by Annie Hawes
3
Buon giorno, we say as custom dictates, upon entering the bar on this fateful day. But, for the third day running, we take care to say it in a most abstract and general manner, avoiding making eye contact with anyone for more than a second. There will be no more of those thoughtless displays of public sociability. We have realized that the card-playing and man-frequenting women in here are always, and only, the same two women, and now that our grasp of the local dress code is firming up, it has been borne in upon us that they are in fact women who dress up as men. A pair of eccentrics, no less. Who knows what they have gone through to get themselves accepted as honorary card-players by the Methuselah gang? Outrageous of us to expect preferential treatment so early in our San Pietro careers.
’Giorno, the men and the two eccentrics mutter in reply. The multicoloured plastic strands of the fly-curtain flap heavily behind us. Our eyes slowly adjust to the gloom within as we make our way to the bar. Giacò is there waiting to be served, bleary-eyed and unshaven, hanky on head. He does, it is true, edge slightly away from us. But it is an almost imperceptible edge; and as it becomes clear that we aren’t planning to address any further remarks to him, a certain rigidity about his spine seems to melt. We ask Luigi for two coffees. Things have gone well with Giacò; how will we fare with Domenico? He is over in the corner by the vine-tangled window overlooking the olive mill and the river, apparently engrossed in l’Unità, blue-black moustache bristling as usual, the usual shrunken and shapeless vest covering his stringy mahogany torso. We let our eyes flick, just for a second, in his direction. He gives us a minuscule nod of recognition. Lucy and I return the brisk, casual jerk of the head we’ve been practising – more of a tic, really – and swiftly look away. Perfect. We’ve cracked it. At last we are behaving normally.
Giacò, finishing his glass of wine, gives a faint nod-and-a-grunt in our direction, publicly admitting to knowing who we are. A triumph! Luigi finishes the battle with his cranky hissing espresso machine and turns to plonk our cups on the bar. We head for our corner table, Giacò for the knot of men already shuffling the tarot-like cards they use for their interminable games, cards whose mystical symbols – curved scimitars, fat-bellied urns, golden coins – give you the impression that you’re looking, not at a roomful of gossip and gambling addicts, but at a bunch of horny handed fortune-tellers bent over their muttered predictions.
The card-players call Domenico over; hasn’t he finished the paper yet? Ribald remarks about his lack of energy. What has he been up to all night? Hasn’t he let his wife get any sleep – again? Uproarious laughter from the card table; lots more humour in dialect, incomprehensible to us. Domenico mutters some blasphemy that involves the Madonna and (I think) a pig: ‘Porca Madonna’.
We are still busy behaving normally, glowering poker-faced into our coffee cups and giving no sign of fathoming this arcane men’s talk, when an unfamiliar figure bursts in through the fly-curtain trailing sunlight, buon giorno-ing cheerily all round and not, frankly, getting an overwhelming response. Flouting all convention and decency, this free spirit has his hanky tied rakishly round his neck, cowboy style, not knotted on his head. He wears brown corduroys with braces, and a bright yellow waistcoat.
Under a natty straw trilby we meet a laughter-line-furrowed walnut of a face, drooping grey moustache, bright blue sparrow-eyes whose lightness is startling against the weathered skin, greying slicked-back hair, and a strong aura of mischief. The dashing stranger leans chirpily on the bar and orders a glass of black wine, speaking in dialect. He certainly isn’t a foreigner then – not even one from Milan or Turin. Luigi reaches unenthusiastically for the wine-bottle. Now, startlingly, the newcomer steps over and introduces himself to us. He is Franco, our paths have already crossed, he says. Salve.
Our grasp of reality weakened by our recent intensive course in peasant respectability, we are almost as appalled as the rest of the clientele at this Franco’s extraordinarily free-and-easy behaviour. Luigi, to judge by the lack of eye contact and the heavy way the chunky wineglass hits the counter, disapproves mightily. The apparition goes on carelessly ignoring the iron rules of social intercourse we have been at such pains to unravel; now he is asking our names and shaking our hands, brazenly talking Italian. The shockwaves reverberate round the bar.
Are we on holiday here?
No, we say, we are working.
