by Annie Hawes
Pompeo, true to his word, has brought some nets up for us – but he has no time to show us what you do with them, he says, we may just have to wait till next year. Next year! Can’t he just explain how you do it? But of course, he can’t. Older men like Pompeo and Domenico quickly lose patience with all our hows and whys and wherefores. Everything they do seems perfectly obvious to them: they half-believe they were just born knowing all about olive nurturing, vegetable growing, wine making. Anyway, none of it has ever been expressed in words. You have to wait to be shown, and that’s it. We go clambering up to Nino’s land – naturally his nets have been out for weeks – to examine the job, see how complicated it looks. Not at all complicated, really: a bit like fitting a dress to a body. Only the size of the elements involved is different – three-inch nails for pins, the cloth in unwieldy forty-foot long, fifteen-foot wide lengths, and the body you’re fitting much too big to take in in one eyeful – hill-sized, in fact. And with limbs poking out of it in rather unorthodox places.
On our morning bread-run to the village, we pop in to Mariuccia’s shop to check whether there are any hints and tips we need to know before we start. Women for some reason have much less trouble imagining that in spite of being relatively sane, we may just not know some things which seem incredibly obvious to them and that a quick description in words, requiring hardly any muscle power and no bulky equipment of any kind, could easily remedy this defect. Mariuccia as always is deeply informative. Never just pin two raw edges of your net flat together, she says; you must roll them over double, french-seam style, or else when you roll the olives down-terrace to be bagged up for the mill, half of them will vanish through the gaps. And check your terrain for the longest straight downhill stretches so you can angle your net correctly as you unroll – it’s hard to change angle a few terraces down, you’ll have too much weight on the ground by then, easy to rip the net if you have to drag it. But as it happens, she is off to help Aunt Erminia lay hers as soon as she shuts up shop for lunch – maybe we’d like to come and help, it’s a big job for only the two of them anyway, and then we’ll see everything?
Do women often do the nets on their own, then, we ask? No, they don’t – but Mariuccia’s family is very short of menfolk, as we know. Soon we are bouncing our way up towards Erminia and Besta de’ Ca’ in Mariuccia’s clanking Renault.
A lot of those roadside rolls of olive netting waiting to be laid have pieces of paper pinned to them, a number or a letter drawn on them. What’s all that about? They show the laying order, which bit of hillside each roll has been cut to fit. People with an awful lot of piante, or with especially intricately shaped gaps between their trees, do the bits-of-paper trick as they roll each net back up and put it away, to save time and confusion next time round.
Erminia is extremely pleased to see us, insists that we must stay to lunch once we’ve finished the job – there’s plenty of rabbit in the pot, she says. Rabbit? Surprise. We know the path between the two Bestas well by now, and have heard the story of Giovanni and his drug addiction many times. Still I find it hard to connect twentieth-century junkie hell with Erminia’s positively medieval lifestyle – just another thing to cope with, heroin addiction among the olive groves and the soap vats.
We scramble about in a half-loft above the rabbit zone, throwing the nets down and dragging them out, great dusty unwieldy things full of bits of plant and straw from last year’s outing, and piling them on to the olive terraces by the side of the house. Erminia of course doesn’t have hers labelled – she can remember where they go perfectly, she says, doesn’t need such nonsense. Doesn’t she just. We waste a good sweaty half-hour laboriously unrolling the first couple of nets, scrambling down very dodgy walls while trying not to get tangled up in the netting, only to discover our bit has a great slit cut in the end of it in the wrong place, designed to fit round a tree that isn’t here. Back uphill, re-rolling, while Erminia tries to work out which tree is four terraces down and three feet to the left of a join… eventually, hot and irritable, we have the things all laid out in the right places and are ready to start pinning. We have learnt something already: we will certainly be numbering our nets. We may even make Erminia a set of labels, too, once this is over.
Erminia vanishes off into the house with Mariuccia to get the pinning equipment; my sister and I wait out here in the yard on the stone seat above the dodgy arch. The ladies return bearing four dishcloths, some string, and a carrier bag with several hundred rusty nails in it. As is our wont, Lucy and I gaze hopelessly at this collection of objects, waiting for a lead. We know about the nails, but where do the dishcloths and string come into it?
