Extra Virgin

by Annie Hawes

  A pig in a poke. But we are secretly already resigned to our fate: we know we will buy the thing. It is boiling hot, has been for weeks, and doing anything at all is an unbearable effort. This pump is already here, saving all the trouble we’d have to go to to get one from anywhere else, driving to and fro in a sticky sweaty car and being sent, no doubt, from pillar to post into the bargain… done. It will turn out to be the most horrible troublesome erratic pump in the world. But we will gradually get used to its little foibles, among which is the fact that you have to risk your life by unscrewing its spark-plug and adding a dash of oil-and-petrol mixture down the hole to give its feeble starter-rope mechanism that extra bit of explosive oomph. It is still down there at the well to this day, though, pumping away loudly and smokily for fifteen minutes once a fortnight.

  I go indoors to collect cooling refreshments from the new fridge – Euh! says Franco, how can a fridge work on gas? – to find that the tank has completely obliterated the lovely wild rock-garden which used to be our uphill view from the window above the sink. All those various textures and colours of green, those cushions and carpets of tiny tough leaves which grew so splendidly on our mini cliff-face – and incidentally caused me to realize why anyone ever wanted to grow a rock-garden, a thing which had always eluded me – are now under or behind the monstrosity.

  Lucy comes and stands gloomily next to me. There is no getting away from it, though, we’d still rather have this nightmare in blue than all those trips to the well, all that putting-off of jobs because we can’t be bothered going for the water. And now we can start on our downstairs bathroom plan, get Bruno up with his plumbing gear and have water without bucketing off down the hill for it. A tap over the kitchen sink, an indoor shower at last… no more fear of things with too many legs coming at you when you are at your most vulnerable, naked and wall-less. We’ll get another bit of root from one of those great trailing morning glories, try to grow it up the tank to hide it – if we can protect it from passing strimmers this time. Madonna-blue trumpets of flowers, thick concealing leaves. San Pietro is festooned in them, they must like the soil round here. And apart from the aesthetics, it’ll stop the water heating up in the sun every day and turning to bacteria soup. Please God make it grow quickly.

  Sad to say, unlike the trusty pump, this tank will not last more than a few years. Going off back to England to earn some money a few winters on, we will find, when we return in the spring, that it has vanished completely. Or not, on closer inspection, completely; a small flat bright-blue pancake, about four feet across, lies miserably up on the terrace where the tank once loudly stood. Strangely, its black plastic lid has suffered no similar metamorphosis: it is lodged surreally in the upper branches of a nearby broom-bush, still in a pristine state. And the morning glory now straggles flatly over the terrace as if there had never been anything there for it to climb on. It has somehow regenerated after the forest fire which, our neighbour Nino tells us, passed close by the house just after we’d gone, reducing our poor water tank to this sad remnant. Nino owns the dozen or so terraces above and below our path, between our parking place on the bend and our own olive-belt around the house, and he is a very dry character. The fire nearly got his olives, too, he says – he and half the village were up all night trying to put it out. Our lid must have been fired right off the body of the tank and on to a flame-free zone by the pressure building up once the heat struck.

  We are lucky, says Nino, that the fire started lower down the hill among the olives trees. If it had just been in the wild scrubland above the house, no one would have bothered to come up to fight it. Our home would very likely have gone up in flames. He says this, we think, in an odd manner, almost as if he felt we deserved this terrible fate. Some time later we will discover that we are right: this is exactly how he feels.

  16

  We creep along in our sturdy Fiat, over rut and gulley, rock and ravine, on a mission to check out the very top of our hair-raising mountain. The so-called road finally comes to an end in a wide shallow bowl of rolling meadowy downland, dotted with ponds and criss-crossed by streams. All plant-life down below in San Pietro has withered and dried in the fierce August sun; everything is yellow and brown and shrivelled around our house now too, except for the bits we manage to water. But up here it is fresh and green, the grass thick and luscious. It’s wonderfully restful on the eyes, and makes me realize I haven’t opened them fully for months. They’ve always been screwed up against the fierce sunlight.

