Extra Virgin

by Annie Hawes

  Is it a joke? we ask. The three varieties of policeman in this country are a favourite butt for humour – instead of an Englishman, and Irishman and a Scotsman you get a carabiniere, a poliziotto, and a finanziere: the carabinieri thick as two short planks, the polizia marginally less so, while the finanzieri occasionally manage to come up with a streak of low cunning.

  Do you know the one about the poliziotto, a raw recruit, who is fed up with being sent every morning down the long steep hill to the bottom of town to collect the daily paper for his boss? He decides to buy six at once to save his feet. Second day, all goes well… Third day, ditto. But on the fourth day he is called into the boss’s office; he edges round the door nervously, sure he’s been caught out. But no. ‘Take a look at this,’ says the Capo, in tears of laughter, waving the paper at his subordinate. ‘Two fools of carabinieri have had a head-on crash in the very same spot – for the fourth day running!’

  Carlo and Nicola’s, however, turns out to be a true-life story; but it is so good, involving as it does the outwitting of the hated tax-gathering finanzieri, that everyone is as keen as Franco to hear it all over again, Italian subtitled version.

  It goes like this: Carlo and Nicola recently bought six horses at a bargain price from a man who was about to go bankrupt – a man who had tried to set up a riding school somewhere a few valleys away and failed miserably. Some weeks later the Finance Police, timing their arrival cunningly for suppertime when all good Italians are bound by the laws of digestion and custom to be at home at mamma’s table (chorus of outrage), had appeared at Carlo and Nicola’s door, upsetting their mother terribly (another chorus of outrage), to announce that the horses in question were to be sequestered to pay off the ex-owner’s debts. He had had no right to sell them. The brothers might get some compensation but not until the court case was over, which could take anything up to five years. Carlo and Nicola mulled this one over as they ate. The worry disturbed their mother’s digestion so badly she was hardly able to eat at all (chorus) but spurred on by her suffering her sons came up with an idea. Next morning at the crack of dawn they rode down in cavalcade to the Finance Police HQ in Diano Marina, all six of the horses in question tethered together behind them, causing much enjoyable traffic chaos on the Via Aurelia. They had been told, they said to the policeman at the reception desk, that these horses were not their property. So they had come to hand them over. They certainly weren’t going to feed and care for six animals that weren’t theirs: animals that now, apparently, belonged to the State, in the form of the Finance Police. The policeman panicked. Of course there are no animal-holding facilities at the Finance Police Headquarters. We should have seen his face. (Carlo does the expression of blank horror, which his audience enjoys even more the second time round.) Taken to confer with a Very Important Finance Policeman, they pointed out that evidently if the police were unable to look after their own beasts, and wanted others to take responsibility for the care and feeding of police-owned animals, it was up to them to pay for the stabling. At commercial rates. (Outbreak of Magari!, Euh! and Ah, sì, sì in many and various tones.) Shortly afterwards, Carlo and Nicola left for the hills triumphant, complete with the train of horses and the firm assurance that no more would be said about their ownership. Lovely! The table breaks out in assembled sighs of pleasure.

  *

  It will take a good half-dozen feste, much detailed observation of footwork and many hours of deep yearning for us to pluck up the courage to take to the dance floor for the ‘smooth dancing’. As the spring wears on into summer and the serious festa season begins, some village or other will festa every single weekend; by August, a month of zero peasanting activity, they go on even during weekdays. Posters for these events are put up by the festa-giving village in every other village for miles around, stuck up on the officially allocated bill-sticking wall, amongst the black-bordered posters announcing local deaths and the white ones announcing recent decisions and decrees of the Comune. In our valley, we discover, feste are always Communist parties; while in the next-door Faraldi valley, reigned over by Christian Democrats, people still prefer the local saint’s day.

