Extra Virgin

by Annie Hawes

  Dare we bring up the topic of Franco? Perhaps not. Not only is Luigi the only man in San Pietro who doesn’t enjoy a good gossip, but it is obvious that there is no love lost between him and Franco the Mystery Peasant. We will start, we decide, by getting Maria on her own.

  Easier said than done. Maria is much too busy setting tables and ministering to her cauldrons. Which Franco do we mean? She’ll be with us in a minute. Pasta with potatoes tonight, she adds, followed by liver and sausage. Sounds oddly English. Obviously we’ll just have to wait till after dinner if we want to talk to Maria about anything but food.

  As we wait to be called through, two new customers arrive; a pair of weekend holidaymakers straying in from the coast, to judge by the lack of string and knotted hankies about their persons. Yes: their linguistic handicap gives them away. They are addressing Luigi in Italian. And they are ordering sparkling white wine and a dish of olives: the classic pre-dinner aperitivo. Are they going to try to insinuate themselves into Maria’s dining room? Are they, like us only a few weeks ago, innocent of the fact that our hosts will have no truck with the foolish modern notion that the job of a restaurant is to feed casual passers-by on demand? We hope so; and judging by the expectant silence that has fallen among the assembled card-players, so does the rest of the company.

  Lured by the clatter of knives and forks, the low hum of companionable eating-chat, the mouth-watering cooking smells, every now and then a bunch of these ignorant strangers will walk confidently in thinking they have found the delightful country restaurant they were looking for: good peasant food, traditional local dishes, home-grown specialities fresh from the vegetable garden. They’re right, of course. Maria is happy to feed anyone who’s given her a bit of warning with endless deliciously authentic dishes, in terrifying abundance and with great insistence, as we know to our cost. But the bit of warning is vital.

  Maria will tell you that it’s simple politeness to give a day’s notice if you’re expecting to be fed a decent meal. Or a morning at the very least. She has much to say on the topic, and everyone is looking forward to hearing her say it again.

  Is it possible, she will ask, that the lives of stranieri could be so senseless and chaotic that they are unable to predict from one day to the next where and how they will be eating? Do they have no respect for their hosts, who will have to improvise something shameful from whatever’s lying around, and be hindered from demonstrating the full range and virtuosity of their cooking? Unless, of course, they want pasta out of packets, sugo made with tinned tomatoes: in which case they have no respect for their own stomachs, and have come to the wrong place. Her poor starving victims will slink out with a flea in their ear, or agree meekly to come back tomorrow with an appointment – having preferably sat down for a civilized chat about what is available, what is in season, and how they like it prepared. Like normal people. A gleeful cackling commentary in dialect will break out the second they are out of the door. Watching persons who think themselves superior losing face, making a brutta figura as they call it here, is a national sport: and shamefully, we can’t help but look forward, along with the rest of the bar, to witnessing the discomfiture of the strangers.

  We have understood by now that we are hardly any more foreign than people from other parts of Italy; they also count as stranieri, can’t speak the local tongue either, and are easily as glower-worthy as us. People from Milan or Turin, or any of the other towns and cities of the rich high plains to the north, are not just stranieri but Plainsfolk into the bargain, ‘gente de pianüa’ in dialect. Said in the right tones of withering scorn, this phrase conveys everything a hardworking hill-farmer locked in constant struggle with deluge and drought, with collapsing terrace walls and recalcitrant olive trees, might wish to say about rich lazy good-for-nothings who live a life of ease messing about in offices or factories, or farming that flat fertile land where you hardly have to lift a hoe. People, in fact, who have never done a day’s hard graft in their lives. Furthermore, among the crops that grow so smugly and effortlessly up there on the plains you will find – yes – hectare upon hectare of sunflowers. It is some slight consolation to our olive-farming hosts in San Pietro that it is always cold, rainy and foggy on the pianüa, and its inhabitants have to travel all the way down here to catch the odd ray of sunshine. But not that much of a consolation: evidently, they can afford their travel.

