Extra Virgin

by Annie Hawes

  Ardito’s family consists of an aged tiny mother and two brothers who look in their late fifties, both older than him, judging by their head-of-the-family behaviour towards him. Ardito seems to be the only one with serious learning difficulties. The house is tiny, with not so much as a coat of limewash on its inside walls. Earth dribbles out of the gaps between the stones, and the floor of this upstairs area – the beasts really do live in the downstairs – is cracked and lopsided, evidently made, like the floor in Franco’s awful roundhouse, from mud-and-lime plastered over branches and twigs. Still, though Ardito’s home may not be much, it’s certainly better than that place. At least he gets a plate of hot food here and some company. No wonder he’s done a runner from his awful job up our hill.

  Ardito just sits there saying nothing, looking dejected and guilty; the brothers rage on at him in dialect, taking Franco’s side; presumably they have already eaten and drunk the payment – or wouldn’t have enough to last the year if they gave it back. I suppose Ardito is just another mouth to feed. He isn’t up to much more than watching dumb beasts. So they’ve decided to swap a year’s worth of him for extra supplies. Martin and I don’t know what to do. Ardito really is no better than a slave, till his year runs out at any rate. They are all shouting at him; he seems to have lied to them, told them that Franco had sent him away. Or that’s the impression they want to give Franco, at any rate. I hope that secretly they were sorry for him, weren’t really going to send him back if Franco didn’t turn up and make a fuss. But now, with the Boss in their kitchen, they are stony-faced, telling Ardito he has to go. Franco wants him up with the beasts, and Franco has paid.

  Later on, back in San Pietro, which I now see is a place of great enlightenment and modernity, I find out from Luigi that this kind of contract is in fact illegal. If we’d known, we would certainly have refused to bring Ardito back. But this, of course, is why Franco particularly wanted us two to come. Nothing to do with bad roads and four-wheel drives, but because we were ignorant foreigners who knew no better. Worse still, I suspect he was afraid Ardito’s family might put up some resistance, and wanted to create the impression of a posse prepared to use force if necessary. No one from San Pietro would have come, so Martin was the ideal candidate, being large and male and having absolutely no idea what was going on.

  All this sheds new light on the disapproval which Franco inspires among the respectable olive folk of San Pietro; his links to the wild hinterlands really do connect him to an ancient, backward and shameful way of life, to miserable feudal exploitation. The rest of Italy has taken basic democratic rights to its bosom and left him behind, still working by another, ancient and horrible set of rules. An intensive course of l’Unità would do him a world of good. Or at the very least Tom Paine and The Rights of Man. But first, of course, he would have to learn to read.

  17

  Our blue plastic pancake of a water tank – all that remained after the forest fire – is to be replaced by one that Bruno has found us. A huge, and hopefully fireproof, second-hand zinc monstrosity, now resting on the back of Paletta and Ciccio’s lorry. It is even bigger than the blue plastic one. We manage to get the thing off the lorry and on to the ground, just: but what next? With only the five of us, we can hardly lift the thing. Getting it along our complicated and squiggly path is out of the question without some large reinforcement of fit and muscular persons. It weighs a ton, being solid metal, and has no handles, just a few outlet points that might give someone with unusually powerful wrist muscles a grip on its smooth flat sides. Not only is the path narrow, no more than two people wide in places, but halfway along it are those few yards where there’s a ten foot drop to your left and a high terrace wall to your right. Here the path is less than four foot wide; the tank must be five or six – and it is fifteen foot long. Where do the feet of the carriers go while it’s getting past the nasty bit? And if we ever get it past the precipice, there is still a tight bend round the big modesty rock, and a long steep slope up two or three six foot terrace walls to the tank’s spot above the house. We all stare hopelessly at it for a while; then go up and down the path a couple of times, reconnoitring in case inspiration strikes. It doesn’t. Eventually we just leave the tank on the corner where it sits immovable, taking up most of the parking space and already looking as if it’s been there for a century or two.

