by Annie Hawes
Pompeo doesn’t seem to have been listening this time, either; inspired perhaps by the need to save us from Calabrian contamination, perhaps by the success of his ‘ciao’ lesson, he has decided that it’s time for a lesson in Ligurian.
Say ‘Chang chaning’ he instructs us.
We do, several times. Both men go into such paroxysms of mirth that I begin to suspect ribaldry. But no. It means Piano, piano – slowly, slowly. Or gently, gently. It’s just the usual hysteria caused by anyone who’s not a Ligurian speaking their own private dialect. We now learn that Diano Marina in its own dialect is really called ‘Diang Maring’, strangely oriental this may sound; while the true name of Diano San Pietro is ‘Diang San Peo’ (evidently a Vietcong hideout). And the inhabitants of Diang San Peo? Not San Pietresi at all, but, in their own tongue, ‘San Peotti’.
Say, ‘Testa Janc’, says Franco. More cackling – this turns out to mean Testa Bianca – White Head, and the nickname of Pompeo’s elder brother. Not content with swapping pi’s for ch’s, Ligurians have swapped bi’s for j’s too.
The tale of Janc Head is now told to us with great relish by his brother, Franco simultaneously translating the tricky bits which are too exciting to be told in prissy official Italian. It illustrates beautifully the huge cultural divide between civilized Ligurians and lawless Calabrians.
Fifteen years ago, it seems, this white-headed brother employed some other villager to fix his leaking toilet roof. The workmanship was terrible. The very next time Testa Janc sat on his loo in a rainstorm, he was leaked upon anew. He called back the incompetent workman, stabbed him to death, and took to the hills, never to be seen again.
What, you’ve really never seen him again? we ask.
Mai più! Never again! says Franco.
Mai chü! says Pompeo proudly.
Just for a toilet roof?
Euh!
Ah, si, si!
11
It is Easter Sunday and a very small and startlingly tidy looking Domenico, combed and hanky free, appears at our door, knocking timidly, moustache newly trimmed. He has been sent by his wife, he says; people are not allowed to be alone on Easter Sunday. Two single women do not count as company for one another, and extra portions of Easter Sunday lunch have already been prepared for us by Antonietta. If we don’t accept it will be the worse for him, he adds, with a sideways grin from beneath the walrus. We accept happily, ignoring the veiled insult to our sex. We wouldn’t dream of turning down any offers of home cooking round here, whatever the provocation.
Chauffeured by Domenico, we Ape our way down to the village. San Pietro, now that summer is drawing near, has broken out into a wild floral extravaganza; the already larger-than-life geraniums have redoubled in strength and vitality, mixed now with the swathes of vibrant blues and purples of morning glory and hot-pink bougainvillea now festooning the houses, flowers trailing down every wall, creeping up walls and along gutters, climbers snaking up terraces among roses and lilies and jasmine. Spectacular. Though, as it happens, nothing compared to the great flood of greenery that will overwhelm the village by mid-June when the leaves finish coming out on the grapevines and all the vegetable gardens explode into business. Soon hardly a square inch of stone or earth will be visible at all. For a month or two, that is, till the desert heat of August strikes, and shrinks it all back to something more realistic.
Halfway down this flower show of a village we bump off the asphalt road down a section of muletrack so impossibly narrow that we involuntarily squeeze our elbows into our sides to help the Ape fit between the walls. Not only impossibly narrow, but also impossibly steep; and with rather noticeable steps in it. Nothing, apparently, to this Ape. Who needs an off-road vehicle, anyway? We squeeze through a narrow archway with a millimetre to spare, and squeak to a halt in a tiny mossy courtyard full of the obligatory rusty tins of wildly blooming geraniums and buckets of gleaming aspidistra.
