Extra Virgin

by Annie Hawes

  I create a diversion by untangling Luigi’s binoculars from round my neck; we both have a go with them. Neither of us can find the house, though, even though it has to be there right in front of us on the slopes opposite; perhaps there are too many trees in front of it. In any case, with no landmark but endless olive trees, of which I don’t have enough experience as yet to distinguish their separate personalities, I’m not really sure which bit of hillside to focus our energies on. Erminia is so overcome by the way the binoculars bring the distance right up to her nose that she’s not much use at all. Look at that branch – I could reach out and touch that! she keeps saying, handing me the binoculars as though this particular branch had somehow imprinted itself on the lenses.

  Now we are talking about conigli. Got it: coneys. Rabbits. She is telling me what all the greenstuff she was gathering is for. We carry it into the shed where her rabbits live to dole it out, I guess, but she takes me first over into a corner where a small grimy barrel stands with an old sack (of course) over it.

  For the soap! she says, whisking off the sack to reveal what seems to be a barrel of damp grey ashes.

  From the fire? I say, not knowing how to say ash.

  Yes, that’s right. Later on you add the oil.

  I am finding it hard to connect anything about these ingredients or the general ambience with the notion of getting clean. Much later my Scots granny will confirm that all this was not just an hallucination brought on by heatstroke and sulphurous alcohol; her own granny used to make soap with wood-ash and pig-fat, she says, up in her old Highland home. The Italians got off lightly, then. Think of a soap perfumed with pork scratchings.

  The rabbits lounge smugly on their beds of straw. I wish I could join them instead of having to do all this brain exercise, willing myself to understand by osmosis. I think evil jealous thoughts about sisters in hammocks hot steep miles away, and yet so close as the crow flies. Some long pointy leaves have to be picked out of the pile of greenery, or the pets will get stomach problems, apparently. I join in the sorting out, although I have my suspicions that Italian rabbits may be just as unnecessarily neurotic about their diets as their human counterparts. Erminia picks one of them up, a big black-and-white one, and cuddles it; her favourite, she says. She hands it to me to stroke. Beautiful, I try to say, bello!

  Not bello, but bella! says my hostess. This Best Rabbit is not only a femmina, but is the mother of almost all the others. She seems to be taking it personally, the way people do when you get the sex of their baby wrong. The wine is getting to me horribly. Amongst all the gay chit-chat of rabbits, their foodstuffs and delicate digestions, we suddenly seem to be on thyme, rosemary, garlic… a few olives, red wine, a slow oven… While I’ve been playing along with what I thought was sentimental rabbit-lovers’ chat, we have actually been running through her favourite recipe for serving up the little fluffy darlings. I am horrified. Probably that was what she liked so much about the rabbit I’ve just been holding – not its loveable personality at all, but its reproductive and stomach-filling potential.

  No. I have some serious brain juggling to do to get to grips with this. Of course you can cherish your wee bunnies at the same time as gloating about how tasty they’re going to be. Do I genuinely think you have to hate an animal just because you’re planning to eat it? My own culture is obviously the weirder one of the two if I do. The effects of the ferocious beverage make it impossible to get any further with this philosophical problem. Again.

  As dusk begins to fall, I totter off homewards, promising to call again soon. Well, not really homewards; I have come by such a tortuous and pathless route that I am bound to get lost on the way back unless I keep to the road. Erminia can’t help with the right path, because we still haven’t identified which part of the hillside facing us, so tantalizingly near, so unreachable, I am aiming for. Erminia is right. The only sensible thing to do, I have to agree, if I don’t want to meet those evil bushes again or break my leg stumbling off a terrace in the half-light, is to go on seawards and downhill to San Pietro. Then, alas, turn back up the other side of the valley for the long steep walk up that darned muletrack.

  I am also going to stop off at the Sulking Café and have half-a-dozen espressos first, regardless of public opinion on the matter, or I will never make it alive.

