by Annie Hawes
But a few days later, Antonietta comes up alone during Maurizio’s morning school hours, stumping along our path with her stick to get me alone for a serious talk. Do I seriously think, she asks, that she and Domenico can’t tell the difference between a tall, fair marito and a short, dark one? She is not a fool; she understands about things like divorce, even though round here they don’t get talked about much. She understands that I don’t want to discuss it in front of Domenico: it isn’t men’s business anyway. But I can be frank with her. I am the same age as her daughter in America. And although she would never mention such a thing to anyone in the village, this daughter is divorced too. That is why she’s guessed at my secret. But I must be more circumspect with the rest of San Pietro; I would do much better to introduce this person as yet another of my vast collection of brothers. Or just to say nothing. And I certainly mustn’t go presenting him as my husband down at Luigi and Maria’s, for example, where everyone is still speculating about the last one.
Are they? Oh God.
Kind Antonietta. I am mortified. Why didn’t I just tell the truth in the first place, instead of putting good people like her in invidious positions? After all, unmarried folk cohabit all over Italian television screens every night: and this is much more serious stuff than the right to display your nipples or to get pissed. They will have to get used to it in three dimensions sometime, stop having to go around never mentioning their daughters, for example – poor Antonietta! Someone has to break the ground, and Sergio and Lilli, who managed to put everyone’s backs up almost as soon as they arrived, and these days have almost no truck at all with the village, are certainly not the positive role models San Pietro needs. Nor am I, I daresay, but still, I should have owned up openly to my naughty city behaviour. Now, if it comes out, it will reflect badly on Antonietta.
Or so I think. Meanwhile, though, Domenico is secretly taking a much more frivolous attitude to all this potential scandal; some time later I will hear, at a festa in Diano Borganzo, about the other Englishwoman – supposed to be utterly mad, but perhaps I know her anyway? – who lives far away up in the hills in some isolated ruin and is rumoured to have two husbands. This Englishwoman, my aged informant seems to recall, does some men’s job for a living – some kind of construction work, is it? And the husbands just stay at home and don’t lift a finger except to look after the house, leave all the men’s work to her.
No, I don’t, I say, trying hard to visualize this unusual ménage, which even by depraved English standards sounds rather unlikely. Does she perhaps mean the only other Englishwoman I’ve heard about round here, one who’s recently moved into the Colla, an ex-alcoholic who used to be married to an Italian ship’s captain and has now found God? I’ve heard she’s pretty peculiar, and have been doing my best to avoid meeting her…
No, no! That’s Sheila, says my interlocutor, I know her very well. (Oh God, what have I said?) No, this other woman, she continues, keen to jog my memory, hangs out, people say, in the old bar-and-restaurant in Moltedo, the one that is nowadays run by a bunch of Southern Mafiosi drug-dealers…
Ah. In spite of my by now long familiarity with the Diano valley’s gossip and scandal machine, I have been a bit slow off the mark here. The identity of the mystery Englishwoman is obvious. It is me. I’m friends with Ciccio and Franchino: I once built a staircase: Englishmen (or, at least, the ones I know) know nothing of Ligurian agricultural procedures: and Domenico, at some point, has done some serious blabbing about my love life.
21
Once October has brought the occasional shower, mushroom fever strikes these valleys. With Caterina and Anna we drive up almost to the Piedmont to look for funghi porcini in the steep pine and oak forests here. We only find half a dozen; stopping in a bar on the way home, we meet an aged couple with a whole basketful. I get us all a bad brutta figura by insistently asking where they found them.
Euh, impossible to explain, they answer. But here, say I, is a handy paper napkin and a pen – just draw us a quick map… Volley of incredulous glowers: how can I be so thick-skinned? Caterina has to draw me aside: of course they’re not going to tell me!
