Extra Virgin

by Annie Hawes

  First we check out the one huge room downstairs, its back wall built into the earth, the beasts’ byres still standing, olive-wood pegs and iron rings built right into the drystone wall for tethers so the animals couldn’t have got away without pulling the whole house down with them. Not easily done, when the walls are a good four feet thick. The upstairs room is even larger, built back on to the terrace above; some old chairs, a built-in corner cupboard from which Pompeo extracts the glasses and a couple of large earthenware bowls. A huge table made of thick olive-wood planks that weighs a ton takes up the centre of the room, and there is an ancient cast-iron wood stove in one corner, its chimney tube hugely and unnecessarily long, stretching right across the room at just-above-head height.

  Pompeo sees me prod incredulously at this tubery. It works like central heating tubes, he explains; it is his own design, saves heat and firewood. The warmth stays in the room instead of flying up the chimney.

  And what, I ask, are all these long hooks dangling from the beams with weird flat round plates of slate halfway down their length?

  Mice, says Pompeo mysteriously. I think I must have misheard him; how would you catch a mouse with that? I hover uncomprehending, not wanting to be laughed at again. Pompeo does a small bit of mouse-mime for me and I get it. You hang your salami or bag of bread or whatever from the hook; and even if the place is riddled with mice they won’t be able to get at it unless they can walk upside down on a smooth surface like flies. Which they can’t.

  I’m a sucker for odd bits of ancient technology like this; I want to move in immediately just so I can hang a salami on one of those hooks and gloat as desperate mice contort themselves trying to get round the slate. There is no getting away from it: we have to buy this place. I’m sold.

  6

  Built into the back wall next to the gigantic stone-age alcove is the only modern convenience in our dream home: a strangely elementary bit of plumbing – a huge sculpted marble sink (and draining-board) with no taps to feed it; a piece of hosepipe leads from its plughole out under the door and on to the roots of the cherry tree. There is an old cork for a plug, and a bucket to fill it with water from the well. Pompeo is very proud of this sink; his dad pinched it from a disused church during the war, he tells us, a church whose priests ran away as soon as the Germans invaded. Better us than cretini of priests who leave their flock in the lurch, says Pompeo; and asks Franco to ask us if we’ve seen the two forks painted on the side of the Church of the Madonna of the Snows at the Colla, right at the top of the village?

  We have; or rather, we’ve seen a mysterious graffito in palest green, ten feet tall, of two objects which we thought were meant to be rakes, or possibly afro-combs. Some type of agricultural implement? We couldn’t guess what their portraits might be doing on the side of a church.

  Forks! For eating! To show that the church is only interested in lining its own stomach, not in the welfare of its flock! says Pompeo excitedly. He painted those himself, he says, with some other partisans during the war. Didn’t we get it?

  Well, no, say I, apologetically. In fact, even if we’d recognized the implement I doubt we would have got the point…

  Ah, says Pompeo, but in those days it was easy to understand. Lots of people couldn’t read, so they had to be more intelligent, he adds, rudely. The church has tried painting over them, lots of times, but they always show through again in the end! Of course they do. Nothing’s changed, has it? Euh!!

  (A long-drawn-out Euh! accompanied by slow, wise nodding, which is how Pompeo is delivering it, means in Liguria something like ‘I told you so all along’. Minus the nodding, and depending on the tone of voice it’s uttered in, it can convey anything from ‘Yes, of course’ to dismay, shock and amazement.)

  All very solid, says Franco, prodding at the roof with the handle of his sickle, studiously ignoring Pompeo’s irreligious remarks. He dislodges a tile, hooks it deftly back into position with the point of the implement. No cracks in the walls – nothing you can’t sort out with a bucket of calce.

  Lucy looks at me. I’m supposed to be the linguist. Calce? I don’t know. Calcium? Chalk, maybe? It’s a mystery to me, too. Franco and Pompeo get engrossed in dialect building-talk. Lucy and I wander off back to the fire and Iole. By now the sunset has calmed down and the yard is bathed in moonlight so bright it makes shadows. The fire has achieved the correct format, and a delicious perfume is rising from the sausages. Iole has also put the red peppers on to roast before retreating to the cool of the bench.

