by Annie Hawes
What about just telling the priest not to bother with the coming-into-the-house part? I say. Stupid idea. The house-blessing is the only essential bit of the whole business. Who knows what bad luck you might bring on yourself and your family if you barred your door against the priest? says Antonietta. Who knows if the priest mightn’t put the evil eye on you, the malocchio, if you didn’t let him in? says Erminia.
But this is going too far. Everyone laughs at Erminia, who is practically a pagan anyway. The priest doesn’t bother with Besta de’ Ca’ any more, and you can see why!
Now we’re told of a whole litany of misfortunes that have befallen those staunchly Communist families who have refused to let the priest in. We all agree, some more doubtfully than others, that these things would probably have happened anyway. But, on balance, it’s foolish to tempt fate. And so, on the principle that if you don’t buy a lottery ticket, you can’t win, the ladies of the parish set to working out how much of the altar they can cover for free, using wild flowers and ones they’ve grown themselves, and how much will have to be paid for so as not to look too stingy in the eyes of the priest. Or, more importantly, the rest of the village.
The cut-throat competitive spirit amongst the inhabitants of this valley is brought all the more sharply to our attention on the day the village of Diano Castello, till now no more than an attractive feature of our view, decides to upstage all the other Dianos by replacing the tediously old-fashioned and conventional midday tolling of its church bells – tolling which has, for the last seven or eight centuries, signalled lunchbreak to the olive growers – with a spectacularly modern thousand-odd decibel factory siren.
Diano Castello is, architecturally speaking, not a village but a small town, tiny though it may be, and is the only one of the Dianos to own a road of drivable width running through its centre – a road built as wagon access to the Castello of the medieval barons of the area, some time in the thirteenth century, and which is at least a hundred yards long. As well as its superior housing stock, carved doorways and curlicued balconies befitting a lord’s retainers, there is the fact that many of its inhabitants, though long reduced to the rank of peasantry, still bear the noble name of Gastaldi. Naturally, the place has always been tarred with the brush of snobbery by the residents of other villages.
Anyway, there we are walking peacefully on this momentous Siren Day towards the Sulking Café of San Pietro. We have just come level with the church, and are busy savouring the delicious odours wafting from Maria’s kitchen and bemoaning the fact that we will never taste her food again unless we somehow get organized enough to plan our lives twenty-four hours ahead, when suddenly the thing goes off. It screeches ear-splittingly out across the valley, air-raid siren-style, on the dot of twelve – just as San Pietro’s own earth-shaking and eardrum-battering peals are starting up. The screaming and whooping goes on and on, reverberating round the terraces, bouncing off the hillsides, melding cacophonously with the roaring vibrating bell just above our heads… Is it an earthquake? The outbreak of World War Three?… As we are poised to take to our heels, a bevy of agitated men comes pouring out of the café. Looking to them for a lead, we see that the expressions beneath the hankies are not those of panic or terror, as we’re expecting, but of outrage. They mill and shout and gesticulate angrily, hardly audible above the racket; a whole barful of impotent fists are being shaken at the caterwauling culprit, Castello, poised smugly on its hillock above us.
Luigi, imperturbable as ever, ambles out in the frothing wake of his clientele, and since there is no point trying to speak, what with the bell still booming and the siren still wailing, rests a ham-like hand on each of our shoulders to reassure us. By the time the din is over, we have gathered that there really is no need to panic; most of his clients, over the initial shock, are now doing their best to adopt a nonchalant air, laughing scornfully, spitting on the ground, jerking their heads and saying Euh! and Mah! to one another to indicate their profound unconcern in the face of whatever folly Castello may choose to throw at them from its exalted position.
The emergency over, heated debate breaks out in dialect. A few of the more belligerent souls stay outside making menacing gestures at Castello, defying them to try saying that again. The calmer elements return to the bar to fortify themselves with their unfinished drinks while they discuss the political implications of this aural attack from above. But we can make no sense of any of it; whoever starts trying to tell us what is going on is always too excited to keep up the Italian subtitled version, and gets drawn back into shouted dialect before they’ve got to the end of the sentence. We can measure the gravity of the situation, though, by the fact that Luigi is doling out free glasses of his own private supply of vino d’uva all round.