  8

  Since the Foreign Females have moved into Pompeo’s old place, a surprising number of people have decided that it was about time they popped up here to check on how their abandoned bits of grove were doing. The land round here is divided into such tiny parcels that a good dozen people have a terrace or two of olive trees, or rather plants – they all just call them ‘piante’, don’t even bother to specify what kind, it’s so obvious – right near us. A couple of families have a proper campagna, still tended, complete with a well and an orto, a vegetable garden. Ours is the highest well, but several others are plumbed in, at various levels and on various terraces, to the sorgente, the spring somewhere under our feet. There is, we’ve discovered, a whole collection of these olive-free orto terraces in this bend in the hillside. Most of them going the way of Franco’s bramble patch: they’re too far from the village to be worth bothering with unless you were already coming up here anyway to do your olives.

  A burst of cheery salve-ing from down below us, somewhere past the well: not unknown San Pietro sightseers at all, but Domenico and family. We are neighbours now, he shouts; their own campagna is just down here. Domenico, sandpaper-chinned, moustache fierce as ever, has the Bad Baby Maurizio in the crook of his arm as they come up the path from the bottom road. We clamber down a few terrace walls to where their orto is concealed in one of the snug nooks below, squeezed into the fertile space around their well, eye-bogglingly green amidst the silvery-greys and earth-browns of the olive land around, startlingly tidy and ordered compared to our own swathes of tall scruffily waving weeds and flowers.

  He introduces us to Antonietta, plump and curvaceous with crinkly hazel eyes and short wild raven-black curls showing the odd thread of silver. Antonietta is twice as wide as her husband, several inches taller, and makes up for his shyness at least twice over with her huge sociability. She tut-tuts over how Dirty our land is, how much work we’ve landed ourselves with. Our resolve to keep our wilderness as it is has already begun to weaken: not only has everything grown nearly waist high by now, making it difficult to move around our domain, but it is deeply disturbing to our neighbours, who always comment upon it in this worried manner. We are beginning to feel faintly embarrassed about it, as if it really was dirt, the agricultural equivalent of never hoovering your carpets.

  Domenico and Antonietta have come up to collect their olive nets, which have to be put away before Dirt starts to grow up through them and ruins them. We help them shift the great cloudy white rolls piled up against a terrace wall in a corner of their land, and heave them into the back of their Ape parked on the road below. From the cab, Domenico extracts a house-warming two-litre bottle of wine they have brought for us, their own vino d’uva, carefully wrapped in an aged carrier bag resting cosily on an old sack.

  I don’t feel that I’ve entirely got to the bottom of this vino d’uva business. What else might it be made of apart from grapes? I ask. Do Italians have things like parsnip wine or elderberry?

  They certainly do not. Domenico and Antonietta have never heard of such a bizarre and revolting idea. Why, when grapes exist, would anyone wish to use such unpromising raw materials? In fact, it is precisely the knowledge that such outlandish ingredients have on occasion been sneakily added to mass-produced wine that has led to people using the phrase ‘wine of grapes’, rather than just ‘wine’, to describe the stuff that really is made from grapes, by known humans, using natural processes. Under Mussolini’s Fascist regime, Domenico tells us, experiments were even conducted into producing wine entirely without grapes. Why anyone should have bothered to do this in a land stuffed full of vineyards remains a mystery. But it has created a general and lasting paran
oia about bought wine, into which the more recent scares about antifreeze, wood alcohol, pesticides, have fed. Nobody in San Pietro would ever dream of buying wine from shops, say our neighbours.

  Domenico and Antonietta decide to inspire us to get our noses to the grindstone by giving us a guided tour round their campagna. They come up here a couple of times a week, they say, to do some weeding and watering and collect whatever is ready for eating. By their well at the moment is a great dark green clump of bietole, spinach-beet, which Antonietta is now busy cutting; she thriftily retrieves the carrier bag in which our bottle of wine arrived and begins to stuff armfuls of leaves into it. She will make ravioli tonight, she says, use the bietole to fill them, chopped up with ricotta cheese and garlic. Round here you don’t decide what you want to eat first, and then go out and get it: you go to your orto first, see what there’s a lot of, and base your next few dinners around that.

