Extra Virgin

by Annie Hawes

  13

  Sergio stands with the hot sun in his eyes outside the crumbling yellow-ochre palazzo where the San Pietro Comune has its offices above the tiny post office. A dead and bloody Alsatian dog lies limp in his arms; he is hurling an impassioned soliloquy into the apparently empty square.

  Will no one do anything about the peasant mafia who run everything in this village and its godforsaken hillsides? Does the Comune not give a dry fig for its duty to defend decent law-abiding citizens? Sergio’s face is brick-red from his exertions, the veins standing out in his neck; still he rages on. From their usual shady stone seats in the farthest corner of the dusty sun-bleached piazza a couple of the oldest and most crumpled citizens of San Pietro look on impassive and blear-eyed; a few men in hankies lurk amongst the Apes parked round the cool side of the church, heads close together, leaning on their vehicles or their knotty walking sticks, muttering among themselves, backs turned to the appalling spectacle. There is some slight movement in the shadows behind Signor Ugo-the-grocer’s fly curtain; someone, it seems, is watching from in there, too. Now, dimly visible through the dusty French windows that open on to the wrought-iron balcony above, a couple of faces appear looking down from the Comune. They quickly withdraw as Sergio turns to face the building, voice pulsating with emotion.

  Why don’t they come out and answer him? They are too ashamed of themselves, that’s why! Is he to get no protection? He knows who has done this to his beloved dog; everyone knows. It may only be a dog this time; who knows if it won’t be his children next?

  There is a pause while he tenderly places the bloodied animal on the Comune steps. He turns back to face the silent square and shakes a fist in the air. Bastardi! Figli di putana! One day the Comune will have to face up to its responsibilities. And they can start now, by disposing of the body themselves! He storms back to his jeep and shoots off with a squeal of rubber, still shouting imprecations. The moment of high drama is only slightly spoilt by a head-on encounter with one of the larger and more implacable of the lorries from the village builders’ yard round the corner, which obliges him to stop and reverse back up into the piazza.

  I am watching all this with interest from the doorway of Mariuccia’s hardware shop, along with Mariuccia herself: it is the latest episode in the long-running saga of Sergio’s non-payment of his debt to Franco. As Mariuccia observes drily, once the jeep has disappeared in a cloud of dust down the road to Diano, all the drama would be far more effective if everyone didn’t know perfectly well that Sergio had always underfed and maltreated his three poor Alsatians.

  So far, the war has gone like this:

  Skirmish Number One – a person unknown has strategically sawn down a tree across the road leading to Sergio’s house, blocking his jeep into the driveway and causing him to have to walk all the way down to Diano to buy a chainsaw with which to saw it up and remove it. Although various Ape drivers pass him on his way down the hill, nobody stops to offer him a lift. And he is certainly not going to ask. He gets himself and the chainsaw driven back up in style in a spanking new off-road vehicle by one of his boat-owning cronies from the port. A few days later Sergio makes an unaccustomed visit to Luigi and Maria’s bar where he announces in a devil-may-care manner to all and sundry that he is very pleased with life: he has efficiently got all his winter firewood ready months early.

  Not long after, several fascie of Franco’s olive trees are found to have been savaged horribly by somebody with a chainsaw. It will take them years to recover.

  Skirmish Two: the tubes leading from Sergio’s huge rainwater vasca to his domestic plumbing arrangements mysteriously come adrift, causing the vasca to empty itself out all down the hill and into one of Sergio’s chicken-runs. His house is now toiletless until the thing refills itself in the winter rains, and he has had to move all the chickens to new premises out of the damp.

  Shortly afterwards a carrier bag full of human excrement is deposited through the window of Franco’s cantina.

  What will be the retaliation for this dastardly dog shooting?

  The village is agog to see the outcome of Skirmish Three. Neither Sergio nor Franco is held in great affection or esteem by the village; but Franco is ahead, just, in San Peo public opinion. His moves are certainly more classical, more in tune with the local Queensberry Rules for this type of dispute. Attacking olive trees is definitely well below the belt, and bags of shit, everyone agrees, have no place in a manly fight.

  Mariuccia, like everyone else, is very interested in the lack of males in our household; and very pleased to hear that, though they may not be present, we at least own three brothers. How lucky we are! And then, of course, we have one another. She has no brothers or sisters, and she and her husband never had any children. She had a cousin, Erminia’s son, who used to help her out with the men’s work once she’d lost her husband, but he vanished off to Milan twenty-odd years ago, married an unknown woman there, and has hardly been heard of since. A couple of years ago they thought they might have got themselves a maschio about the place at last, she says: Erminia’s grandson, the cousin’s son, reappeared one fine day in San Pietro, now in his late teens. But as it turned out, says Mariuccia darkly, he was worse than no one.

