by Annie Hawes
Bello, bello, they said in their pidgin Italian, waving their arms delightedly at the scene of decay and dilapidation all around them. What a pity, they said, pointing at the half-ruined rustico in the crook of the valley just below them, on the edge of the olive belt. Such a lovely old building, such a beautiful spot, with such a wonderful view, going to rack and ruin! Was it Franco’s? Was it for sale?
Franco, as it happened, could remember the place bustling with busyness, with wives and children, olive-harvesting, tomato-bottling, cheesemaking. This rustico, like many others, had been left to rot well before the olive market shrank beyond recognition. Once the motor had replaced the mule, you could easily nip to and fro from your village home to your groves in half an hour; get on with the cash-crop, the olives, and dump the rest. No need to stay over now, no point bringing the family up here. And now look: no cash-crop either. Even the olives were no use. Nothing left but a view for stranieri to enjoy. Did Franco perhaps hum a few sad bars of one of those Death of the Old Way of Life songs at this point? Probably not: after all, this was a happy day. Inspiration had struck…
No peasant, Franco said to himself later as he mulled over this interesting encounter, would ever buy a piece of land unless it would contribute to his resources. But then no peasant would do any of the other things tourists did. These days all sorts of mad thriftless folk were rushing down the motorways to throng the coastal strip. Down in Diano Marina they wilfully exposed themselves half-naked to the midday sun instead of finding a nice bit of shade to relax in like normal people. On the promenade in Diano Marina, he happened to know, they paid three times the San Pietro rate for a cappuccino. They trudged for hours through steep olive groves, it now appeared, with nothing more useful in mind than to admire the same seaside from a different angle. Some of them, he’d heard, had bought up abandoned houses in the half-empty villages inland: places they used for just a few weeks of the year, not homes to live in. And a rustico was specifically built for staying in part-time. If they found this miserable dying landscape so attractive, maybe they would like to have a bit of it for their very own. Who could say whether they might not want olive groves you couldn’t make a profit from? Had anyone asked them? It would be money for old rope. Franco girded his loins and set off to seek out land-hungry turisti. An empire was about to be born.
Keen to make sure we don’t miss our appointment with Pompeo and nephew, Franco comes to collect us from Patrucco’s after work, driving up with a flourish in his Ape, the modern peasant’s beast of burden, an unlikely looking three-wheeled contraption which is really a kind of Vespa. A vespa is a wasp; so logically this chunkier, buzzier, harder-working version, with a cart built on to the back and a tiny carapace over the driver, is an ape, a bee.
The latest Apes have developed a wee steering wheel, but Franco’s ancient model still has handlebars in the cab. Only room for one inside, too, so we leave Patrucco’s in the truck-bed of this glamorous vehicle, waving nonchalantly to Caterina-in-the-office, jolting through the knot of rose-lorry drivers hanging round outside the gates, who cheer us rousingly on our way. A couple of hairpin bends later we stop to collect Franco’s wife, Iolanda, from their house halfway up the village. At a hoot from her husband’s Ape she appears in her apron, clutching a large white knotted cloth full of huge ripe tomatoes, a great bunch of basil making that overpowering per-fumey mouth-watering smell, and a bulging carrier bag. Iolanda, Iole for short, is tiny, lively, bright-brown-eyed. And she can’t believe her husband is planning to take us all the way up that bumpy road in the back of the Ape. Shouldn’t he get the truck out? Is he sure we’ll be OK? Yes, says Franco firmly. We’ll love it. Iole looks doubtful, but gives way to her husband’s superior knowledge of the eccentricities of stranieri. She hands us the carrier, apologizing for the frugal fare. Franco, she says, feinting a slap at him, has only just told her that we were eating up in the hills. Lucky she always has something put aside, what with the cattle and the horses, not to mention the basil plantation to worry about and the cheese to make and the olives still not finished pruning – Franco is more at home in the hills anyway than down here, you never know when he’ll turn up – but if she’d known there were guests… Still talking, she squeezes herself improbably into the tiny cab somewhere under her husband’s right armpit.
