by Annie Hawes
Aubergines turn out to have fat round purple flowers like stout drooping-headed mini-sunflowers, very fetching. They and the red peppers are coming along nicely. Amazing to find them just growing out of the earth on ordinary normal plants. Everything here grows at an amazing rate – every three or four days another foot or so of tomato plant needs to be tied back against its six-foot cane support. That granny of ours, who has fought a life-long battle under the grey skies of Scotland with troublesome tomato plants which, up there, have to be all wrapped up in greenhouses for protection, would faint for joy.
Fresh-off-the-plant snacks whenever you feel like it, just a potter down to the well; a delicious kind of baby marrow called trombette, little trumpets – long curly things, pale green outside, creamy and firm-fleshed within, no tendency to wateriness like the dark-green shiny things you get in England; tomato salads with basil, to which we are now heavily addicted, several times a day if required; lots of lovely green leafy stuff, mouth-watering rocket and spinach and bietole as well as lettuces green and red, and a square yard each of rampaging basil and flat-leafed parsley – no fear of slugs and snails in this dry climate.
And thanks to all those insistently ripening eat-me-now-or-I’ll-rot vegetables we have at last understood what it is about the olive that has made it such a symbol of peace and plenty for the last couple of thousand years. The olive is magic: if you have olive oil, which we do – even though ours is for the moment bought at Ugo’s and may very well be full of only the Lord knows what – you can transform virtually calorie-free greenery into nutrition-packed sustenance. Not that we ourselves need more calories at the moment. In fact, we’re rather trying to lay off the olive oil. But we see how useful the principle of the thing is if, like most of the humans in the world today and throughout history, you are actually short of the calories you need to stay alive.
During the war, Domenico says, when food shortages were bad, you could live off just your orto – or, once you’d stripped that bare, wild greens from the hills – stuff that wouldn’t keep body and soul together for any length of time at all, as long as you had your olive oil to boost it up (and as long as you had your old granny who still remembered which stuff to gather). With a good dose of olive oil and a few wild garlic heads you could transform borage, fennel, the sprouting tips of old man’s beard, tiny wild broccoli or asparagus, into fine stomach-filling nutrition-packed dinners. Not, of course, that it wasn’t a lot better when you could come by a spoonful of flour, an egg or two, and abandon your mashed-up poltiglia of greenery and oil for something classier, a primo piatto of borage fritters maybe – or fritters made of the flowering heads of wild garlic, even better – and a secondo of delicate old-man’s-beard-tip frittata. (Inspired, we will try out both these recipes – wild garlic-flower frisceüi and old-man’s-beard-tip omelette; both so good that we have to tell Ciccio about them. Traditional Ligurian frisceüi of garlic flowers are soon featuring among the antipasti up at the Moltedo restaurant. Much to the annoyance of Ciccio’s mother, Francesca, who insists that there is nothing especially Ligurian about them except the silly name. She must have eaten tons of the things in her childhood in Calabria, she says.)
Of course, we ourselves haven’t sunk to a state of famine yet, and probably never will, despite Domenico’s anxieties. Our only problem is that we’re too lazy to bother going all the way down to the shop. So, go down to the orto instead to see what it dictates for lunch: return with some tomatoes, a fistful of basil, a few zucchini. Boring? But cut the zucchini in strips lengthways and stick them on your griddle; when they are a bit translucent and brown-stripy, chuck them in a bowl with some garlic and olive oil, and a crumpled thyme twig. Leave a few minutes for the flavours to mix. Mmmm, as we English so ludicrously say. Or, if you’re after a few more calories, grate the zucchini up and add salt; wait twenty minutes while the salt draws out their liquid. Now beat in some flour; drop spoonfuls of this batter stuff into an inch or so of sizzling-hot olive oil, fish out mouth-watering golden crunchy fritters. Next piatto: chop the tomatoes up (chunks, not slices, naturally), add the basil, pinch of salt, olive oil, a quick whisk, and your tomato juices, drawn out by the salt, will emulsify with the oil to produce a thick voluptuous sauce into which you can dip yesterday’s dry crusts, transforming them into a gourmet’s delight. Even better with a mozzarella chopped up in it, of course.