Antonietta appears at the top of an outside staircase leading off the yard; and we are welcomed into what must be the smallest flat in the world. It was made, they explain, by Adjusting their hayloft, no longer needed these days with only the Ape to feed, and was designed for that restful retirement they were planning to have until they found Maurizio was on the way. The living room might possibly be a reasonable size if it wasn’t filled to the brim with the monstrous cupboards people here are helplessly addicted to, ceiling high and four foot thick. Not even room for the bulging three-piece suite that ought by rights to complement them. Slide back the doors of one of the cupboards, though, and there’s a small bed-settee; now destined to be Maurizio’s when he leaves his cot. There is just one bedroom, looking across the roofs of the village down to the sea, a tiny kitchen, and an even tinier bathroom with one of those space-and water-saving baths shaped like an armchair. In the bottom of the bath sits a small wooden cage. Inside the cage is a depressed-looking thrush. What on earth is that doing there?
For hunting, says Domenico.
Does he take it out and chase it round the yard? Not funny. Of course not; he straps it on his back, still in its cage, when he goes out with his gun; and being used to humans, and no doubt full of the joys of getting out of its bath, it sings cheerily away and lulls the other, wild birds into a false sense of security. Bourn! says Domenico, miming the shotgun for us. Got it, thanks. Poor thrush: an unwitting Judas in a white enamel desert.
There is just about enough room here to edge carefully round the table which fills the centre of this ornament-packed room. A television is balanced on a shelf in an alcove of one of the non-bed cupboards, inches from your nose wherever you sit. Claustrophobia strikes. Luckily, outside, just across the three foot wide road and through the arch, is Antonietta’s garden – not to be confused with Domenico’s official orto up the mountain – which is where we’re going to eat our lunch.
You can tell these ladies’ orti because, apart from being closer to the home, they have flowers as well as vegetables in them. At the moment, a positive riot of flowers, as well as a selection of chickens and one of those typically Ligurian skinny angry cats. Also, against the back wall, is a beautiful beehive-shaped bread and pizza oven that Antonietta made herself, following her granny’s recipe, out of hand-sized dollops of dried mud. You have to use that red kind of earth, she says. You leave the dollops to dry in the sun, then use them like bricks to build your oven over a frame of bent twigs, with more mud as mortar. Once it’s dry you just light a fire inside it. The framework burns away, while the oven kilns itself into rainproofness. I resolve to make one of these as soon as I get home: how sensible to have your oven outside so you don’t broil up your home with the heat. Alas, I will discover when I get back that there is no red earth round our house, only grey-brown; and that the twigs of olive and oak are short and squiggly, snap easily, not at all the right thing. You need hazel or chestnut, I suppose. I still haven’t quite got round to it.
Antonietta goes back up to the flat to do something to the lunch, leaning on a walking-stick – something has gone wrong with her knee-joints since the pregnancy – and Domenico has to take us on his own to see the last, most important item: the cantina below the flat. Nobody lives at street level in the Diano villages, where the tiny, dusty barred windows and the ramshackle doors along the alleys give the impression that a lot more of the houses are abandoned than is really the case. On these steep slopes your lower storey is dug deep back into the hillside, making a cool, dark, even-temperatured space. Only a thriftless fool, or maybe a straniere, would waste such an asset by living in it. It serves a much more important purpose, as we are about to see. Domenico heaves open a pair of huge double doors big enough for a barn: amazingly, the cantina really is barn-sized. A huge, lofty, vaulted space. We can’t believe this; why on earth have they made themselves that tiny cramped flat upstairs when they had all this vastness down below? I have to ask, though I don’t put it quite like that. The answer is, I suppose, logical. You don’t need much space just for eating and sleeping: but you
never know how much room you may need for working and storing. We are introduced to the year’s worth of olive oil, the year’s worth of wine, the row upon row of glass jars of tomatoes bottled for the year’s pasta sauce, the pots of mushrooms, peppers, aubergines, jams, the hanging bundles of oregano, strings of garlic and onions and dried chilli peppers; and all the equipment associated with producing this stuff, jars and bottles waiting to be recycled, cauldrons and oil-drums, the rolls of olive net, the wine-press and associated impedimenta – including the corking-machine, useless item, lying in a dusty corner covered in cobwebs – the workbench and vice, the tins of nails and screws, the hammers and sickles, spades and hoes, brushcutters, pruning-hooks and machetes, chainsaws, tomato-mincers, neat rolls of vari-sized hosepipe and siphon tubing hanging from nails in the walls, the precious new motor-driven mini-plough under its dustcloth – more vats of olives in salamoia, of salted anchovies… and, of course, a winter’s worth of firewood for the stove, neatly sawn-up branches from the olive pruning. Awesome. A haven of order and plenty. All of it much more essential to life, we now see, than a few more square metres of indoor living space in a place where the weather’s always fine.