  What is this calce they’re talking about, I ask, what do you do with it?

  Well… it’s a kind of white powder, it burns your skin if you’re not careful…

  Burns your skin! Can it be lime, we wonder, visions of mass murderers and plague pits rising before us.

  It disinfects everything, fills up the cracks, kills the insects, says Franco, returning. You make paint with it, just mix it up in a bucket with water.

  Lime! That must be what it is. We think we may have heard of limewash, something like whitewash. But why does the house need disinfecting? I ask, nervously.

  Nobody takes this up. The need for disinfection is too obvious. Here in Liguria you are surrounded by life-threatening terrors. Infection is as one with draughts and dampness and sea-bathing out of season and the awful things that will happen to your digestion if you don’t eat your food in the right order.

  It comes out better if you add a litre of milk though, or a kilo of glue, says Iole. To stop it making dust that comes off on your clothes when you lean against the wall.

  You can if you want, says Franco, his tone implying that this is namby-pamby women’s stuff.

  And if you don’t want your walls white, Mariuccia at the shop has little bottles of colour you can add to it.

  Franco tells his wife rather pointedly that there is no need for us to know these things. He personally will be organizing the work needed to make the place habitable and it will be done by professionals. We will of course want the rooftiles taken off and the roof re-lined with wood instead of the crumbly cane it has at the moment; we will want proper doors with frames, and windows with glass, and probably an extension built for a bathroom. This will involve not only his skills in Adjusting, but in tricky negotiations over building-permits with the Comune, the Town Hall.

  We will later discover that this word he is using – aggiustare – sounds like ‘adjust’ and is about right for the level of home improvements we have in mind – actually covers anything from a lick of paint to knocking the whole lot down and starting over. ‘Giusto’ means ‘right’; aggiustare is just ‘getting it right’.

  We conceal, for the moment, our complete lack of intention to spend more than a negligible amount of money on our Adjusting, most of which we will be doing ourselves. If we ever do end up living here, it’ll have to be on a shoestring. Forget the Country Ladies. Bonfires and buckets at the well, sickles and axes. Ferrets and shotguns even? Wild frontierswomen: could be good.

  Now off to check out the water supply before we eat. Pompeo and Bacalè’s clearing didn’t extend this far from the house, and Franco brings one of the sickles, laying about him as we go at the knee-high vegetation all around us. Wildflowers fall before him in their thousands in the moonlight. The wells are down three high terraces from the house in a rock grotto full of ferns surrounded by clumps of wild iris, through the other side of a tiny vineyard which has been almost choked to death by creeping Old Man’s Beard. The four olive terraces down below and to the right of here are Franco’s, he tells us. (Ah! So that’s how he spied us up here!) And so is the adjoining bit of land just below the wells; it used to be his vegetable garden. Fine piece of land, good and fertile, as we’ll find out when we replant our own orto on this terrace. Franco’s not using his own plot just at the moment though.

  We can see that; it consists, as far as we can tell, of two terraces of rampaging brambles with three depressed apple trees just showing their heads above the tangle. Pompeo tells
Franco to tell us that he had a fine vegetable garden down on this well-terrace, too, in his younger days, and the ground has all been cleared of rocks. There are still some artichoke plants going strong over there, he says, waving towards the far corner of the terrace, which appears to have been invaded by a clump of giant thistles since he last inspected it closely.

  At first sight we aren’t at all impressed by the main well; it’s just a stone-edged circular hole in the ground, no wall round it or even a lid on it. A selection of grass seeds, drowned insects and bloated snails float on its surface. When Franco lights a match inside its mouth, though, we see it’s beautiful: shaped like a giant Grecian urn sunk under the ground, very wide and curved at the bottom, narrow at the neck, and only about fifteen feet deep. It’s built into a natural spring, Pompeo says, it doesn’t need to be deeper than this. Franco shows us the second well, a square muddy hole open on one side so animals can get at it to drink: this, he says, is as deep as the other well, and just needs clearing out.

  Both of them full to the brim and it hasn’t rained since January, says Pompeo proudly, but as city girls born and bred we’ve no idea what a vital resource we’re being shown. We’ve never met a house without water; we’ve never had reason to consider how impossible a home would be without it.