The olive not only saves your life, it makes everything taste good, too. Pondering upon this pleasing fact as we munch – we have gone for the hi-cal frisceüi, with the excuse of heavy painting work downstairs this afternoon – we notice that we have dealt only with the Olive and Plenty. What about the Olive and Peace nexus? Is it just that well-nourished people with full stomachs are less inclined to go to war? Very likely, we decide. At the moment, for example, well-lined with olive oil, we are feeling positively overwhelmed by a certain pacific lassitude… Maybe we’ll save the painting till tomorrow.
Our revived orto is improving our diet in more ways than one. After all this time, we have still not managed to get the hang of the Byzantine complexities of local opening hours, and a surprisingly large number of our trips to the village shops are fruitless. It appears to us – although the other inhabitants of San Pietro always have some glib explanation for his erratic behaviour – that Signor Ugo-the-grocer just opens and closes as the whim takes him. He doesn’t always bother to open on a Tuesday morning, for example, because it’s market day in Diano Marina. Meanwhile, he often closes early for lunch on a Friday because there is no bus that day. Once the summer season has started he doesn’t open for the afternoon shift till four. Or perhaps four-thirty or five if it’s very hot – unless, that is, he happens to have finished lunch early because his wife’s away. In which case he’ll shut early. Meaning that he’s already shut by five some days, others is still standing chatting at his fly-curtained doorway, happy to serve you, at eight in the evening.
True, erratic hours are quite normal round here. Shops in Diano Marina also open and shut with no identifiable rhyme or reason. But it doesn’t matter so much down there in the town – if one is closed, plenty of others will be open. Here, with only the one grocer, the one hardware shop, and the one butcher, unpredictability is all very well for people who live in the heart of the village and form part of its daily exchange network of news and gossip; it is enough to drive us mountain-dwelling folk twelve hairpin bends away to distraction.
Assuming we have managed, for example, to get into Signor Ugo’s shop at all, our troubles are not over. First, wait while he finishes dealing with the customers ahead of you. This does not involve merely selling them things: as well as the general gossip and trying out the merchandise, there is the in-depth debate about exactly how they are planning to cook the items they are purchasing – the relative merits of adding white wine or tomato puree to a mushroom sugo, the putative effects on the digestion of either, and so on. You are welcome to join in, but the conversation switches in and out of thickest Ligurian.
Once it’s your turn, you still face a barrage of exhausting social complexities. Sometimes Signor Ugo will meet you with a sunny smile and include you in the in-depth gossip in progress. You will be called, intimately, ‘tu’; enquiries will be made about your health, attitude to prevailing weather conditions and so on. You may, for example, be offered various exciting new foodstuffs to try; somebody’s home-baked bread, somebody else’s fresh eggs that are so good you must drink one raw – eek. You may be warned of imminent dangers in the area – shown, maybe, the signs that gypsies will have left on the wall by your front door to indicate to one another your level of handout-giving or robbery-worthiness (gypsies – mostly from Montenegro – occasionally take over from junkies in the local psyche as the most likely source of anarchy and chaos in the valley).
At your next visit to the shop, you will be called a formal ‘lei’, as if you’d committed some unknown offence since Signor Ugo last saw you. Just to make matters more complicated, in calling us ‘tu’, he ma
y not even mean to be intimate: persons who are older than you, or superior in some other way, may call you ‘tu’ and expect to be answered with a respectful ‘lei’. So if we call him ‘tu’ in return, we may be offending him with unsolicited intimacy, an unwarranted assumption of equality: if we call him ‘lei’, we may be rudely rejecting a friendly move. Unnerved by the whole business, we often find ourselves inadvertently doing a bit of each. It is a minefield, and we are relieved when Caterina, rather than laughing at us for being daft foreigners as we’re expecting her to do, confesses that she can’t make head or tail of Signor Ugo either. Her solution to the problem is to do long circumlocutions to avoid using the word ‘you’ at all. Cunning. We knew the locals must have a way round it.
