The Reluctant Tuscan

by Phil Doran

  There was no time to waste, Gigi proclaimed, pointing to a swirl of leaves caught in the jaws of a cold wind, a sure augury of a big storm. We craned our necks to look around his shoulders and saw a flatbed truck jammed with many familiar faces. Climbing out of the truck were Va Bene and Problema, cousins Spartaco and Faustino, Signora Cipollini and Annamaria, along with a collection of grandmothers, wives, children, chickens, and dogs. They had been going from house to house harvesting, and we were next.

  We threw on our grubbiest jeans, grabbed some gloves, and reported for duty, only to be scolded for not having put up our nets. We were supposed to have hung sheets of netting, as fine as cheesecloth, between our trees by securing them to the trunks so that they didn’t touch the ground but gently sagged like a safety net under a trapeze artist.

  Our netting should have been hung days ago, and here we were clearly negligent. Cousin Faustino reminded us that he had kept offering to do it for us, but we never got back to him. Nancy and I looked at each other sheepishly. We remembered him explaining that the nets needed to be in place early because, as the olives ripened, they became so heavy that gravity begans the harvest far ahead of the first human hand.

  Nancy and I were now ready to make up for lost time and pick olives, but the first thing we had to learn was that olives are not picked. The actual harvesting is done by shaking and beating on the trees. Nothing subtle or romantic about it, the big guys shake the trunk while the others stand on ladders and beat on the branches with bamboo sticks until the olives come raining down. This is a method that’s remained essentially unchanged in over two thousand years, and back then it was probably the best show in town when they couldn’t find a martyr to burn or an adulterer to stone.

  The only concession to modernity was Va Bene kicking on his gas-powered leaf blower to separate the leaves and twigs that got mixed in with the olives. That done, the olives were gathered up and gently poured into baskets with a loose enough weave to allow them to breath. Everybody exercised great care not to let a single olive touch the ground, or it would be declared damaged and be quickly discarded before it could spoil the whole batch.

  Like everyone else we didn’t have enough to process individually at the frantoio (olive mill), but by combining our crop with our neighbors’, we would all come away with more than enough oil to last until the next harvest.

  The truck was loaded, everybody hopped on board, and we chugged away like something out of The Grapes of Wrath, itinerant farm workers bouncing down a bumpy road in a junky old truck. Any minute I feared we might break into a Woody Guthrie song. But it was not all merriment. The black clouds churning on the horizon gave a real urgency to our mission. If a big storm washed out the roads, we wouldn’t be able to get to the mill. This delay could be fatal, because olives start to ferment the moment they’re picked, and that would ruin the flavor.

  Thunder boomed and lightning hissed across the sky. Those of us bouncing around in the back of the truck covered our heads with everything from newspapers to burlap sacks. Va Bene gave us a little horseshoe of a smile as he flipped up the hood of his sweatshirt, while Problema blew on his hands and cursed. Annamaria fished out a crucifix from under the five sweaters she was wearing and Mrs. Cipollini threw on a raincoat that looked like something she had made out of a shower curtain.

  On both sides of the road lay somber evidence that everything of value had been harvested. Fields of earth glistened where plows had freshly turned dirt so it could breathe over the winter. Vineyards were plucked clean and cornfields were leveled bare, but nothing was more desolate than the sunflowers.

  The Italians call them girasole, which means “turns to the sun.” In summer they burst into an eye-blinding yellow so brilliant that the very sun they turn to must burn with envy. But in the fall the seeds are gathered, leaving the dead sunflowers standing parched brown, their heads eerily bowed in the same direction like an army of mendicant monks.

  Our truck lurched up a steep mountain road. Nancy and I had to hold on tight to keep from flying out. The flatbed was so overloaded and top heavy, it felt as if we were on a boat threatening to capsize at every turn. Fast cars whipped around us, blasting horns and shaking fists as we cheered their bravado. We were laughing and squinting at the raindrops that were slanting sideways into our faces. It was scary and crazy and exhilarating beyond description.

