by Romy Sommer
When Ettore returned with the paints, I had to admit he’d made a surprisingly good selection: a soft pistachio-green for the kitchen, reflecting the green of the porcelain tiles on the wood stove, a cheerful sunny yellow for the drawing room, to match the colour Fiorella had revealed beneath the hideous wallpaper, eggshell blue, soft buttery yellow and pale lavender for the bedrooms. White was only for the ceilings.
‘It’s rather more colourful than I’d have chosen,’ I said tentatively.
Geraldine peered over my shoulder. ‘If you’d chosen the colours, everything would be white.’
I didn’t deny it. ‘But we have no idea what colours Florian and Yusuf might prefer,’ I protested.
‘They will like,’ Ettore said simply, as if they had no other choice.
‘Your bodyguard has hidden depths,’ Geraldine whispered.
I had to admit it was rather fun painting with company. With Ettore’s rollicking baritone as accompaniment, we all set to work. Since Tommaso had been assigned the job of sanding and sealing the ceiling beams, I made sure I painted in whichever room he was working in. It gave me plenty of opportunity to ogle his rear as he balanced on the ladder. It also gave me plenty of time to wonder if I hadn’t been a fool turning him down. Maybe I should have taken Cleo’s advice and gotten laid. Followed my heart rather than my head just once. Not that it was my heart demanding to be heard. The feeling came from a great deal lower down than my heart.
After sunset, when it grew too dark to carry on painting, we assembled in the dining room, beneath the bright colours of Fiorella’s restored fresco, for a meal I’d thrown together – pici with a sauce of fresh fava beans and pecorino cheese.
Tommaso opened a bottle of Sant’Angelo Sangiovese, and Ettore, who’d been invited to stay for dinner, made the toast: ‘To family!’
‘Salute!’ we all replied – even me, since I’d grown rather more charitable with Geraldine after she’d spent most of the day working with unfailing enthusiasm. She had even carried on working when Ettore wasn’t watching.
After supper, I served apple crostata, then, once we’d waved Ettore off on his little Vespa, we took our drinks out to the terrace to enjoy the warm evening.
Geraldine sat in Per’s lap, and they cuddled like teenagers, while I did my best to ignore them, and not to imagine myself in the same position in Tommaso’s lap.
I heard the noise first, a snuffling, grunting, wild animal sound. I peered into the darkness and listened.
‘What is that?’ Geraldine asked, sitting up straight in Per’s lap. She sounded scared.
Tommaso and I exchanged a look, then, ‘Cinghiale!’ we said together.
We leapt to our feet, and Tommaso grinned as we ran towards the sound, waving our arms and whooping. Like excited children, we chased through the garden to scare away the boars rooting in the flower beds. We chased them all the way out through the mesh fence that circled the garden, and then Tommaso patched together the hole where they’d broken in.
When we returned to the terrace, we were still breathless and laughing.
‘What were those things?’ Geraldine asked. She stood now on the edge of the terrace, waiting for us, her arms wrapped around her waist.
‘Pigs?’ Per asked, moving to join her.
Tommaso shook his head. ‘Wild boar. At this time of year, they’re in a feeding frenzy, stocking up for winter. And there’s been a population explosion in recent years, so they’re venturing further and further afield for food.’
In the cold hard light of the next day, we examined the damage the boars had done. They’d dug holes in the lawn, rooted up the iris bulbs, and left a path of destruction across the garden. Tommaso spent the morning checking the mesh fencing, but it did no good.
When I returned from the weekly trip to the market, I heard Geraldine screaming. At a run, I followed the screams around the house and down the slope to the swimming pool, arriving at the same time as the men. Geraldine was in the water, surrounded by wild boar who’d come to the pool to drink. They’d broken through the fence again, uprooting the posts and tunnelling beneath the wire.
‘Tomorrow, I’ll put in an electric fence,’ Per offered, once we’d chased them out again.
‘You know how to do that?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘Before I was a plumber, I put up electric fences.’
I laughed. I might wish my mother gone, but Per was a most welcome house guest.