Next, twenty-odd of us go in weekend cavalcade after Gambe Secche, those Dry Leg mushrooms in the hills above Cervo; much more successful except that Lucy and I don’t know that when you’re sun-drying mushrooms you have to bring them indoors at night or the dew makes them go mouldy. So our Dry Legs go mouldy. Next, with Iole, we collect a load of tiny button mushrooms up on Franco’s high pastures – ones whose stalks go bright yellow when you cut them with a knife, poisonous according to our English mushroom guide. Rubbish, says Iole, they have to be pickled by boiling in vinegar and water, then potted in olive oil. It is true you wouldn’t eat them raw like porcini, or plain fried, they would upset your stomach. But they are delicious sott’aceto. This solves one mushroom mystery for us – we haven’t been able to understand why people round here desecrate what seem to be normal button mushrooms in this way, potting them all vinegary and nasty. We give ours away to Fabio, whose dad loves potting and bottling things. Who finds it so hard to believe we don’t like them that he pots them and sends us three jars back anyway.
Eventually, going for an autumn wander above our house, we discover that there was no need for all that wandering far afield; there are dozens of mushrooms of every variety right here at home, bursting from tree roots and rock crevices, nestling in the grassy patches. Although we know lots of them must be edible, we have no advisers to hand. And in spite of, or maybe because of, our miserable failures so far, we too have become obsessed. Left to our own devices, we’re only absolutely sure of the gallette, chanterelles, so brightly coloured and oddly shaped that they’re unmistakable. Even something we’re sure must be a porcino isn’t: the cap changes from yellow to bright cyanide-blue in seconds when we break a bit off it. Worse, the only poisonous ones we can definitely detect are the deadly snow-white amanita.
Can we bear to just leave all this plenty lying about the hillside, though? What we’ll do, we decide, is to pick everything that even looks as if it might be edible, drive the whole lot down to Luigi and Maria’s at aperitivo-time and get the advice of the assembled pundits of the Sulking Café on their edibility or otherwise.
When we roll into the bar with our carrier of funghi – a good three or four pounds of mushroom, poisonous or not – the game of competitive mushroom expertise proves even more popular than scopa, and several card tables suspend operations while they come to inspect our haul. We soon have the whole lot spread out over several tables while woollen-vest-clad patriarchs pronounce upon them. Two different kinds of porcino, both very tasty – good news, we had thought there was only one edible kind, and the other must be poisonous – and in such good condition, young and juicy, that everyone agrees we should eat them raw as an antipasto, sliced as thin as possible, dressed with a drop of olive oil. And maybe some flakes of Parmesan.
The star of our collection, though, turns out to be the most unlikely looking thing, a bright yellow fungo as big as your hand and shaped like it, though with too many fingers; called a dieta by some, a manina by others; no one has seen such a decent-sized one for years. They are so good that our informant has to kiss his knuckles – you don’t do fingertip kissing round here – and call Maria away from her kitchens to come and look. Maria’s recipe: fry lightly in olive oil with a couple of cloves of finely chopped garlic, then add (in this order) a big handful of chopped flat-leaf parsley and a glass of white wine. Simmer for a few minutes till the wine has evaporated away. Perfect as a pasta sauce. Warning: add no Parmesan – this will ruin the flavour.
Giacò and Luigi can’t agree whether the three big white puffball things we’ve brought are called farinelle or ovuli: one name is Italian, one dialect, but which is which? Whatever they’re called, they are pronounced delicious by everyone – slice them thick and fry-them up like steaks with maybe a hint of onion or garlic. This will complete our mushroom meal perfectly.
Ext
raordinary. In this country Nature herself, it seems, wishes you to divide your meals into antipasto, primo piatto, and secondo: in just the one collection of funghi she has provided us with the basis for a fine respectable three-course dinner.
Now for the rest of our bag, the more small and insignificant items. Disturbingly, heated arguments begin to break out in various corners of the bar over the edibility of a good half of what’s left. Our advisers examine them minutely, turning them round and round, prodding and squeezing delicately at them with big callused fingers, taking them over to the window for a better light, Euh-ing away. But a mushroom which to one card-player is edible but doesn’t taste good enough to bother with, to another is poisonous; another will come over to see what fungo is under debate and tell the other two they’re insane, this is a particularly delicious little number, his family’s favourite. The others snort and puff and tell us to take no notice, throw those ones away, you’ll end up with a stomach-ache, if not in Imperia Hospital.
