by Annie Hawes
In the nick of time Caterina and the Diano compagnia step in: they are taking us off for a cooling and cheering weekend trip to the mountain lakes above Triora. So serious is the heat and drought situation down here that, unusually for our tribe of Diano hunters and gatherers, there is no food-collecting subtext to this outing. Nothing to collect anyway, they say; much too hot and dry. They just want to escape the water shortage, the sweaty itchy heat, the packed greasy bodies on the coast. They will show us a place where, though it is a mere thirty miles inland, all is coolness and greenness and space, and there is never any shortage of water. Extraordinarily hard to believe under present shrivelling conditions. Despite my grumpy scepticism, though, it turns out to be true. Three-quarters of an hour of slow uphill hairpin bends here doesn’t just change landscape but apparently season too. As we drive up the narrow green gorge of the valley of the Argentino river, four valleys along towards France, it is like going from high summer in the Sahara to a pleasantly warm, green, shady springtime in the Black Forest. How sensible these Italians are. Or at least, how well they know their landscape.
Arriving at Molini di Triora, we stop at the village to shop for camp supplies: not as simple as you might think, not with a bunch of Italians. Still, at least there’s a cool breeze up here. Our friends spend a good half-hour communing with the village butcher whose fine meat from his own herds in the high meadows is renowned throughout the area (knew there had to be a food subtext in here somewhere); when we manage to drag Ciccio away from his blood-brother the butcher (Patrizia says we’ve done well – he was in there for over an hour last time), it is only to go and do the same thing at the baker’s. Mills of Triora: of course, we are at the home of the famous bread-that-never-goes-stale. A mile up the hill is Triora itself, a tiny town with a peculiar mini tourist industry based on it being the location of the last witch-burning in Italy. The sister and I do our best not to stamp and snort in our impatient hot-foreigner manner, while everyone buys in their stock of the flat round loaves of Triora, a transaction which inevitably takes another half-hour, what with the low quality of modern yeast and the need to discuss in great depth the problem of getting decent flour these days.
At last we are back in our small fleet of cars, heading for open country. Park and walk for twenty minutes along a shady path, tall green-leafy chestnut trees over us, hazels in among them, rich dark humus underfoot, ferns and wild strawberry leaves: and way below us, at the bottom of the steep banks to our right, yes, the sound of a river, a loud full-bodied healthy river, no trickling shrunken coastal torrente. The path runs level, clings to the side of the ravine, heading to meet the river at the high pools. If only we weren’t loaded down with absurd numbers of carrier bags it would be perfect. Suddenly we are there, precious roaring rushing water, thousands of gallons of it, clear freezing mountain-spring stuff pouring down a dozen silver channels through the rocky hillside into a great blue mirror of a limestone lake. We put down our burdens and marvel.
Clothes off and into the water, splash about for hours, dust-free at last, clean and damp, ferns and verdure all around, dappled sunlight instead of the shimmering white heat of the coast. Up here with your feet in the cool ripples of shallow downstream pools, tiny trout slipping through your fingers, it’s hard even to imagine our sad mudhole of a well, the tragic shrivelled hay which is all that’s left of our once-luscious green terraces, our taplessness and bathroomlessness.
One of Paletta’s ingenious shelters is already going up in a clearing under the chestnuts, and we mess about making benches out of hazel saplings, wander about the woods, up and down ravines, finding new pools and tributaries to the main river and splashing in and out of them, full of unaccustomed energy now the heat can’t get us. Lucy and I realize that this is our chance to collect the bendy twigs we need for our Antonietta-pizza-oven, and get ourselves a lovely big bundle.
We have brought an SAS survival guide with us, a present from a recent English guest who couldn’t tell the difference between Liguria and the Mato Grosso: following its instructions, infected by the local hunting-and-gathering ethos in spite of ourselves, we make a very serious-looking fish-trap out of woven hazel wands, which so impresses Anna and Patrizia that they do one, too. We put them, as directed by the SAS, in a fast-flowing bit between two rocks, where everyone keeps prodding and poking at them all afternoon, much to Anna’s despair, rattling them around and alarming any fish stupid enough to be poking its nose into the things. Unsurprisingly, we catch nothing. No one cares: Italians don’t think river fish are really worth eating anyway, not even trout. We grill some of the several tons of meat we’ve brought instead. As dusk falls a billion damp green frogs start to croak sexily on all sides of us, and we have to add lots of green-leafy stuff to our bonfire to smoke the midges away.
