Return to the Olive Farm (The Olive Series Book 4)

by Carol Drinkwater

  Olives and vineyards followed.

  Somewhere within this Madonie conservation area, where rivers ran at high altitudes, was a source, a rivulet springing up out of the rocky outcrops, known as Fosso Inferno, the trench of the underworld. It was believed that Odysseus visited during his long wanderings. I had no idea where it was located and there was no mention on our map. The Trench of the Underworld, a potent image.

  In the middle of nowhere, where silence and birdsong reigned, where nothing but stunted, gnarled olive groves stretched, within which wild flowers grew, we came upon a low-lying, sprawling farm. Tucked away beyond tall, dark trees and rows of elegantly pruned olives, it was tinctured with warm tones, many shades of earthy brick were its multi-levelled terracotta roofs. It promised, from its middle-of-nowhere situation, an environment of peace, harmony, an idyll. Might it be this farm with its pale washed walls that I dreamed of in my own odyssean quest to reach ‘home’? (Does travelling create an inner state of homelessness?) We attempted to find an ingress, a break somewhere in the metal fencing, but there was none. Eventually, at the foot of an endlessly winding dirt track, set back, a rusted iron gate with a hefty padlocked chain. Hanging from it, a sign informing callers that the property was owned (or managed?) by an olive institution whose headquarters were in Rome. An authentic body or a front for nefarious dealings? I had no idea. There was no caretaker about, no caretaker’s lodge, nobody at all, and I could find no bell, no means of requesting the gates be opened that we might peep inside. For a national institution, its activities were very discreet.

  I knew that more than seven thousand acres of land had been reclaimed from Mafia syndicates throughout Italy and these were slowly, very slowly, being reallocated to such bodies as Libera Terra who were honourably producing good wines, olive oils and citrus crops, organically, too, from the farms. Whether this holding had been part of such a donation, or was in any way connected to Libera Terra, there was no way of knowing. And nothing suggested it might be for sale.

  On we journeyed, winding, climbing, descending. A cubed sienna-tinted palazzo here, shining beneath the sun, reigning over a hillside and acres of fields; elsewhere, another upland estate, ochre-walled, encased within sloping grasslands carpeted with green and yellow growth.

  And late in the afternoon a hilltop town lost in backwash heights. Michel felt confident we’d find a bed but it lacked any hotel or pensione. Not so much as a bed and breakfast on offer even though the town was of a substantial size. Here we encountered wizened and bent Sicilian nonne, grandmothers, with ash-grey hair swept back into tight buns, thick stockings rolled to the knees, leaning on knobbled canes, climbing the steep cobbled lanes. Here, we found donkeys as transport as well as the modern-day chaos of cars and scooters, and a fountain with twenty-four spouts that overlooked green hills and valleys cloaked in spring colours. But no hotel. I was secretly delighted because I was still hoping to reach Siracusa before the day was out.

  And so we did. First passing by mighty Etna or, in Sicilian dialect, Muncibeddu. The Mountain of Fire. In the falling evening light, she was more like a wild virgin goddess than a mountain, with her white orifice gaping heavenwards, seeping snow, exhaling iron-grey plumes of whirling smoke. A creature of volatile moods, exuding both heat and cold.

  Finally, the outskirts of Siracusa. The same story here as elsewhere at the city’s edges. Looming before us were aggregations of high-rises, sordid concrete blocks that made the eye sore to look upon them. Who, on the outskirts of such magnificent cities and towns, would construct these? Who would secure the necessary planning permission? On this island it was always the same answer.

  Midnight in Siracusa’s Piazza del Duomo, one of the most beautiful squares in the world. People everywhere. I had not expected such activity. It was Saturday night, but even so. On the table before us lay two glasses of bubbling prosecco and two magnificently complex ice creams woven, striped, striated with colours and flavours.