  We finally came to a narrow mud-and-gravel driveway that was overgrown with foliage to the point where we could have lived in Cambione in Collina for the rest of our lives and never have found it. We turned onto that road and the rain stopped pelting us, thanks to an arch of overhanging branches and leaves that formed a lush green tunnel dense enough to compel a driver to use his headlights on even the sunniest of days. This canopy began to thin as we approached a two-story stucco villa that was painted a soft reddish pink. Our truck rolled to a stop under one of the low-hanging eaves and we climbed out, to be greeted by Roberto and Roberta, the owners of the frantoio.

  Roberta was a tall, willowy woman with otter-black hair and the sheeny brown skin common to generations of Tuscan farmworkers. But Roberto was short and thick with red hair, milk-white skin, and eyes as blue as delft, living testament to somebody’s great-great-great-grandmother being paid a nocturnal visit by a raiding party of Vikings.

  As Roberto and Roberta greeted us, we could see how exhausted they were. During harvest time the frantoio operated twenty-four hours a day, and as we hauled our baskets out of the truck, there were quite a few growers ahead of us waiting to have their olives weighed. Most of them had sought shelter under the tin roof of a patio whose main attraction was a forno that was churning out a constant stream of baked bread.

  Eventually our load was inspected and the bad or bruised olives were discarded. The rest were spread out and hosed down, then fed into a machine that looked as if it were hammered together from three other machines. This contraption fed the olives onto a conveyor belt that deposited them into a stone vat, where they were crushed by a large granite wheel that looked like a whetstone. This ancient wheel moved in a slow, steady circle, squashing the olives as well as their pits, for the Tuscans believe that the crushed pits act as a natural preservative.

  The wheel smashed everything into a greenish-black paste that looked like a mixture of bread mold and beach tar. This paste was then spread out on circular wicker mats stacked one on top of the other to the height of about twenty feet. The tower of mats was hydraulically compressed and the raw oil started to flow. This is where the term “cold press” comes from, and it can legally be used when the oil has been extracted using no heat or chemical interaction.

  As far as the terms “virgin” and “extra virgin” go, there are strict definitions based on things like acidity levels and organoleptic properties, which gets pretty complicated. A simpler way to understand it is that when the oil is made from the very first pressing it can be called “extra virgin.” The remaining pulp is then spun to separate out all the water, and the oil that’s made from that second pressing is designated to be “virgin.”

  Incidentally, I have no idea why they use such religious and sexually loaded words to describe what is essentially cooking oil and salad dressing, other than to remind you that we’re dealing with a people who are obsessed to the point of dementia about whatever they put in their mouths.

  But I was curious, so I asked the group how these terms came into usage, and they replied as if in one voice. Olive oil is the essence of Italy, and like the Madonna herself, it is both pure and life bearing.

  We raised glasses of beet-red Chianti and drank to that, as Roberta took a rack of freshly baked bread out of the forno. The rain was falling in earnest now, making a steady drum-roll on the tin roof. Potholes overflowed and pathways became fast-moving streams. The leathery aroma of wet leaves and the scent of burning olive branches combined with the smell of the garlic cloves that Gigi was cracking open with his fingers.

  We rubbed chunks of raw garlic on the hot, rough bread
just as Roberto appeared with a clear glass bottleful of our oil. He held it up and we cheered. It was golden green, like congealed sunlight shining through a rain forest, and although Nancy and I were greatly impressed, people who knew far more about it than we reminded us that color alone was not necessarily an indication of quality.

  The only indication of quality was the taste, and as we drizzled our oil over the garlic-scented bread, we knew we had something special. It was sharp and fruity and peppery, and in an instant, it brought to mind how olive oil has been lubricating life for six thousand years around the Mediterranean. It has anointed the heads of kings, massaged the bodies of noble Romans, and is referred to copiously throughout the Testaments both Old and New, as well as the Koran.

  We drank to that, toasting “Al olio nuovo e vino vecchio.” “To new oil and old wine,” and as is so often the case in Italy, what started out as serious business turned into a party. Food appeared, thanks to Roberto and Roberta’s daughters, who were an eye-catching combination of walnut skin and ginger-colored hair.