By lunchtime next day one of those usual large crowds of friends and relations has gathered up here, bearing vast quantities of loaves and fishes (proper sea fish, that is), meat and vegetables, and even the only missing item for a home from home, a great cast-iron grill. Also a pair of four- and five-year-old girls, Marila and Miki, who are as overwhelmed as us by the wetness and coolness of the place, not having been here before either. Miki and Marila speak Italian to about the same standard as us, even make the same mistakes; and all the humorous allusions of the grown-ups to Italian popular music and TV series of the last decade pass them by, too. Lovely not to be linguistically and culturally handicapped for a change. We bond immediately.
Soon an eating orgy is, as usual, under way. After weeks of stomach-shrinking heat and no appetite worth speaking of, after weeks of doing the absolute minimum to avoid melting into a puddle of sweat, we find that all the unaccustomed activity in this cool green place has left us famished. We have no trouble at all keeping up. But alas, after lunch our infant friends are forbidden to go in the water. Not for at least three hours, their anxious parents tell them. Kiddies cry; foreign females save the day. We bravely enter negotiations on their behalf; English children, we say, do not die from paddling after lunch. Can Italian kids be so much more fragile? Eventually, once we’ve promised under no circumstances to let the bambine get wet above the knees, we are permitted to leave together for the shallow pools down river to hunt for minnows. We find we have so much in common that we hang out together for the rest of the visit, to the exclusion of the adult company.
Time to go: misery. Time to face not only the dry despair on the coast, but the very irritating travelling behaviour of our friends. They are obsessed, for inexplicable Italian reasons, with travelling in close convoy. Nobody knows why, but it is vital that we all travel and arrive simultaneously: we often, or so it seems to me, spend as much time waiting by the side of the road as at our official destination. A market day in some hilltown, a concert, an asparagus hunt: it makes no difference. We are always in at least half-a-dozen cars, and have to keep stopping every ten minutes, waiting for the rest of the bunch to catch up, doubling back on our tracks to hunt for lost or straying members of the band who have stopped to use a loo or get a bottle of water or a snack or a coffee or do a spot of hunting and gathering or pop in to visit an old auntie or whatever.
Huge rows break out every time we are held up by someone vanishing, but this doesn’t stop it happening: it just means that as well as the fifteen stops, there will be fifteen outbursts of rage. Of course this is all very healthy, you’ll be saying. Latins are famous for doing it, steam is let off and soon all is joy again and you’ve saved all that money you would otherwise have had to spend on psychotherapists. Fine, in theory. We’d like to be able to do it ourselves, even. But you have to be brought up on it. We weren’t, and the rowing sends us into stress-alert panic every time, neck muscles tied into anxious knots. And we can’t get anyone simply to arrange to meet at the end of the journey, rather than trying to keep one another in sight all the way.
Don’t the others know where we’re going though? we ask plaintively.
Of course they do.
; Why can’t we just meet there, then?
Nobody knows why: we just can’t, that’s all. We are gazed at as if we were saying something incomprehensibly absurd and outlandish. Or made to suffer rude jokes about the unsociability of the English. And we really are unsociable compared to our Italian friends. They never seem to need to be alone. They find a group of less than half a dozen positively uncomfortable: if by some mischance you find that you’re alone with just three or four of them – ideal for foreigners like us, who lose track of what’s going on when groups get too big – they will wander restlessly around bars and telephones until they have added another few to the band. This doesn’t mean they necessarily chat the whole time; any of them may decide to read a book for a bit, or have a nap, listen to their Walkman, play patience in a corner. But we haven’t learnt to do this either; ignoring people we’re with is just as unsettling to us as having to be constantly in company.