Eventually, concerned that we should be able to participate in an informed and democratic manner in the Siren Controversy Debate, Luigi comes over to explain the scenario to us in all its complexities. Refusing, of course, as befits a man of superior wisdom, to take sides in childish inter-village rivalries. Background first: every village in the valley has always marked midday by ringing its own bell for its own peasants slowly and clearly twelve times to make sure the toilers in the olive groves didn’t miss their lunch break. This has always made it necessary to stagger the peals village by village to avoid confusion.
This much we have noticed for ourselves – the good twenty minutes it takes for midday to finish happening in these parts. But of course we see only too clearly that if all the churches began to ring at the same moment, the toiling peasant might lose count and mistake midday for, say, eleven o’clock; the trickiness of the Italian digestive system could make an extra hour before lunch positively life-threatening. Equally clearly, no Diano would tempt fate so far as to trust to any other Diano’s competence or good faith in such a vital matter.
As Luigi is now pointing out, logically only one village in the valley can be ringing on the official stroke of midday; everyone else has to have their church clock a few minutes out. This has not been a problem in the more casual past; but now the pressures of modernity have led, sad to say, to this distressing outbreak of one-upmanship. Nobody wants to be less than accurate. Everyone takes things personally. Is the ringing order to be based on economic importance, in which case San Pietro ought to go first – Luigi carefully resists the temptation to let any inflection of approval creep into his voice here – or should it be based on historic seniority, putting Castello in the lead? We finally grasp that it is the timing of the siren, set to go off at the same moment as San Pietro’s bells, in direct competition and short-circuiting dignified democratic debate, which is so offensive to Luigi and his clients, and not the terrible blood-curdling racket itself.
Their mayor’s high-handed decision to inaugurate his absurd screaming siren without consultation does nothing for Castello folk’s reputation in the valley. From now on mutterings along the lines of ‘Who do they think they are?’ break out in bars up and down the valley each day on the officiously punctual and screamingly modern dot of twelve. Things gradually calm down as the volume is reduced once the siren’s novelty has worn off. But for months any Castello native who is caught out and about by inhabitants of the other villages at siren time will be tortured with much ribald hilarity about his aristocratic provenance, addiction to expensive and ridiculous toys, and slavish timekeeping.
12
As our first Ligurian May Day is due to dawn, we find ourselves travelling, packed sardine-like into the back of a truck owned by Paletta, with a good fifteen people. We have passed the turn-off to Sergio and Lilli’s house, passed the building site where the new cowshed of Franco’s nipoti is being created, passed the wayside Madonna shrine that marks the crossroads to Franco’s cowshed. If we didn’t know that Franco and his nipoti went up and down here every day we would not have believed this abomination was even meant to be a drivable road. Huge rocks sprout in the middle of it, and our lorry skids crabwise down into deep gullies left by the winter rains, sc
rapes up the other side, hurling gouts of mud into the air. We have to reverse to and fro to get round ever-tighter hairpin bends, slaloming up clay cliffs as we go.
The olive trees give way to lush woodland greenness for a bit; then we are at the top of a high ridge, bare white bony rock with the odd grassy tussock and stony scree, the drop to our left stomach churning, shreds of cloud floating below us in the valley. Horribly unnatural.
Eight hundred metres here, shouts Paletta cheerfully, sticking his head out of the driver’s window. I stop looking down.
Incredible though it may seem, we aren’t alone in following this mad road to the bitter end. Now we catch up with a great, slow-moving convoy of cars and Apes, all stoically making their way up the mountain at zero miles an hour, joining us from all sorts of equally horrible-looking side roads from all the other Dianos. Cars jampacked with at least three generations, heads poking out of windows, shouting and cheering, people on each other’s laps, suspensions being destroyed and sumps cracked on rocks as they go. Another cavalcade gradually builds up behind us to match the one in front. It is true, the whole valley really is going to the meadows. We have become part of a huge grindingly slow traffic jam prompted by only The Golden Bough knows what primeval stirrings of the soul to go on this awesome pilgrimage to the most unlikely place on earth.