  One of manifold gifts brought by the Arabs to this island was an early incarnation of ice cream, or, rather, sherbet. To the Arabs it was sarbat and then to the Italians it became sorbetto. Its base was a fruit syrup diluted with water. From Mount Etna ice was taken and the sarbat was transformed by partially freezing the diluted water to create a slush. This new delight became known as granita. By the eighteenth century, Sicilian ices and sorbets were renowned throughout Europe.

  I raised my glass and wished my husband ‘bon anniversaire’.

  ‘This is very special,’ he grinned. ‘You know I love you very much, don’t you? You are the soulmate, the generous spirit I looked for, dreamed of finding, but it does not make you easy to live with.’

  At our table, in a restaurant steps from the Aretusa Fountain, we were offered olives. ‘Olives swelling sleek and dark’ – Homer. Ours were green and dark and larger than cherry plums. We drank ruby-red wine and sat together after lashings of pasta, also brought to the island by Arabs, replete and deliciously satisfied, enjoying the early afternoon heat and the views and the passage of people.

  Michel, who had been working at regular intervals in China, gently suggested that surely it was the Chinese who gave us pasta? I was delighted to be able to refute this. ‘The Chinese had rice, but no other cereal crops.’

  Pasta, the real substance, was created from a base of durum wheat, which, back when the Arabs were a force in the Mediterranean, was cultivated only in these southern Med climes. Spaghetti, vermicelli, macaroni: all were invented by the Arabs as they learned to work and utilise the durum paste. And because at that stage, eleventh century, the Arabs were still here in Sicily or on the point of being ousted, the Sicilians had mastered along with their colonisers the skill of pasta, the preservation of the basic wheat food.

  Out on the silk-smooth water, a collection of white yachts. One, two – no, three – were approaching the shoreline. Each was tilted perilously close to the sea’s surface, skimming, tipping, leaning – they are going over! – until, at the very last moment, each in turn rose like a pure white swan, flapping upright sails, taking flight, tacking gracefully; a ballet, a coupé jeté in the wind.

  I was profoundly happy to be back in Siracusa and I hoped that the birthday man at my side was beginning to feel the pull of this place in spite of its abject poverty, its decaying beauty, its streets as slender and bendy as pipe cleaners. There we stayed until the sun was low in the sky and then we walked, going nowhere in particular, desirous of ambulation. Sneaking into crumbling courtyards, entering fine palaces, I was showing Michel discoveries of mine from the previous year, catching up on the changes, the ‘improvements’, some of which left me a little depressed, precipitating as they did the approach of mass tourism.

  Vendesi. Everywhere, vendesi. ‘See, there! For sale. And there, another.’ A studio, disintegrating shutters with only flecks of paint remaining, a flaking-walled apartment, a barn, a ruin bound together in a symbiotic marriage of stone and wild, thorny weeds; a twisted fig tree thrusting up through its cracks and crevices, and, best of all, a partially restored house of soft pastel pink, a crouching-in-the-crook-of-a-curve abode, along the lungomare on the far side, the less discovered extreme of Ortygia. I scribbled down several of the numbers where it suggested that it might be a private sale. I had no desire to waste time talking to Sicilian middlemen. Michel caught my urgency.

  ‘What has come over you?’

  In the serenity of the candlelit night, I felt able to unburden, to shed the load I had been carrying, to allow the partner I loved to share my recent encounters, to see into the trough I found myself in. I talked of the anger I had felt as I drove home from Sophia, the inspiration I had felt after my meeting in Correns, that fleetingly I had resented Michel because he, by his decision to continue with pesticides, was not expressing such a vision.

  ‘If we had been fortunate enough to have children together, you would not ask me to feed them what you know is detrimental to them. Losing out elsewhere, I want to preserve Appassionata, to do t
he best for her. Appassionata is my child, our child, and the decisions that you and Quashia make sit heavily on me. I would prefer to up sticks and quit, to find another property where olives are not farmed, where the acres have been dedicated to other purposes, where our land management can be kinder to the earth or where I can simply walk away from all such responsibilities.’