Simple: you tie a knot in each end of your dishcloth, then use the string to hang this improvised bag round your waist to keep the nails in. Eat your hearts out, bumbag manufacturers. Now we begin, absurdly, to do french seams all down a hillside; roll, tuck and pin, roll, tuck and pin. It would be a lot easier if the nails weren’t rusty, though. As we’d imagined, the activity is strangely reminiscent of dressmaking on a gigantic scale; every now and then you need to fold, nip and tuck round a large rock, or pin a great ten-foot dart into your netting so it will drape snugly up walls or round curves and bulges in the terrain. I wonder idly whether Christo the artist has any Ligurian blood: it would be but a small step from this hill-couture to curtaining off the Grand Canyon or wrapping Sydney Opera House.
We’re doing all right, we’re told, except for a tendency to stretch our net too tightly. Don’t forget you have to walk about on it in a few months when it’s time to beat the trees, and if it’s strained or taut it will rip. With four of us at the job, the terraces round the house are almost done when a lot of bongs and a long-drawn-out ear-splitting wail announce lunchtime. We aren’t desperately hungry yet, we say, we could easily finish off first if they’d rather. No, they wouldn’t. Outlandish suggestion; didn’t we hear The Midday? Later when we have completed our digestion, and not before, we’ll go back and sort out the rest.
For now we’re back inside in the deliciously dark cool kitchen with the pasta pot on and the rabbit bubbling away. We sip at Erminia’s red wine as we wait for the water to boil – we’re still on her last year’s vintage, she says, and it is wonderful, smooth and full bodied, nothing like her sulphurous white stuff. I’m sure it would cure me of heroin addiction, no trouble.
On the hotplate of Erminia’s great square cast-iron woodstove our rabbit-in-sauce has been simmering away while we were working. The rabbit juices will be the sauce for the pasta. Nobody here, with the exception of restaurants, makes a separate sauce: you cook the day’s meat long and slow in a potful of whatever there’s a lot of in the orto at the moment. Lift it out and what’s left in the pot is the sauce for the pasta; then serve the meat for the secondo with a salad or some other vegetable dish – today Erminia has a load of wild salad, rocket and some kind of dandelion, to mix with her red lettuce, lollo rosso. Lightly crush a couple of garlic cloves with the heel of a nearby coffee cup, douse the lot with olive oil. The perfect rabbit accompaniment.
Erminia, whose home is by no means packed with mod cons, has, above her sink, one of the ingenious dish-cupboards we have begun to yearn for. Everyone in this country has them: except, of course, us. They hang on the wall directly above the washing-up area and have doors but no bottom to them. Instead of shelves inside, there are draining-racks. Your dishes, knives and forks get washed up straight into here – which is also where you actually keep them. Washing-up, drying-up, and putting-away in one fell swoop. And it certainly isn’t new technology. Erminia’s is made of wood, the racks of dowelling, and it looks a good century old. How long have Italians had these things? And why has no one in our own backward country ever noticed? Have no other English people but us ever managed to get into Italian kitchens? Or is it just that historically speaking most travellers have been men with no grasp of the intricacies of housekeeping?
Our hostesses have by now noticed our bizarre interest in this perfectly ordi
nary item: I try explaining that we don’t have them in England, describe the vast amounts of unnecessary labour performed by British housewives every day. But it is beyond them. Why don’t these English women just go get a carpenter to make them a proper washing-up cupboard? It wouldn’t cost very much. Ah, say I, but they don’t know they need one. I get a most disbelieving pair of looks, and give up. I’m not sure I really want to publicize the fact that my whole nation is mentally defective. We return to the more comprehensible topic of olives.
Why, I ask as we chomp, do people all seem to put their nets out at different times? Our neighbour Nino, for example, already had his out weeks ago. And why do they need to be put out so long before the harvest anyway? – won’t any olives that fall just go off if they’re left sitting there for months?
