This tiny black-tip-winged insect had, according to scientists, been in residence around the Mediterranean for two thousand years and was the principal enemy of Old World olive farmers. Up until now it had been unstoppable unless treated with toxins, such as the product we had sitting in our garage. Scientists, farmers, soil experts, major chemical companies, greenies – everyone who was interested in finding a way to improve the quality of olive produce, not to say the quality of life, had a vested interest in controlling this little critter, but this fly had the olive world at its mercy.
However, Luke had beaten the experts to the table. When I spoke to him, talking very fast he briefly explained the reason for his success. He had found a fly that fed upon the olive fly.
‘It’s that simple,’ he said. ‘Nature’s own predator.’
Luke had released on to his land an enemy, a predator of Dacus. Psyttalia lounsburyi was an African exotic, a fly that had originated in Kenya and South Africa. This alternative fellow was a parasitoid; it fed off the larvae of the olive fly thus destroying all future generations of Dacus and potentially wiping our enemy out. It sounded ingenious. I was very excited.
Mid-December. I was ascending the driveway, returning from my last mill visit of the year, and spotted a man strolling with Michel through the olive groves up behind the villa. This had to be Luke. Today was the date for our designated lunch. I could not hear their conversation as I parked up and pulled out our containers of freshly pressed oil, but I assumed they were estimating the number of flies we would be requiring and an approximate costing for them. Dressed in denim, he exuded an air of casual confidence. Both Michel and I took to him immediately and we listened eagerly as he told us over lunch that he was considered a bit of an outlaw in the area, ‘a renegade,’ he laughed, because he had followed an EU directive that had caused one of his colleagues, a fellow vegetable farmer in northern France, to be thrown into prison.
‘Tax evasion or selling rotten fruits?’ I laughed.
The man’s crime was that he had been caught by the police driving his truck on a public road. He was in possession of a clean driver’s licence and full insurance, but his motor had been fuelled by an illegal substance.
‘What might that be?’ I insisted. Michel always warned that my curiosity knew no bounds.
‘Pure vegetable oil,’ grinned Luke.
We learned that it is both legal and a common practice to drive tractors and trucks, any diesel-powered vehicle, in fact, fuelled by vegetable oils on private land, but not on public roads, which was where his comrade had been ‘nabbed’.
‘I do it all the time,’ continued our guest, ‘but the difference is that I have not yet been hauled over. In fact, there’s rapeseed oil powering my old gal right this minute. That’s what got me here.’
He must have caught our surprised expressions because he grinned and said, ‘Don’t worry, you cannot be held responsible while my bus is parked on your gravel. This is a private estate and once I leave here, well, that’s my own affair. My colleagues and I see it as both a gesture for the environment and an up yours to the state.’
Should that have been a warning to us? I don’t know. I like to believe that I still possess a streak of my younger revolutionary spirit and, when the conversation eventually turned to the purpose of his visit, I was engrossed.
Luke was vanguarding another petit revolution down our way and I was keen for us to jump aboard. Indeed, it was not so petit at all.
He had been trading in vegetables for over twenty-five years – he was surprisingly older than he looked – and had gone bio, converted his farm to an organic one, six years earlier. His main crops were salad vegetables: tomatoes, lettuces, onions as well as aubergines, potatoes, courgettes. Alongside all these he kept a couple of goats, made cheese for his family’s consumption, and owned forty olive trees up behind Nice. They, like ours, were of the cailletier variety. Although he was a little further inland than us, Luke’s olives had regularly been blighted and, also like us, he had grown tired of not being able to find a gentler alternative to pesticides. Until, somewhere along the line, he had come across ‘this exotic species of fly’.
‘Psyttalia lounsburyi. She’s a hot, sweet, tropical beauty and a natural enemy,’ he winked. He might have been talking about a mistress, a dangerous liaison.
A dangerous liaison indeed!