  ‘You are not trying to run away, are you, not you?’ Michel nudged his shoulder close against mine.

  ‘I am looking for a quiet place. Somewhere where the decisions will be less challenging.’

  ‘Such a place is a dream. There is nothing to be said against dreams, but we are their weavers, we hone and direct them ourselves. To many Appassionata would be a gift, the Olive Farm would be their dream, as it has been ours. It still is and this is but a step along our path. Perhaps I am at fault for not accepting the depth of your commitment to the farm, and I can certainly reconsider my decision. Yes, we can go bio, but we will possibly lose our crops.’

  ‘I am ready to pay that price until we find an alternative. We didn’t buy the house to be farmers, it was an unexpected bonus, a blessing, but a blessing I believe we need to put back on the scales.’

  ‘Then let us do so’ were his carefully considered words.

  On our evening circumnavigation of Ortygia, returning to the far side of the islet to where my pink house awaited its purchaser (it was not to be us) and beyond it to a forgotten, out-of-the-way pizzeria with a façade climbing in vine, we found ourselves caught up at the straggly hem of a costumed procession flanked by lines of Sicilian onlookers, churchgoers, believers.

  ‘We can’t get through,’ murmured Michel. It was a dense congregation. We had no choice but to shuffle at the pace of the rest, haltingly protracted.

  Far ahead, four or five hundred yards, within the bunched, crawling mass of religion, held high in the darkness, as though walking on air, but in reality transported on a pedestal lodged between two long wooden poles resting on the shoulders of broad-backed Sicilian men, rose a resplendently tacky golden statue. It had the height and the sturdy dimensions of any short Italian woman.

  ‘What is happening?’ I asked a black-haired female in the crowd.

  ‘A homage to Santa Lucia.’

  Santa Lucia, the patron saint of this city of Siracusa, the blind saint, the saint of light. I had mistakenly thought that her feast day had been celebrated in Siracusa the Sunday previous to this one.

  ‘Oh, there are celebrations and services in her honour all year round.’

  ‘Lucia,’ I tell the man leading me, ‘was a young noble woman from the fourth century who refused to marry her betrothed, a pagan, a choice foisted upon her by her mother.’ It is said that the virgin girl distributed her dowry and jewellery to the poor. This act of defiance infuriated her rejected lover who denounced her as a Christian. The governor sentenced the girl to death. The soldiers, unable to arrest her, stabbed her to death, then cut her throat and gouged out her eyes. A gruesome finale for a poor creature who was standing up for her desire to marry the man of her choice, or not to marry at all if that was her preference. I was puzzled as to whether, in this land of blood-linked family honour and leather-jacketed machismo, these believers really understood the nature of the female they were celebrating.

  Michel was growing impatient. Since I had known him he had never been comfortable in the face of formalised religious services or gatherings. Pushing forward, we reached the apex of the procession where the boldly disobedient Lucia towered over us in brazen glory and where, alongside us, a knot of men in several types of curious hats were chanting frenziedly, some holding candles aloft. Perplexed children watched on from the perfect vantage point of a parent’s shoulders while we were jostled and shoved. Everyone was being jostled and shoved. Michel sought my hand, vigorously chiselling a path through the body of people, slipping us through the narrowest of apertures until we had overtaken the feverish pulse of this assembly. The procession turned at the next corner, making its way to the cathedral in the Piazza del Duomo. We paid those behind us no further attention and continued hand in hand along our way, intent upon our al fresco dinner.

  The little trattoria of our choice had only one other couple eating on its terrace. Italians. It seemed remote and forgotten, but from where I was sitting I had a full view of my recently discovered house with its petal-pink walls, while, in the other direction, the sea.

  ‘I don’t want to leave,’ I admitted, raising my glass of prosecco in yet another toast to Michel.

  ‘Yes, these days, this too-brief trip, have been magical and I can understand why you love it here. Thank you for offering me a tiny taste of this stop along your journey.’