In the end, the pile of questionable items is somewhat larger than the definite yes’s and no’s. Can we trust anything they say? How come they are all still alive when they do so much wild-mushroom eating and yet have such a surprisingly minimal grasp of which ones are actually edible? Is it really their wives and mothers, maybe, who collect the things for them, and all this knowledgeability is just a sham?
Eventually the answer dawns on us: each family must always have gone off and collected its own funghi in its own private top-secret places. And each family will, naturally, only collect the ones they have been taught by their parents are absolutely safe. Who have been taught by their grandparents, and so on. Probably with each passing generation a few species have got lost to the table of each family, species that by some mischance happened not to be around during their childhood training. We have unknowingly created what is probably the first San Pietro forum for the public pooling of mushroom information in centuries. Brilliantly deduced! When would they ever have found themselves all in one place, sharing their mushroom expertise? And why? They might likely eat one another’s mushrooms, but once cooked or potted, one fungo looks much like another. This means, we conclude triumphantly, that any mushroom any one person says for sure is edible, really is edible. On reflection, we decide to go for any two people, in case there is the odd ignoramus or homicidal maniac among our advisers. All the hitherto debatable items now go into the carrier along with the definites, to the delight of their supporters and the despair of their critics. We set off with our haul for the hills, cries of ‘buon appetito’ following us from the open windows of the bar. Hopefully not with ironic intent. And all goes well. We cook: we savour: we live.
As soon as mushroom fever dies down, chestnut hunting takes over. Round here, we discover, the chestnut is surrounded by a nostalgic miasma compounded in almost equal parts of pleasure and pain. On the one hand it conjures up all the pleasures of autumn, the end of the ferocious dry dusty heat of summer and the coming of mists and mellow fruitfulness; on the other it is redolent of hard times in the not-so-distant past, of scarce flour having to be stretched with ground-up chestnuts to make enough bread, of some horrible kind of chestnut polenta or porridge which had to take the place of wheat pasta during the worst bits of the war. The old folks remember only too clearly a time when they heartily wished never to see another chestnut – but still, in the end it is a good friend, always there when you’re desperate. And so, to be celebrated. Time to go up to Testico for the yearly chestnut festa.
Testico is one of those ancient muletrain trading towns placed strategically between the olive valleys and the grain plains, once so busy and prosperous, now half-deserted. As the crow flies, it is only fifteen miles away from us, directly inland. From the top of our small mountain on a clear day you can see it perched there on the promontory of one of the high inland ridges. There is, or was, a muletrack which took you directly there, a continuation of ours. But by road you must go, perversely, right down to the coast, along the Via Aurelia for ten miles to the town of Andora, and set off back inland again, taking the predictable vast numbers of hairpin bends till you’re back just above where you started from. We hear the tweedling accordions drifting down the terraces miles before we can see the place, as we zig and zag our way up to it. We arrive in Testico’s main piazza as dusk is falling; a triangle perched on the pointed end of a ridge with two bars and a village spring, and low stone walls all round for gossiping on. A few merchants’ houses, too, places that must have been very glamorous in the early Middle Ages, with massive carved doors and bevelled slate frames, oddly literal-looking Lambs of God carved into their lintels. On the inland side is a wide cloudy view across an unfamiliar type of valley, smooth and furry with pine trees in the half-light, hilltops pointy and Alpine, and on up to the high peaks far inland already snow-tipped; on the seaward side the bright green of chestnut woods are close below, rolling on down to the familiar rounded hills of home, grey-green with mist and olive trees, a faint smudge of sea beyond. At the far end of the piazza stands a crumbling Romanesque church inside which, we happen to know (Testico is famous not only for its Chestnut Festa, but also for its yearly Animal Fair, which we have dutifully checked out already) hangs a piece of parchment written in near-illegible medieval Latin, promising the reader some large number of decades off any sojourn in Purgatory they may be due, if they will only say a certain number of Hail Marys in this church on one particular day of the year. Which just happens to be the day of the Fair. Come to Testico for your yearly shop! Not just a bargain in this life, but in the next too!