  The occasional cow, property, presumably, of Franco and nipoti, wanders about the place grazing, beautiful sad-eyed cream and beige buffalo-like creatures with long legs and huge bells round their necks; nothing like the square and stocky cows you see in England. Silhouetted against the top of the ridge are small groups of distant horses. We get out and climb the steep grassy slope right to the top, wander along the ridge trying to find the spot where our muletrack joins the one that would, according to Franco, eventually take us up over the high mountain passes to the crossroad towns – Pieve di Teco, Testico, Cosio d’Arroscia; towns that were great trading centres not so long ago, in the days when the coastal strip, now bloated by tourism, was nothing but a miserable collection of negligible hand-to-mouth fishing villages.

  The trading towns are these days mostly reduced to ghost towns, though you can guess at their past glories from their massive, solid medieval architecture, their slate-paved thoroughfares; for centuries the staples of peasant life, the oil of the hills, the salt from the sea and the corn of the plains – all you need to keep a decent Italian body and soul together – met up here to be bartered. The pack mules from the olive groves would have trudged their way up these muletracks, main arteries of the region’s trade, to meet others carrying goods from the grain basket to the North. I see those Ligurians of ancient times – coloured hankies, I think, in those days, and maybe the odd earring, but already known for dour penny-pinchers – trudging up this very path, their beasts weighed down with salt, olives and oil, muttering bitterly to one another about the lazy good-for-nothing plainsfolk whose journey will all be on the flat, and whose crops practically grow themselves. How many quintals of flour for a quintal of oil? You must be joking…

  When you get to the peak you find a cairn with a cross built on to it that takes the hilltop up to exactly a thousand metres; inside it is one of those books you sign to show you’ve made it up here. We do. Below us the land flows on, valley after valley, hilltop town after hilltop town, in every direction. Inland we can just make out huge peaks still snow-capped; behind us an infinity of misty sea. I have never been remotely interested in mountaineering but suddenly I can see the attraction; right up here you get an incredible sensation of power and control. But why? There isn’t anything to control. What do I imagine I’m controlling?

  Farther on, another cairn; a rough stone monument to seven Partisans killed in this spot by the Barbaria Nazifascista during a rastrellamento. We don’t know what a rastrellamento is. But the dead were all boys in their late teens and early twenties bar one, who was thirty-five. Their names are Ardissone, Alberti, Novara – good San Pietro names. Somebody still tends the memorial; as well as the aloes and geraniums planted around it there are some fresh-cut wildflowers in a jam jar. What a terrible place to be caught and killed, on this wide bare hillside, village and home so close down below, but no way out, nowhere to hide.

  A great flock of goats is grazing down below; there must be a couple of hundred of them at least, ambling slowly uphill towards us. We’ve never heard Frank the Knife mention having goats. But up here we are well above the point where the head of the Faraldi meets our own Diano valley. They could be Faraldi goats. The sum total of our knowledge of the Faraldi valley, apart from its fine feste, are the distressing facts Pompeo has shared with us: too many oxen, not enough football pitches, too many Christians. For all we know, the place may be riddled with goats.

  The altitude or something has gone to my head, and a strange inspiration c
omes to me when finally the herd’s leaders are only a few yards away. I jump to my feet, lift my arms and give a great shout at the top of my lungs in their direction. The herd with one accord turns and streams back down the green hillside; rushes on and on, leaping the low remnants of terracing, disappearing behind curves in the terrain, reappearing again in the distance, still hurrying, until they are nothing but tiny dots far below us. Wonderful; an utterly pointless sensation of power. Control at last.

  Heading back down, we spot a red lorry and an Ape pulling up near our car, where the road trickles to an end. Franco and his nipoti arriving to attend to their beasts. We wave and jump about. Franco calls us down, and we walk right into another of those surreal Ligurian experiences.

  Franco is off to take supplies to his herdsman, Ardito, he says – do we want to come and see the horses? We do. Apart from anything else we think that if we were officially introduced to this fearsome person we would find him less scary. And he might stop leering at us in that awful way.