  We have already had a good nose around this vegetable garden, as it happens, though we didn’t know whose it was, and have spent some time admiring, and even photographing, the extraordinary marrow frame at the back of the plot. It is a rectangular construction of canes, head high, from which dangle a dozen or so four foot long stripy-green marrows as thick as your arm, jammed ludicrously into recycled ladies’ stockings for support. The stockings, full of sexy ladders, are tethered suspenderwise to the framework above, and the vast fleshy weight of the marrows bulges, obscenely deformed, inside them, swelling lewdly, fat and thigh-like, out over the stocking-tops. It looks like the wildest dream of some surreal naughty underwear fetishist.

  Our guided tour, however, starts at the other end of the Garden of Eden. We are proudly shown yards and yards of tomatoes growing in serried ranks up pointy cane frames: some of them huge, lobed, almost pear-shaped – cuore di bue, ox heart, says Domenico; others round and English style – tondo liscio, which means something like ‘round smoothie’; and the long oval plum kind you usually meet in tins, which will be minced and bottled in the autumn, says Antonietta, for next year’s sugo. There are more frames, these ones triangular, with the tallest bushiest green beans we’ve ever seen; two fig trees, one white, one black, near the well where their roots will find more water; a peach, an apricot and a pear tree up at the drier end; nearby, a dozen big prickly leaved artichoke plants: no, they’re not thistles. The down-covered thistle heads are just last year’s overblown artichokes. Revelation. Pompeo was right. We do have an artichoke patch.

  Not to waste space, rows of stuff that doesn’t need too much sun – at least a dozen varieties of lettuce, rocket, broccoli, spinach, parsley and suchlike – are planted under a melon frame, along with strips of low, bushy peas. Zucchini clamber up to fill the last gaps on the frame, peppers and aubergines and little bushy chillis, peperoncini, in full sun around it. Patches of basil for the pesto, Liguria’s summer staple and most famous export, are squeezed into every gap. Hard to imagine that Franco’s bramble patch once looked like this. Or that our scruffy plot will ever achieve such perfection.

  Even the canes for making the frames grow here, in a tidy clump by the narrow stone watercourse which carries the overflow from the well. For string you use strands of broom-bush. Talk about self-sufficient. Domenico is demonstrating their use, tying up the tall new top-shoots of the tomatoes as he pinches out the side-shoots. Incredibly, some of the earliest tomatoes, low on the stems, are already turning colour. In March.

  By now we have arrived at the marrow-frame end of the orto. We can’t help catching one another’s eye as we are introduced to the bizarre marrow-support system. Antonietta’s work, says Domenico hastily. His wife bursts into great gales of laughter. Non cacciar’ niente, che tutto serve per il camino (‘Throw nothing out; everything serves for the fire’), says Antonietta, once she’s got over it. Is this remark at all connected with her husband’s rubbish-disposal techniques? No, it is how they say ‘waste not, want not’ where Antonietta comes from.

  Is she not from here, then?

  No, she says, she came up here from Calabria to work on the olive harvest thirty years ago. And in spite of the Ligurians’ reputation for penny-pinching – so stingy that they use confetti for loo-paper, she’d been told back home – not only were the wages here nearly double those in the South, but on her very first job there was Domenico, man of her dreams, up a tree with his bastone, beating her branches for her. (Outbreak of naughty laughter.) And he hasn’t stopped since.

  Her husband grins happily, avoiding our eye, a faint blush appearing beneath the mahogany; somehow we all find ourselves looking over at Maurizio, now lying gurgling happily under an olive tree.

  He seems to be a reformed character, I say.

  Maybe he’ll stay after all, says Domenico proudly.