Franco puts the Ape into gear. As we’re moving off he hollers out, ‘Te!’ – Here, You! – at which signal a hitherto unnoticed large hairy dog leaps off the terrace above and lands slavering in our midst, causing panic amongst the foreigners. Iole, watching through the rear porthole, has a fit of giggles. Once we and the dog have got our many and various limbs sorted out, I have a quick nose in the carrier bag. Several yards of sausage all in one long meaty garlicky loop, a whole cheese, four large red peppers and a huge flat round loaf. As usual in this country, no fear of going hungry.
Lucy and I have always gone through the village on foot, up the cobbled mule path, which has a step in it every couple of yards, steps being no more problem to a mule than to a human. The road we now shoot skittishly off along must have been bulldozed for Apes as the mule was phased out. The only logic it follows is that of the deepest promptings of the peasant heart: never give up a decent bit of land if you can help it. It curvettes eccentrically round outbuildings, skirts vegetable gardens, cuts through lemon groves, squeezes between olive trees, weaving crazily back and forth across the muletrack, into and out of the village, hairpin-bending to overcome the steepness. Seven – or was it eight? – zigzag crossings turn the few hundred yards up to where we first met Domenico into something more like two miles.
Once the tarmac stops, we soon see why ours is not a customary seat for ladies. The Ape lurches wildly from rock to rock, and has the most vestigial suspension. We have to cling to its low metal sides so as not to fly bodily out every time we hurtle over a bump or lurch down a crevasse. The dog, intriguingly, manages to stay on its feet the whole way, using some sophisticated canine no-paws internal suspension system. Up past the smouldering dump we ride, and back into olive country again. New light is thrown on Franco’s pessimistic predictions for the Mad Milanese’s egg-trailer. It is hard to believe that any good could come of a business operation involving eggs up this hill, whatever the means of transport.
Now, as we round each perilous hairpin bend we get a breathtaking view over the tops of the trees down hundreds of hair-raising feet to the riverbed below and the vibrantly blue sea beyond; and absolutely nothing at all to stop you plunging straight off to your doom except this tiny Vespa motor, grinding horribly as it changes down a gear, pauses heartstoppingly, and churns its laborious way on up.
We catch the occasional glimpse of our safe, friendly muletrack, crossing this alarming road and vanishing off across country again, cosy in the olive trees, heading straight as a die for our destination; it’s all we can do not to jump out and finish the trip on foot. The sky is starting to go pink and streaky across the valley. Not long till sunset. The bothy of our dreams may be only three kilometres up the old pathway, but it’s more like six by this modern route.
Finally we round the twelfth of the tight bends that we will one day know so well that we have trouble imagining what visiting friends find so scary about them. Here another Ape is parked, this one in eggshell blue and even more rattletrap-looking than Franco’s. On its bonnet someone has painted the word TURBO in dribbly orange. Bacalè’s machine. The dog leaps out as Franco gets on with the ninety manoeuvres required to park anywhere in these valleys, and we clamber after it wobbly-kneed, exhausted yet elated by our turbulent Ape-ride.
Are we sure we’re all right? asks Iole, looking reproachfully at her husband as she struggles out of the cab. We are. We’ve enjoyed ourselves immensely. Franco knows his onions. Off down the path to meet our doom.
Bacalè and Uncle Pompeo, turbo-Ape riders, are waiting for us on the grassy cobbled patch outside the house, a hysterical pink and orange sunset going on all around them. No soppy bench for them; they have moved
a pair of manly rocks on to the patio under the dangerous cherry tree, and are sitting surrounded by sickles, machetes and the obligatory old sacks. They have thrown the doors and window shutters wide open to the warm evening air, and picked a large pile of lemons from the two trees by the side of the house, which lies on one of their sacks; next to it, resting miserably on a small crumpled paper bag, is, we see guiltily, a tiny pile of amarene.