No. Think how it takes forty days to soften up an olive even with the help of a vat of brine, says Erminia between mouthfuls. The net keeps them off the earth, and that’s enough. You can put your nets out whenever you want; if you do it too early though you’ll maybe save a few quintals of olives you might have lost if there was a big storm, but you also risk having a load of Dirt grow up through the mesh – then it’s a work of the Madonna to get them up without ripping them.
Mariuccia doesn’t agree with her aunt about this eternal olive business. The oil doesn’t really taste so good if the olives have been lying about for months – it’s much better if you can manage to collect them up and get them down to the mill straight away if there’s a decent amount of them – if there’s been a big storm or something and a lot have been knocked off.
But, I ask, won’t they be unripe anyway if they’ve fallen off so early? No. Ripeness in an olive is, it seems, all a matter of taste: the oil’s already there long before the olive is ready to fall off the tree. It’s just the flavour that changes. Early olives make a much greener oil with a hint of bitterness. Some people like it better, especially for salads, and do an early beating to get it: then when the olives are properly ripe, another one for cooking. In Tuscany, says Mariuccia, she’s heard that they start their harvesting as early as October, get all their olives in well before Christmas.
Euh! says her aunt, several times in several different tones of voice ranging between horror, amazement and disbelief, and then makes her niece repeat it in dialect just to be sure she’s heard right. Before Christmas? She has never heard of this outlandish behaviour by the Toscani before. The olives won’t be ripe! What on earth can their oil taste like? Why would they want all their olive oil to taste bitter? Or do they just leave it for months to settle before they use it, never eat it fresh?
Mariuccia doesn’t know: but it’s a different variety of tree they have down there, anyway. The olives aren’t mottled brown-and-green like our Taggiasca ones. She’s not heard that this Tuscan oil is bitter: just that it doesn’t taste of very much at all.
Erminia is not at all soothed by this information, and now as she adds another gill or two of her own properly matured oil to the vegetables on her plate, she makes horrible sucked-a-lemon faces to herself and goes on muttering, ‘Before Christmas! Euh!’
Anyway, Mariuccia says, addressing us alone since her aunt naturally knows it already, Ligurian oil is not only much more tasty, but generally better for you than Tuscan. She hasn’t actually tried the Tuscan stuff, but it stands to reason that whatever type of tree it is, olives should not be harvested before they’re ripe. No wonder Tuscan oil is not good for the digestione.
Later I will hear the Tuscan version of the timing of the olive-oil harvest controversy; my Tuscan informant tells me that Ligurians, penny-pinchers as ever, only leave the olives on their trees to full maturity because they weigh more when they’re ready to fall of their own accord. This, he says, is a pointless exercise since the extra weight is not oil but other olive juices. Olives should not be left on the trees till they are ready to fail of their own accord. Needless to say, Tuscan oil is lighter and more digestible than Ligurian. I leave this debate to the cognoscenti.
The tale of our own first-ever home-grown olive oil does not end well or redound to my credit. We get our nets spread rather competently, impressing Domenico as planned: he turns up to find us pinning our very last row all by ourselves, ethnically bedizened with dishcloths and string. He isn’t at all impressed by our nail-pouches, though, of which we’re very proud. He just thinks they’re normal.
He is also most deeply unimpressed by our never turning up at all for the harvest, immersed in various London money-earning schemes as we are. I get back alone in the middle of March, hoping they’ll still be millable, only to find that he has been unable to bear the sight of our wastefulness and has got them in himself, taken them to the mill with his own. We have got nearly six kilos of oil per tree, he reckons, which is doing very well for people who have hardly looked after them at all.
I didn’t know you measured oil in kilos, I say humbly – what does that mean in litres?
A kilo of oil is a litre plus a wineglass, he says severely. I can see I’ll have to work it out for myself as punishment. He has also, in case I wondered where they’d got to, taken up Pompeo’s nets and put them away in our roundhouse. So they haven’t been ruined by the Dirt growing up through them, as I probably thought they would have been, he adds reprovingly.