  We probe deeper into this, as we are expected to. How come?

  Heroin, says Mariuccia, lowering her voice conspiratorially. The story goes like this:

  Mariuccia and Erminia had only seen Giovanni a couple of times since he was a sweet little boy taking his First Communion. They welcomed him with open arms anyway, blood being thicker than water and Erminia having no one else to leave her place to. But instead of being an extra pair of hands about the yard and the fascie, getting himself a job, contributing something to the household, Giovanni spent most of the time lying about in bed saying he was sick; and looking, indeed, sick. When he wasn’t being sick, he would disappear off on his motorbike for days on end, returning only to go back to bed and be sick again. Meanwhile the pair of them were living on Erminia’s tiny widow’s pension, supplemented by what Mariuccia herself could spare. Erminia had begun to look very old and tired – but then she really was getting on a bit, and even though Mariuccia was angry with Giovanni for worrying his granny with laziness and capricci, she didn’t suspect what was really going on. She could have kicked herself for not having spotted it. All that being sick! And the Milan connection, too…

  Giovanni had secretly admitted to Erminia that he had a drug problem, a thing she hardly understood at all, when she’d confronted him over her gold earrings that had gone missing. He’d sworn he would reform and become a proper grandson to her, if only she wouldn’t tell anyone. Erminia fell for it, kept her side of the bargain, didn’t breathe a word. Silly thing to do, trust a drogato, but what did she know of these matters?

  Mariuccia had guessed nothing until Signor Ugo kindly alerted her to the fact that her old aunt had begun to buy wine from his shop, a thing she had never done before in her life, and in surprisingly large quantities. Mariuccia had witnessed several attempts by San Pietro families to cure heroin addiction by drowning it in wine – cheap, legal, more socially acceptable. But somehow you don’t expect it in your own family, do you?

  Erminia was by now a sad shadow of her former self. Mariuccia faced the boy out – he’d had the nerve to come trying to borrow money from her – and told him to get out of town and leave his poor granny in peace. But drogati, she says, have no pity for anyone but themselves: he didn’t go far, just went and camped in a rustico up in the hills, kept reappearing at his granny’s at mealtimes asking for food. (Aha! So there really was at least one biker junkie marauder from Milan!)

  Of course, once autumn arrived and the cold weather with it, Erminia gave in, couldn’t be so cruel to her own flesh and blood. She let him come home and the whole business started all over again. It only ended when Giovanni got caught breaking into somebody’s house right here in Diano San Pietro. On his own doorstep, che brutta figura! Luckily there’d been enough of this sort
of trouble round here before, and no one thought any the worse of her and Erminia…

  He was taken off to Genoa in handcuffs, in the back of a police car, never to be seen again. And good riddance too, says Mariuccia. That boy was worrying poor Erminia into an early grave. So nowadays they are a woman-only team, except when her dead husband’s best mate Ettore has a moment to help them out with the heavy stuff.

  Extraordinary place, this Diang San Peo. You could be living in a particularly lively edition of a British Sunday tabloid. If it wasn’t for the landscape and the weather being all wrong.

  June has come: in Diano Marina we stand amazed. The place is unrecognizable. Some kind of catastrophe has overwhelmed the streets with a flood of chaos and primary colours. The rather staid and classical face of the town we know has been blotted out at a stroke, the usually restrained shopfronts suddenly invisible behind wave upon wave of lurid plastic. Huge stands are crammed with tourist goodies of every kind: multicoloured toys, goggles, beachwear, flip-flops, snorkels, flags, inflatable beach mattresses, suntan lotions and everything else remotely connected with holidaying you can think of. Tall glass-doored freezer cabinets, their shelves loaded with extravagant ice cream sundaes that bristle with paper parasols and lurid plastic swizzle-sticks, have been wheeled out and are taking up any small areas of pavement not totally inundated with gaudy knick-knacks.

  The bars and cafés are obscene travesties of their former unostentatious selves. The two or three little round tables, which usually sit outside each one, have expanded on low wooden platforms set out in the middle of the streets; now there are hordes of frilly sun umbrellas, flowery tablecloths and swing-seats, all smothered with frou-frous and furbelows. Cars can only just squeeze past, single-file.

  We weave erratically through the new-laid multicoloured obstacle course, and finally manage, dazed and disoriented, to track down the pharmacy, then turn tail and dash for the hills. No, Pompeo wasn’t exaggerating after all.

