As he heads up the hill with Michel at his heels, Quashia points to a mass of small spindly stalks which are growing everywhere. Wild asparagus, he tells me, delicious. I pick a huge bunch and steam them with the idea of adding them to a salad or serving them with prawns or as an accompaniment to another spaghetti alle vongole. In fact, I serve them as a first course to my family for lunch. “They’re rather bitter, dear,” says my mother. I add lemon juice, olive oil and pepper, and we find them… bitter.
“I can’t eat this! What is it? Some type of grass?” my father says.
I chuck them out and decide to leave the rest in the garden.
WHILE I AM CHEERFULLY chanting verbs in Nice, Michel’s parents telephone to say that they have decided to accept his invitation and visit us; they will be arriving in two days. My parents are not due to leave for a while yet, and before their departure, Michel’s daughters are flying down. We lack habitable bedrooms. So while my father and Michel work the land with Quashia, my mother offers to help me tear out what Michel and I have christened “the brown room.” It remains as we found it, a hideous, smelly space. After scrubbing, buckets of Eau de Javel and a slap of whitewash, it has the potential to become a cool, airy retreat with a fine view across the valley and a perfect situation right alongside the swimming pool. Its previous function seems to have been for puppy breeding. The tenant who skipped out on the bills must have run some kind of kennels here—we have come across one or two rather ghastly examples of her workmanship—but in this room she surpassed herself. It has been divided into eight nests that are entirely covered in a foully stained brown carpet. Not only is the entire floor done in this dank rugging but all four walls as well. Lack of air and years of puppy pee seeping into the rotting weave added to an outside temperature of 80°, and you can understand why we have left this room till last.
My mother loves to clean and scrub, to make bonfires and burn great mounds of rubbish. She seems to find fanatical joy in all such activity. I, on the other hand, loathe it, but she soon has me up and at it. Dragged away from my computer, I am armed with mops, sponges, scissors, bread knives, ladders, hammers and hot water. As we rip at the walls, dead plaster and white dust crash down upon with us with the force of an imploding mine. Within minutes, we resemble bakers. My throat is dry as a bone, and I am giddy with trying to hold my breath because the acrid air has me reeling, but worse is yet to come. Living beneath the carpet is an entire microworld of insects and small black worms, disgusting little beings wriggling free from the shock of having been unearthed. Everywhere around us, creatures are on the move.
Perspiration stings my eyes, dust is engrained in my hot, sticky flesh. Spiders and other bodies are marching over my feet, and some are ascending my calves. I shout across to my mother that we should give up. She answers, “Why, dear, we are getting on nicely.” I glimpse her across the room. Scraping and scrubbing, ripping and tearing, she is having the time of her life. I can tolerate spiders as long as they are not too large and hairy, but these small black worms look venomous. We begin to lift up the floor covering. Beneath the carpet are twelve-inch gray cement blocks which have been stacked and grouted into a maze of small walls, presumably to discourage the puppies from crossing from one nest to the next. Settled in among them is a mass of black stirring life. I think I am going to throw up and suggest most emphatically that we leave it, but my mother shakes her head. “We’re nearly finished, dear,” she says. I have to get this over with fast. I cannot bear one more black being mountain-climbing over me. I run to the tool shed, where I dig out a mallet. Back I come. Swinging my arm like a discus thrower, I begin to smash at the cement blocks. I am sweating and heaving, thrusting and crashing. Shards of cement shoot all over the place. Furry and shiny carapaced creatures are whizzing through the air. My mother is yelling at my incompetence. My legs are bleeding. I have no expertise for this, but I am determined until finally even my mother runs for cover. “Stop,” she cries, “stop,” pleading with me to leave the dislodging and dismantling to Michel or Quashia “before there’s an accident.”
I am satisfied. With brooms and black bags, we begin to shovel up the mess we have created, stripping the room bare. It is then we notice the floor.
“Look at this!” Yet another original find. The tiles are obviously Italian. Each has a blond stone base with terra-cotta triangular insets and, at the center, sunflowers in brilliant yellow.
