by Annie Hawes
A sign of the great profitability of this kidnapping industry, unsuspected by us or by anyone else as yet, is already burgeoning on the farthest of the three ridges opposite our house. Of an evening we notice scattered lights strung out over there, along what appears to be a road. Not enough lights for a village, though, and too widely spaced anyway to be one of the higgledy-piggledy piled-on-top-of-themselves villages round here. In fact they are the first signs of a large building enterprise, the ‘villaggio’ of Merea, a set of a hundred-odd holiday villas with sea views set in sumptuous gardens, being built as a Mafia-kidnap-money-laundering effort. Soon this scenario will be uncovered, and the building work held up for a decade while the Finance and other competing Police Forces unravel, at their usual snail’s pace, which, if any, of the owners of the many plots of land are involved in the kidnapping and laundering, and which are the operation’s innocent victims.
It has by now become evident to us why Pompeo had the habit of taking his dirty plates down to the well, rather than water up to the house. And, as a spin-off, why anyone bothered inventing plumbing. We’d never so far considered this question, but then we’d never considered the problem: water is absurdly and unimaginably heavy. You only want it for tedious and ordinary things like cleaning your teeth or wiping the table or washing the plates; and the amount of effort expended dragging it about the place seems quite ludicrously out of proportion to the importance of the task. Having to heave every drop of the stuff up from its deep underground lair in buckets on ropes, and then carry it up a hill along a steep twisty path, you find yourself becoming more and more resentful of its indispensability.
Still, we have discovered why those winding devices that traditionally sit on top of wells were invented. Not, as we have hitherto unthinkingly assumed, out of a twee desire to torment future generations with ersatz picturesqueness. We have overturned the prejudices of a lifetime, and now positively yearn for one. Us stone age windlass-less folk have to bend back-wrenchingly over our well, heaving our bucket up hand over hand on its rope, muscles screaming as we try to stop the thing banging against the sides and losing half its contents before it gets to the top. Still, working our way through the birth of civilization step by technological step as we are at the moment, we are immensely proud of our first innovation: adding a few knots to the rope. It makes all the difference, saves no end of blisters and rope burns.
Will we confound history by leaping forward into the machine age at one bound, getting a petrol-driven pump and a water tank? Will we just build ourselves a windlass? We can’t decide. We have already witnessed some terrible battles with the tiny petrol-driven engines people use round here – things you wind a cord round and pull, like outboard motors on a boat. Pompeo’s brushcutter spent more time in tiny oily pieces on the patio than it did actually clearing anything, and Domenico’s weekly watering pump regularly does the same thing, to the accompaniment of much loud and agitated Porca-Madonna-ing, clearly audible from up here. It seems unwise to become dependent on one of these things unless we are planning to unravel the mysteries of the internal combustion engine and be able to fix it ourselves.
A happy fantasy where we installed an old-fashioned hand pump just outside the door and solved the problem was soon dashed. Some annoying law of physics means that these things can’t raise water more than a certain number of metres; if we got one we’d have to install it two-thirds of the way up the path. So much for intermediate technology. Back to the buckets, splashing all over your feet on the way up to the house however careful you are, contaminating themselves with vast quantities of insect life and vegetable matter as you wade through the grass and floral Dirt on the path. We have mounted a ferocious sickle attack along the path to get rid of the taller seedier vegetation – only to find ourselves foiled by a plague of brown bobbly stuff falling from the olive trees into our buckets, while some type of minute and suicidal grasshopper suddenly came into season and leapt into our precious water in droves as we trailed uphill, shoulders slowly wrenching from their sockets.
At last, following Pompeo’s wise example, we have abandoned the exhausting effort of moving washing water up to privacy, and instead have moved the body-cleaning zone down to the well. Our first great contribution to the house’s amenities is an al fresco shower area, complete with a marble-topped wrought-iron washstand courtesy of Giacò. The water for the shower runs from a ten-gallon plastic olive barrel balanced on the rock above; this item courtesy of somebody who couldn’t be bothered waiting for Domenico’s rubbish lorry and threw it off the side of the mountain by our parking place, along with two broken-legged dining chairs and a bedside table. According to the legend on its side, our shower barrel, and the olives it once contained, arrived here from Greece. Sign of the times.