One afternoon, we stopped work to forage in the forest behind the winery for hazelnuts, before the wild boar ate them all, and that evening, we sat around the big kitchen table, wrapping the toasted nuts in hot, damp cloths to steam the skins loose so they could be peeled.
With the bounty, I made chocolate hazelnut biscotti and heavy fig and hazelnut panforte, which I stored ready for the harvest feast. For the trattoria, I made hazelnut meringues, and chocolate calzone filled with hazelnut cream.
‘I’ll be happy never to see another hazelnut as long as I live,’ Geraldine moaned, when we’d finally peeled the last nut. ‘I desperately need a manicure now!’
Since my bedroom smelled overwhelmingly of wet paint, I slept in one of the spare rooms for a couple of nights. When I finally returned to my own room, at the end of another long day of scrubbing walls and painting, I discovered that Ettore had left me an unexpected gift – a trail of painted yellow roses climbed the pale blue wall and twisted around the window. The flowers were delicate, and so incredibly realistic. I climbed into the big wooden bed and lay for a long time looking at the whimsical design as the familiar song of the cicadas lulled me to sleep.
The next day, I found Ettore in John’s room. I perched on the bed, which he’d pushed into the centre of the room and covered with dust cloths, and watched as he painted a twining branch of vine leaves, heavy with clusters of purple grapes, as a border where the ceiling met the wall. His big beefy hands wielded the tiny paintbrush with surprising care and delicacy.
‘You never told me you’re an artist!’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘I didn’t know I was. I never had the chance to try before.’
With a few delicate brush strokes, he created a green, writhing tendril of vine, his tongue stuck between his teeth.
‘My father would have liked that. He would have liked to go to sleep looking at the vines.’
Ettore nodded.
‘Did you know him?’
‘I worked the harvest here sometimes, before…’ His voice trailed off.
I knew him well enough now to feel only the slightest trepidation at asking the next question. ‘Before you went to jail?’
He didn’t answer. I cleared my throat. ‘Ettore, what were you in jail for?’
For a moment, I didn’t think he’d answer. Then he set down his paintbrush and turned to face me, wiping his hands on his overalls: ‘I beat up a man. Badly enough to put him in hospital.’
Though I’d thought very differently when I first met him, I couldn’t imagine Ettore hurting a fly. Not once had I heard him even raise his voice, unless it was in song.
‘Why?’ I asked softly.
‘He wasn’t nice to his date. She said “no”, and he didn’t listen. She needed someone to help her.’ He said it simply, as if that was all there was to it. And perhaps it really was that simple. If I had a date who wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer, I supposed I’d want Ettore in my corner too. He turned away, to add a hint of shadow and texture to a cluster of grapes, and I slipped away.
In two weeks, I’d barely managed a single moment alone with Tommaso. There was always someone around, always something to be done. It was as if fate were conspiring to keep us apart these last weeks of my stay in Tuscany. It’s probably better this way, I thought. But my body didn’t agree.
At night, as I lay in bed and looked at the yellow painted roses, I still fantasised about Tommaso’s hands on me, and replayed our kiss amid the scorched and smoking vines.
The first week of September arrived with showers that coo
ped us up indoors. When the rain stopped, the air was pungent with the scent of ripening grapes and I could almost taste them on my tongue when I breathed in. The fruit hung heavy on the vines, and the rolling hills took on that magical golden glow that made for such enticing travel shop posters.
Each day, Tommaso prowled the vineyard, watching and waiting for the grapes to reach the perfect balance between sweetness and acidity. Each evening, he anxiously scanned the weather reports, watching for more rain, which might cause the grapes to rot. ‘The grapes must be dry when they’re picked, so there’s no excess water in the fermentation process,’ he told me. ‘The veraison was early this year, so the harvest should be too, but the cooler air is delaying it.’
I, though, was grateful for the cooler temperatures that came in the wake of the rain. The heat was more bearable now as we madly worked to put the finishing touches on the castello. I could scarcely believe this was the same house I’d arrived at four months ago.
And I only had three weeks left to enjoy it.