They are exquisite and as far as we can tell—given the mountains of general detritus, rotting carpet piled everywhere and insects who won’t stay where they have been swept—barely damaged. How could anybody in their right mind have cemented blocks on top of such craftsmanship? I am bemused but thrilled and can picture this bedroom in days to come with crisp white linen and sunflower-yellow walls nestling behind our Matisse-blue slatted shutters. Well-rested guests waking to the music of water trickling into the swimming pool. Open the shutters to a new day, swallows wheeling overhead, and there, on the tiled surround, tall terra-cotta pots ablaze with scarlet-red geraniums to greet them.
It was worth the work and the worms.
We stagger out into the hot afternoon, promising to reconvene for tea. My mother disappears to shower and put the kettle on while my father reminds me we should call the vet, which I agree to do after I have hiked the hill in search of Michel and Quashia. I am too excited to await their return, and I need an oxygen tank full of fresh clean air.
At the summit, it is a veritable rain forest. The broom bushes have been left for so long they are twice any man’s height. Even here, there are olive trees hidden in the canopy of rampant growth. Branches whip against my arms, unknown leaves pricking and jabbing as I force my way through. A holly scratches my damp, plastered shoulder. It stings unreasonably. I am calling every few minutes, but the whirring of machines and cicadas drowns out everything. I spy Michel. He is bent over, hacking away with a scythe, liberating strangled trees, disentangling brambles, suckers and vines. Quashia is working at ground level, clearing roots with the strimmer. They crack and thud as they fall.
As I draw near, I pause for breath and take in the staggering beauty of the surrounding hillside. In every direction, there are pines and dusky olive trees, dry stone terraces falling away like snow slopes and, way off in the distance, toward a dense cobalt horizon, the seductive sight of the sun-kissed sea dotted with clear white sails.
Deep hot stillness.
On the terrace beneath me, I spy a twisted, ailing pomegranate engulfed in trumpet vine. Roots and stripped branches lie like dead men on a battlefield. Michel straightens up, lifts his visored head and spies me. Quashia is thankful to switch off the machine, a moment’s respite from the sweltering graft. I recount the news of our treasure buried beneath the muck. I watch Michel’s delight, the smile spreading and breaking across his sticky, muddied complexion. “We have a surprise, too.” He grins, pointing.
Way off to the left of where I am standing is our ruin, uncovered for the first time in at least a decade. We hike over to it and discover the remains of a picturesque little cottage. In what still exists of the living room, there is a fireplace and chimney, terra-cotta tiles—no roof—and crumbling walls; beyond are outhouses where the animals would have bedded down, a fabulous semicircle staircase which leads us up to a higher terrace shaded by a fig tree and a monumental, very ancient Judas tree. I had often wondered why Lawrence Durrell described this magnificent, deep-rose flowering tree as “tragic” until I read legend has it that Judas hanged himself from the branches of one. In the distance, looking back beyond our land, our tiled terraces, the pool where my family is relaxing, swooping down past the olive groves, is a wide blue expanse of Mediterranean. Perfect.
Time for tea.
Quashia and Michel put down their tools, and we trail in single file back down the stony pathway. Quashia pauses to point out a clump of pale green plants which I don’t recognize.
“What is it?” I ask him. An aromatic herb. The name he gives is Arabic. “Excellen
t for the stomach. Drink it as an infusion.” The leaves have a pungent scent, sweet yet spicy, but we cannot place it. “Shall I pick some for tea?”
I tell him next time. After the wild asparagus, I prefer to leave well enough alone.
We seat ourselves in the garden and drink Indian tea. I am fascinated to watch my father with No Name forever at his side. Though neither he nor Quashia can understand a word the other says, they are fooling together, and an image returns. I picture myself as a child on his knee, entranced by his exotic tales of those Cairo nights, of that wicked Arab who stole his glasses, and I regard the two men in front of me now, a million worlds apart, clowning like schoolboys. My father is attempting to recall a word or two of Arabic but gives up and instead offers his welcome greeting in Zulu, to which Quashia falls about with toothless, good-natured laughter.
CHAPTER EIGHT
FIRE!