  Franco tells us that scariness is one of Ardito’s most important functions – potential cattle rustlers are kept at bay by their fear that he will give them the evil eye. Carlo tells us to take no notice of his uncle, who suffers from the delusions of old age; no one believes nonsense like that these days. Franco is incensed. Cattle thieves would come from the cut-off valleys of the hinterland, the wild inland side of the mountain, of whose primitive inhabitants his molly-coddled coastal nephews know nothing. The boys throw up their hands in despair and head off for their lorry and home.

  We load ourselves into the back of Franco’s Ape and head off downhill and cross country, over rock and meadow, towards the Faraldi valley and an extremely huge one of those ancient stone roundhouses – triple-sized at least – which turns out to be the herdsman’s HQ. He is nowhere to be seen. Hard to believe that anyone really lives in this thing. It’s a man-made cave, nothing more – the huge stones just cantilevered inwards one above the other until they meet at the top, rather than being built on the arch principle. This primitive construction method means that its walls have to be absurdly thick; five feet at least at the bottom. The doorway is practically a tunnel. An upper floor has been made by embedding four treetrunks in the walls for beams and laying thick branches followed by thinner branches followed by twigs across them. Once upon a time the thing was stabilized with some kind of mud plaster; now it is so decrepit that you can see right through it in places. This is where Ardito sleeps, clambering up to the upper floor on a rough nailed-together tripod ladder.

  One of those great demijohns of wine, with a siphon tube and tap leading from its cork, stands on the earth floor just inside the door, a mug and a couple of glasses on a cracked plate next to it. Ardito doesn’t even seem to have a table. A few bits of clothing hang from two of those wooden pegs built into the wall for tethering beasts, next to a contraption of sticks for holding the horses’ hay. Ardito’s washing facilities are a bucket and a tin bowl balanced on an old orange-box outside the door. Nearby, built on to the side of the roundhouse, is a kind of smoke-encrusted cross between a shed and a stone oven, with a wood-store below. This must be where he does his cooking. A slab of stone juts from the wall just below the fire-shelf, and on this stands a coffee-encrusted espresso pot and a battered and smoke-blackened saucepan, alongside a greasy bottle plugged with paper – olive oil, at a guess – and a food-bespattered damp and crumbling box of salt. A string of garlic hangs from a nail jammed between the rocks.

  Franco is very airy about these conditions – it’s what Ardito’s used to, he says, as if the man had designed and built the place himself. The horses don’t need to come indoors anyway, not during the summer, unless they’re sick or foaling.

  So he’s living in a stable, really? we say.

  Euh! Ardito’s fine up on his branches! Nice and warm! Franco himself has lived for months on end in places just like this, and it’s done him no harm.

  We sit down in the warm sun on the grass outside this stone-age dwelling and wait for its inhabitant to turn up. Franco goes over to his Ape, brings back a loaf and some tomatoes. We may as well eat while we’re here, he says, collecting his employee’s salt and olive oil and getting out his trusty knife. He does us a slice of bread each with a bit of tomato and a lot of salt and olive oil, then nips indoors to refill his wine bottle from Ardito’s demijohn. I wonder if this theft too will be blamed on the phantom drogati.

  A few swigs later, Franco is ready for therapy. He settles in to tell us the story of his father. Or rather, his lack of a father, who we now hear died when Franco was only eleven. The father, it seems, had a huge drunken fight with his best mate; something to do with shoeing horses. In the morning when he came to his senses, he discovered that he’d broken both his friend’s legs. Realizing that he had devastated the friend’s life, knowing that he would be ostracized by the rest of the village and would have to support this man’s family into the bargain – I suppose in those days you would have been likely to be crippled for ever with two broken legs; no way you’d be able to carry on being a cowperson at any rate – Franco’s dad went straight down to the bridge over the ravine at Moltedo, just below where Ciccio’s restaurant now is, and threw himself off. Franco, sister Silvana and their mother had to get along by themselves from then on; he stopped bothering with whatever schooling there was in those days, stepped straight into his father’s shoes, or rather saddle, and went off up the mountain to look after the beasts.