I sent Florian pictures of the re-painted rooms, of the terrace lined with pots of white hydrangeas, of the restored frescoes in the dining room. I even sent him pictures of the bathrooms, though, apart from the plumbing issues Per had fixed, we’d made no changes to them.
‘I always knew we’d have to do some renovation work if we bought an old villa,’ Florian texted back in reply to the pictures of the out-dated Seventies’ bathroom suites.
You have no idea!
Then one night at the end of the first week in September, Tommaso was late for dinner. He burst into the dining room like a firecracker. ‘It’s time! Tomorrow we start the harvest!’
Chapter 29
Col tempo e con la paglia si maturano le nespole
(With time, everything comes to fruition)
Tommaso woke us early by the simple expedient of shouting up the stairs, his voice echoing through the sleeping house. It was early even for me.
‘Do you have any idea what time it is?’ Geraldine grumbled, popping her head out the door of the bedroom she and Per shared. She rubbed her bleary eyes.
‘Yes, it’s 2 a.m.,’ Tommaso answered brightly, then he bounced away back down the stairs to stoke up the stove. Once we were dressed in comfortable clothes and shoes, and fuelled with coffee, we bundled a grumpy Geraldine into the back of Tommaso’s little Alfa and headed to the winery. A light mist filled the valley, eerily reflecting the pale moonlight.
‘Do we really have to do this in the dark?’ Geraldine asked. She’d still managed to find the time to put on make-up, I noticed.
‘Picking when the air is cool is better for the grapes.’ Tommaso’s gaze remained steady on the pool of light cast by the car’s headlights. ‘It ensures the sugar levels remain stable. And trust me, you’ll soon appreciate not doing this in the worst heat of the day.’
There were already cars parked outside the cellar, and a fleet of Vespas. Tommaso unlocked the tasting room, and we all piled in, farm workers and friends and neighbours, and the crowd swelled and grew louder as Geraldine and I poured out coffee from flasks, and distributed the sage shortbread biscuits I’d kept in reserve for the occasion. We were joined by student volunteers and migrant farm workers, and even a handful of curious tourists.
Almost everyone I knew seemed to be there: Ettore and his friends, Carlotta and Marco, Alberto and most of his family. Even Adriano, the policeman.
Marco carefully signed them all in.
‘That’s a lot of people to pay,’ I commented.
Marco shook his head. ‘Not everyone gets paid. Many are volunteers. But we have to keep records for insurance.’
Alberto had brought a mountain of focaccia bread for all the workers, a quick breakfast before the start of the day. ‘Beatrice will bring lunch later,’ he said, giving me a quick hug.
I looked around at the throng. ‘She’s going to need a very big truck!’
There was a lot of laughter and chatter as we set off down the dusty road through the vines, everyone in a good mood despite the early hour. Some of the workers rode on the back of the tractors that were loaded up with crates and baskets, and some of us walked. When we reached the fields where the picking would start, lights mounted on the tractors were switched on to illuminate the dark rows of vines.
Tommaso climbed up on the back of one tractor and waved his arms for everyone’s attention.
‘Most of you know how this works,’ he said, first in Italian then repeating it in English for the visitors. ‘Those of you who are new, find yourselves a partner to work with until you know what you are doing.’ He unstoppered a bottle of Sangiovese, and poured some on the dry ground. ‘Since there’s no time to waste, let’s go!’
As the crowd broke apart, he jumped down from the truck and took my hand. ‘You’re with me.’
I pointed to the bottle in his hand. ‘What was that for?’
‘It’s something your father used to do.’ He smiled. ‘Did you know that the name “Sangiovese” comes from the Latin sanguis Jovis, the blood of Jove, the father of the gods? John always said it was wise to start the picking with a libation to the gods to ensure a successful harvest.’
I hadn’t thought my father had such a romantic streak. I smiled back. ‘Did you know that it was also the Spanish explorers who introduced grapes to Europe from the Americas?’
Tommaso nodded. ‘And did you know that grapes consist of about eighty per cent water, making them one of the lowest calorie foods?’ He squeezed my hand. ‘I can go on with random facts about grapes all day.’
‘Okay, you win. But one of these days I’m going to find something you don’t know.’
‘You can try.’