I wake in the sweltering night, perspiration running from my damp body, to the sound of scratching. It seems to be coming from the hill above our rear patio. I lean up on my elbows and peer out at the shadowy shapes of trees, the dark silvery contours of the boskage. What is shuffling or cutting its busy way through the foliage? My first thought is a snake sidling toward our open doors. I tap Michel’s shoulder. He mutters in his ocean-deep sleep, wriggles and returns to his dreams, oblivious. Now there is a tiny squeaking to accompany the rustling. I reach for a sarong not out of modesty, for there is no one to see me, but because I fear being attacked or bitten when I am naked. It’s illogical. I get up and patter barefoot out onto the terrace. The night is warm. The moon is full and shines across the treetops as though we had forgotten to switch off the lights. The sky is brilliantly clear, not a cloud in sight, galaxies of stars twinkling within a sharp navy heaven. The rustling continues but remains concentrated in the same place, which is at the foot of the largest of our green oaks. I cannot make out any shapes or movement because the trunk is enveloped in deep bushy growth. Fearful of going closer, I sit at the table where we have breakfast, my knees drawn up tight against me, and try to concentrate on other sounds of the night, whiling away time, inhaling the balmy air.
Everywhere smells sweet. Perfume from the twenty-four lavender bushes I have planted—one of the gardeners from our local nursery who knows me well now advised me that lavender planted close to the house keeps the mosquitoes at bay—wafts in heavenly drafts from the lower terraces. High on the hill, there is a bird trilling even at this hour. I catch an owl’s hoot, and then again the squeaking. It must be mice. I wander back to bed and lay listlessly on top of the sheet. I turn and watch Michel, his peaceful handsome face. It never ceases to amaze me how anyone can sleep so deeply. Nothing troubles him.
The squeaking is growing more insistent, the intervals more regular as though it is multiplying, and the rustling continues. If it is mice, there are plenty of them, and they do not trip lightly on their feet. I rise from the bed a second time and search for sandals and a wrap. Slowly, I make my way the few meters up the hill to the tree, crouch low on my haunches and discover No Name surrounded by a writhing mass of life. At close quarters, the sweetly cloying smell of blood thickens the humid night. She glances my way but makes no effort to greet or even acknowledge me. I move in close, and she growls. It is not a real threat, more an atavistic maternal response. In any case, she seems exhausted. Birthed out.
Gingerly, I touch her head and find her coat wet and sticky. Viscid fluff heaves against my arm. Overhead branches dapple the moonlight. Dawn has not yet broken, so I cannot make out how many whelped puppies there are. Five, maybe even six. I sit on the ground and keep watch with her. Pride surges within me for my elegant procreating Belgian shepherd. I quell a longing to rush around the rooms, beat on the doors and rouse every sleeping person. I doubt that Michel or our parents would welcome my rude awakening, it is not yet five o’clock. Still, I am too overwhelmed to go back to bed. So I decide to stay here, keep guard over the newborns and await their first sunrise.
Around seven A.M. Michel finds me conked out, curled up amid the stones and dusty dry earth at the foot of the tree. Twigs tangle my hair, indentations and dirt have creased and daubed my cheeks. I am brushed with blood and bits of gummy afterbirth, scantily clad in a bedraggled sarong.
“Chérie?” He is gently shaking me. “What are you doing up here? I have been looking for you everywhere.” No Name’s halfhearted growl draws his attention to the nest of life alongside me while I wake slowly, aching and sore, stones piercing my back, trying to work out where in heaven’s name I am. And then I remember. “The puppies, have you seen them?” I cry.
Aside from a zillion worms and ants and spiders and caterpillars and ladybirds and bats and lizards and geckos, and carp and those horrid feral cats, which took off the day after we found them, and probably snakes, but I prefer not to consider them, and thousands of rabbits and hopefully dozens of those almond-munching bushy-tailed red squirrels, these blind little mewling beings are the first, the very first life born to us on our farm. No Name’s puppies.
“How many are there?” I ask sleepily.