Our grotto down by the well now looks positively Habitat; we have even wedged some bits of marble amidst the trailing ferns and the wild irises to keep soap and shampoo on. We have also, with much effort, dragged a big flat slab of stone over for a shower base, solving the major defect that surfaced after a few uses of our fabulous new facilities: while the rest of the body got cleaner, the feet got muddier and muddier. The stone also eliminates at a stroke any fears we might have about unpleasantly large grasshoppers, the scary three-inch-long praying mantises, and their various crunchy and squiggly cousins underfoot.
Now a piece of hosepipe siphons water from the precious barrel to a tin shower head with a strange lever-like tap, bought from the hardware shop in San Pietro run by the one-eyed Mariuccia; a shop where you can buy all sorts of unimaginable things from up in the backward mountains of the entroterra. Not just shower heads, but also candle holders made of recycled tin cans; hand-knitted socks complete with an extra set of toes and heels to be stitched in when they wear out; shoes with uppers made out of old sacks and soles of used car tyres. Something that would have been immediately obvious to the backward mountain-folk still hasn’t occurred to us sophisticated city girls: if we keep washing gallons of soapy water into the earth down here, it will eventually seep into the well itself and we will have no froth-free water supply.
Against all expectations, the day has finally dawned when we are to Do the Act. Not, as we thought when he announced it, another of Franco’s innuendos: this turns out to be what exchanging contracts is officially called in Italian, ‘fare l’atto’. The lawyer is down in Diano Marina, and Franco is coming to collect us; he will be passing our place on his way back from some cow business. We are to meet Pompeo at midday at the crossroads, gateway to the town from the valleys.
Time to become clean and tidy; and at this early hour of the morning, Lucy discovers a new defect in our washing arrangements. If you take a shower before the sun has had time to warm the water in the olive barrel for an hour or two, you are first lulled into a false sense of security by the stuff which has been sitting in the tube and catching the first of the sun’s warmth: then all of a sudden the breath is knocked out of your body by a deluge of freezing water straight from the still ice-cold barrel.
Lucy lets out a piercing shriek which has me haring down the path to save her life. But by now she’s already wet all over, and it doesn’t seem so bad. Evilly, she turns the shower head on me so I can share her experience. Now that I’m down here anyway and soaked, I may as well join her under the water for company, if not actual warmth. We splash, giggle and shriek in our ferny grot behind the veil of grapevines which protects us from any binocular wielders who may be lurking in Diano Arentino’s campanile across the valley. Sunlit silver-green haziness of mountains to the right, intense blues of sea and sky to the left, luxurious froth cascading down my body… whence comes this strange compulsion to advertise something?
It is at this idyllic moment, of course, that we hear revving and hooting from the parking place at the end of our path, followed by shouts of Salve! from somewhere horribly close.
Franco has come almost an hour early. We run like the wind for the house, myriads of things with too many legs crunching u
nder our naked feet, clutching scraps of towel and damp clothing to us; just manage to get inside the house as Franco rounds the big modesty rock which (fortunately) conceals the house from the top path.
Peeping out through the window, we see that Franco, in his natty straw hat, is carrying what looks like a large bag of cement balanced on his shoulder, his best yellow waistcoat and corduroy Mellors-the-gamekeeper outfit protected by one of his collection of old sacks.
Calce! he shouts. Lime! I’ve brought you a sack of lime!
Using the bench outside the door, perversely, for the lime, he carefully spreads his sack on a step, sits down on it mopping his brow, and waits courteously for us to appear at the door.
Instead of his Ape, today Franco is driving the same red lorry in which the nipoti usually fly up and down our hairpin bends. Once we’ve climbed in and taken off across the boulders, we seek information. What sort of nipoti are Carlo and Nicola? Are you their uncle or their grandad?