Ah, we’re Patrucco’s girls! What fine taste in women Patrucco has!
We roll our eyeballs. Luigi, politically correct in this as in other matters thanks to his extensive reading of l’Unità, snorts something in dialect. Franco continues blithely in Italian. Where are we from – England? We agree that we are.
His nephew brought home an English girlfriend last summer, he tells us. She wore her hair messy like ours, and T-shirts with holes in them. Franco didn’t mind. Unlike a lot of people round here, he announces with a casual gleam over his shoulder, he has no problem with stranieri. And he pulls up a chair and sits down nonchalantly at our table, knocking back his wine with noisy gusto. The glass empty, he leans round to dump it back on the bar, tips his hat on to the back of his head, whisks the handkerchief off his neck, mops his brow with it, and leans forward sighing happily, elbows on knees, ready to commune.
How are we supposed to stick to the rules when locals go around breaking them at will? Nobody is actually staring openly at us, but the feeling of every ear in the bar being pricked in our direction is unnerving. We suddenly know exactly how our own victims must have felt when we assaulted them in public with unsolicited friendliness.
We are at a loss to place this Franco. His style is certainly not that of Giacò’s card-playing cronies, who are busy studiously ignoring us. Nor is it that of cosmopolitan Diano Marina. Franco is no ordinary olive farmer, but some as yet unknown variety of country person.
Gaily addressing Luigi, who is regarding him with a fixed and sceptical eye, Franco calls for another glass of wine. No, he doesn’t always want to just see the same old faces, he says, knocking back a good half of it in a single gulp and giving his moustache a quick wipe with the back of a callused hand. This place needs new blood. Quite a few stranieri are moving in round here these days, did we know that? Getting themselves holiday homes so they don’t waste their money on hotels every summer? No, we say, beginning to suspect our forward new friend of some hidden agenda, we don’t. We haven’t met any stranieri except the odd Milanese passing through.
Ah, says Franco, that will be the Mad Milanese who’s moved in at the top of the valley. Comes through the village on one of those new-fangled mini-tractors with a trailer, brand-new, a load of eggs on the back of it? He will find that people round here use three-wheeled trucks for a reason. One day that affair will hit a rock and tip right over. Probably with a full load of eggs. Ah, si si. (A longish pause here while Franco savours to the full this salutary scenario.)
No, we say, we just meant the tourists who appear in here every now and then, looking for a meal.
Have we met the German with the mill by Moltedo, then? Or the other foreigner, the one from Rome who is doing up the old rustico on the ridge above the Colla? Franco has, it seems, helped all of them, the Mad Milanese, the German and the Roman, with their house purchases. He could help us, too, he adds with calculated innocence, if we were interested in buying something in these valleys.
No, we say, we don’t even have a first home, never mind buying a second one. We’re just here to work.
Franco caresses his moustache thoughtfully, preparing his coup. I only ask, he says, leaning forward and lowering his voice confidentially, because I saw you the other day, up there in the hills, inspecting properties. The house with the cherry tree… You seemed to be interested in that place all right. He intensifies the knowing look, tapping a forefinger meaningfully just below his left eye.
I can feel myself going red. Lucy is kicking me under the table; she told me not to go inside. This is our second encounter with the omniscience of villagers in th
ese parts, the second time I’ve got us into trouble. No matter how much you feel you’re in the middle of nowhere round here, completely unobserved, you’re sure to come across someone who saw exactly what you were up to – or who knows someone else who did. Never do anything you don’t want noised all over the Province of Imperia; especially picking up objects which seem to be thrown away by the side of the road. These will be someone’s prized possessions, with some aged aunt or uncle watching over them from a nearby green-shuttered window or leafy treetop, who will rush out at you from an apparently empty hillside to give you a stern ticking-off. This was my fate over a long stick idly picked up one afternoon as I rounded a hairpin bend. It was, as I ought to have guessed, part of an important and useful set of sticks for supporting runner beans, the rest of which were being sensibly if inexplicably stored elsewhere. I was accused of wanton thievery over the stick; this latest episode will be breaking and entering or something.
