by Annie Hawes
Now we’ve made him lose his thread. We may laugh, says Pompeo, but look how swiftly and efficiently the ruthless German race made sure there’d be plenty of empty properties to buy up when the Occupation was over, once they’d seen how pleasant Liguria was compared to their own miserable land. Sinister, or what?… Not that he blames Franco for helping speed up the process, not at all…
Franco is posing now as a man of reason, sensible and unprejudiced, telling Pompeo that we can’t blame the children for the sins of their fathers. These words don’t necessarily represent his deepest feelings. A year or two from now, down at the San Pietro festa, we will see another side of Franco. He is standing chatting with his nephews in the piazza, where everyone is dancing, dining and drinking; he is also eyeing up a table full of jolly middle-aged German tourists enjoying a delightful evening with the simple Italian peasants. Franco looks entirely relaxed and casual, if not entirely sober: he drains the last drops from a bottle of beer, hat pushed back on his head as usual, festive yellow waistcoat unbuttoned. Now he links his hands behind his back, still holding the empty bottle. We are amazed by what happens next; thinking he is unobserved, he suddenly flick-throws the beer bottle from behind his back. It arches high into the air and crash-lands with pinpoint accuracy smack in the middle of the Germans’ dinner table, covering them in pasta and wine, smashing several glasses. (Hours of practice or what? Definite signs of a misspent youth.) Panic breaks out. Now, along with everyone else, Franco rushes solicitously over to his victims.
Madonna! Who could have done such a thing? He joins everyone else in looking around for the evil culprits, his face an entirely convincing mask of shocked innocence. To everyone but us, that is.
Alberti the lawyer is a revelation, a different breed of being from anyone we’ve met here so far. He is straight out of Italian Vogue, Armani-suited, English-brogued, smooth and cultivated. Alberti’s anglophilia extends well beyond his footwear; his English is good, if a little stilted, and his house is surrounded by an outlandishly smooth and unnaturally green English lawn, on which, he tells us, one has to lavish enormous amounts of care in this climate. He has an irrigation system actually built into it, under the turf: minute sprinkler-heads rise up out of it at the touch of a button, swirling a mist of water across the grass and our ankles as he demonstrates it. We seem to have wandered into another world: yet the cosmopolitan Alberti is entirely unperturbed to find himself doing business with the pair of dialect-speaking hill-billies we have brought with us. Of course they are perfectly ordinary to him, he has grown up alongside people like this, whatever his present predilections may be, and it is we English sisters who are the more disturbing presence. We horrify him with our casual attitude to lawns, our ignorance of the correct procedures; he certainly would not dream of sitting on his. And walk across it?… Please!
His office is on the first floor of this rococo and objets d’art-laden house in which he lives with his father and mother – normal behaviour in Italy, where nobody leaves home unless it is to marry or, if absolutely necessary, to seek better work opportunities elsewhere. To leave for any other reason implies that you don’t care about your parents at all, are happy to insult and shame them publicly, in front of the rest of the family and the town. We have no idea of all this as yet, though, and add it to the list of Alberti’s weirdnesses.
His office is all leather chesterfields, mahogany desks and carved cigar boxes; a good stab at an Englishman’s smoking room circa 1910. He may be much too young ever to have sighted Maria’s angelic English of the good old days, but Alberti seems to be infected with the same nostalgia for them. We should have got ourselves up in tweeds and hand-crafted walking shoes… a hint of silk at throat and hem, an understated string of pearls… he is clearly deeply disappointed in us as representatives of our race.
Signor Alberti’s slightly obsessive cultural interests are not exclusively English, though; he is keen to point out the beautiful sixteenth-century carved stone Madonna who watches over the room from a high carved plinth; she was not made for a church, as we may have imagined, he tells us, but for a niche over the front door of a merchant’s house in Genoa. He adores Italian statuettes of this period, has a small collection of them, he says, running his fingers possessively over her curves.