It becomes evident that to Italians Easter Sunday is an extra Christmas; everyone has to gather together and stuff themselves with food. Preferably in family groups, but anything will do. Maybe we go some way to replacing Giovanni-in-Holland and Elena-in-Buffalo. We hope so. The idea of people not celebrating together at Easter is as awful to Antonietta as the idea of people being alone and isolated at Christmas would be in our own land. Hence Domenico’s mission. Except that this is much better than Christmas; you eat outdoors in the sunshine, the air already warm, yet still crisp and fresh. We sit in the garden and (surprise) eat and eat, surrounded by clucking chickens and flowering rosemary bushes.
Antonietta has made the festive tortelloni herself, perfect crescents: one day she will show us how. The ossobuco which comes next is the tastiest thing I have eaten yet. It has been gently simmering all morning with wine and garlic and carrots and peas – all their own produce – and tons of their own artichokes, the latest orto item to come into season. They aren’t at all like the globe ones we’re used to; these are much smaller, and once you’ve sliced off the spiny tips you can eat the whole thing; none of that sucking the flesh off each individual leaf. You can make a salad out of them raw, too, sliced thinly crosswise and sprinkled with thin slivers of Parmesan under the oil and lemon. And, says Antonietta, you should never throw away the couple of inches of stalk under the head: this is as tender and tasty as the heart, once cooked, and should be saved for making a risotto later.
In the matter of the ossobuco the Lord is on my side – once my sister discovers that the thick delicious gravy is composed of the marrow from bones, a delicacy she is expected to pick out and eat, she can’t eat any more. She has to keep surreptitiously slipping me extra bits whenever our hosts are distracted by Maurizio, who is pretending like mad to be the right sort of baby again, gurgling happily away in his Moses basket at our side. Maybe it doesn’t count here, though, where there are no olive trees, only peaches.
On her next trip indoors, Antonietta gets their wedding photos to show us. Disconcertingly though, done up in their very best period gear and worn out with the strain, they look so much like some classic image – ocean liner immigrants arriving in America, maybe, or a scene from some Italian neo-realist film – that it’s hard to see them as their individual selves at all.
Egged on by Antonietta, Domenico tells us the tale of their courtship. Even more like one of those films. In those days, he says, you couldn’t so much as think of marrying a girl without going and formally asking her father’s permission. Much less a girl from Calabria. If he wanted Antonietta, he had no choice but to go, in person, to Calabria to present himself to the family. Brought up on Ligurian tales of the violent and unruly South, he was petrified at the prospect: thirty-six hours of train through unknown and probably bandit-infested country, and an uncertain welcome at the end of it. Not only, says Domenico, was he not the rich man her parents would be hoping she’d catch for herself up in the wealthy North, but he was short, dark and ugly. Worse still, he had a secret and invisible defect which he knew, honourably speaking, meant that he should never marry any woman, far less one he really loved: a weakness in his heart from which he might drop down dead at any moment, leaving her a defenceless widow.
I’ve managed to keep him alive so far, though, says Antonietta, pinching his arm comfortably.
Anyway, says Domenico, he was certain that if he somehow survived the journey, if he wasn’t set upon and murdered on the way by some pirate-scarfed sawn-off-shotgun-wielding desperado, or gang of ditto, the menfolk of Antonietta’s family would probably do him in as soon as he revealed his designs upon her.
Still, the prospect of not marrying Antonietta was even worse than the prospect of sudden death at the hands of her male relatives. After some weeks of working up his courage, he’d come up with the solution: a weapon, as impressive as possible to make up for his lack of money, height, and sound heart. He spent all his olive-harvest savings on the train ticket and a double-barrelled shotgun. A few days’ target practice on the family olive trees, and he was off on his deadly mission.