They have seized the chance to do a bit of property enhancing; the terraces have lost that wilderness look they had last time we were here, and are newly lawn-like, while a great mound of grass and weed cuttings is piled beside them on the cobbles, next to the pile of olive prunings for the bonfire. Every now and then one of them idly throws an armful of greenery from the mound on to the fire, producing a great column of thick white smoke. Bacalè, only marginally more chatty than he was the first time we met him in the Sulking Café, gets up and drags our bench round, while we are introduced to his uncle; a man almost as short as Domenico but much more stockily built, with a brush of thick white hair, startlingly black brows, and designer stubble in iron-grey. The sprightly if seriously wrinkly Pompeo couldn’t be more different from his low-energy nephew, who is now lumpily starting to unpack the supper stuff on to a particularly greasy and repellent-looking sack. Iole snatches it from him and replaces it with her crisp white cloth. We’d like to help, but in these unfamiliar surroundings can’t work out what might be useful.
We settle down on the seat and receive our wine rations in paper cups provided by Iole, while Pompeo checks out our background and credentials. Pompeo is almost a generation older than the others though, and not bilingual like them; he has to concentrate hard to speak Italian, and disconcertingly wanders off into dialect whenever his eye strays on to Franco, Iole or Bacalè. And our own foreign accents and mistake-riddled speech are the last straw for Pompeo. We are all but incomprehensible.
We do our level best to answer his questions, while he peers hopefully at us, brows furrowed with intense concentration. Each time we finish speaking there is a long pause while he thinks our gibberish over slowly and carefully just in case he can extract some shred of meaning from it; nine times out of ten he ends up turning in despair to Iole or Franco for an explanation of whatever it was in good Ligurian. For some reason he seems to think that we’re going to chop down the olive trees.
No, we say, we love them, they’re beautiful, of course we’re not going to chop them down.
What did they say? Iole translates for him. Pompeo does not look any less worried. He is half-convinced, did we but know it, that we are planning to plant some new and outlandish crop – something like Patrucco’s roses, but needing less water – which will enable us to make a fortune up here, and whose identity we are craftily concealing until after the transaction is done.
He would like to sell this piece of land; the price Franco has mentioned is an unexpectedly good one. But he would not like to be made a fool of. He stares deep into our eyes; we certainly have an air of innocent incompetence. But as far as he is concerned, beauty in an olive tree is a function of how well it has been pruned and looked after; a matter intimately linked to how many kilos of oil it will produce next year. He hasn’t pruned them for the last four years; it wasn’t worth his while. Why have we said his trees are beautiful?
You’re not going to replant the place with something else, then? he asks.
Of course not, we say, mystified.
Pompeo can see at a glance that we are not a pair of Calabrian subsistence farmers wanting a cash-free supply of oil for our families. Perhaps we are merely the ignorant agents of our menfolk who have put us up to this purchase, and are using our innocence as a crafty front?
What about your husbands, he asks, after a longish pause. Do they have a lot of land? Are they farmers? Where are they?
Nowhere, we say, we aren’t married.
Pompeo understands this without Iole’s help; it does not seem to reassure him. The impressive eyebrows sink another few millimetres.
Franco explains with a flourish of international savoir faire that English men are cold fish, wouldn’t know a Fine Figure of a woman if… etcetera. But Pompeo doesn’t want jollity and innuendo: this is serious business. He tries asking what our father does for a living; maybe this will give him a clue.
An electrical engineer, we say.
Not a contadino, a peasant farmer, then?
No.
Have we got any brothers?
Yes, three, but they’re not contadini either. Pompeo seems positively downcast by this news. Obviously he can’t ask us straight out why on earth we want to buy a piece of utterly valueless land without cutting his own throat. He tries another tack.
What do people grow in your country, then? he asks.
Well, we say, potatoes, we suppose. Or wheat. Or sheep.
Pompeo looks at us sharply. You won’t do much with sheep and potatoes up here, he says.