Oh, the guilt. All right, I’ll never leave San Pietro ever again.
A pair of precious first-ever demijohns of our very own cold-pressed unfiltered extra-virgin olive oil is waiting for me in his cantina: a hundred-odd litres of the stuff, another two hundred in a huge stainless steel vat against the wall, and I’ve not lifted a finger. We couldn’t possibly need more than a litre a week for the year, says Domenico, but he couldn’t bear to sell the rest on to the miller. Even though, surprisingly, the price of olive oil has begun to creep up to something worth having again… Still, he thought we’d want it for family or friends. In any case, we’ll have to leave the second demijohn where it is. One’s enough to carry along that miseria of a path.
Why don’t I just decant it into bottles, say I, and save the trouble? I can just take it up a few bottles at a time. But of course I can’t. If I don’t siphon it out into another container and throw away the sediment every couple of months, it’ll go off, won’t it? And if I’d bottled it, I’d have to siphon out each individual bottle over and over again, wouldn’t I? Which would be stupid as well as leading to a lot more wastage, wouldn’t it?
I see what he means.
The demijohn is so heavy that Domenico and Pompeo now strain every muscle in their bodies to get it along our annoying path on a wheelbarrow padded with several dozen filthy old sacks and crumpled newspapers, one pulling it from in front with a rope, the other heaving from behind. There’s no point me trying to join in – I know from our staircase-building labours that I can’t handle a wheelbarrow along this path. Anyway it would just be taken for ungraciousness.
Oh, even more guilt. Once we’ve lugged it into the house, I get new sediment-decanting advice from Pompeo. The stuff you scrape out from the bottom of the vat, far from being thrown away, must be saved: it makes a particularly delicious type of focaccia, slightly bitter yet very tasty, called fogason in dialect. He will tell me more when I have some ready to use.
But I never will. In no time at all, with my ignorant Northern ways, I manage to destroy the whole lot before we so much as find out whether it would have lasted a year, as projected by Domenico, or not. I never even make it to the first siphoning.
Since we are foolhardily using our cantina as a pair of bedrooms, the demijohn is living upstairs in the kitchen/living room; where, being a good three feet high and ditto wide, it is highly visible. And since the beauty of the giant green glass bottle is completely hidden by a horrid grey greasy plastic replica of the traditional plaited straw container, it is a most unattractive addition to the living space. But I see, when I go to decant some, that the top half of the repellent cover can just be lifted off. So, assuming this protection was only nee
ded while the demijohn was bouncing up rocky roads, on and off Apes and wheelbarrows, I remove it, clean the oily grime off the bottle, and cleverly create an object of beauty where once there was only a dismal plastic encumbrance.
How could I know that some law of physics states that where there is a huge weight of olive oil in a very large and relatively thin glass container, the smallest tap on the glass will cause it to split open like an egg? It does this two months later at the merest touch from a passing handbag buckle, wasting what must be a good hundred pounds’ worth of oil and causing a terrible slithery mess which (although it will eventually turn out to have improved the look of our terracotta tiles no end) will take days to clear up. Or so I hear. Lucy has to do the cleaning. I am packing, about to leave; that’s why I was flapping bag-buckles about in the kitchen in the first place. My flight to England is this very afternoon.
Antonietta, who has popped in to say goodbye, is horrified at the sight of the gallons of olive oil all over the floor, the broken fragments of demijohn. Surely I’m not seriously proposing to go and get on an aeroplane after I’ve just spilt a whole damigiana of oil? Have I lost my wits?
I don’t immediately grasp the connection between olive oil and aeroplanes: does she mean that it is unsisterly of me to leave all that cleaning to Lucy? No. Hereabouts, spilling olive oil is like breaking mirrors. Just to waste a litre or so, when your bottle slips from your hand as you dress your salad or some such thing, will bring you seven years’ bad luck. But a whole damigiana! There is no way that plane is going to survive, according to Antonietta, who as we know has her doubts about air travel at the best of times. I will never reach London in one piece. I should cancel my ticket immediately.