You got in through the window, says Franco, who seems to be enjoying my discomfiture immensely, and went upstairs and opened the shutters. And you, he adds with great glee and more tapping under the eye – addressing his remarks, thank God, to Lucy – you liked the cherries outside the door so much you stripped the tree naked!
In spite of the gleam in his eye, we start apologizing wildly. The place looked abandoned, we thought no one would mind…
Franco, with delighted insincerity, hopes Lucy didn’t get a problem with the digestione that night; those were Morello cherries, amarene, and no one in their right mind would eat more than a handful of them raw, unless perhaps to aid the stomach after a particularly heavy meal… He looks searchingly at her, checking for long-term symptoms. No, says Lucy. No problems.
Ah, says Franco, you Northern peoples! Digestions of iron! Constitutions of steel! Anyway, he goes on, demonstrating those socially irresponsible tendencies we will come to know so well, it wasn’t his land or his tree so we needn’t worry. The house we were inspecting with such appreciation belongs, in fact, to an uncle of his old friend Bacalè, who by chance is sitting over there, he says, waving airily in the direction of Giaco’s card table; and the unfortunate Bacalè, a large lumpy man wearing the regulation potato-head hanky, set off by an egg- and wine-stained vest with a forest of grey straggly hairs sprouting from its neck and armholes, is dragged over to make our acquaintance.
We shake a damp hand; Bacalè avoids our eyes. Though hardly a head turns, all attention is upon him, and many packs of cards shuffle apprehensively on his behalf. Lucy and I still aren’t sure that all this isn’t designed to make us grovel some more about burglary or cherry-thieving, and brace ourselves to apologize anew. But this is not what Franco has in mind at all.
Is it not true, Bacalè, he says, that Old Uncle Pompeo can no longer keep up all the plots he holds, scattered about the valleys as they are? Might he not be pleased to get rid of one of his furthest-flung terreni, in which these two charming signorine are interested? Bacalè, still avoiding our eyes, seems to be agreeing in dialect that this is probably the case.
We should meet with him up there one evening, this weekend maybe, Franco goes on breezily, we’ll light a fire and cook dinner alla brace under the olives, and both parties can get to know one another…
Don’t be ridiculous, we say, boldly ordering another coffee now all this company protects us from comment by Luigi. We would be wasting the poor man’s time, we say. We can’t afford to go buying property on the Italian Riviera.
Not to worry! says Franco. He will negotiate a price for us. It will be very reasonable. He knows we like the place.
The point is, we say wistfully, not whether we like it, but that we don’t have the money. Franco leans forward till his eyes are only inches from ours, speaking so low that his moustachios hardly move. Five million lire, give or take a few thousand, that should probably do it.
Five million… Slowly it dawns on us that the sum in question is not much more than two thousand pounds. Even we could raise that amount! We look at one another with a wild surmise.
Our second coffee arrives at this moment, a fact pointedly announced by Luigi as he delivers it. Franco may be prepared to fly in the face of social convention in many ways; but he has certainly not risen above his nation’s rules and regulations surrounding caffeine. The idea of a second coffee – thank you, Luigi – before lunch is so appalling that it is momentarily more important even than salesmanship.
Two espressos! Before eating! And another one, of course, after lunch… That will be three. What about our stomachs? Our nerves? Will we sleep tonight? Why don’t we have a good healthy glass of wine instead? Or at least let Franco get the coffee corrected for us?
How exhausting is this country? Everybody is so determined to save your life, and so full of fixed ideas. It is, for example, pointless to say that we might not have another coffee after lunch. As far as anyone within many hundreds of miles is concerned, the one after lunch is obligatory: civilization will crack, chaos break out, if you turn it down. How do they think our Island Race has survived all these centuries without their advice?
And no, we certainly don’t want our coffees corrected. We have already been introduced to this bizarre solution to the eternal Italian coffee problem: we won’t be falling for it again. Not before the sun’s over the yardarm, at any rate. The caffè corretto means simply that you drink the same cup of coffee you were originally planning to have, but with a small dose of stiff liquor added to it. The alcohol will counteract all the harmful effects of the caffeine. More than happy, as always, to comply with local custom if only anyone will tell us what it is, we agreed one lunchtime to a dollop of brandy in our coffees. (Grappa, naturally, is the traditional coffee corrective, but there are moments when the British liver quails at the very thought of that ferocious stuff.) The correction cheered Luigi, but had the direst consequences on the rest of our afternoon, turning the four hours bent over rosebushes, wax and bits of string under hot sunshine into endless torture.