  At last, downing several pints of wine to deaden the nerves, we boldly lurch off into a mazurka, me with Pompeo, who just about comes up to my nose, and Lucy with Luigi. As we knew they would, our two victims have taken our disclaimers for modesty. They are unable to conceive of such a thing as a mazurka-free childhood. Both of them, once they have got over the initial shock and grasped how total is our incompetence, rise to the challenge with grace and generosity. And with a firm guiding hand-and-foot to follow, we manage not to show them up too badly. The feeling – in the bits where you are getting it right, at any rate – of being part of a huge mass of people all doing the same rhythmic thing at once is positively mystical. We are both ecstatic at the end of the dance, and certain that we now know how to mazurka. A theory utterly disproved when we try standing up together for the next one. Luckily, the floor is so crowded that our brutta figura passes, as far as we know, unnoticed. We are hooked: henceforth every festa of whatever persuasion, Communist or Christian, will find us lurking at the edges of the dance floor waiting to pounce on anyone who’ll take us for a spin. We’re still at it to this very day.

  Check for feste amongst the village posters; you want the one with a luridly coloured photo of an accordion player with a sickly toothy grin. Behind whom, in these modern and liberated times, usually stands a small bevy of lightly clad young ladies with huge bouffant hairstyles. You will often find that the young ladies’ features, on closer examination, bear a startling resemblance to those of the accordion player. These bands are family enterprises, and daughters and nieces will not stint when showgirl support is required.

  9

  Inspired by the Garden of Eden down below we are busy sickling away at our remnant of an orto, where Franco’s bramble patch is making a vicious takeover bid, when Sergio and Lilli turn up to pay their respects and check us out. Pompeo’s sickles have turned out to be a much less simple implement to wield than you might imagine, and so far Nature and her Dirt have been winning hands down. Italian brambles are a hundred times bramblier than their English relatives, and we are covered in scratches and clinging scraps of nasty prickly vegetation. Just as we are beginning, triumphantly, to get the hang of a certain flick of the wrist, something like the way you shake down the mercury in a thermometer, which sends your blade slicing through the vegetation like a knife through butter, we hear voices heading our way; people coming along our path, shouting their heads off. Nothing to worry about: Sergio and Lilli’s normal conversational volume is somewhere around a hundred decibels.

  They’ve seen our motorini parked at the end of the path of an evening for a while now, roars Sergio, and as our nearest neighbours and the only other people intrepid enough to live this far from the village, they’ve popped in with a bottle of wine to welcome us to the mountain dwellers’ club. Sergio is looking very un-San Pietro again, his head hanky-free, his jeans pressed, a city-folks’ T-shirt instead of a vest. Lilli is wearing something velvety black and sophisticated with a low neckline and the slinky eye make-up. Only their footwear – Lilli’s a pair of broken-backed slippers, Sergio’s a disgraceful pair of trainers with one toe flapping open – gives a hint of their hillside chicken-farming lifestyle. The bottle of wine Lilli now presents us with, surprisingly for mountain-folk, has a nice clean label on it and a covered cork, and has evidently been bought, for money, in a shop.

  How are we liking the Wild Life of the Mountains?

  Fine, we say, but it’s a pity about the brambles.

  Sergio takes a look at the work upon which we are engaged, which has escaped his notice till now; he sees our shredded wrists and ankles, the mess of bramble sicklings surrounding us; and goes off into a lather of outrage. Has some evil cunning peasant had the temerity to sell us this disgracefully Dirty piece of bramble-covered land? In this state?

  No, most of it is Franco’s, we say, a
s soothingly as possible.

  Typical of Franco! shouts Sergio. We should complain to the Comune of San Pietro; we could get him fined.

  We thought we might just ask him if he’d mind clearing it, say the wimpy Brits.

  That is no way to deal with peasants, says Sergio sternly. Especially the ones here in San Pietro, who are twice as mule-headed as the rest of Liguria put together – do we know that, until poor Diano Marina put that balustrade right along the bay to stop them, they would just appear with Apes and barrows and simply remove a chunk of beach whenever they wanted a bit of building sand? They are doubly backward and benighted, and worse still have no desire to improve themselves. Look at their reaction to his mini-tractor, which he has selected after weeks of intelligent study and research as the most appropriate vehicle for farming work on this terrain. Franco wouldn’t so much as read the brochure for it. They are cretini! It is important to show them, right from the start, that they can’t take advantage! And he launches into a long and passionate description of the various unkempt-nuisance-land by-laws we might invoke in order to achieve this dubious goal.