  Yes! The poor sap of a Plainsman in the stylish suede jacket is asking Luigi about dinner. They will have to ask his wife, says Luigi, playing to the gallery. Simple country folk outwit smug city slickers. Alas, just as Maria arrives, wiping her hands in a businesslike manner on her apron, and the entertainment is about to begin, little Stefano appears to call us privileged guests away to the dining room. There is a small amount of satisfaction to be got from showing off our easy access to Maria’s domain, and we make a majestic exit. But we’re missing the fun: we can only just hear Maria’s voice from in here.

  The strangers? asks one of our hanky-headed companions, already grinning in anticipation, when she appears to take over the doling out of the ten thousand antipasti.

  Coming back tomorrow for lunch, of course, replies Maria briskly.

  Tonight we get a short training session in the use of a bowl of hot bagna cauda. Pick an item from the pile of crunchy raw vegetables cut into sticks; dip it into the bowl, shovelling up as much of the garlic-and-anchovy-laden stuff as you can. Now, straight into the mouth! Well done! We do our usual transports of delight routine. Turning to the floor, Maria wonders aloud what on earth people do eat in England.

  What has been billed as potato pasta turns out not to be so English after all: a most pleasing mixture of fresh green beans, pasta, and chunks of potato spiced up with tons of basil-loaded pesto and fresh Parmesan. Pasta alla Genovese, says Maria. I am surprised to meet the potato in what, judging by its name, must be a traditional local dish. Until, that is, my erudite sister points out that Christopher Columbus was from Genoa, capital city of Liguria. The potato will have arrived here, likely enough, before it ever saw England. Now I come to think of it the tomato is from South America too. What on earth did Italians eat, I might ask Maria, before the tomato?

  She is doing a second round with the refilled pasta dish: surely somebody wants some? We hesitate and are lost. Just a taste! She swings into generous action with the serving tongs. Double primo piatto; what have we come to? Next a dish piled high with fat spicy sausages and wafer-thin slices of crispy liver; we accept with alacrity. New information: the reason liver crops up regularly on a Tuesday here is that the village butcher does his butchering on a Tuesday. No one here would dream of eating liver that was even a day old. Alarming to think how much dodgy liver we must have consumed in our lives so far. Maria can’t tell us exactly what old liver does to you; she doesn’t know anyone who’s ever eaten any, she says, and she certainly wouldn’t dream of eating it herself. How should she know?

  Once we’ve got her to sit down and she’s worked out which Franco it is, there’s no holding Maria back. Franco, as we’d feared, doesn’t have much of a reputation to lose by hobnobbing with strange women. We should watch out; he’s bound to be up to something. Most of his land is miles away up at the head of the valley, well past where olive groves and civilization end and the wild pines and scrub oak trees take over, where cultivation stops and the bare white bones of the mountain begin to show. His beasts are pastured up on the high pre-Alpine meadows and unlike the silent majority of the village, rooted to the spot, he is always on the road, travelling hither and thither to livestock fairs, wandering right out of the province, over the mountain passes to the grassy uplands where Liguria meets France and the Piedmont. He may have a few hundred olive plants, like a respectable man, but his horse and cattle breeding put him beyond the pale; he is known for a wheeler and dealer, hanging out with the Lord knows who, eye to the main chance; haven’t we noticed how seldom he comes in here?

  We have not so far thought of using the regularity of visits t
o this bar as an index of social responsibility; but we have, indeed, only seen Franco set foot in here that one time. Looked at in this light, his behaviour leaves a lot to be desired.

  And what will Luigi the Wise have to say about Franco? Hardly a word. Eventually we drag a reluctant opinion out of him, blood from a stone. He does not think that Franco is a very responsible person, though underneath it all his heart is not bad; and he drinks too much. Unfortunately, this does not make him any less astute. He is bound to be making a few lire for himself on any deal we make with Pompeo – in fact, he is already entitled to ten per cent by law for introducing buyer to seller. Which, of course, he made sure to do in front of a good twenty witnesses…

  Maria does her best to liven up proceedings. Does Luigi remember all the trouble that time Franco rode his horse right inside the Bar Sito down on the seafront in Diano Marina and let it mess on the floor in front of all the tourists? To punish Federico the bar-owner’s son for daring to try to date his beloved only sister, Silvana?