Franco has seen us swallow his two-thousand-pounds bait; now he switches on to full power, ignoring our feeble protestations. Only three kilometres up from the village – six terraces, fifty good well-kept olive trees, a small but perfect vineyard, fine well with plenty of water, vegetable patch, house sturdy and stone-built, roof intact, and a spare roundhouse we can easily build back up and use as a cantina… Enough trees to make a couple of hundred litres of oil in a decent year, easily enough for us and all our family… He’s sure we could sort something out with Pompeo, we can probably pay in two or three instalments if we don’t have all the cash here and now… cheap at the price. Of course we can afford it! We’d only have to put down 20 per cent of the price to keep the offer open… and haven’t we just got our month’s wages off Patrucco?
(How on earth does he know that? He’s right, of course.)
Bacalè, who has edged off during the coffee confusion, is called back, still shuffling and shifty eyed. Intense negotiations proceed in dialect.
Aposto! Sorted! says Franco, with a decisiveness born of years of horse-trading. We are meeting Pompeo up there on Sunday evening for dinner alla brace. We are not to preoccupy ourselves about the food – Franco, it goes without saying, will organize everything.
As we trudge up and down our rows of roses, slicing, slotting, waxing and winding, we half-convince ourselves that we must have misunderstood the price. We must have missed off a nought – or even two. You couldn’t possibly get anywhere to live for just two grand. Mistaking prices is easily done in lire, everything is so riddled with zeros. The tiniest item such as a single boiled sweet, for example, costs a hundred of the things. Our familiarity with the price of individual boiled sweets may seem surprising; but at this time Italy is going through a small-change crisis, and boiled sweets often replace coins as a medium of exchange. When you go shopping your change can easily be, for example, two one-thousand-lira notes and three boiled sweets. The Japanese, it is rumoured, are stealing hundred-lire coins by the
shipload to use them in watch manufacture. If you take your Japanese watch to pieces – a thing most people are strangely reluctant to do – you will very likely find built into its casing one of the coins whose lack is so sorely felt in this country. This rumour is perhaps, like so much we will hear in San Pietro over the years, not entirely true.
We ask Caterina-in-the-office, our ally. Does she think we’ve missed off a nought? Does she think Franco is up to something? Does she have any idea why he is immune to the no-speaking-to-us-in-public rule, or why he dresses so differently from everyone else in San Pietro?
Not only does she have no idea, being, as she points out, from Diano Marina and therefore of a different breed, but she thinks the whole idea is deranged. It’s bad enough, she says, coming to San Pietro to work among a bunch of crusty old contadini: why on earth would we want to live here as well? And as for an isolated house way up in the hills, we must be mad! A rustico is only for staying in at busy times in the farming year; nobody’s lived in one full time for centuries, not unless they had no choice. Silly idea. Why don’t we come out with her and her mates tonight and forget all about it?
4
Logically, Luigi is the man to talk to about the renegade Franco and his proposal. Luigi has taken to sitting chatting with us whenever he has a quiet moment. He has educated himself in defiance of the class system that would keep him down; and he is still busy researching. Why, he wants to know, has the British aristocracy bred so many radicals? Is there any connection between the Labour Party and socialism? What is our attitude towards the Irish struggle for national liberation? He registers every halting syllable of our attempts to do justice to his heavyweight topics in our make-it-up-as-you-go-along Italian, fixing us with his mournful eyes. Frivolity and ignorance are not in order. My momentary lapse in a session entitled, I think, The Influence of the English Romantics on Tourism in Italy (I speculated that Lord Byron, among others known to be fond of the place, might be buried somewhere in Italy) almost put an end to our budding friendship. Luigi’s horror was such that he had to rise momentarily from his seat. Did I not know, he exclaimed, clutching at the table for support, that Byron had died fighting for the liberation of the Greek people? I was mortified.