  We are now very worried that Nino may come up to work on his trees while it’s there. Where will he park his Ape? Nino has only recently given us a severe ticking-off for pinching a pile of flat stones that were half-hidden in the undergrowth by the side of his rustico to mud-proof our path with. There are so many stones lying about these hillsides that we didn’t actually perceive these particular ones as private property. But they were, in fact, Nino’s ex-roof stones, which he would, of course, have let us have, he said reprovingly: but we should have asked first.

  Nino makes us feel like a pair of naughty schoolgirls. Help is urgently needed before we offend him again. He’s already behaved in that odd and unsympathetic way around the dead-tank-in-the-forest-fire tragedy, and has made it clear that we are not his flavour of the month.

  He’s very unlikely to come at this time of year, say the boys, nothing to be done to olive trees in August. But we aren’t so sure. Nino is a workaholic. Nino’s trees, and the fascie beneath them, are like textbook illustrations. He never stops doing things to them; he does more things than everyone else put together.

  Fortunately the football season has begun again, and soon a good fifteen Diano boys have been recruited for the tank-moving job. The road at the end of our path looks like a parking lot, cars squeezed in every gap between olive trees and broom-bushes for a hundred yards above and below our too-small parking place. Nino, thank goodness, has not shown up.

  Heavings, shoutings, Porca-Madonna-ings, and general tumult begin. Just as the tank arrives at the precipice section of the path, amid much uproar, it slips, almost rolling off the path and taking half a dozen youths with it. This is all too much for us – if, by any chance, the tank escapes the hands of its carriers on this bit, it will roll down a good dozen terraces on to the track below, and quite possibly on down the rest of the hill to the river if it gets up enough momentum. Taking any amount of olive trees with it. At any rate, there’s no way we’ll ever get it back up here again. If it takes someone with it, it’s hard to see how they’d survive.

  We can’t possibly go on watching: Lucy and I beat a strategic retreat to get the coffee and the radio ready for when the job’s done. Espresso pot on, we track back along the upper terrace by our loo-shed to watch the progress from behind the broom-bush which these days, thanks to Cleaning deficiencies, surmounts our modesty-rock. The tank has made it past the drop, and is now edging round the bottom of our stone perch, surrounded by heaving, contorted bodies, uproar and altercation. It looks strangely like some wildlife documentary: a horde of ants dragging some juicy fat maggot back to their nest. But with unusually rowdy ants.

  The tank comes to a halt before our bottom door. It still has to get up the last and steepest bit, past the house and on to the rock ledge on the second terrace above. Our chain gang is exhausted, drooping on the tank, wiping the sweat from its eyes: realization is dawning that the worst is not yet over.

  It is during this thoughtful pause that Sergio and Lilli drop in unexpectedly. What are all the cars doing at the end of the path? Are we having a party?

  The longer Sergio and Lilli stay up in their hillside residence, the odder their dress sense seems to be getting. Lilli is at the moment wearing carpet slippers and a torn sprigged housedress with frills at the shoulders. Her eye make-up has slipped rather badly, and her hair is looped up in the most bizarrely haphazard manner, pinned vaguely in place with a huge diamante Spanish comb. Sergio has on a black T-shirt advertising a heavy-metal band, over what appear to be a pair of ladies’ floral-print shorts, beige knee-socks, and brown plastic slip-on sandals. Neither of them, moreover, seems to be entirely sober. The youth o
f Diano Marina, who have not so far met our eccentric neighbours, are startled. This is probably exactly the sort of thing they expect to happen to people who ignore the rules history has laid down for our guidance, and go around not living in villages.

  But Sergio, wild-eyed and wild-haired though he may be today, has the habit of command; and he is highly stimulated by the sight of the job in hand, not to mention the large number of young men he will be able to order about if he can manage to assert control of the operation. He is, after all, senior both by virtue of his years and of his Mountain Skills. (His house, by the way, is now finished: he gave up on the plan of ‘building with his own hands out of natural stone’ after a year or two, and has simply balanced a gigantic prefabricated wooden Swiss-chalet type structure on top of the original one-storey stone building, which has now become a cantina – as indeed many Ligurians might feel it should.)