We sign all our bits of paper, everything in triplicate and in a legal Italian so obscure we haven’t the faintest idea what it means. Pompeo agrees that it is incomprehensible, which is some consolation; Franco remains uncharacteristically silent and aloof throughout the reading and signing procedure. We are surprised to see that under ‘profession’ Pompeo is listed as ‘Forest Guard’. We thought he just did olives. This isn’t the moment to investigate, though. Alberti has risen to leave the room: strategic move for which we have been primed by Franco. He is not off to fetch a pen, as he claims, but to allow us to give Pompeo the envelope that contains the undeclared portion of the price. This, apparently, is perfectly normal procedure: no one, either buyer or seller, would dream of admitting to the true value of their property. No one expects them to. Not even the tax authorities we’re defrauding.
Franco’s silence, meanwhile, is covering another dark secret; later on, in one of those wine-lubricated therapy-moments, with no one else around, he will reveal that he has never learned to read, and the only thing he can write is his own name. A revelation that casts new light on his attitude to Sergio’s Latest Farming Technology brochures. No wonder he agreed so readily that Alberti’s documents were incomprehensible, we say.
Euh! says Franco: you don’t let on about that sort of thing (finger under eye) to cunning city lawyers who might use the information in some underhand way. You don’t want to go giving them any more scope to take advantage than they’ve already got.
Any advantage being taken on this occasion is by Franco himself, who has got his own special and equally incomprehensible ‘well-reserving’ document, twice as long as our own house-purchase one. Its length has something to do with Franco owning the land adjoining ours: lots of extra bureaucracy created by some wildly optimistic legislation, over a century old by now and still showing no sign of success, aimed at getting people to go and live on their land, rather than waste several hours of the working day travelling to and fro from their village homes – a tradition which some turn-of-the-century Minister for Agriculture deduced went some way to explain Italy’s relatively abysmal productivity. This particular bit of legislation was designed to transform tiny scattered peasant plots into large cost-effective modern farms by giving next door neighbours extra land rights. It may have been futile as far as the original aim goes, but Franco is doing his best to turn it to some use, as we will find out later.
We finally get away from Alberti’s, taking care not to step on his jewel-like lawn as we call out our last ‘ciao’s. Once we are out of earshot, Pompeo, who has begun to grasp that some of the odd things we do are done out of ignorance and not perversity (thank the Lord) – tells us we shouldn’t say ciao except to children or people we are intimate with. Otherwise it looks like lack of respect. I cringe inwardly thinking of how many times I must have dissed old folk in San Pietro.
What about saying salve, the way you all do, I ask, is that OK?
Neither of our guides is quite sure if this word is dialect or Italian. But it certainly isn’t disrespectful. We resolve to salve as much as possible in future.
What’s this about your being a Forest Guard? we ask Pompeo.
We won’t have noticed, he says, because at this time of year there’s not a lot to do, and he only has to be in giro – around and about – at weekends. But come summer, he’ll be gyrating the hills three days a week, on serious patrol work.
Euh! says Franco. He just drives around looking important in his jeep, getting free drinks everywhere he goes from people who hope he’ll turn a blind eye when he catches them hunting out of season – that’s all he has to do.
Pompeo is outraged by this misrepresentation. Come September, he says, once the
forest fires start, he is often out twenty hours a day. And the rest of the year, the knowledge that he may gyrate past at any moment stops all sorts of nonsense going on. It puts people like Franco, for example, he says snappily, off shooting birds and beasts out of season, throwing old cars off the side of the mountain, dumping building rubble and old fridges in the woodlands or off hairpin bends, lighting fires in dangerous places.
We tell him about the rubbish that’s been thrown off the hillside at the end of our path; he ought to drive past his own property more often. Dispetto! he says. Someone will have dumped stuff there out of spite, just to make him look a fool. He can guess who it was: he will sort them out. They will be sorry.
We walk along the Via Aurelia, on the way to celebrate our new homeowning status by buying a drink for our two mentors, trying out our ‘Salve’ on every acquaintance we meet, much to Pompeo’s gratification.