After learning of Luke’s existence from René, before this first lunch with him I had tried to find out about this ‘tropical beauty’ who fed off our enemy. The fly was not some tale. It really did exist and it had been imported by scientists into France and California. Psyttalia lounsburyi was a natural and recognised predator of the olive fly and was, even as we spoke, being studied in a research laboratory not twenty miles inland from our farm.
‘But it is not as yet out in the fields; it is not available to farmers.’
‘Oh, but I had understood that you had already …’
He nodded. Luke had, during the previous season, released batches of these flies into his groves and had been rewarded with a splendid harvest of fly-free fruits.
‘This organic alternative works,’ he smiled, forking one of our greenhouse tomatoes into his mouth.
‘Why are the laboratories holding back then?’ I wanted to know.
It was Michel who offered an explanation. ‘It could be irresponsible,’ he said, ‘to let loose any form of foreign life, be it plant or creature, into a territory that is unknown to them. Their behaviour patterns need to be thoroughly studied and understood. Consider the devastation caused by the introduction of rabbits to Australia and then, later again, the myxomatosis virus used to kill them off.’
I wondered where Luke had come by the flies, if they had not yet been released on to the market, and I asked him directly.
‘Out of Africa,’ he winked. And if we were genuinely interested, he would import the required batches for us.
‘How do we let them loose on the land?’ I puzzled.
Our guest assured us that he would take responsibility for that. The insects would be delivered in long rolled nets. These ‘baskets’ would then be hung from a selection of trees, not all trees but one in every twenty, Luke was calculating.
‘And then?’
The predatory insects were left alone. They were in open-ended containers, at liberty to come out at their leisure.
‘And then what?’
‘They will feed off the larvae growing inside the olives.’
‘So this happens during the summer months?’
‘Precisely.’
‘And then what?’
‘That’s it. Without youngsters emerging from the larvae, the olive fly cannot propagate. Within one season, maximum two, you will have no more fly problems.’
The way Luke described it, it all seemed remarkably simple and I was ready to take the gamble. Still, in spite of my determination to go organic, Michel stayed my hand. He remained reticent. ‘If the flies have not yet received the all-clear from the Ministry of Agriculture, then perhaps we should await the laboratory results,’ he reasoned. ‘They might discover that this exotic does not settle well here or predates on, targets, other species. Risk-assessment is essential.’
Luke shook his head firmly. ‘There’s no risk, Michel. This predator is safe. The change involves red tape, a complete shift in attitudes and that is what is holding everyone back. Trust me, I have tried the fly myself and it works. On top of which, I can assure you, it causes no auxiliary damage. Psyttalia lounsburyi feeds off olive fly larvae and destroys it and its growth potential. That is it.’
I glanced towards Michel, wondering whether or not this had closed the deal. Luke, sensing Michel’s ongoing uncertainty, continued:
‘Everyone is dragging their heels because going organic means that the pest-control companies are going to lose fucking fortunes. They’re in cahoots with the governments, got them in strangleholds.’
It was certainly a fact that agrochemicals were exceedingly big bu
siness (approximately twenty-five billion euros a year and rising). France was the European Union’s leading agricultural producer and the number one user of pesticides. Western Europe represented 20 per cent of the world’s market.
‘Listen, guys, go organic! I’ll take care of both the shipping arrangements and la douane, the customs. I’ll organise the transport of the little cutesters from South Africa and they will be delivered right here to your door, and I will assist you with their release. I cannot offer more.’
‘Is it illegal to bring these flies into the country? Will we need a special permit?’ I wanted to know.
‘Look at it this way – it’s a bit like the gas. The European world is shouting loudly for everyone to support a cleaner future, cut out the fossil fuels, get green, but as soon as you take the initiative they nab you for some infringement or another. If I want to drive my old truck powered by rapeseed oil, whose bloody business is it but mine? But if I’m stopped, I could well be fined. I might even get a short prison sentence.’