  Luigi refuses the bait. Yes, he pronounces. Irresponsible. That’s what I said.

  And that’s our lot. Time to move on to the Principles of the Matter. For years now, Luigi tells us, the only possible targets for unloading a few hectares of profitless olive grove have been the occasional family of ignorant landless peasants migrating up here from the poverty stricken South, from Sicily and Calabria. Once upon a time there were loads of them, unskilled labour, poor saps coming to tunnel through mountains, viaduct over valleys, build the motorways linking North to South, Italy to the rest of Europe. Where they came from, to own your own campagna, your own bit of land, was everybody’s dream, a golden vision of permanent security. That’s why they’re called – though not to their faces, of course – terroni: land-folk, dirt-grubbers, clodhoppers.

  The terroni would jump at the chance to buy, hock themselves up to the eyeballs if necessary. Luigi is sorry to say that they often paid well over the odds for their plots, a lot more than a Ligurian would have. The slow death of the olive-oil market meant nothing to the Southerners. For them the land was just an insurance policy against finished motorways and joblessness, a way to be sure of feeding their families. With a year’s worth of olive oil and a vegetable plot, a few chickens maybe, at least you won’t starve.

  So after their day’s work on the soaring pillars of the motorways, monumental reinforced concrete, throbbing power tools, roaring pneumatic drills, the quixotic terroni would trudge off up into the hills to the other end of history and work on by paraffin lamps with the sickles, shovels and hoes of the dirt-grubbing past, rebuilding the terrace walls stone on stone, clearing the old wells half-choked with mud and weeds, freeing the vegetable gardens from decades of rampaging brambles, pruning sickly olive trees back to life and fruit. Often as not with their stoical wives and scruffy kids working alongside them. Once upon a time Ligurians would laugh at them for ignorant backward folk, says Luigi. Now look. Everyone’s reduced to the same sorry state: subsistence farming, or give up the land.

  Franco, we gather, made a few bob brokering for the terroni; but the supply has more or less dried up. These days not even the Southerners want San Pietro land. Us Northerners may as well take over.

  Caterina and the rest of her compagnia – Gianni, Paletta, Bruno, Ciccio, Barbara, Anna, a good dozen of them and far too many names to remember – are in their usual after-dinner spot outside the Bar Sito in the thick of the evening traffic on Diano Marina’s main sea road, the Via Aurelia. We take our seats with them, unprotesting among the noise and the fumes. We’ve given up trying to persuade them to sit on the other terrace over the road by the sea, nicely shielded from the traffic by a thicket of lush palms. Only tourists sit over there. Caterina and friends come to the bar at this hour, we now understand, on purpose to watch – or rather, to participate in – the traffic. Which is not, after all, an undifferentiated mass of racket and pollution but a fascinating concatenation of friends and enemies, acquaintances, relations and neighbours going about their interesting and newsworthy business. Cars stop, blocking their side of the road while the drivers chat and everyone else hoots and shouts; messages are passed, news is swapped, go-betweens roar to and fro on mopeds and bikes, everyone catches up on the day’s events and arranges the evening’s entertainment. Hissing blue buses pull in with the latest bulletin from Imperia or Albenga, San Remo or Savona; scandal is talked, gossip exchanged. There’s nothing going on over the road, meanwhile, but a bunch of boringly generic tourists who provide hardly any scope for speculation; and some palm trees, and the sea. Why leave the action-packed roadside to go and stare at a bunch of unknown foreigners and a few waves? Who knows what you might miss?

  In any case, the service is terrible over there. The waiters can only get to you by trekking back and forth through the unpredictable traffic across a seriously ineffective zebra crossing. And they too, at this quiet time of year, find it hard to take an interest in tourists. Once we’ve realized that you have to pay almost double for the privilege of sitting by the sea, we are embarrassed ever to have suggested such a thing. And truth to tell, after only a few weeks’ training we too have got to know enough faces and stories to be as keen as everyone else to get the latest update: we’re already thoroughly hooked on this heady combination of soap opera and regional news bulletin, spiced up with a good lungful of carbon monoxide.