We are beginning to wonder whether we’re not going to be offered the place unless we can produce some olive-farming credentials. Maybe he has a sentimental attachment to his land, wants to make sure it’s in good hands? We would love to learn all about olive growing, we say. If we bought the place, we certainly wouldn’t leave the trees to dry up unpruned, or cut them down, or anything, he needn’t worry about that. This is clearly not the correct response either. What is all this about our family, then? we wonder. Is it just that he can’t believe women could be in a position to make a deal with him? Does he want our menfolk to negotiate with? We try asking Iole this.
He’s old, he’s old, e vecchio, vecchio, she tells us through peals of laughter. She gives Pompeo a short lecture in dialect, which we decide is about the advances made in the legal rights of women since Pompeo last considered the matter. With hindsight I see that it must equally have concerned the importance of not looking gift horses in the mouth, and the pottiness of the inscrutable foreigner, female or otherwise, in the matter of land-use. She finally gets him to join in the hilarity, looking a bit sheepish, and makes us all shake hands. He goes on giving us perplexed glances every now and then from under the eyebrows, though. Whatever Iole may say, it is obvious that we are not being entirely straightforward about our motives for buying the place. Who knows what we are really up to?
Franco is the only one who has fathomed the depths of the profound misunderstanding going on here. Pompeo is selling fifty olive trees and a piece of arable land which just happens to have a useless rustic building on it; he doesn’t even store his tools in it any more since the rumoured maraudings of evil biker junkies, drogati, from Milan and Turin, who will steal anything movable to sell for heroin. We, on the other hand, are buying a lovely rustic dwelling with a large garden which just happens to contain fifty olive trees. Franco certainly has no interest in resolving this mutual incomprehension – the more unaccountable and mysterious is his selling-power, the more locals will put themselves in his capable hands, and the more percentages for him.
Bacalè has silently subsided on to his rock; Franco is prodding at the fire. Almost ready, he says, changing the subject with some relief. Prepare the sausages!
Time for our first Ligurian outdoor cookery lesson. Bacalè has cut a handful of rosemary and thyme twigs from the bushes at the edge of the terrace, which are lying neatly on his uncle’s sack by the lemons. Our hosts have to show us several times how you twist off a foot or so of sausage, roll it into a snail, and skewer it flat with one of these herb sticks.
We battle with our lengths of sausage, which insist on unravelling as we try to get the bendy twigs through each layer of the whorl; either the twig snaps, or the whole thing disintegrates completely. Everyone else has theirs done in seconds. As mine escapes for the third time, one end trailing on the ground, Iole indulgently gives me her apron to put across my knees and protect my dinner from the alarmingly large amount of leaf debris it is collecting. Franco the diplomat pretends to be too busy with the fire to notice our difficulties, but Pompeo a
nd his nephew can’t help giving us the odd sidelong glance; they are undoubtedly concluding that our unmarried state may not be unconnected with our culinary incompetence.
How do we cook sausages in England, then? We try to describe the truncated form and uncurlable rigidity of the British sausage – only to be laughed at uproariously. What we are describing are clearly salami. The second glass of wine improves our sausage-spearing dramatically. It must just have been nerves. A sharp, stabbing motion is the way to do it. And stick to rosemary. The thyme twigs are knobbly and snap at the joints easily, while rosemary is lovely and straight and skewer-like. Sadly, we will discover later that the thyme ones are just that touch more delicious. The grill is an old oven shelf, now red-hot, which Pompeo has brought from some murky corner inside the house and balanced over the fire on four small rocks. I seize the chance to be helpful at last, and begin loading the sausages on to it. Consternation breaks out.
Not yet! Not while there are still flames! cries Iole, snatching them back off by their skewers. You have to wait until there is nothing left but la brace, the embers. She thinks it’s hilarious, but we can see this episode has confirmed Bacalè, at least, in his diagnosis.
Amazing, the English digestion, says Franco; you even eat your food carbonized.
We go for a quick inspection inside the house as the moon rises and we wait for the perfect brace to finish forming. Pompeo thinks he’s got some real glasses in there. I know just which glasses he means; they are ancient curvaceous chunky lovely things, and at this moment I am eternally grateful to whatever power (probably Lucy) prevented me from pinching them the other day, sure that no one would ever miss them.