  Up here, too, June has arrived: and with it Apes at dawn. All around Besta de Zago the midsummer pulizia, the Cleaning, is starting up. From six-thirty onwards the hills are alive with the sound of the many types of tiny yet eardrum perforating internal combustion engines required for this task, buzzing and howling to one side of the house or the other, if not both at once, and dragging us stumbling and swearing out of bed and over to the coffee pot. Even people who don’t bother doing anything else at all to their olive trees are now loudly and bustlingly Cleaning all round them.

  Until now all has been peace and quiet apart from the gentle background racket of wildlife getting on with its business – frogs croaking down in the bottom of the valley, cicadas skreeking in the grass, tree crickets krarking in the olives, depending on the time of day. But these creatures croak, skreek or krark rhythmically and continuously and soon fade into the background. Not so this onslaught of cleaning technology, whose roarings stop and start, come and go, punctuated by sudden full-throated outbursts of cheery shouting or song from the operators when things are going well, or of black blasphemy, porky madonnas and lurid cows when the equipment fails, which it does with dramatic regularity. Voices carry beautifully in this bowl of a valley; for three mornings in a row we hear, over and over again, delivered by one invisible peasant working somewhere downhill and to the seaward of us, the same few lines of a tragic ballad concerning his great loneliness and his deep and undying affection for his horse, his only true friend.

  How sad that the horses are almost all gone from this valley, I say to myself; it sounds as if the old folk miss them terribly. Remorseless repetition having burnt this fragment of nostalgic olive-farming song into my brain, I will now go around humming it off and on for months, feeling very folklorical.

  How do I know that song I keep singing? asks Patrizia one day as I’m humming my way through the washing-up. How have I come to be so familiar with the signature tune of a 1960s kids’ cowboy series? Can Italian TV Westerns have been worth dubbing and exporting to England? Surely not?

  During this period of high concentration of knotted hankies around our home, I find I am beginning to get my eye in to the many and various knotting styles from which the modern olive farmer can choose. There are, I notice – as a whole new crop of people do their level best to get a good look at us, needing either a glass of water or a screwdriver or, to prolong the inspection, one of each – two basic designs around which you can create your own individual look. You can have four knots, one at each corner, creating the classic pudding-basin shape; or you can have two knots only, tying the corners together in pairs, one of which rests on the forehead, the other on the nape. This creates a tube-shaped head covering that funnels the breeze, when there is any, up over the knots and on to the pate below. When there is no wind, though, the loop of cloth over the forehead lies flat, forming a shady peak over the eyes. It is while I am gazing at an interesting variation on this two-knot-tube style – Lucy has gone for the screwdriver – that an amazing fact of headgear history is revealed to me. This visitor has tucked the cloth in at his nape, up under the knot, so that it hugs the back of his head, while the peak flap is left free: seen in profile this arrangement looks exactly like an ordinary English peaked cloth cap. In a blinding flash I realize that the design of the classic working-man’s cap is nothing but a highly elaborated descendant of the two-knotted hanky. I envisage that first-ever cloth-cap maker gloating over his or her cunning plan to stitch the damn thing up and save all that time wasting knotting and unknotting… then, over the centuries, layer upon layer of reworking and refining until the original form was lost to conscious thought, veiled in the mists of history… Until this afternoon.

  No wonder the cap never caught on in the higher echelons of society, I say to myself now that I have spotted its close kinship to an old hanky; in spite of many and complex mutations over the centuries, it was unable to escape the stigma of its lowly birth. What else could it become but the official headgear of the British working class?

  Having so far managed to ignore the occasional pointed comment in dialect from beneath various knotting styles about Dirty Land and clung tenaciously to our wildflower-strewn terraces, we have given in at last. We have begun to notice, in spite of our initial aversion to the Cleaning Ideal, that whereas good tidy mowers of terraces like Domenico and our other nearest neighbour, Nino, have an attractive new growth of lush meadow-green covering their February cleaned fascie, you can hardly walk about on ours any more. Everything that had grown waist high by May, everything that didn’t have roots more than a yard deep at any rate, has now dried out under the hot sun, shrivelled and turned to tangled knee-high prickly straw, beneath which lurks ankle-trapping dried-out undergrowth turning at earth level to murky black rot. Except for the narrow strip we keep beaten with the constant passage of feet, our path to the well has silted back up again with the dead and scratchy remnants of once exuberant plant life. As we keep finding out round here, what seems to our unpractised eyes to be a beauty of Nature is, after all, down to centuries of Nurture. The reason our terraces were so lovely when we first got here was not in spite of Cleaning, but because of it. Though we still can’t really see why everyone else is so keen on keeping their land tidy, considering they’re never up here and mostly don’t even harvest their olives. Anyhow, we have seen the error of our ways, and have begun to Clean thoroughly. Down with Dirt.