  We ate and swapped stories well into the night. And as pleasing as this festa piccola was, it was only a prelude to the festa grande that was to follow.

  33

  Cavallomania

  It rained for most of the following day and night. Nancy and I passed the time in front of our fireplace. I read a book I had been waiting for a day like this to read, while she petted Pepe, who was curled up on her lap making contented little goat noises. Despite the serenity of the scene, the problems we had stirred up with the Pingatores weighed on us. We needed to heal this rift, and although we didn’t realize it at the time, that opportunity would come much sooner than we were expecting.

  The following day, the rain stopped. The clouds rolled away and exposed a cornflower-blue sky and a dazzling sun. A magnificent double rainbow appeared, arcing over Cambione as if to herald the beginning of the Festa di Raccolto, Festival of the Harvest.

  It was the biggest event of the season, and every street in the village was lined with multicolored tents and stalls that suddenly popped up out of nowhere like a fairy ring of toad-stools after a spring rain. There were food vendors, fortune-tellers, puppet shows, portrait painters, mimes, drummers, acrobats, and flag twirlers in brilliant medieval garb. Rows and rows of kiosks selling costume jewelry, carved African masks, farm implements, bras, panties, scarves, neckties, boot-leg DVDs, home-bottled bee honey . . . and a whole world of soaps, lotions, and candles made from it. Huge throngs of milling people, bands playing different songs at the same time, and packs of children laughing as they chased each other through the cross eddies of the crowd. Dogs barking, babies crying, lovers kissing. Just the kind of organized chaos the Italians love.

  As soon as we left the rustico for the ten-minute walk into the village, we caught the scent of a thousand odors twisting and braiding together. Smoked porchetta still on the pig, aged pecorino cheese, cotton candy, exhaust fumes, backed-up Porta Pottis, night-blooming jasmine swollen to grotesque proportions by the rain, and above it all, the heady whiff of a hundred sweaty horses.

  These horses, or cavalli, were here to take part in the centerpiece of the festival, a sublime piece of madness known as Cavallomania. A rodeo. That’s right, a good, old-fashioned, down-home, Wild West rodeo smack dab in the middle of Tuscany.

  When I first spotted people in Levi’s, cowboy boots, and ten-gallon hats, I thought that they might be from the area known as La Maremma in the southern part of Tuscany. This is Italy’s beef-producing region, and although I had never seen it, I had no reason to believe that there weren’t vast stretches of open grazing land covered with huge herds of cattle. But as I discovered, the concept of wide-open spaces is uniquely American. La Maremma is small. Grazing land is parceled into lots no bigger than a suburban backyard, and a herd is often no more than a small cluster of highly prized cows.

  What Cavallomania represented was an homage to a way of life as American as apple pan dowdy. These urbano cowboys were a product of our cultural juggernaut. Years of watching John Wayne and Gene Autry had not only spawned the spaghetti western, but also a thriving subculture of bronco busters from Bologna, saddle tramps from Siena, and cowpokes from Cortona. Maybe it is all one world after all, we mused as a rodeo rider trotted past us, dug his spurs into his horse, and cried out, “Vai, Bessie, Geeddy-yup!”

  Interestingly, their spin on the rodeo comes out far more humane than ours. For starters there are no quick-draw contests, nor even a single cowboy walking around with a six-shooter strapped to his hip. No signs of weapons at all. Their treatment of their animals is also gentler. Thanks to the efforts of the Green party, such events as calf riding or steer roping are not practiced. In their place are barrel racing, rope twirling, and a type of roundup where the cowboy and his horse execute balletlike maneuvers in order to separate a specifically marked steer from the rest of the herd by nudging it along. They have so Italianized the rodeo, I can only assume that at the end of the day they all sit around the chuck wagon eating pasta e fagioli instead of chili and beans.

  Dolly Parton was warbling at us through a tinny loudspeaker as we wandered around the roping pen. We caught sight of Marco Mucchi, and instead of his usual banker’s garb, he was wearing blue jeans with a big Mexican silver buckle, a white Stetson, and a gaudy Sons of the Pioneers shirt.