I stuck my tongue out, and he laughed.
Still holding my hand, he led me to an aisle of vines where Marco was already showing Geraldine and Per how to pick the grapes with small pruning scissors.
‘Hold the cluster in one hand and snip the whole bunch off the vine,’ Marco said. ‘Breaking the cluster with your hands is difficult and will damage the plant, so you must use a sharp cutting tool. Then, place the grapes in your basket, taking care not to break the skins.’
‘Don’t you have fancy machines to do the picking these days?’ Geraldine asked.
Tommaso laughed. ‘Machines would bruise the skins and start the fermentation too soon.’ He took her hand and flipped it over, stroking the soft skin of her palm. ‘It needs a gentle caress to keep the fruit undamaged, and to keep the flavours trapped inside the skin.’
‘You are such a charmer! Isn’t he, Sarah?’ Geraldine was all smiles now. I rolled my eyes. My mother really was the most incorrigible flirt.
We worked through the dawn, as the sky first took on a grey tinge then turned to murky blue. The light slid slowly down the slopes and into the valley, stealing between the vines, gradually lightening the air around us. Then the sun came up, picking out the green-gold of the leaves, the browns of wood and soil, the violet of the grapes. The big tractor-mounted lamps were switched off, and our sense of urgency increased as the day grew warmer.
The recent rains had left the ground muddy in places, and the grapes were sticky, the juices running down my fingers as I picked and picked and picked. Soon, my jeans and shirt were spattered, and with all the bending and stooping, muscles I didn’t even know I had began to ache.
The sun rose higher, beating down on us with a ferocity that felt more like July than September. Tommaso stripped off his shirt and gave me all the eye candy I needed to motivate me to keep going. I wouldn’t have minded being able to strip mine off too. Sweat trickled down my back, between my shoulder blades, under my arms, until I was dripping and dirty and hot, and no longer felt in any way loving and gentle towards the grapes.
Heavy as they hung on the splayed branches, the clusters did not simply fall off the vines into my hands, but had to be cut off, and though I wore gloves Tommaso had found for me, the cutter was already scoring blisters into the soft skin between my th
umb and forefinger, and my arms were scratched from reaching through the gnarled vine branches to reach the grapes.
Tommaso, walking between the vines to check our progress, paused to rub my arms. ‘Want me to kiss it better?’ His eyes twinkled dangerously, making me forget every reason why I’d said ‘no’ to him.
‘Sod off,’ I replied instead, my tone a mix of frustration and amusement.
I wasn’t entirely gratified when he did sod off, heading back to his own spot to continue picking. I’d rather enjoyed the up close and personal view of his bare chest and shoulders. No wonder he had such a good tan.
But it wasn’t all hard work and sweat. As we moved from vine to vine, we chatted, laughed and shared gossip. Some of our fellow workers even sang. I watched, amused, as Ettore flirted with one of the students who had come up from Rome by bus with her friends to pick grapes. I learned that Aurelio and Silvia were expecting their first child, that Carlotta’s baby sister, who was studying to be a teacher, had taken the day off school to help with the harvest, and that Marco had a wider repertoire of dirty jokes than anyone I’d ever met.
From mid-morning, Marco and a team of drivers shuttled the filled baskets and grapes to the winery, stowing them in the cool, climate-controlled processing room.
When the sun peaked, we stopped for lunch, sitting in what little shade we could find to eat the foods Beatrice and Matteo had brought from the trattoria – cold cuts, and bread with cheese: crostini with prosciutto and olives, bruschetta with salami and succulent tomato, all washed down with wine. And as many of the round, sweet grapes we’d picked as our heart’s desired.
‘Who’s cooking at the trattoria if you’re both here?’ I asked Matteo.
‘No one. It’s La Vendemmia, the harvest. We close the kitchen and hang out a sign until all the grapes are in.’
After lunch, with the sun high overhead, we headed back to the cellar, all piled on the tails of the trucks between the crates and plastic bins filled to overflowing with juicy grapes.
‘Same time, same place tomorrow,’ Tommaso said cheerfully, as everyone headed home for well-earned showers and rest.