  Lilli – her husband’s megawatts of moral outrage are clearly routine and water off a duck’s back – decides that it is time to get on with the wine. Pitching her voice low and penetrating so we’ll hear it past her husband, the way people do over the radio or the TV, she asks if we have a corkscrew and some glasses. But Sergio is on the case. Used as he is to the Wild Life of the Mountains, he carries a trusty Swiss Army bottle-opener at all times. He interrupts himself to demonstrate this, and within seconds it has done its job. Glasses are not part of the everyday accoutrements of Wild Mountain Folk, though, so I go to fetch Pompeo’s beauties, which we have inherited with the house since they are old and ugly. Proving conclusively that crime does not pay.

  I return to find Sergio busily outlining to a rather glazed-looking sister a letter which he proposes to write on our behalf to the Comune. Topic: unacceptable bramble-patches which impede our cultivation of a vital vegetable garden, essential to our livelihood. It is useful to have the educated city man’s grasp of these matters, he explains. For example, his own house and campagna are right at the top of the ridge which forms the border between the Comune of San Pietro and the Comune of Faraldi in the next valley. An ignorant peasant would have no idea how to profit by this! But a man like himself can manage, by dint of sending endless streams of letters in highly competent bureaucratese, to confuse both Comuni so thoroughly that for almost two years now he has paid no rates or taxes to either!

  I pass round the glasses, hoping to distract Sergio from his mission to make our lives more complicated. Sergio is now admitting to a rather more specific grudge against Frank the Knife than has so far appeared. Franco, it seems, rented them a house down in San Pietro, an empty house belonging to a recently deceased aunt, in which they stayed for almost a year while they were Adjusting their new home-and-chicken-farm. Now they have found out that he was declaring them not as tenants but as agricultural employees whose lodgings were part of their wages. And hence paying no tax at all!

  Surely, I say, this is not too terrible? It sounds not dissimilar to Sergio’s own tax-evasion activities.

  But no, Sergio exclaims, brandishing the wine bottle, we have understood nothing! He doesn’t care about Franco’s tax evasion; there is nothing wrong with that. Everyone does it. But why did Franco conceal it from him? That is the question! Answer: because Sergio would have insisted on paying less rent if he had been let in on the truffa, the scam, that’s why. Moreover, Franco was already making a fortune out of them for the building work that he was organizing – and which he was taking a suspiciously long time to finish. You rub my back, I’ll rub yours. That, says Sergio, poking angrily at the air with the still unpoured bottle of wine, is the principle!

  Seeing Lilli’s eyes fixed with growing desperation upon his prop, I gently extricate the bottle from her husband’s grasp and fill the glasses. Taking my first sip of this wine-from-a-bought-bottle I am startled to find the thought crossing my mind, unsolicited, that it may contain only-the-good-Lord-knows-what. The power exerted by peasant certainties upon a poor uprooted foreigner, cut adrift from the convictions of her own culture, is alarming. I brace myself with the memory of how many gallons of this potentially lethal stuff I have drunk in my life so far, and with no noticeable ill-effect. Not beyond the next morning, at any rate.

  After a few sips Sergio turns his abundant energies from righteous anger to gloating. He still owes Franco three months’ rent, he says, and has no intention whatsoever of paying it. Why should he? Who is Franco going to complain to without exposing his own dishonest dealings? He has given it to Franco nel culo – up the arse! he says, rising to a triumphant crescendo and finishing off with Franco’s own favourite finger-under-the-eyeball gesture. There is nothing like out-cunning a cunning peasant. He laughs long and uproariously, with plenty of happy knee-slapping. Lilli does not join in: she just looks worried. She is right to worry, too, as we’ll discover later.

  Moreover, says Sergio once he’s got over the guffaws, he has now sacked Franco and his men from the Adjusting work, which still isn’t finished. They’ve got two habitable rooms now, and he will be doing the rest himself, with his own hands. It will be done the old way, he says, the craftsman’s way: and all in stone as Ligurian building should be. Franco was using too much cement anyway. Lilli’s worried look deepens.