  Allora, says Caterina, surely you’re not going ahead with that absurd hovel-in-the-hills plan? Recount!

  Proud to come up with some good gossip of our own at last, we pass on the news about our wonderful offer. But the response is not what we expected at all: everyone is more disturbed than delighted. It isn’t just Caterina who thinks our idea of living in a rustico is utterly deranged. None of them can imagine how we could think the idea was remotely attractive. And not because they are townsfolk, as we immediately assume. We are surprised to discover that almost all of them have a family campagna or two somewhere up in the hills, with some retired or unemployed relative working it; and though you’d never guess it to see them so elegant and hanky-free, most of them join in the grape harvesting and the winemaking, the tomato-bottling event in September with the fires going on day and night; the olive harvest is fine too, in the first sunshine of the year…

  But it is only on these great social occasions that they like the countryside, when the fields are full of folk. None of them can get their heads round our idea of a country idyll, where you live in a house on your land, your vegetable patch outside the kitchen door, your fields (or, as it were, groves) visible from your windows, nothing but nature all around you. Here in Liguria, you live in a town or village, travel to work on your land as if it was a job. The idea of living alone and isolated up in the country is horrible, and totally foreign to them. English, in fact.

  On top of this, not a few of them have an alternative idyll where they escape the tedium of small-town Italy and run to London where the streets are paved with famous musicians and you metamorphose on the spot into Cool Incarnate. Why would we want to move the opposite way? Inexplicable. We should come out for a dance, forget all about it. All right.

  We go, we dance, but we cannot forget.

  Back at Luigi’s we sit in our cosy corner with a nightcap, alternately trying to follow the TV news and mulling over the house-in-the-hills business while we wait for the midnight-thirty earthquake to happen. The last few card-players are packing up, knocking back the dregs of their digestivi.

  A bold move, I say to the sister. Sidestep all this what kind of life are you trying to have business with a throw of the dice: arbitrarily set one fixed term to it. Attach yourself to a certain shack up a certain hill near a certain village, and then see what you can make of it. It would certainly eliminate vast swathes of the paralysingly endless possibilities in life.

  And no mortgage. The idea of a fixed home, a home anywhere, which I don’t have to spend the rest of my life atoning for – even if it is a very long walk to the Central Line – is i
rresistible. And this is a seriously beautiful home, short though it may be on mod cons. We could just camp in it to start with, slowly civilize it as we got bits of cash together. We could do lots of the work ourselves.

  The sister is not sure. Maybe I’m not either. We look round at the late night remnants of wine-laden peasantry trickling homewards out of the bar, stopping in a huddle just outside the door to count out crumpled handfuls of grubby thousand-lire notes. Maybe, after all, you can limit your possibilities too far?

  5

  Up at the head of the valley one morning, a year or so before our arrival in San Pietro, a certain horny-handed innovator stood leaning on the gate of the muddy yard outside his calving shed, contemplating the plume of smoke from the rubbish dump a couple of miles downhill, the depressing vista of ever-increasing numbers of abandoned olive groves, and the ruin of his neighbours’ fortunes. And worst of all, the absence of any bright idea which might turn the situation to some advantage.

  Franco’s conceptual leap, he will confide to us one day in a hillside therapy session, was brought about by a new breed of tourist: the hill-walking German backpacker. There might be nowhere near enough lowly terroni to take up all the slack in the wasted hills above San Pietro. But thanks to the lovely new motorways the terroni had built, here came the harbingers of the future: bare-legged and be-sandalled young tourists, beetroot headed from their senseless rucksack-laden trampings about the hillsides under the baking sun. Franco, from his strategic gateposts, watched the blond apparitions heading energetically up through the olive groves towards him, out on to the high pastures, and finally right into his yard, waving their map and asking directions, radiating cheery good-fellowship. Blessedly unburdened by any depressing grasp of the local economy, they raved on happily about the beauty of his miserable landscape.