Arriving at the Bar Sito we find Mimmo, Bruno and Ciccio sitting outside with a fourth person we don’t know, calling us over. We introduce Pompeo and Franco to them, amid much handshaking. It surprises us how relaxed people here are with members of other generations; Bruno is already chaffing Franco: You must be the famous Knife of San Pietro, he’s saying. I worry that Franco may take offence. On the contrary, he seems flattered, and starts to tell the story of the time, in his youth, when he rode into this very bar on horseback…
They have got a brilliant surprise for us, say Mimmo and Ciccio; a hand-operated washing-machine! A thing you just wind round and round with a handle, a thing we can keep down by the well! When should they bring it up?
Pompeo gives us an old-fashioned look. Clearly in the mind of a good citizen of San Pietro this suggestion can only be the prelude to some kind of mass orgy. Luckily for our reputations, at this moment Mimmo’s girlfriend Lorella turns up and joins us, and Pompeo’s fears are allayed. She is a decent girl from Diano Arentino: he knows her father. We are safe. Lorella, now doing the shaking hands round with everybody, is big: much bigger than her tiny sinewy fidanzato – at least half as tall again. We have so far refrained, Britishly, from commenting on this potentially embarrassing fact. We see now that our restraint was absurdly misplaced. Franco and Pompeo both wade straight in: What a fine figure of a woman! They congratulate Mimmo heartily on having managed, in spite of his tininess, to get himself such a prize, and insist on doing some extra handshaking to celebrate the achievement. Mimmo and Lorella both beam delightedly: obviously there is nothing embarrassing about it at all. Lucky Italians. I think sadly of my various tall female friends in England who are prepared to go to enormous lengths not to seem even half an inch taller than their boyfriends, devoting their leisure moments to hunting out the flattest heels in existence. Lorella, on the contrary, is cheerfully trotting about in four-inch mules.
Ciccio introduces the unknown fair-haired man who is sitting with them; he is called Helmut, and is, oh no, a German.
Now what’s going to happen? Will Pompeo spit in his face? Refuse to sit with him? To our great relief, he shakes hands like a lamb. Helmut is a very cheerful and chatty German; he is busy inviting everyone to come up to his house in Camporondo this weekend. He wants to celebrate having finished fixing his open fireplace by lighting it and eating around it in company. There is no getting away from it – Helmut is definitely one of the odious German buyers-up of empty village homes. I glance covertly at Pompeo; he still hasn’t turned a hair. Helmut only looks about thirty-ish; maybe in practice Pompeo reserves his wrath for the older generation, as recommended by Franco, whatever he may say in theory?
The Diano Company are busily planning Helmut’s menu for him. Heated debate about grilled fresh sardines versus spit-roasted pigling in the fireplace is going on. Helmut himself has no opinions on the matter. Wonderful! The endless Italian food-obsession can get very wearing. Whatever Pompeo may feel about him, Helmut is a great relief to us. He speaks perfect English, to start with, which is very soothing after a morning of lawyering and dialecting and all; but mostly it is the magic of talking with someone who shares our own Northern assumptions about the world.
Helmut, for example, has no problem with the idea of living in the country and not in a village. He says we have done right; he is suffering horribly from his neighbours in Camporondo, where the feuding spirit is strong. In less than a year here he has had all sorts of rows and vendettas about responsibility for falling walls and rights of way through other people’s land and music after nine p.m.
Helmut’s other great feature is that he too is a lover of village feste. We’d been sure that amongst Caterina’s large collection of friends and relations there must be the odd partner-cum-trainer to help us out with our Smooth Dancing ambitions. But no. The village festa is practically the symbol of everything they want to escape from. Here, at last, is Helmut, a male at least, even if of the wrong nationality. He can dance a waltz, a polka, even a mazurka: all the festa favourites. He comes from some southern and Catholic part of Germany, he tells us, where Smooth Dancing is commonplace. Moreover, he is not, in fact, called Helmut at all, but Mario. The Diano boys have found the idea of a German with such a normal, Italian-sounding name impossible to cope with, and Helmut has accepted his re-christening with good grace.