Michel puts his hand into the nest, which has been extraordinarily well fitted out. She must have been secretly foraging for days, when we were not around to notice. “Seven, I think.” He is moving furry balls aside to see if there is yet another furry ball beneath. “It’s hard to say, but you know, I don’t think she’s finished.”
“How can you tell?”
He shakes his head. “Look.”
I cannot see anything besides a mass of shining wet pelt which resembles a damp moth-eaten fox wrap unearthed from a long-forgotten attic. A second look reveals ejected placenta and a substance similar to a plastic bag filled with murky water. And No Name is not moving.
“We should wake my father.”
“HOW MANY NOW?”
“Ten.”
“Ten!”
“I think so. There won’t be any more.” My father pronounces this with such certainty that no one questions him, and he has a way about him with dogs. After all, until our splendid vet confirmed my father’s suspicions, none of us believed the dog was pregnant.
So ten is the final count. “See how she cleans them with her tongue.”
Now the puppies are as round and pristine and furry as mink tennis balls. Michel is taking photos while my father and Michel’s mother, Anni, keep watch, communicating with each other through sign language and intricate mimes. My mother is making tea, and Michel’s father is sitting at the table awaiting his breakfast, scribbling a list of ingredients for the cake he plans to bake later today. As for me, I am taking on board the reality of eleven dogs gunning all over the farm.
By evening, there are nine puppies. The general opinion seems to be that it was not a miscount. Either No Name ate one or it perished and she has buried it somewhere, although, as far as we know, she hasn’t left her site all day long. Any day now, Clarisse and Vanessa will arrive. They will be entranced, although I am not altogether sure how Pamela will respond. We will be eight people, two dogs and nine puppies in addition to the prehistoric carp surviving in our murky pond. Our menagerie grows. It’s becoming exactly the home I craved as a child. Carefree and casual, with animals and people falling over one another, books everywhere, guests dropping by to while away a happy hour or two, jam a few tunes with whoever can play whatever instrument, nobody being quite sure where anyone else has disappeared to because there’s loads of space and everyone is quietly getting on with their own thing. Heaven—just so long as I can creep off to my cool stone room and write in peace!
The farmyard spirit is taking hold of Michel, too. He is eulogizing about the possibility of planting a vineyard, acquiring a donkey, goats and bees. “Think of it—our own honey! And the goats can roam the terraces and eat the vegetation. It will save us the cost of cutting back the land.”
Yes, and of ironing the laundry!
Alas, his suggestions are impractical. The olive does not need babysitting, the a
nimals do. And we are both still on the move, living our itinerant professional lives. Somewhere beyond summer, beyond days drenched with heat and familes and scrubbing walls (and fumigating the brown room before the girls get here) and endless puppy care, we have another life, all too easily forgotten as the days drift listlessly by and we swelter and burn under the relentlessly seducing sun. Retirement, even as producers of olive oil rather than television, is not yet in the cards. I think of the scarecrow farmer and his weekly visit to the village crémerie. I can’t quite picture myself in that role, yet after a sleepless night in the garden, I do resemble him!
What does amuse me is a shift I notice taking place. I have never been a practical creature, whereas Michel is far more down-to-earth, but there is a pendulum swing happening here. We are changing places, changing roles. He begins to fancy while I place feet on the ground.
LATER, TOWARD THE END of a sun-blessed afternoon, while still enamored by our new family of fluffballs, we receive a call from the girls. They want to confirm the hour of their arrival two days ahead of when we had agreed. In other words, tomorrow, and can they, please, please, Papa, bring two of their cousins with them, Julia and Hajo.
“But where we will sleep everyone?” I ask.
The plumbing is creaking, the water has turned a rusty autumnal shade—we cannot work out why—and half the house is crumbling. The cottage has not been touched yet, the brown room has barely moved on since my mother and I attacked it and we are, as ever, almost out of money. Even if we could afford rooms at our favorite hilltop hotel, they are no longer available, for he has sold his petite affaire to a restaurant owner from New York who has closed the place down for extensive renovation, intending to reopen it in readiness for next year’s film festival as an exclusive hideaway, set back in the hills overlooking the glamorous bay of Cannes.
Olive Farm Page 20