Can the fact that this commercial enterprise is still going strong after eight centuries be at all connected with this barefaced advertising sponsorship direct from Heaven? The parchment, we concluded, must be one of those famous and expensive Indulgences that caused such outcries about corruption and money-grubbing in the medieval church; scandals that ended in Martin Luther, Wittenberg, and Protestantism. A chain of events that led, more or less directly, to our never being taught to say a Hail Mary: and hence, alas, to our being unable to take advantage of the Special Offer.
Tonight we follow the narrow cobbled roads, which are, unusually, just wide enough for an Ape – evidently the place was once so busy with commerce that whole carts needed to be got down its streets, not just the odd mule – down towards the music. The alley turns towards the festa at last and the scene we are heading for is laid out before us. Three levels, one above the other. At the top the church looms enormous, high and dark on the skyline, outlined black against the stars. Below us a bright harlequin dance floor heaves with cheerful galloping dancers. But what is going on in the shadowy space between the two, level with our eyeline, too far and dark to decipher clearly?
Arriving at dance floor level we are dazzled: eye-boggling colour and chaos. The bandstand vibrates with saxophones and accordions, frilly shirts gleam under the spotlights, the stage is outlined in festoons of fairy lights. The packed dance space in front of it is paved with wildly assorted brightly coloured tiles left over from everyone’s home Adjustings, and lit up with strings of multicoloured lightbulbs slung on cables from the encircling trees; to the side of the dance floor are rows of trestle tables busy with laughing, shouting, gesticulating roast-chestnut eaters and wine swillers.
It’s still hard to decipher that darkened strip between the starry heaven with its silhouetted church and the bright sinful gallivantings below. The red glow in the darkness, the bent figures scurrying back and forth engaged in some great labour: heavings and shovellings, smoke and dark flame, metallic bangings and grindings… a dark satanic mill, the sufferings of the damned? Heaven, Hell and Purgatory maybe? A subtle reminder to us feckless partygoers that we would be well advised not to miss the next Animal Fair Day?
Some kind of smoke-blackened infernal machine, tubular and gigantic, looms on its pivots among a great heap of glowing embers… one of the souls in torment bends to its gaping, smoking maw, shovel in hand, outlined against the red; a
group of sweat- and smut-smeared sinners labours half-hidden in the smoke to wind a monstrous handle welded to one end of the device, turning the thing endlessly round and round, over and over, choking and swearing as the fire cracks and spits around them. Meanwhile a chain gang of bent figures groaning under the weight of their burdens, huge blackened buckets with steaming, flesh-searing contents, trudges up and down the steep path that separates the gay lights of the innocent festivities from the hellish fire-terrace.
Nothing to worry about: just mass chestnut roasting in progress. Arriving at the Palace of Sin below, spitting on their singed fingers, the bucket bearers tip great steaming ash-covered piles of chestnuts on to the massive platters which stand on the trestles amongst the revellers below. We rush to join the heaving throng.
Not just roast chestnuts, but castagnaccia, a thick heavy chestnut cake; chestnut polenta, chestnut bread, chestnut tart, sweets made of chestnut purée, whole chestnuts boiled in syrup. We gallop the night away with the residents of Testico and their guests from the valleys around – we can do a rather competent Ligurian-style polka these days – pausing from our labours only occasionally to swill some more wine and stuff some more food. By the time we leave Testico, we have done the chestnut thorough homage.
In the last few days rolls of olive nets have appeared everywhere, lying along the roadsides. Apes rush up and down the hairpin bends, humans dash up and down the terraces, anxious to protect their next year’s supply of oil. Big storms have been forecast over the weekend, and there is a rush on – the olives are starting to ripen and the nets must be laid before half the crop gets knocked netless to the ground and goes to waste.