In years to come, we will learn to reduce the cross-cultural travelling discomfort to a minimum by insisting eccentrically – all right, Englishly – on being shown on the map exactly where our destination is, and going in our own transport so as to have only one wait, in the place we’re aiming for, rather than twenty pointless hangings around and shouting matches on empty brain-boilingly hot mountain roadsides or hair-raisingly busy crossroads. But for now we are still learning: and after gorging ourselves on coolness, dampness, and billions of gallons of pure mountain water, we face the ardours of the trip back with all these extra Sunday lunchtime visitors and the usual incompetent military manoeuvre-style travelling behaviour. As we expected, it takes for ever just to get ourselves and all our luggage, including the massive grill, back along the path to the cars. Adding insult to injury, we are made to leave our bundle of twigs behind in case the Guardia Forestale stops us. Surely they won’t care about a bundle of twigs, we ask, if they don’t bother about bonfires and benches? Not to mention great hordes of people gathering forbidden narcissi?
You never know, says Alberto, whose car we are travelling in. Best not to give them any excuse to harass you.
As we travel gently downhill following the rushing water below in the gorges of the Argentino, heading for drought again, we begin to wonder where all this water goes to. Why can’t the combined Comuni of these valleys just build a reservoir on this river, have all this stuff to hand when it’s needed, instead of doing dodgy deals with San Remo and running low on water every summer? But of course, we are not the first to have thought of this. There have been several attempts, we are told, to build a dam across one of the high, wet valleys; our friends point out three of these false starts as we drive down, enormous concatenations of abandoned concrete pillars and blocks on the steep tree-clad sides of the Argentino’s high banks, already half vanished into the undergrowth. But the problem is that no damable valley exists, which does not have fifteen or twenty villages dotted about lower down, below where the reservoir would be. Each time work gets started, the inhabitants of these places notice that, were the dam to burst, they and their homes and lands and olive trees would very likely be washed away in the flood.
They agitate against the scheme: work is halted while litigation goes on. And litigation taking the decades it does here means in practice that the dam is abandoned for good. Easier to look for another site.
I say something thoughtless and superior about the resistance of aged country folk to modernity and change. Mimmo, Alberto and Anna leap down my throat. Do I not remember the flat road to Imperia from Diano Marina? Indeed I do: the Incompiuta. And yes, now I see what they mean. If a dam was to be built to those standards of workmanship – and what innocent villager living in its shadow could tell how well-built it was until it was too late? – no one below it would ever get a wink of sleep. I put my silly foreign attitudes away immediately.
OK. We’ll just have to wait for it to rain then. And, amazingly, as we travel down towards the sea – oh joy! – the sky suddenly darkens. Over towards France, too, no less. And yes, as we arrive at the coast and hit the Via Aurelia, it begins to rain. Rain! Next time we stop to wait for some lost car or other, we ring Diano: is it raining there as well? Yes, it is. And it goes on all night too, and all the next day. By the end of the week our well has begun, slowly but surely, to fill back up. We are saved.
19
I wander cheerfully down to the well to give a drink to the long-suffering bietole and tomatoes, humming a happy ditty. Not too much water after the thirst they’ve been through, though, or the tomatoes’ skins will all split, say the experts. Hard to follow this instruction – the temptation to bung an extra bucket of kindness to a sad, shrivelled plant, a plant that has treated me so well, provided me with so many lovely lunches, is extreme. I lift the lovely anti-snail-and-dog lid, beautifully carpentered by myself – and behold! The well is bone dry! Not a drop of water in it! I let out a shriek of horror. Has it sprung a leak? Can wells leak? How can we have got through that whole drought without running out completely, only to have it all suddenly disappear now, just when it was refilling so nicely?
The trusty Domenico, who is down below checking out what he’s managed to salvage of his own vegetable patch, hears my scream and comes rushing up. What is it? Soundlessly I point down the well.
Domenico is as horror-stricken as I am. We both stand and stare, aghast. Someone has pumped it dry, he says.