  Sergio identifies Ciccio and Paletta as the operation’s leaders, and draws them aside for Important Men’s consultations about the next move. A block and tackle, says Sergio: we could fix it round one of the oak trees above the house and heave, so that not all the weight would be on the boys, who will have trouble enough just finding a firm footing on the steep slope. And Sergio, as it happens, has a block and tackle up at his Swiss chalet cum chicken farm. His takeover bid has succeeded. The youths are ordered to take a rest and get their breath back while the elders organize. Fortunately we have a case of cans of Nastro Azzurro to hand: we dole out the beer. Lilli, meanwhile, vanishes indoors. She needs no help to find the wine supplies. Our leaders, all three, go off to get the equipment. But they are not reckoning on the power of marital rivalry.

  As the last sips of beer go down, Lilli, in fine fettle after a few quick swigs at her glass, leaps to her feet, loops of hair sticking out at all angles, panda eyes blazing with husband-upstaging fire.

  We can do it alone! she cries. We’ll have it done before they get back! Forza, ragazzi! Come on, boys!

  For a tricky moment, it looks as if the boys aren’t going to accept orders from a lunatic. A female lunatic at that. But Lilli makes as if to put her own shoulder to the tank, and it’s more than they can resist. Nutter or not, she’s got their competitive juices flowing. They are back on the job in no time. With Lilli at their head, slippers slipping, arms flying, shouting wild exhortations – Uno, due, tre, forza! Uno, due, tre, avanti! The tank starts to edge its way up the stepping stones, across the steep slippery hill.

  Lilli is on her last triumphant ‘Andiamo, forza ragazzi!’ and the monstrous tank is just settling into its home on the uppermost terrace when Sergio, Paletta and Ciccio arrive with the block and tackle. Lilli is triumphant; Sergio crestfallen. She has made a fool of him. We suspect that Lilli’s life is for some time to come not going to be too easy. And yes, Sergio suddenly notices that her eye make-up could do with some attention, and starts to throw a string of insults at her. He is hardly checked by the appalled looks our assistants are giving him. A man insulting his wife in public! And a man of that age! Lilli, though, takes no notice: she is on a roll, buzzing with her momentary ascendancy. With great dignity and a rock-steady hand, she pours herself another glass of wine and raises it to toast her accomplices.

  *

  The German Army was in occupation. Domenico was only fourteen. And already small for his age even then, he says. But for once his size had worked in his favour. The organizer of the Partisan raid in the offing, a certain Pompeo, had chosen him for an important mission: he was the only one who looked young and harmless enough to stand a chance of getting away with it. Domenico was handed a watch, a rare and precious object in those church-bell dependent days. He was to hide out, three nights in a row, in a dark doorway at the entrance to the Vico dello Schiavo, the alley opposite Diano Marina Station, and memorize the details of the Nazifascist Barbarians’ guard on their arms store in the station: times, numbers, weapons. Times, numbers, weapons, he repeats, as if he can still hear the orders. He was not to write anything down. If he was caught, he was to drop the incriminating watch down the drain at his side and pretend he was only out breaking the curfew for a kiddies’ dare. He remembers it as if it was yesterday: the blacked-out silence, the stamping feet and muttered German in the darkened station yard, the thumping heart. He spent as much time, he says, trying to devise a foolproof scheme for disobeying orders and saving the wonderful watch if the worst happened as worrying about being caught by the Nazis. Hide it in a gap in the door jamb? No, better, a piece of thread and a matchstick across the drain grille so it wouldn’t fall right into the mucky water below… Then waiting outside the station with the others for the raid itself, over in no time. Two grunts in the darkness as the guards went down: Pompeo and Luca, Giacò’s elder brother, taking one each, careful not to kill their men, the reprisals were much worse if you did. Now everybody in through the gates, running silent and barefoot through the dark… How many good guns, how much ammunition! Euh! Una mera-viglia!

  The rastrellamento, he’s been telling us, the one we’ve seen the monument to up at the head of the valley, was the Nazifascists’ response to that very arms raid. A rastrello is a rake; a rastrellamento is a raking-in, a huge military swamping manoeuvre to flush out Partisans from their hiding places up in the hillsides. Domenico had never seen so many German soldiers – thousands of them, all setting off up through the fascie, a pincer movement up the Diano valley and the Faraldi, spread out like beaters on a hunt. And no way to warn the boys in the hills.

