extravagant. Advised by René, he was rocketing thousands of gallons of water fused with pesticides everywhere. The residue from these settled on the ground and seeped beneath the soil back down to the flows from mountain rivulets making their way to other homes, springs, lakes, reservoirs.
‘Quite an industry, don’t you think?’ cried Raymond.
I nodded, deeming it inappropriate to comment. Fifty-five per cent of all French groundwater has been found to be contaminated by pesticides.
‘René’s allotment’, a quilt of land that extended for more than an acre, was bursting with exaggerated foodstuffs. The cabbages and greens were as tall as our silver-haired guru himself. He walked in among them while we photographed the sight, and he was barely visible. But his one free eye glinted with pride, with the knowledge that he was earning himself a tidy packet, selling most of this on for cash. Tax free.
‘I’m building the foundations of a better life for my grandchildren. I’ve fallen upon a goldmine here, Carol. I only wish Raymond and I had caught up with one another again years ago,’ he confided, ‘but in those post-war days nobody wanted olives. The idea that they would become a luxury food item was risible back then when I set off inland to Provence profonde and herded goats and sheep in the mountains. It was a hard living, a pinched existence, even if I did know it inside out. Goats and olives: no one understands them better than I do. My old Catholic mother made herself a set of rosary beads out of olive stones. She prayed day and night, fingering them so hard they grew shiny as marbles. Well, her prayers for her only son have been answered, n’est-ce pas? Who would have ever thought my fortunes would deliver me here?’
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