You might think that a non-Ligurian-speaking customer could entertain herself during the unconscionably long waits by pottering round the shop inspecting the merchandise. Wrong. Almost nothing here is on open display; no sudden shopping inspiration can strike you the way it might in a street market or supermarket. When your turn finally comes you have to ask for each item by name, wait while Signor Ugo goes and gets it from some deep dark recess of his storeroom, and then start all over again asking for the next item. All this, mark you, whilst concentrating on avoiding any formulation involving that dangerous word ‘you’.
Still, Signor Ugo is, indeed, superior: certainly not a person you would address lightly as ‘tu’. He is a man of education, and in some years’ time, when the educated begin to be proud of their dialects rather than shunning them, will translate not a few plays from the Italian into Ligurian, and they will be put on in the piazza by the Nui autri circle of local dialect supporters.
It is possible that in these early days the germ of Ligurian regional patriotism is already lurking in Signor Ugo’s blood, and he is not pleased with foreigners hanging out in the hills and contributing to the decay of Ligurianicity in the village; it is also possible that he feels we should support our village shop more concertedly, instead of being lured away as we often are by the gaudy charms of Diano Marina’s street market or the air-conditioned marble halls and silvery trolleys of the Imperia supermarket. Apart from getting your eggs in nice rigid boxes instead of rolled up in sheets of newspaper from which you know they will never make it back to the house whole, in either of these places you won’t have to deal with persons of unnervingly unstable dispositions – or rather, you need never find anything out about their dispositions at all: most soothing to us mealy-mouthed English who just want to get on with it and get home. Also, the national tradition of in-depth discussion in public of exactly how you’re planning to cook whatever you’re buying comes in much more handy here, since the stallholders and supermarket cashiers are by no means all Ligurians, and debate is carried on in the lingua franca, Italian.
Signor Ugo will eventually become Independent non-Communist Mayor of San Pietro – though the disillusion brought on by the collapse of the Communist Bloc will hardly touch San Pietro’s old-timers. Much more of a commotion will be caused by the physical collapse of the economies of the East, and the appearance of surprisingly large numbers of its inhabitants in this valley, than by the political upheavals which have made them leave in the first place. In the nineties Signor Ugo’s clients won’t only be fearful of junkies and gypsies, but also of Albanians.
On the twelve hairpin bends between us and Signor Ugo’s you will always meet at least two huge lorries and/or an assortment of bulldozers, tractors or related large and unwieldy vehicles, so that you spend about as much time going backwards very slowly to let these monsters past without slipping off the edge of the road, as going forwards towards your (probably pointless) goal. The building instinct of their forefathers who created the village in the first place still runs strong in the blood of today’s San Peotti, and seven or eight centuries later everyone is still at it, adding and improving, knocking down and putting back up the other way round: though in these modern times, rather than reusing the rather inconvenient materials nature has placed at their disposal as they did in days of yore, they understandably go for lorryloads of bricks, sacks of cement, and heavy machinery. We may have only the one grocer in San Pietro, and the DIY chains may not quite have got here yet, but we do have our very own builders’ yard, the poetically named Giardino dell’Edilizia – the Garden of Eden /stroke/Garden of Building. If, by some mischance, you meet no builders on your trip to Signor Ugo’s, you will instead find yourself trapped in some major cow-moving manoeuvre by Franco or his nipoti, the Giacomassi boys; or get stuck behind some infuriatingly slow Ape, its truck-section weighed down with assorted petrol-driven agricultural tools, dogs, and wrinkly old men who wave cheerily at you while sniggering beneath their hankies and venerable grey moustaches every time their friend or relation at the wheel (or perhaps handlebar) manages, with a nifty weave and wobble, to thwart yet another of your attempts to overtake. Reason enough, you may conclude, to go along with Domenico, return to self-sufficient subsistence farming, and give up shopping for ever.