The so-called meadows are strangely unlike my idea of a meadow – unless, maybe, the illustrations in my childhood Billy Goats Gruff story. But then we are in the foothills of the Alps, so maybe that’s not too surprising. The grass is that fine, short stuff you get on cliff-tops, pocket handkerchief-sized flat bits dotted among rocks; a huge semicircle enclosing both our valley and the Faraldi one next door, the view running right down to the sea. A lot of it seems to have been terraced at some point in the distant past, and there are half-collapsed stone igloos everywhere. I suppose in the old subsistence farming days everyone who could manage it would bring a few animals up here to pasture in the summer months.
Tiny clumps of wiry mountain thyme scent the air as we trample around setting up camp, the menfolk unloading scaffolding and sheets of plastic and rolls of bamboo, while we females go off to look for wood high up on the rougher land, hunting amongst clumps of hawthorn and hazel. The hillside is a carpet of narcissi. The ones down by our house have vanished long ago, their season over, but up here where it’s so much cooler they are still at maximum beauty and perfume.
Patrizia and Barbara find some plate-sized white mushrooms, which everyone gets very excited about. These are prataioli, it seems, delicious stuff. And as it happens we don’t just have mushrooms, but also our own personal chef to deal with them: Ciccio, who recently took over the abandoned bar-restaurant in Moltedo, next village up from San Pietro, from where he is mounting a spirited challenge to Luigi and Maria’s dream cuisine. Soon a mass mushroom-hunt is in progress. Ciccio snatches up the results, takes them off to the kitchen quarters he has established beside our improvised shelter, and returns them as a lovely garlicky salad to accompany our aperitivo of fizzy white wine. Amazing: even up here, so far from civilization, the niceties must be observed.
Mmmmm! I say appreciatively, causing the usual outburst of hilarity. Italians, for their own inscrutable reasons, don’t say ‘mmmmm’. They can see no connection between this sound and the appreciation of food, and every time we do it, they laugh uproariously. We are trying to control ourselves, not liking to be a laughing stock, but it’s hard. Particularly when they will insist on introducing us to some new and delicious foodstuff every twenty minutes or so. They have started, annoyingly, to entertain themselves by doing pre-emptive ‘mmmm’s as they pass us any old item of food – crusts of bread, bits of peeled carrot. We are planning our revenge, though. One day they will come to England: we will take them out to eat in a greasy-spoon café where they will get their courses all mixed up together – how about burger, spaghetti and chips? Sausage, egg and lasagna? – and nothing but stewed tea or watery instant coffee to drink. Mmmm, we will say, loudly and often, as we watch them suffer. And none of the other customers will turn a hair.
We are having a lot of trouble remembering the names of the vast number of new people we’re being introduced to up here in the wilderness. Especially the males of the company, who all have at least one nickname, sometimes two. As if all this weren’t complicated enough, women don’t address men, especially men of the older generation, by their nicknames: to do so is odd and laughable, not quite respectful or respectable. As females we have a double feat of memory to perform: recognize the nickname, but respond with the official baptismal name. The whole thing is a minefield, especially to foreigners who don’t necessarily recognize which is a nickname and which a given one – as we discovered when looking for Pompeo and Bacalè down at Luigi’s one afternoon. No, they hadn’t seen Pompeo. What about Bacalè? No, they said, they hadn’t seen Giuseppe. Who, we asked confusedly, was Giuseppe? Much cackling from card tables. Hours of fun unravelling the confusion. The nephew is not really called Bacalè. That is his nickname, derived – rather fittingly, it seems to me – from the word baccalà, dried cod. His true name is Giuseppe. So you can call him Beppe, too, if you want. Great. Thanks.
In the darkness, the whole curve of the hillside is dotted with the glowing lights of bonfires and hurricane lamps. We fall asleep under the stars sardined up under our cane and plastic shelter, listening to a mixture of distant tapes of festa accordions from far away, funky jazzy stuff from some closer ghetto blaster, and spooky storytelling amongst the sleeping bags.