  Before we can find out more, especially what it could be about horeshoes that might cause someone to break a friend’s legs, Franco, grumbling, says he has to get back down to the village. He’ll just have to wait till next week to see his employee. Rooting in the back of the Ape he pulls out another three loaves of bread, five bags of pasta, a box full of tomatoes and onions, two of Iole’s cheeses and another dribbly bottle of olive oil. We realize that we’ve been tucking in to poor Ardito’s week’s supplies. Last of all, Franco extracts a neat six-pack of Danone chocolate mousses from the cab. Something Iole thought Ardito needed, he explains, and dumps it on top of the pile in the doorway, in which surroundings it sits looking like some particularly glaring anachronism, a terrible mistake by the continuity person.

  Is Ardito really as happy up there as Franco claims? Not at all, is the answer, in spite of the chocolate mousses, as we soon find out.

  Our friend Martin is staying with us at the moment. By now, the Morris having collapsed, we are on the ancient but four-wheel drive Fiat. Franco’s means of transport are off the road for various reasons, he says, and he needs to collect Ardito from his parents’ house, thirty-odd miles away up into the mountains. The road is terrible; there would be no point in his borrowing a normal car to go there. Maybe, he says, Martin would enjoy a trip inland, up into the hills? Would he, perhaps, agree to take Franco in the Fiat? I imagine that Ardito has been having a well-earned holiday with his family; though I’m a bit surprised at Franco being so generous as to go and give him a ride back.

  What an odd person Franco is, I say to myself, the way he takes these unexpected shines to people. I’ll have to drive, though, I say, the car’s not insured for anyone else. Fine by Franco; it doesn’t, apparently, have to be a men-only trip. As long as Martin is coming along too. Yes, he is, don’t worry, I say indulgently. Next lunchtime we set off.

  On and on out of known terrain we drive, until the hairpin bends are steeper and higher than the imagination can compass, the trees unfamiliarly tall and the valleys miles below sharp, narrow abysses, mist-filled depths where the sun hardly penetrates, the occasional villages all half-abandoned stone and wood and poverty, no paint, no colours at all except mud. Out into a high moorland place where the tarmac ends and a dishevelled hamlet, more than half its houses empty ruins, crouches miserably with its back to a grey cliff.

  Now that we’ve arrived Franco reveals, with a rather half-hearted attempt at a casual laugh, that what has really happened is that Ardito has run off without saying a
word, left Franco in the lurch, and we have come all this way to get him back, make him face up to his duties.

  What do you mean? I say. He doesn’t have to work for you if he doesn’t want to, does he?

  But yes, says Franco, he does. Franco has paid for a year of Ardito’s work in advance; partly in money, mostly in cheese and wine and oil. Not to Ardito himself, of course, but to his family, who have in effect rented him out. And he has broken the contract, done a runner before the full year is up.

  This is stuff you read about in history books, payment in kind and by the year. You know it’s bad somehow but in a general sort of way. You also know that it stopped sometime round about the end of the Middle Ages. But you are wrong. I am outraged; I certainly wouldn’t have brought Franco if I’d known what was going on. You can’t force a poor halfwit to live in vile conditions in the middle of nowhere against his will! And as for paying someone else for his labour, as if he was a slave…!

  Well, says Franco with spirit, he would just have come next week when his Ape was fixed anyway, if we hadn’t brought him. But he is definitely looking a bit shifty and shamefaced; and why didn’t he tell us what he was really up to until we’d got here if it is so normal?

  Franco has timed our arrival for the dinner-hour to be sure of catching the family in, Finance Police style. They are sitting at table eating pasta with no sauce, just a smear of olive oil on it and (judging by the perfume) a lot of garlic. A wizened bit of cheese sits on a grater between the plates. We are in a small cramped kitchen with a smoky wood-stove in one corner, on which there is no sign of the usual secondo piatto bubbling away. Maybe the five dropping-smeared eggs sitting on the window ledge next to a bundle of parsley are it. In the corner is a bucket of water with a jug-shaped ladle sitting in it; no sink. The one outside the door surrounded by trampled mud must be all there is.