Adding to the immense strides civilization is making up our hill, we have got ourselves not only bottled gas but also a fridge that runs on it, which Helmut/Mario and his girlfriend Doris have found for us. (Doris is, apparently, a trendy and attractive name amongst the Tedeschi.) It comes from a camper-van belonging to some other Germans, which has been badly damaged and is being sold as scrap. We and all the Diano Company are amazed by this thing – how can it work on gas? And with just the one tiny pilot light-type flame? Actually, we have no idea how an electric fridge works either: the one is not really any more amazing than the other, truth to tell. Still, we go on gazing at the thing, sitting snugly under our marble sink like a visitor from another planet, and being amazed. Until now we have been rediscovering the pre-fridge diet, living on the salami we hang from our mouse-proof hooks, on tinned and potted things, keeping leftovers edible by pressing them down hard into jars or bowls to remove any air and covering them with a layer of olive oil – another handy hint from Mariuccia – to keep them from going off. Now that we have suddenly caught up with history, we can have any amount of fresh meat, we can store vast quantities of cooked ham, mayonnaise, fresh cheeses; we can even have cold drinks with ice cubes. And at last we can start making tea again, a habit we had to give up because it was so vile with UHT milk, while it was pointless buying the fresh stuff, which would turn to yoghurt or worse five minutes after you’d bought it.
The fridge is not all. Our intensive hillside course in Great Technological Achievements of the Last Few Centuries and Why We Needed Them has led to our splashing out on a water tank, a huge kingfisher-blue plastic cylinder, purchased from – where else? – the Builders’ Eden. We have noticed in our well-water a hint of perfume, a slight tendency to froth up, and have at last made the connection between this and our habit of washing vast quantities of shampoo into the ground right next to its source. The outdoor shower must go. We bump into Franco as we are paying for the tank, and he airily announces, to the great annoyance of Mr B. Eden who is in the middle of booking us an expensive delivery by lorry, that he will bring it up for us, save us the money, since he has to pass our house anyway on the way to reroof his cowshed. Of such stuff, I say to my sister, are bad reputations made. Frank the Knife is Innocent!
The tank arrives early next morning, edging its way along our path under what appears to be its own lurid-blue steam: it is in fact roped to the back of a small minion of Franco’s who is bent double under it, partly to avoid the hanging olive branches, but mostly because of its weight. A boy, we see as the tank draws closer, who can’t be more than fourteen, and who (we soon discover) speaks hardly any Italian. Franco himself comes strolling along behind, waving a large and beautifully whittled stick, shouting instructions in pidgin Ligurian to his porter and prodding the occasional olive frond out of the way with the stick.
We and the long-suffering boy now struggle to get the thing up to its new home a couple of terraces above the house, Franco having disappear
ed back to his Ape to collect something he’s forgotten. Or so he says.
As we heave and grunt our way up the hill under a blazing sun, we find out that Franco’s helper is not a Ligurian from some distant dialect-only outpost, as we have assumed, but, of all things, a Moroccan. We have heard, amongst the general San Peotto criticisms of Franco, that he gets his maltreated workforce from far-off places where people know no better – but still, Morocco! How would an illiterate Ligurian peasant and horse-dealer go about getting hold of a teenage Moroccan? We ask Franco, who has reappeared down the path from his lorry with a small heavy object swathed in a sack under his arm: his answer is to lay his finger along the side of his nose and wink. The object he had forgotten turns out to be a water pump he no longer needs, and which he is generously proposing to sell to us. At a bargain price, of course. No wonder he was so keen to bring the tank up. We hum and ha a bit. Why don’t we all go down to the well, says the high-pressure salesman, so he can demonstrate it to us? No. The well is nowhere near as full as it might be, it not having rained more than a few drops for two months; and we still need to buy the thirty yards or so of tubing to go between well and tank. We don’t want to waste gallons of water by squirting them uselessly out on to the ground just to try out a pump that’s practically bound to work, at least the first time, unless Franco’s completely lost his touch. We know where to find him, anyway, if we have trouble with it, says Franco with his best blue-eyed look.