  Seeing there are two wells here, Franco says, he may as well reserve one of them for himself if we don’t mind. If we decide to buy that is. Plenty of water for all, anyway. Who knows if he may not want to reactivate the vegetable garden, or need water for his beasts one day?

  Unfortunately for us, Jean de Florette has not yet been filmed: and without giving it a second thought, we agree to give up the rights to half our water supply, no problem. We are however slightly worried when we see Pompeo simply crouch down and dip the salad bowl straight into the first, beautiful well amongst the decomposing snails to rinse it.

  Is it cleanable? we ask Franco, is the water drinkable?

  Pompeo proudly demonstrates how pure it is by taking a great swig of it out of his newly rinsed salad bowl. The dog joins him, ignoring the special Well for Animals and just lapping it straight out of the human well. We will definitely make it a lid.

  Of course it is; pure as a mountain spring, says Franco, no hint of irony. Just throw a bucket of lime down it and wait two or three days, that’ll get rid of any dirt down there.

  Lime again! We’d established it in our minds as a kind of cross between insecticide and whitewash; now it’s a water purifier too. Neither of us has a clue about lime. Where do you get it? What does it look like? Is it really the stuff people in thrillers use to get rid of bodies? If so, do we want to drink water with it in? We’ll save all this till later. We’ve had too much wine to care just now.

  You can tell how good and fertile the land still is by the height of the erba, the weeds, says Pompeo, waving at a bank of narcissi, a few unnaturally perfect blue irises, and few dozen gladioli-like pink things. Hard to believe these beauties are nothing but wild weeds round here. Franco takes a slash at them with his sickle, remarking that the land is very dirty – sporco, molto sporco, he repeats in tones of disgust, as a swathe of wildflowers falls under his blade. We can’t help but pick them up, dirt though they may be.

  Bisogna pulire! Cleaning is necessary! says Franco. It wouldn’t take much to sort it out, though, he goes on, just a couple of days’ work with a sickle.

  Euh! You could do it in an afternoon with a decent brushcutter, says Pompeo.

  Magari, says Franco pessimistically.

  Pompeo shakes his head sadly at this Luddism in one so young. He has just got himself a good petrol-driven brushcutter, he says, a decespugliatore; if he has time, he’ll come up and clear the land properly for us.

  Perhaps we could just borrow it ourselves, we ask, fearing for the safety of all those amazing flowers. But no, we couldn’t. It’s too heavy for a woman to use. This from a man who’s about two feet shorter than us. We’re too busy trying not to draw attention to our soppy bouquets to argue. We may do less Cleaning than they think, though, as well as less Adjusting, if the place is ever ours.

  A ludicrously huge moon is looming above our heads as we head back to house and sausages. Iole loves our bouquets. Relieved that not everybody round here is a philistine, we give her all the irises.

  Pompeo passes round the bread: each of us carves a thick slice off it with Franco’s jackknife, and he dishes a fragrant sausage on to it as if it were a plate. There is no sign of a fork but the twiggy skewers make up for it. They don’t just add savour, but give you something to hold on to so as not to burn your fingers on sizzling hot sausages. How wise these peasants are!

  The other men turn out to have their own jackknives too, which they produce from their pockets to slice and spear bits of meat; women, it seems, just use their fingers.

  Now the dog appears, smelling sausage and eager to join in. It doesn’t seem to have a name at all, it’s always just called ‘Te!’

  Iole tells us it’s already eaten a huge bowl of pasta down at the house and isn’t hungry, only greedy. Pasta! We keep our lips tightly buttoned. And rightly so: pasta is a completely normal thing for dogs to eat in Italy. Pet shops sell the stuff, pasta per cani, in huge sacks and the dog-owner religiously boils up a portion every night.

  Lucy and I pick up a tomato each. I put mine, whole, to my lips, ready to take a bite. I’ve done it again: the assembled company is horrified. Maria’s lessons have not got as far as outdoor eating etiquette yet. Firstly, tomatoes are inedible unless cut up and dosed with salt and olive oil. Franco produces the oil from another nearby sack – or is it the same one? – in a two litre bottle. Secondly, you don’t eat salad items with the sausage, but after it. We should have guessed that.