  One of the dead boys commemorated on the stone is Luca. Another is Fabio, Domenico’s cousin and childhood hero. Fabio had thick curly hair that would never lie flat whatever he did to it, and a dog he’d taught to do all sorts of tricks. He never took anything seriously, could always make you laugh fit to split your sides, and had managed, just before he was shot dead, to grow his first proper moustache. Not just fluff on the upper lip like everyone else his age. Much good it did him, says Domenico.

  As usually happens when I get told these war stories, I’ve gone all sniffly. These cheerful matter-of-fact folk living with another, parallel vision of these safe and familiar streets and hillsides, one filled with death and danger, hunger and fear. Cautious old peasant folk who seem as solid and unchanging as their stony landscape, rooted in centuries-old tradition, but who’ve lived through more upheavals and earthshaking changes than I can begin to imagine, and whose stories send everything into double exposure. The Vico dello Schiavo, a high-walled leafy alley which till now has been just a useful shady bypass away from the milling mainstreet tourists of high summer, will be overlaid for ever now with a flickering image of a teenaged Domenico crouched moustacheless and scared in the dark in that last doorway, single-handedly defying Nazifascist Barbarism, yearning for a watch of his own. Over cheerful little Diano station, with its bright flowering oleanders, a jump-cut shadow of a Nazi Headquarters dealing death, a cold-blooded shooting up in the hills.

  No wonder the old folk round here are all so fussily in love with the security of their daily routines, their carefully ordered meals at carefully ordered times, the endless pernickety rules and regulations about their food and drink, health and safety, the web of customs and habits, all the amulets and charms designed to ensure survival and continuity, to magically stave off any new outbreak of chaos and incomprehensibility.

  This is our fourth or maybe fifth Ligurian year, and Domenico has dropped in to see if we’ve noticed the smoke up in the hills. So far we’ve survived several late-summer seasons of forest fires without any coming nearer than the next-door Imperia valley; but now a big one has started somewhere higher up in our own valley. On this side of it too. We can just see the place from the patio where we’re sitting if we lean round the side of the house and look uphill along the terraces. All the men from San Peo and from Moltedo are already up there, says Domenico, they’re trying to cut a firebreak between the uncultivated patch where the fire has (as usual) broken out, and the olive groves. Domenico isn’t allowed to
join in firefighting duties because of his heart, so he has stayed to share his fire-wisdom and a glass of wine with us. That’s why we’ve gone back to the Partisan days when he was strong and healthy. Or at least to when he didn’t know he wasn’t.

  On this forest fire day, another visiting brother, Jim, is down in Diano Marina checking out the beaches. It is a lot less crowded now September has come and the factories of Milan and Turin have reopened, and the seaside has started to be a pleasure again rather than a torture. Jim is lazing happily and sleepily on the sand at Diano when a pair of helicopters begin zooming and roaring to and fro over his head. Huge buckets dangle from their bellies; they hover ear-splittingly over the bay for a minute or two while these fill with sea water; then they swirl round, hurling large quantities of high-velocity sand into the sunbathers’ faces, and whizz off at top speed up into the hills.

  Our Jim, along with the other outraged holidaymakers, turns and gazes up into the hills, trying to make out what’s going on. Alarmingly, the whole side of the valley where our house is has disappeared behind a veil of thick grey smoke. To make matters worse, as Jim is rushing for the motorino to come and save his sisters from charbroiling, two men in knotted-hanky-and-string gear, obviously hill-folk, appear on the hated promenade shouting agitatedly through a megaphone for volunteers to come and firefight. Our bold brother knows nothing of firefighting; but nor, he supposes, do most of the other bathers. The situation must be desperate. He rushes to volunteer, trying to explain, mostly in Spanish, that he has to go up to the fire anyway, that he has a pair of close relatives up among the flames. Handicapped by his oddly garbled speech, and by his white-blond hair, which causes everyone to think he is a German, he is firmly rejected by the San Pietro firefighters. He leaps on to the motorino regardless and dashes up the hill, flying heedless over boulders and crevasses.