  Almost all the compulsive cleaners of this hillside seem to have the olive grower’s equivalent of a Hoover, a great roaring petrol-driven strimmer and brushcutter, the decespugliatore, advertised by Pompeo. After our efforts with sickles among the brambles, we have decided that Pompeo is absolutely right about new technology; the horrors of the complex and delicate innards of the internal combustion engine can’t be any worse than the hand-blistering back-breaking sickle horror. Sadly, though, on going down to make our bid to join the late twentieth century at the Cooperativa Agricola, we discover that they cost several hundred pounds and change our minds at the speed of
light. The sooner our funds run out, the sooner we’ll have to go back to England to raise more. If we want to postpone the moment of doom there is nothing for it but to mount an intensive attack with the good old-fashioned sickle, of which we have plenty thanks to Pompeo having moved on to better things. Oxen are probably a lot cheaper for ploughing than Rotavators, too, if you happen to have a couple lying about the place.

  The earth is low, and we backward Faraldi-style sickle-folk soon find that due to our obsolete equipment we have great heaps and piles and bundles of hay to clear away once we have finished cutting; unlike the lazy rich strimmer owners, whose Dirt is reduced to a fine mulch that vanishes by itself in a couple of weeks. Should we get ourselves some hay-eating creature to help? A rabbit? A goat? Of course, an ox!

  Will we ever make it to Peasants Professional? We console ourselves with the thought that exercise is good for us, while sickles are probably better for the rather more selective Cleaning we want to do, saving the best clumps of wild flowers.

  The boring job of clearing the terraces below, the ones with the olive trees on them whose scruffiness sticks out like a sore thumb, is beginning to get us down. We’ve been doing a bit every day, trying to tame those eight terraces of knee-high grass and weeds. Neighbours are coming up to sort out their groves below and to either side of us. Nino is here every morning at crack of dawn, and so is Ugo with a recalcitrant ten-year-old son. Also a very grumpy and monosyllabic gentleman with a big long beard, name unknown, who owns the trees just above our parking space. All of them are setting a fine example of the correct Cleaning timetable: six-thirty prompt start, down tools at the first hoot-and-bong of midday, don’t start again till four if at all. We have noticed this; we appreciate its good sense; but we are constitutionally incapable, it seems, of either starting or stopping at the right moment. We never manage to get out here till eight at the earliest, and with the summer heat building up, by ten o’clock in the morning the fierce sun is already over the ridge behind us blatting our terraces, hammering our heads, setting off those ten thousand cicadas whose skreeking makes you feel twice as hot instantly. By eleven, just doing the easy stuff, grasses and weeds, never mind dried-out tangled undergrowth and fierce woody prickly brambles, is almost unbearable. Twelve o’clock bongs, hoots: needless to say we grit our teeth and keep on slashing. We have to atone for the wastrel hours of coffee drinking and hanging out. Our clearing is getting more and more scruffy and incompetent. And we are fed up to the teeth with it. Depressingly, because we didn’t do ours in February, even when we finally succeed in clearing all the trailing surface greenery and the dead undergrowth below it, we are left with ugly terraces of bare scrubby earth. No smooth green meadows for us unless it rains again soon. Which it shows no sign of doing. This afternoon we’re finishing off the small half-a-terrace just below the house: an urgent operation inspired by a snake in the grass. This horrible thing appeared to me as I was sitting under the lemon tree over my after-lunch coffee, gazing unfocused and abstracted at the foliage below me moving gently in the sea-breeze coming up the valley. One tall stalk that seemed oddly out of rhythm with the rest gradually drew my attention; eventually it dawned on me that the off-rhythm item was not vegetable at all, but animal. Some sinister kind of long skinny snake was sitting among the tall grass, waving its top half around, cunningly camouflaged as a bit of plant life and hoping, I suppose, to catch some unwary plump insect. New light on that saying ‘snake in the grass’ – not just a concealed snake, as I’d always imagined it, but an actively duplicitous snake. We didn’t need any of that sort of behaviour so close to home. Who knew what damage it might do to an unwary plump human? We set off a-sickling with renewed vim and mild hysteria, stamping about heavily to scare off serpent-life as we went.