This simple question predictably unleashes an outburst of soul-baring. We are not bothered in the least; by now we are used to our role as emotional blotting paper.
The nipoti are the sons of his sister Silvana, the person he loves most on earth. He is closer to her, he says, than to his wife even; though (hastily) he would never dream of telling Iole that. He knows, he says, that for example if one day he was to find himself, by some desperate combination of circumstances, lying penniless and despairing in a gutter in some nameless spot – I can’t remember if he actually said drunk, though that is the image I have retained of this fictional moment of high drama – Silvana would somehow sense it; she would appear, come hell or high water, to rescue him. She would not criticize him or castigate him in any way; she would just take him in her arms and comfort him with boundless loving care. That is how close they are. Like this, he says, raising the first two fingers of his right hand, tightly crossed, to show us, and allowing the lorry to lurch horribly towards the precipice as it breasts a collection of small rocks. And because of her he loves his nipoti as if they were his own sons.
In fact, as Franco goes on Sharing, we get the impression that the poor son is distinctly out of favour at the moment. He has, it seems, opted out of the cattle and horse business in favour of a girl’s blouse of a job running the restaurant at Diano Arentino – l’Usignolo (the Nightingale). He is, says Franco firmly, a deficente.
We try asking how many antipasti you get at the Usignolo, just in case we need to go and try the place out. This, we have discovered, is the best index of good country cooking – the further up into the hills you go, the better is the food and the more plentiful the antipasti, while your bill shrinks accordingly. But Franco is not interested in the quality of the restaurant. He has never eaten there at all, he says, not once. He eats at home. He’s got too much to do to waste time on such nonsense.
Poor son. Carlo and Nicola, meanwhile, good manly boys, have gone into business with their old uncle, and are the apple of his eye. Nicola is the one all the girls fancy; the one he has told us about before, who had an English girlfriend last year. Franco is worried, he says, that this is bad for Carlo, who is becoming demoralized. Carlo is very good-looking too, and is actually more serio and more simpatico than his brother, but he never seems to get the girl. It is sad, he says, looking us both over speculatively, that Carlo can’t find someone who will appreciate his finer points and not just throw themselves blindly at Nicola without giving Carlo a chance.
In fact, we know what Franco means about Nicola; but we both thought he had a bit of a ‘how-fabulous-I-am’ problem and preferred his brother. Can Franco have managed, in his cunning-peasant way, to detect this? Even so, we can’t believe this walnut-featured farmer is actually trying to set a pair of respectable foreign women, clients of his in a manner of speaking, up with one of his nephews in this shameless way.
Anyhow, says Franco, Carlo has much the better business-head of the two; if a woman was looking to settle down, she couldn’t do better than choose him. His uncle won’t forget him when it comes to the inheritance, either, he adds; and checks out how this has gone down with a nifty sideways glance.
Is it, even more disturbingly, a wife rather than a night of passion that Franco is seeking for Carlo? Any embryonic designs we may have been harbouring on this pair of nipoti rapidly evaporate; imagine getting embroiled in Franco’s family with him watching over you patriarchally, blackmailing you with olive trees or cows or whatever this inheritance may be. It is borne in upon us, rather tragically, that we must never become romantically involved with anyone from San Pietro. Imagine the awful consequences if you realized you’d made a mistake. You’d never be able to show your face here again. Still, there’s the whole of the rest of the world to choose from: we will manage to go on importing our boyfriends for a good few years, until I finally fall by the wayside.
10
At the crossroads we collect Pompeo, almost unrecognizable in shirt and tie, creaking shiny shoes and hair all flattened down and hanky-free. We see, as we cross the level-crossing into Diano Marina proper, the first signs of the annual tricking-out for the tourist season – fairy lights, banners, signs to a funfair.