‘Prison does not seem likely,’ argued Michel. ‘This is France, after all. We are not living in a police state or a dictatorship.’ Having said that, we all concurred that the infringement of certain personal freedoms, the heavy emphasis on national security, the high police presence on the streets, made daily life under Sarkozy a less tenable option; the new face of France was growing to resemble a police state a little more each day.
Lunch over, we shook hands with Luke, thanked him for his time and agreed to consider seriously his proposal. In the meantime, Michel requested that he contact us whenever he could with costings and the availability of a lounsburyi shipment. When the facts had been laid out on the table, then we would make a decision and let him know.
I wonder now how neither of us suspected anything. I was so keen to find a new way forward that I can only suppose I was blind to the realities.
3
The day after our visit from groundbreaking Luke, Michel flew up to Paris for meetings and to begin preparations for our family Christmas there, while I, still at the farm, took Cleo to the veterinary clinic. Her heart since birth had always been a little faster paced than average, but on this winter afternoon it appeared to be beating at a rate that was a little alarming.
‘We will need to call in a specialist from Nice,’ I was informed by our vet. The robust German who had looked after our animals for years, a kindly, sensitive individual, had retired at some stage during my travels and this young lady, along with another, had purchased his business. She or her partner had cared for Bassett during his final, rather torturous hours. I had not been here, so I had little experience of these women.
‘Shall I bring her back tomorrow?’
‘It cannot wait. Why don’t you take her for a short walk and we’ll call your mobile when the doctor arrives?’
I nodded.
‘Her heart is enlarged’ was the specialist’s verdict, three-quarters of an hour later.
I watched on helplessly, electrode conductors clipped to my beauty’s belly, without grasping the gravity of what was taking place.
‘Do we know what has caused this and how soon it will be before she’s back to normal?’ I asked.
‘Ohhh, mon Dieu!’ cried the doctor.
Cleopatra had begun to emit a high-pitched keening that chilled my blood. Save for the quickening pulse, she had been fine while we were strolling together up and down the narrow winding alleys behind the surgery, gambolling about my ankles, as affectionate as ever.
‘Is she in pain?’ I begged, while the two vets and one female assistant began running back and forth, grabbing at instruments and cuts of cloth. From the intense expressions on their faces, it was evident that something serious, untoward, was taking place, and then, without further warning, Cleo, our soft-furred, truly beautiful Alsatian just keeled over, collapsing on to her right side on the vet’s table, the two electrode conductors still clipped to her.
‘Can we unplug those things, can we, please?’ I begged.
There was panic now, pandemonium. A small wiry terrier, charcoal-grey, was whining in sympathy with our girl although as far as I was aware he had never encountered her before this evening. Cleo was screaming. I was not sure that I had ever heard a dog actually scream before. Horses on the farm in Ireland when I was a child, yes, but never a dog. Such thoughts were passing through my mind while I watched on helplessly, constantly jostled from one spot to the next.
‘S’il vous plaît?’ I shouted for the third time. ‘Unclip those things from her, please!’ But still neither of the two women, our vet and the young heart specialist from Nice, was paying me any attention.
And then Cleo fell silent. A silence that was ominous and more vocal than her screams.
‘She hasn’t died, has she?’ I mumbled incredulously. The heart specialist began to pound the dog as though she were making bread, kneading furiously into her fur.
‘Stop it, please. Is she dead?’
My vet came and stood at my side. ‘Yes, I am afraid that she is. Her heart was weak. This was inevitable.’
‘But she was fine this morning!’
‘No, she wasn’t. You were not aware of the problem, that’s the difference.’