  “Howdy, pardner,” I said, as if we were meeting on the streets of Tombstone.

  He gave us back a howdy and touched the brim of his cowboy hat in Nancy’s direction. We told him that we hadn’t realized he was such an aficionado of the Old West, and he confessed that he really wasn’t but that he had gotten interested when his daughter developed a love for horses. He pointed to a beautiful little ten-year-old girl mounted on a speckled pony. Marco swelled with pride as we watched her trot around the corral. The little girl had straight black hair pulled back into a ponytail, and her cheeks were peach colored as if somebody had tinted a sepia portrait of her.

  “Che faccia bella,” Nancy said, which is the expression one always gives a parent. It means “What a beautiful face,” and in this case it actually happened to be true.

  While his older daughter continued to lead her pony through his paces, we moseyed over to where Marco’s wife was standing with their younger daughter. We greeted them, and when Nancy smiled at the younger daughter, and told her that she, too, had una faccia bella, the little girl turned shy and disappeared into the folds of her mother’s coat.

  Just then, Vesuvia Pingatore appeared. She was carrying some cotton candy that she had just brought for the little girls, and when she approached, we were all equally startled by the presence of the other. There was a long, deadly silence that threatened to stretch on forever, until Nancy started talking.

  She spoke quietly, yet directly to Vesuvia, telling her that we had never intended to create bad feelings between us. Vesuvia turned away, but Nancy would not let her disengage, reassuring her that no newspaper article would ever be written about them, and how sorry we were to have brought up such an unpleasant memory.

  To our surprise Vesuvia responded, saying that she was also sorry she had made such a fuss when we first moved in, but the sight of their former land being devastated to make way for our road upset her. Nancy apologized for the inconvenience, but kept gently prodding until Vesuvia was forced to admit that what we had done with the rustico not only honored the tradition of the stone, but also beautified the neighborhood.

  Then, reaching out and touching Vesuvia’s arm, Nancy told her how much we wanted to get along with both her and her brother. We’d be having a big party soon, where we were going to renew our wedding vows, and not only did we want to invite them, but Nancy would be honored if Vesuvia would agree to be one of her bridesmaids.

  Vesuvia was flustered. She couldn’t believe that Nancy would want her, but Nancy persevered until Vesuvia’s hard crust cracked. Angry eyes that so recently had fired malocchi in our direction softened and filled with tears. Nancy’s eyes
welled up and the two hugged. I closed my eyes and felt tears sparkling under my lids. I joined their embrace, as did Marco, his wife, and their daughter, turning it into one large, sobbing group hug.

  We were all talking at once. Apologies and regrets were flowing back and forth as we smoothed over a litany of hurt feelings. But being Italians, we were doing it at a volume and with such conviction that it looked as if we also might be at each other’s throats. And that’s exactly the impression Mario Pingatore got when he rounded the corner and spotted what looked like Nancy and me ganging up on his sister.

  He came rushing over, jumped in front of Vesuvia, and tried to shield her from us. She pushed him away and screamed at him for being such an idiot. He yelled back that he was just trying to protect her as Nancy and I hollered that there was nothing to protect her from. Misunderstandings ascended, and when the shrieking reached the level where it started to frighten the horses, Marco stepped in. Like the sheriff of Dodge trying to break up a saloon fight, he separated the combatants and then calmly reviewed who had said what to whom. After a few sheepish apologies we all shook hands. And when that didn’t feel fulfilling enough, we all reconnected into another group hug, this one prominently folding Mario into the mix. In the midst of all this serendipity I felt something strange around my ankle, and when I looked down I saw that, as a perfect complement to all the love in the air, Horn Dog was humping my leg.

  34

  Lo Sciopero

  No sooner had the last tent been folded and the last shovelful of horse manure dispatched than Nancy and I began the preparations for our remarriage. Even though it had been my idea, I was growing increasingly dubious, remembering my conviction that people avoided divorce not so much because of the alimony, but to keep them from ever having to endure another wedding ceremony.