But the tourists, Franco says, won’t start arriving in their masses for a while yet. May and June will be relatively quiet, mostly just Germans, July not too bad either until midway; it is when the big factories of Milan and Turin close down for the month that the trouble will start. August, Pompeo agrees, is a kind of siege month; there will be nowhere to park; nowhere to walk; nowhere to sit down unless you don’t mind paying three times the normal rate for your refreshment. The only way to deal with it is by stockpiling necessities and staying up in San Pietro, never venturing beyond the level-crossing until the 25th, when the Enemy packs up and leaves. We won’t be able to sit on the beach; Germans and people from the Pianüa book the deckchairs by the month on the private beaches; the two small public ones heave with the frying flesh of Fiat workers. We won’t be able to swim, even; the bay will be jampacked with tangled bodies. Lucy and I have started to get the hang of the local predilection for doom and despair, and decide to take all this with a pinch of salt.
There are already a few lightly bronzed family groups straggling about the place now, kids sucking on ice cream cones, parents struggling under their burdens of beach gear. Pompeo glares horribly at the tall blond healthy happy well-nourished family now striding jollily past us.
Tedeschi! he spits out, sotto voce, as they pass.
Some new Ligurian swear word, we deduce. What does it mean?
Not a swear word. It means people from Germania, explains Franco. Germans. Ah.
Pompeo rants on. All full of money! Pieni di soldi! It’s the Occupation all over again.
Aren’t these Germans a bit young, though? we ask. They can’t have had anything to do with the war.
That, says Pompeo, drawing himself up to his full height to wipe the smiles off our faces, just demonstrates Nazifascista cunning. They couldn’t do it by force, but they’ve beaten us with the Deutschmark. Pieni di soldi!
Here he really does go off into dialect, having accidentally caught Franco’s eye, and we are lost.
But we already know the stories from Giacò and Luigi – the villages half starved, the people living on rationed flour stretched with ground-up chestnuts, desperately grubbing about the hillsides for roots and wild greens. When they weren’t getting shot in Nazi reprisals or having to take to the hills with the Partisans. The war is oddly close in history here, nothing like in our own country where it seems to belong to another world. But then, I suppose everything was simpler for the British, who only had to follow their own country’s lead, blindly or not. Here, though, first under Mussolini and then under German occupation, people had to decide for themselves. First, whether to put up with Fascism; then whether to take to the hills and fight back in isolated bands with no outside support and precious little hope of winning. Heroically, the Communist valleys round here chose to fight back,
and the villages went on feeding and succouring their Partisans in the teeth of horrifyingly savage reprisals. Towards the end of the war, we’ve been told, every dead German meant ten villagers’ lives, the victims put up against a wall in the piazza and shot dead in cold blood. We’ve been shown the bullet marks, which are still there. Imagine living here in those times, having to watch the people who’d killed your father or mother, neighbours or cousins, people who stood for everything you hated, parading about the streets of your own town free from retribution, smug and untouchable, ordering you around. Pretty unforgettable.
Every village round here has its bullet holes, its little marble plaque in the piazza commemorating its Victims of Nazifascist Barbarism. (And, a few feet away, another plaque put up not by locals, but by the Italian State: for all the Fallen, left, right or neuter. In the interest of National Unity, no doubt. There are never any flowers under these ones, though.) The main piazza in Diano Marina is called Piazza of the Martyrs of the Liberation: a statue dedicated to the partisans and a poem about Resistance Heroes and the Fury of the Barbaria Nazifascista and all. Still, this is the nearest bit of the Mediterranean if you drive straight down from Germany. Probably, insulated unwittingly by language, money and B M Ws, the Tedeschi just holiday innocently by the sea, without an inkling of what went on round here forty years ago.
People still think about the war a lot, here, don’t they? I say stupidly.
Pompeo gives me a freezing look, and does his best to relieve his feelings with a stunningly long litany of insults and blasphemies – Cazzi di Tedeschi! Porca Miseria! Putana la Madonna! – which only stops when we collapse into giggles at the most bizarre one we’ve heard so far – Lurida Vacca, Lurid Cow.