‘Well, then, leave her, please. Just let her rest.’ I was fighting emotions: anger, pain, incomprehension, shock. Cleo was not even three. She had been born on the farm along with twelve others on a riotously jolly, house-full-of-guests New Year’s Eve. All the puppies were purebred German Alsatians. Of Lola’s thirteen, three had died within the first twenty-four hours. The mother herself had disposed of those tiny corpses, we had no idea where or how, and we had reared the rest. Quashia had constructed a spacious kennel to shelter them against the winter within the stone ruin above the semi-defunct vineyard over on the Second Plot. Ten puppies scooting all over the place, dribbling milk, peeing on the terraces, snouts fossicking in the earth and ripping up the flowerbeds. It had been a chaotic, harum-scarum three months but also a time of bulleting life, of curiosity and endless mischief. I had loved it, loved them all and had wanted, impossible of course, to keep the whole darned pack. Every single wagging-tail ball of trouble that they were, eight males and a pair of undersized bitches. We already had three adult dogs at that time. During those months, I was at the pet shop and supermarket every couple of days buying trolleyloads of milk, biscuits and meat. Shoppers stopped in their tracks, incredulously surveying my purchases. Eight I had reluctantly found homes for and we had kept two: Cleo and her brother, silky, black-haired Homer with one floppy ear.
And now this. Not seven days before Christmas. A couple of weeks before her third birthday.
‘Madame Drinkwater, are you listening?’
‘Sorry?’
‘I was trying to tell you that we can deal with her, dispose of the body,’ the vet was repeating to me, talking slowly as though to one who did not speak the language, while her colleague began in businesslike fashion to unclip the electrical apparatus attached to the corpse and pack her scanning equipment away.
‘Absolutely not. I will just need some help, please, to carry her to my van. She’ll be buried in the garden along with her predecessors.’
Lifting her in my arms, she felt solid and as heavy and unmanageable as a mattress; her tongue lolled sideways. I insisted we return her to the table while I tucked the tongue back into her mouth. The sight of it was too physical an image of death. Body fluids had begun to seep out of her and the heart specialist came running up behind me with half a dozen nappies. Suddenly, I was picturing Cleo that very morning, haring across the grass to accept the bone I had been offering her.
‘No one’s going to believe this,’ I blubbered, half to myself. I could not believe it.
‘Here,’ said the dark-haired young woman, stuffing the towels between my arm and the dog’s haunches. ‘It’ll help keep the car clean.’
The car! Did I care? It was a banger, a crock of a thing, practically held together with bits of string, used
for the transportation of olives and the regular purchase of bags of cement required for the terrace walls that needed rebuilding after the wild boar had passed our way. A few abiotic drops, dog pee and dribble, would make precious little difference to its condition. I climbed into the driving seat once the rear had been carefully locked and started up the engine. The windscreen wipers had jammed. Maybe they had been jammed for weeks, I did not know. The rain had only started to fall while I was inside. I gunned up the engine and set off slowly, climbing back up the hillside. In the late evening glow, Christmas lights glittered in the streets. Our village’s central place was decorated with its annual, life-sized Father Christmas riding his sleigh drawn by four illuminated, bright blue reindeers. He was waving benignly at me, his clockwork hand tick-tocking back and forth. The bustle of traffic and shopping, the blur of raindrops sliding down the glass: all seemed like an out-of-focus film before my eyes, not reality. The reality was the deathly silence of such a pretty girl laid out behind me.
The following morning, after a desultory night, I awoke alone to sheeting rain. Michel had remained in Paris while lifeless Cleo had passed those final nocturnal hours in the rear of the car. Alone, I had not been able to lift her. In any case, I was not going to leave her body lying out in a storm. I hauled on old clothes and, half a cup of gulped coffee later, went downstairs. Quashia was looking for me.
‘I have fed Lola and Homer,’ he said, ‘but I can’t find Cleo anywhere. Mon Dieu, you look dreadful, Carol, what’s happened? Have you been crying?’
I explained that the dog was in the car.
But why was the dog in the car?
I recounted briefly, avoiding details because I could not bear to repeat them, the fatal events of the previous evening. Quashia did not believe me, did not understand, did not want to understand, obdurately refusing to take on board the facts. This man had cared for all those tiny puppies alongside me and had stepped in with the milk rations on the occasions when Michel and I had been off on work trips. Empty as I felt, I had to spell it out to him, while we stood in the rain.
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