Helmut has just got back from the mercato dell’usato, the flea-market, in San Remo, and we chat foreignly of strange and wonderful bargains to be found in these hills, of hunts through junkyards and second-hand shops: no part of youth culture round here, as yet.
The Diano boys leave to go back to work for the afternoon, and Helmut returns to the hills with his booty. We buy a last round for Franco and Pompeo, waiting with bated breath to hear what Pompeo will have to say about being made to socialize with Helmut.
But the horror of Helmut apparently pales into insignificance beside the scandal of Ciccio and Bruno.
So, you’re hanging out with Calabresi down here, are you? says Pompeo. State attente! Watch out!
We don’t think they’re from Calabria, we say, after a pause for thought… in fact, we’re sure they aren’t – only the other day they were telling us about growing up here, all about their parents’ land up in the hills… complaining about being dragged out of the Diano Marina games arcade by their parents, forced to learn olive-pruning, Ape-driving and vegetable-growing when they could have been using their time so much more fruitfully on the table-football game round the corner…
Ah, but they’re figli d’immigrati, sons of immigrants, says Pompeo, in a tone which suggests a world of meaning behind this phrase. You can tell they’re Calabresi.
Well, we can’t, we say. How? They just look like Italians.
You can tell by the way they talk, says Franco.
What, they’ve got an accent or something? They can’t have, they were born and bred here. (Their Italian is certainly clearer than Franco’s, and miles better than Pompeo’s, but it seems more judicious not to mention this.)
No, says Franco patiently, not Italian, it’s the way they speak Ligurian – you can tell they’ve learnt it in giro – it’s not the language they speak at home.
This is all news to us. What do they speak at home then?
Calabrese!! reply our true-bred Ligurians in unison. You want to watch out if you’re going to hang out with Southerners. They’ll get you into trouble.
But what sort of trouble? we ask.
Euh! We mustn’t let ourselves be taken in. Terroni may be friendly, cheery and devil-may-care; they may sing, dance and make merry at the drop of a hat – but we should check out the other side of the coin. They are also lazy, spendthrift and unruly; and then there’s the drink and drugs, the violence and the crime – be it just thieving, or the more sinister, organized stuff.
Really? say we. Sounds just like what people said about the Irish in our granny’s day. Or the West Indians. Do Southern Italians by any chance keep pigs in the parlour and coal – or, as it were, olive logs – in the bath?
Amazingly, they do: though Pompeo can’t see
what this can have to do with the Irish, of whom he has heard nothing but good. In fact, they are said to be a lot more simpatico than the cold, snooty English…
OK, time to change the subject.
It seems there is only going to be a very small swimmable window between the Health Ban imposed by the green-eyeshadow lady and her supporters, and the German Invasion. We feel we’d better take advantage of it right away. Why don’t Pompeo and Franco come down to the beach, too, we say, only half seriously. As we suspected they would, they laugh at the very idea. The nearest they have ever got to swimming, they say, is in the old days before bathrooms when all the village children got taken for their weekly wash to the rock pools above San Pietro. We are pleased to discover that we are not too far behind the times for these parts in our bathroomlessness. They have spent the odd day on the beach, though, they tell us; with a horse and cart, collecting building sand.
Yes, say we, and now the Dianesi have put up that promenade wall to keep you off it – the skinflints!
How right we are! Pompeo and Franco are positively bowled over by our grasp of local politics.
A beachful of the stuff at the bottom of the hill, says Pompeo, but these days you have to go to the builders’ yard and pay for it. As well as the cement.
We used to mix it up with lime, in the old days, not cement, volunteers Franco.
Lime again! We are beginning to wonder whether this is just a monomania of Franco’s. Can it be really the staff of life in the hills of Liguria? So far, it seems, you use it to purify your drinking water, eliminate your excreta, whitewash your house, keep insects at bay; now you make concrete with it. Absurd. Impossible. And there are thirty kilos of the stuff, as of today, taking up rather a lot of room just outside our front door. Pompeo, it is true, doesn’t ever actually deny any of Franco’s lime statements. But maybe he’s not listening because it’s in Italian. Or maybe he’s just humouring his mad friend?