  ‘Could you envisage living here?’

  Michel placed his wine down on the table. ‘I would like to return and spend more time discovering it with you, visiting the classical sites that we have had no opportunity for on this occasion …’

  ‘But selling Appassionata and moving here …?’

  ‘No, chérie, to sell up and move on, in my opinion, is not the answer.’ There was no invitation for debate in his response. His thought was final.

  Clear and cool was the air. Our chosen pizzas were taking a while and we sat listening to the passage of night out on the water, the beat of the sea’s tongue against rock, beyond the battlements, with further glasses of prosecco and red wine to keep us fuelled while waiting for our food. The stars, jewels within the pitch of night, gleamed high above the ornate glass lamps. The pizzas, when they were eventually served, were delicious, but it was a blustery corner and I was feeling a little tipsy and confused. I wrapped my black pashmina more tightly about me, coiling it close against my flesh to protect myself.

  I felt triste. The following morning we would be away from here, returning to the west side of the island, leaving this old world. The fact that we still had one full day before an evening flight did not lift my mood. A longing, both jumbled and bruised, was unsettling me.

  Retracing our steps along the waterfront, the rolling rhythm of the sea dislodging the pebbles against the shore was like dice clattering. The game of chance. Beyond the city wall, an inky silver-blue unfurled before us. It was a dark, theatrical sight, imposing, rippling, dense and velvety as heavy curtains. In the sky above, a moon shone down, accurately centred – Archimedes, Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer and astronomer, born in this city in 287 BC, could not have calculated its placement with more precision – a full honeydew-melon moon, letting spill its juice, its luminosity, across the water in a sweeping, cylindrical shaft of light. It might have been the extravagant train from a wedding dress or a stairway, an ascending pathway to the stars. But the spill stopped short, beyond the city wall, a tantalising four or five metres out to sea.

  Why does it not come ashore?

  ‘Shall we vault this stone waterfront, sink our clothed bodies down into the freezing oil-slicked water and swim out to it, hitch a lift on to its shimmering, golden robe of light and let it draw us heavenwards?’

  Glimpsing a path to paradise, such a sight for a birthday.

  One tantalising step beyond reach.

  Breakfast on the rooftop, surveying the city echoing with Monday morning hammering and restoration. A new port for liners, tourists, was being constructed with ugly grey breeze blocks right beneath us where, the previous year, I had strolled the quayside in between the tightly knit orange trees and the lapping waters of the bay. The entire area was to be dedicated to parking! Perhaps we had seen the best of it, I sighed.

  We took the autostrada rather than our preferred secondary routes, to reach the airport side of Palermo sooner rather than later. Clear roads, good time; this left us with four and more hours to spare. A leisurely lunch and a discovery or two. Time for Trapani? Perhaps not. Castellammare del Golfo, then, which sits on the water within the province of Trapani. Why not? Here, a marina was under construction. We parked down at the water’s edge and strolled along the key. Scopello was within spitting d
istance. It was where I had been heading the year before to meet the granddaughter of an American Mafia notable. Until, at the eleventh hour, she had backed out, refusing to talk; a change of heart, without explanation. This area, this coastline, had bred many figures who had found renown within the Mafia elite in New York City. A gang war there had been christened the Castellammarese War. But that was the past. Today, it was a port for tourism. Might the Mafia have fingers in the pie of this new emerging Sicilia?

  There were three restaurants on this stretch of quayside, alongside the defunct tonnare, the tuna factory, but two were completely empty. We mistakenly assumed they were closed. The third was bustling. Taking this as a positive comment on the food, we followed the crowd. I spotted at another table two rather dubious-looking figures, both dining on mountains of spaghetti di nero. I asked them whether they would recommend it. One called the owner, puppet owner, I suspected, and ordered for me. ‘Add a bit of this, some of that, a little extra …’ and then the diner smiled in my direction and made a gesture. The famous Sicilian shrug. ‘It’ll be molto buono, signora, you’ll see.’