  The olive grove which surrounds their orto stands out like a miracle of labour and love against the sad decay all around. Olive country as it should be. As we’ve explored round San Pietro, we’ve met so many acres of ramshackle half-collapsed drystone walls, the olive trees messy and half-bald, surrounded by broom-covered sloping scrub, that at first we thought this was normal. As soon as you come across a properly tended bit, though, you realize your mistake. Here there is no sign of the encroaching wilderness. Walls are ramrod straight, terraces firmly horizontal beneath the ancient twisted trees, level strips of velvety green meadow weeded, hoed and sickled to within an inch of their life, Nature regularly beaten back into shape at the first sign of indiscipline. Only the odd patch of violets or clump of wild irises is spared here and there, pressed up right against a wall. The olive trees are meticulously pruned, branches elbowed and angular, bent low under the thick glossy weight of their two-tone leaves.

  It’s lovely, we say. But what on earth are all the other olive grove owners doing hanging about in the bar playing cards all day long, leaving their land to go to rack and ruin? Is there some terrible province-wide epidemic of gambling addiction? Are they really never going to be able to sell their oil again? Domenico removes his hanky and scratches his head thoughtfully. He himself has another couple of plots, he says, a hundred-odd trees more: he hasn’t been near them this last two or three years except to do a bit of Cleaning. What’s the point? We should take his advice and cultivate just enough trees to be sure that in the lean years we’ll have enough oil; in the fat years, every second or third year usually, you sell off the surplus through the miller. At least, that’s the idea. This year the price is so low it costs more in petrol to get your olives to the mill than you get back for the oil. Ah, si, si. The earth is low – la terra e bassa.

  The earth is low? I move my gaze vaguely groundwards, trying to work out what he’s on about, figurative speech being a bit tricky in a foreign language. Domenico stifles a laugh. A peasant’s life is hard, he adds helpfully, bending to mime a hoe and a backache. We will see what he means when we start trying to get our own plot into working order.

  Not just our land, but our trees, too, look very messy compared to Domenico and Antonietta’s paragons – not entirely neglected, but very hairy and wild, sprouting suckers everywhere. They’ve still got quite a few olives on them, though, even if most of the crop has already fallen squishily to the ground. They are oddly mottled, neither green nor black but a bit of each. And they taste utterly revolting, so bitter and mouth-shrivelling that you have to spit them out straight away. Is this because they aren’t quite ripe yet? Or because they haven’t been looked after properly? Have they got some kind of disease?

  The olive trees round here are the Taggiasca breed, says Domenico. Zero acidity level. Best oil in Italy. They’re meant to be mottled. And bitter is what olives are like, even when they’re ripe. Of course they taste horrible raw – no one ever eats olives raw. They have to sit at least forty days in brine, in salamoia, before they’re edible.

  I mentally take my hat off to whatever unbelievably desperate person first discovered the edibility of the olive – I’m sure I would have starved without ever guessing for a moment that the things weren’t
poisonous.

  If we look carefully, says Domenico, we’ll see that every fourth or fifth tree on these hillsides is another variety, the Palomba, smaller and more delicate; the cross-fertilizing makes a better fruit.

  We do look carefully, very carefully, but still can see no difference: it’s all right for people who’ve had a whole lifetime to get their eye in. Domenico finds our olive blindness hard to credit. After he’s shown us the fourth or fifth Palomba we give up and pretend we’ve got it.

  It is urgent, according to Domenico and wife, that we get on with our pruning if we want a decent crop next year. Easier said than done. Something like the way you prune an apple tree in England, we think, judging by Pompeo’s cryptic remarks about ‘opening up the middle’: but we were so distracted by his unusual technique for pointing out which bits of branch we needed to remove, done by hurling illustrative pebbles at them, that we missed rather a lot of what he was actually saying. Though we did grasp that it was vital to slice off all the suckers.

  Yes, says Domenico, unless you need to replace a tree that’s too ancient to fruit well any more. Then you keep one of its best suckers, leave it to grow. By the time the old tree’s had it, the offspring will be ready to crop. Domenico does the pebble-throwing routine in his turn – obviously normal behaviour here, then. This time we manage not to be distracted: we think we’ve got the idea. Fine. We’ll start right away, as soon as we’ve got ourselves a saw.