The gun, as it turned out, was not necessary for engagement purposes (of course it wasn’t, says Antonietta, but it was good to know I was worth dying for). As far as Antonietta’s family was concerned, any Northerner was infinitely rich by virtue of simple geography. Size was no object; he was a perfectly average height down there in the South. And the intricacies of their prospective son-in-law’s health went uninvestigated. Domenico needed no other qualifications than a few dozen olive trees to please these simple Calabresi, who had no notion how many fewer kilos of olives you got per tree up here in the frozen North.
Permission granted. And it wasn’t such a bad move to get the gun, as it turned out; many’s the time it solved a cash-flow crisis in their early married life, when there would have been no meat for the pot without it.
Such crises evidently exist no longer: we go on eating all afternoon, the digestive system expanding, as usual, to fill the entire universe and more. I have to give up on the tiramisu; the evil sister uses it to fill the space which should by rights have been taken up by ossobuco. People burst in and out of the garden Happy Eastering, and, accompanying many of the well-known sulking faces from the bar, we meet a vast number of women we’ve never so much as caught sight of before, unless perhaps as part of the swirlers round the dance floor at the Colla. Once we have been officially introduced to the wives and the mothers and the daughters, we will never again be quite so unspeakable-to at the bar. The respectable-female connection has been the major missing element in our social acceptability. But by the same token we lose our mysterious therapy powers; the men of the village, with the exception of Franco, who as an outcast and rebel does not count, will henceforth be much more circumspect in their heart-pourings.
The men go off with a couple of packs of cards, leaving us ladies to our garden. Among the next arrivals, accompanying one-eyed Mariuccia from the shop, is her aged aunt: Erminia. Not so all alone in the world as she likes to make out then!
Erminia rushes over and plants a pair of kisses on my cheeks, to the amazement of the assembled guests. She even remembers that I am called Anna. I am proud to have found out, from Pompeo, the proper name of our house, too. Besta de Zago, I say, and she throws up her hands in amazement. Why didn’t I tell her? There is, as I suspected all along, a perfectly good path to Besta de Zago from her place. It doesn’t take more than twenty minutes. Bah. Growl.
Shamefully, my aimless walking behaviour is brought to the attention of the gathering. Or not so shamefully after all. Some of the ladies have seen interesting Health and Your Family-type programmes on TV, in which the presenters tell you that exercise is good for the health. A lively debate starts up on the topic. One young mother has been so impressed that she is
planning to buy an exercise bike. I suggest that their hill-rushing, vegetable-digging, cheese-stirring and weed-sickling lifestyle is already packed with exercise. No. This does not count. No one except me sees any connection between these boring everyday activities and the prescriptions of the beautifully groomed ladies and leotard-clad fitness experts on the telly.
I also discover to my amazement that this tiny backwater of a village has its own fully fledged kiddies’ nursery, to which Maurizio will be going in a month or two; it is open from six a.m. to six p.m., takes babies from six months onwards, and costs less per month than my friends are paying per week in London. If, that is, they can manage to find a place at all. So much for backward Catholic countries! Notions of maternal deprivation don’t trouble anyone here, either; if a child’s in the village, it is as good as home as far as village mothers are concerned. I resolve to pass this information on; soon, I imagine, all those empty San Pietro houses will be full of refugee mothers from London… Sadly, though, this will never happen; I have forgotten what a very long way they would be from their jobs.
A major item of feminine debate this afternoon is the priest’s coming visit to this frazione of the village, a visit paid once a year to give the Church’s benediction to the homes in it. This, apparently, means that the ladies of the parish have to waste valuable time and money creating an outdoor altar of flowers, from which he will bless the general area: then, worse still, he will pop into each house individually – more work, there mustn’t be a speck of dust about the place – to sprinkle a few drops of Holy Water around and bless it and its inhabitants. At this point it is obligatory to slip the priest an envelope full of cash. She for one wouldn’t care, says Mariuccia from the shop, if the sanguisuga, the bloodsucker of a priest, dropped dead tomorrow. It would save a lot of trouble. This outrageously blasphemous remark causes much delighted cackling. But still, they all agree, there is no way out. Their neighbourhood, the Frazione Gionetti, can’t be the only one to refuse to participate. What a brutta figura that would be! Anyway, they say, their altar is always the best.