  We move on to philosophies of life. Mainly Lilli’s province, it seems: she livens up immediately. The more we hear of their world-view – unimaginably avant-garde for a place like San Pietro, and probably slightly shocking even in Rome or Milan – the less surprising it seems that this pair have had to go and live up a mountain on their own. We begin to get the impression that our only neighbours are going to be rather controversial friends.

  We are not married! We will never believe that true love should be constrained and imprisoned by the law and the church! Lilli announces dramatically, hands flailing, just as I’m trying to refill her glass. She flicks the spilt wine casually off the black velvet with only a momentary interruption to her flow. She is eight years older than Sergio – she does not care! What difference can years make to love? They have two children out of wedlock, aged four and seven, Alessandra and Paola. Lilli comes from Rome, from a rich, cultured and respectable family, who violently disapprove of the too-young, too-poor and (my guess) too-bumptious Sergio. They suspect him, says Lilli in tones of deepest contempt, of only wanting her for her money. They have attempted to prove this by disowning and disinheriting her. It hasn’t worked. It will never work. If only her family would understand how little she and Sergio care about money! Still, they are bound to relent in the end – no one else to give their money to, says Lilli. Meanwhile, she and Sergio are spending away on their expectations. They have a small cabin cruiser anchored down at the port in Diano. It can take four adults, it is very comodo, has a lovely sun deck. We must come down and dine on it with them soon, out in the bay. We will sail over to Imperia for the after-dinner coffee and digestivo.

  Great, we say, wondering if we would survive an evening stuck on a small craft with this pair, surrounded by water and unable to move away for the occasional breathing-space.

  They have spent every lira of Lilli’s own money on buying the campagna up the hill. Now they are living, they tell us, on Sergio’s pension while they build up their egg business.

  Pension? We look askance at Sergio, who can’t be more than forty at most and looks vibrantly able-bodied. And indeed, he is only thirty-seven. But, he explains, he started work in a bank in Milan when he was fifteen. After twenty years in a bank you get an automatic right to retire on full pension if you so wish: a bank is a dangerous place, and if you’ve survived twenty years, you deserve a long and happy retirement.

  We find this only too easy to believe. Two sub-machine-gun wielding men in wildly complicated uniforms stand outside the doors of the bank in Diano Marina at all times,
while another pair lurk inside near the cash desks; every time you cross its threshold you feel distinctly that life and limb are at stake. Moreover, there are daily tales in the news of bank hold-ups, not to mention shootings and kidnappings, all over the country: the danger-money explanation of Sergio’s early pension seems only too likely. (Later, with a better grasp of matters Italian, I will guess that it’s just part of the complicated set-up whereby the need for a social security system is avoided, and official unemployment statistics kept down, by letting people not only in banks, but in railways, the post office, and anything at all connected with local government, retire at about forty. This system not only releases jobs early for the next generation, but also creates a comfortably privileged and conservative layer of pension-owning folk, who will devote the rest of their life to pottering about on their bit of land, cultivating their garden, doing a small bit of private enterprise maybe on the side, and generally making no trouble. In the matter of trouble-making, Sergio, though, is probably a bit of an exception.)

  The manager of the very bank where Sergio worked, he says, was at one point kidnapped and held to ransom. Sergio is embarrassed to belong to a nation where this sort of thing goes on! What must we think of them! When will Italy ever reach the level of civilization of the rest of Europe?

  It does, on the face of it, seem strange that kidnapping should be so popular in Italy, compared with elsewhere in Europe… until, that is, you’ve seen the regular helicopter shots on the news of the wild and desolate landscapes where the hostages are usually presumed to be being held. Anyone poor enough to consider turning to crime for money in England – or Germany or France or wherever – is unlikely to possess an isolated country retreat in which to hold prisoners: putting kidnapping pretty low on the agenda. But here in Italy, the poorer you are, the more likely you are to own some crumbling rustico in some godforsaken spot: a place, in fact, which is no use for anything at all, now the days of subsistence farming are gone, unless it is for holding prisoners for months on end without anyone ever noticing.