  Fortunately, it is O K to eat the roasted peppers as a contorno with the sausage. They look burnt to a cinder to us, all shiny and completely black. Just like English cooking, I say to Franco, who at first takes this at face value, then goes into gales of laughter and back-slapping. Iole whisks the peppers off the grill with a twig, neatly removes the blackened skin with Franco’s knife to reveal the olive-wood-smoked red flesh: delicious. So are the sausages; so is the bread. We wash the lot down with copious quantities of wine. Bacalè tells us that this is wine made of grapes, vino d’uva, which he has made himself. Why, we ask, do you all call it vino d’uva?

  Obvious. It is called this to distinguish it from the stuff sold in shops, which is made out of only the good Lord knows what.

  A quiet munching and slurping period over, the sausage eaten down to the last crumb; time for the salad. Pompeo has vaguely dusted out a bowl with one of the sacks. My sister starts to slice the tomatoes into it. Iole, squeaking with horror, whisks tomato and knife out of her hands.

  Like this, così, she says, doing something with the tomato in the palm of her hand, knife flying at the speed of light. In seconds three huge tomatoes are down, and the bowl filled with juicy chunks. Chunks, not slices. Bacalè applies the olive oil, Iole the salt. Franco rips up the basil leaves and throws them in too. Undeterred by my sister’s fate, I boldly pick up one of the lemons and cut it in half to go in the dressing. In the nick of time, Franco snatches it away from me. It had slipped my mind that of course you don’t put lemon on a tomato salad. Lemon, as you are no doubt aware, is only for salads with leaves in them. Tomatoes have enough acidità of their own.

  Worn out with our own ignorance, we give up trying to be helpful and collapse into passivity again. How do you eat a salad with no fork, anyway? Easy: dip a piece of bread into the bowl to sop up some of the juice, catching a bit of tomato on it as you go. We follow suit. It dawns on us that the older folk here grew up in a forkless world; this is why Pompeo’s painted ones on the church look so oddly agricultural. Forks must have been luxury items. He’d hardly ever seen one.

  In spite of our tyrannical hosts, we’re already in love with the house and the herb bushes and the view and the sunset and the sausages and the grapevine arbour down by t
he well, not to mention the two lemon trees and of course the morello cherry. And Iole who made the voluptuous fresh cheese we are now eating, and will show us how to do it any Wednesday, whenever we feel like popping in. And Franco beaming and gleaming, flushed with wine, hat pushed right back on his head again, who has offered to take us up with him one of these days right to the top of the mountain where he keeps his beasts. You can see right over into the Piedmont from there, he says. And the olive trees all twisty and gnarled in the moonlight, looking like the fairy woodlands of our kiddy books. And the tale of Pompeo’s great-grandad who built the house himself, recycling the stone from two roundhouses that had been here since the dawn of time, since the great-grandad’s great-grandad at least, and who knew the importance of facing house, doors and windows the right way so as to get the moonlight and save on candles… Though in those days, says Pompeo, it wasn’t candles, you got some olive oil in a dish and laid a wick in it – a bit of string or rag – and that was how you made your light.

  Even the graceless Bacalè, now we know he made the wine with his own hands (best not to think about the feet), and now he has begun to look us in the eye, has developed something akin to a loveable glow. Pompeo himself has unbent so far as to offer to show us how to get the olive trees back into working order, and is now busy explaining the use of that wonderful piece of modern technology, the nylon olive net, which will quadruple our harvesting speed. We can’t understand a lot of the words, but he’s miming it all anyway – he’s up a tree beating it with a stick, the olives fall, he’s down on the ground scrabbling for them one by one… he’s exhausted, has a terrible backache… but look! The net has arrived to save us! We spread it on the ground, pinning it together round the treetrunks. (How do you say nails? Tell them you use nails to pin it.) We batter the trees again, we lift the net by the edges, we heave, and the olives all roll into a pile. We have our crop bundled up into its sacks, on to the back of our Ape and on its way to the mill in a trice. Backs unscathed – no crawling necessary!