At first light I am dragged from deep open-air sleep by the wonderful smell of coffee, the sound of a bubbling espresso pot, just in time to catch that vital May Day dawn, which, we’ve been told, will bring us luck for the rest of the year. The sun seems to shoot up from the sea at immense speed, the sky all frilly and pinky-yellow. Within minutes it is already turning into that dense blue that goes with big heat. Cowbells are ringing up on the higher meadows – Franco’s cows – and cuckoos are cuckooing all around us. Magic.
As the morning wears on, more and more cars arrive; the meadows are filled with people, lounging about on the grass, eating, drinking, gathering wood, standing in gossiping knots, playing accordions, playing cards, making coffee on Primus stoves… bonfires are everywhere, ready-lit (of course) to be sure plenty of brace, those essential embers, are ready for lunch. Everyone wanders about visiting each others’ base camps. Shelters, menus and supplies are displayed, inspected and discussed competitively, as are the lunch fires.
Really? Only oak? We always add some juniper branches to ours, you should try it, see how flavoursome it makes your pork chops!… Some people have actually bothered to bring supplies of olive wood all the way up here, so addicted are they to its flavour.
Small children rush to and fro squeaking and hurling balls of many and various sizes; aged grannies and grandads hobble back and forth, shaking hands ceremoniously with friends and acquaintances. On the higher slopes, teenagers show off on their motorinos and Vespas, doing wheelies, death-defying leaps off rocks, skidding down screes. Horrible. I’m not going to look at that. Franco and his nipoti are just visible in the distance, way across the meadows messing around on horseback, their steeds leaping up terraces, plunging back off, showing off just as wildly as the teenagers.
Groups playing petanca with those heavy silver balls are everywhere. No flat pitch, but a chase up and down terraces and screes, silver flashing in the light, shouts of triumph and despair. This, says Alberto, is how the game was originally played. You just follow the landscape; when it’s your turn to throw, you try to choose a bit of terrain that fits your own best skills – backspin on slope or whatever – while making it harder for the others. He has brought a set for us, and we try it out. Addictive: we play for hours, ending up badly sunburnt – you hardly notice the sun with the fresh mountain breeze – and miles from our home-base of plastic sheeting.
We bump into Antonietta, still with her walking stick, Maurizio balan
ced on the other hip. By the time she’s finished inspecting our lunch supplies and describing hers, Antonietta has already detected that, like herself, by no means everyone in our group is a true-bred Ligurian; she now delights those of Calabrian origin by making racy remarks in dialect which the Ligurians can’t understand. Meanwhile, relaxed as everyone always is here with unknown babies, Maurizio is being passed round like a parcel, everyone cooing and gooing at him. And, relaxed as mothers always are here about other people messing with their babies, she asks if they’ll look after him while she goes off for a pee.
Antonietta leans heavily on my arm as we trudge uphill seeking a good screen of bushes; she hangs on to me as she laboriously gets into peeing position and battles with her sensible knickers, making loud cackling remarks about how we’re all the same down there anyway so not to worry. Once she’s got herself re-arranged and upright again, she announces that we must get a bunch of narcissi each before we go back down. Good job she’s here to advise me, she says, the Guardia Forestale will be about, and she doesn’t just mean Pompeo. Narcissi are protected flowers these days and you can get fined for picking them. But everyone’s always picked a bunch of them for luck on May Day: better to risk being arrested than risk the consequences of going home without any.
We head off arm in arm, up to the rough land where the narcissi are. No way out of this illegal flower gathering activity, then; at least, I tell myself, there are plenty of people roaming about up here to give us a bit of camouflage. But they are not roaming at all. I soon realize that every single one of these apparently innocent strollers is doing the same as us: we are all gathering narcissi. The technique is strangely un-furtive. No one even bothers to hide their booty until they have a large and – to my nervous eye at any rate – highly visible bunch. Then they stand up and slip it half-heartedly under their jacket, holding a lapel out so as not to squash the flowers, and make their extremely obvious lumpy-fronted way back to the meadow.