On the face of it this makes more sense than my leak theory; and yet, who could it be? And why? And where would they have pumped it to? I sit down on the ex-shower stone by the side of the well and burst into childish tears. The drought has been horribly stressful, I am only too aware of how impossible it would be to survive up here without water, and now it seems we have a secret enemy bent upon our destruction. Someone who wants to drive us out… and they won’t have to keep this up for long to succeed. It would cost thousands of pounds, which we haven’t got, to get water piped up here from the village. It’s this little well, with its fortnight’s worth of water at a pumping, or nothing. I’m sick of it all, I say. I’m going back to nice green wet England and giving this hopeless place up for good.
Domenico will have none of it. At least, he says, this will give you a chance to get down there on a ladder and scrape out a few decades’ worth of mud from the bottom of the well while you’re waiting for it to fill up. The thought, strangely, does not fill me with joy. We were just going to pump our tank full for the first time in almost a month, have showers, do proper washing-up instead of the version we’ve been condemned to for so long – using a teaspoonful of mineral water. Maybe even mop the floor… I was looking forward to getting thoroughly clean at last, to seeing our orto green and pleasant again, our garden happy and un-wilted. Now, it seems, I’m supposed to be pleased at the idea of going down a deep dark scary hole to get covered in slimy mud instead. Why didn’t we do our pumping yesterday? And more to the point, why bother? Why not just give up? How can we survive up here if whenever there isn’t a drought, which there usually is, people are going to come and steal our water? I sit paralysed with despair on the edge of the useless well, moping and snivelling.
But Domenico, Partisan hero, is not content to sit and wait. Moping and snivelling are not part of his repertoire. And he has no intention of allowing us to abandon San Pietro in despair. He sets off on patrol, stamping to and fro, up and down the terraces, looking for signs of water-thievery. Eventually, having quartered every terreno on this side, he crosses the dirt-track to the so-called Sicilians’ land. And lets out a cry of triumph. Here it is!
I totter down to see what he’s found. A pair of large fibreglass water tanks, which were certainly not there last week, are sitting outside their flying-roofed rustico, inexplicably brimful of water. The evidence seems overwhelming. But why on earth would Anna and Tonino steal our water? And why would they do it in such an obvious way? Grim-faced and pale beneath his eternal tan, Domenico tells me not to worry; he will sort this out. He storms off back to his Ape; I hear the poor creature scre
aming in agony as he pushes it to its downhill limit over the bumps and ruts towards San Pietro.
As dusk falls, there is still no sign of him. We haven’t done any well-cleaning – somehow it seems pointless. We have a wash in the usual two teacupsful of San Pietro water in the bottom of a salad-bowl, and set off to hunt for news. There’s no one in Luigi’s bar – not very surprising, it’s official dinner time – and Luigi hasn’t seen either Domenico or Pompeo all afternoon. Should we go round to see Tonino and Anna? We decide we can’t do that. We are not entirely convinced that there is no other explanation for the full tanks outside Tonino’s: we certainly don’t want to go accusing neighbours face-to-face when they may turn out to be entirely innocent.
Next morning Domenico and Pompeo appear, fuming. They have had no qualms about going round to Tonino, who has admitted freely to draining the well: though, he claims, he had no idea it was ours. Frank the Knife, he says, offered to sell him a well right near his land, one that never dried up completely even in the hottest summer. Franco explained where the miracle well was, told Tonino to go and check it out. Tonino went and had a look; the land around it was all Dirty (oh God, that again. Though it is true that now we only pump every fortnight or so the well has got a bit overgrown, no daily trampling feet to keep the path clear) so he hadn’t guessed it was in use at all. He thought our own well must be up nearer the house. (Magari: we should be so lucky.) And, as any sensible peasant would, Tonino had not merely looked, but had pumped the thing dry to make sure it refilled again and wasn’t just a hole in the ground full of rainwater. What with Franco having a certain reputation, this had seemed a wise precaution to take before entering negotiations. And since it would have been stupid to just throw the water away under present droughty conditions, he’d emptied it into the two vasche.
