by Annie Hawes
Iole, next up to say goodbye, is equally appalled by my plan to travel in spite of the catastrophe. Ciccio and Paletta are due to come and give me a lift to Nice airport: I am not too surprised when Paletta, seeing the mess of glass and oil all over the floor, decides not to come after all.
I think myself, however, that the seven years’ bad luck attached itself not to my travel plans but to my olive-oil plans. Every year so far we have sworn we’d stay here right through the winter, get in those long walks – the all-day ones, to Testico, to Triora, much too long and steep to contemplate except in the cool of winter – and a good dose of wood-stove-snuggling in the evenings; be poised, rested and ready for the olive harvest. It goes on not happening.
It really will be years till we finally manage to get ourselves and our olives down to the mill in good order: till then, we’ll end up relying on Domenico, who comes up with a proposition. Recently the medical opinions which once were so opposed to fatty substances of any kind, which recommended nothing but the oil of the dreaded sunflower, have been muted, and new priests of olive oil are on the road. The sophisticated city folk have begun to realign themselves with the crusty old peasants – in the nick of time, as far as our Ligurian neighbours are concerned – and olive oil is sellable once more, at a surprisingly decent price. Since last year, Domenico has been renting another plot of olives, near his Castello one, to take advantage of this fact. Now he has, inconveniently, four separate sites to travel between: his vineyard, his olive groves one and two, and his orto with olives. (Ah, how right was that land-consolidation legislation!) Moreover, he hates working on the rented trees. The land was practically derelict when he took it over, he says, and he had to bring the plants back from death’s door. Now the owner, a fat rich stronzo (a turd) who owns a hotel down in Diano Marina, has decided to put the rent up this year. Because the price of oil has risen, and because, now the trees are better kept, they’re producing more! Domenico is supposed to pay the stronzo extra for the privilege of having improved his property! And he is beginning to get problems with the digestione from dwelling on the injustice of it all.
He would infinitely prefer to take charge of our piante up here, seeing we don’t seem to be much good at it ourselves… (pause for knowing moustache-twiddling grin)… He could dump the rented land, and seeing we come and go like grasshoppers, it would be to our advantage to have someone looking after our land properly for us. And to his, because our trees are next door to his own ones. Instead of rent, he will go on giving us a couple of demijohns a year of our oil, till we get ourselves sorted out and are ready to take over; meanwhile, he’ll keep the profits if there are any. Brilliant plan. Domenico is pleased as punch when we agree. Thus will the stronzo get it nel culo! And, he says, it’s a fine bargain for him, because there’s no chance of a brainless pair like us without so much as a proper place to store our tools (is this a reference to our bedrooms and bathroom?) managing to take over in anything less than a decade. Thanks, Domenico.
By the time we finally manage to break the mould and get here for the olive harvest, mighty changes are taking place in this country as it gears up to join the New Europe. First item on the modernizing agenda: a cunning plan concocted by the Italian State to eliminate vast swathes of that great national hobby, tax-evasion, at a stroke. Or rather, not at a stroke, but region by region. In a mere six months’ time, every shop, bar, hotel, garage, restaurant in Liguria will be obliged by law to use a Fiscal Till, which will instantaneously register every transaction on to a regional Tax Computer. Pairs of plainclothes Finance Policemen will lurk outside business premises, accosting customers, demanding to see their receipts. No receipt? Swingeing fines for both enterprise and client. Your old and trusted customers will become, willy-nilly, unofficial police agents.
Understandably, the small-business folk of the area are appalled at this wanton attack on all the traditions they hold most dear. Social relations are about to be overturned, pitting man against man; Ligurian pockets will be badly hit. What is to be done?
After much agitated debate, the whole of Liguria has decided to go on an eight-day general strike in protest against this dastardly Roman plot which will doubtless bring to an end civilization as we know it. But, world-shaking though these events may be, no news service in England has thought them worthy of note. The sister and I arrive at Nice Airport this February day, day two of the strike, heads full of olive nets and oil-mills, utterly unsuspecting. The first train leaving for Italy is a fast one to Genoa that only stops at Imperia and leaves out Diano Marina. Never mind, we’ll catch it anyway, get supplies in before we go up to the house. The blue bus will take us the last three miles to the waiting Fiat in Diano. We’ll do some shopping in Imperia first.
But no, we won’t. Every enterprise in the town is firmly shut and barricaded. Affixed to their doors or their plate-glass windows are long and close-printed posters protesting in great detail about Injustice and Unwarranted State Interference and the Death of Liberty.
An aged passer-by sees the dismay on our faces as we fight our way through the complex bureaucratic Italian of this awesome pronouncement. He stops and cackles. Eight days! he says cheerfully. No shops till next Monday! Ah, sì sì!
We know that, we’ve read the poster, thanks. We’ll go and sit in a bar, get a coffee while we think over what to do next. But no, we won’t do that either. The bars are all emphatically closed and shuttered too, every last one of them. By now we are in Imperia’s Piazza Dante, usually a positive obstacle-course of bar tables and chairs; its imposing colonnades look strangely naked and archaeological today without the café furniture. A fountain usually plays soothingly in the centre of the piazza: that is switched off too. Gloom and desolation.
We put our bags down and lean miserably against a bare stucco wall instead. We can’t go up to the house. How will we weather eight days of strike without food, drink, loo paper, candles, and all the other stuff that makes life liveable? Worse still, as far as we can remember we have used up all the firewood, and without a new gas-bottle at least, if not a chainsaw and a skilled pruning operative, we will freeze. February here may be bright and blue and warm by day, but as soon as the sun goes down it gets extremely nippy.
We heave our bags back on to our shoulders and wander disconsolate under the draughty arcades by the fishing port looking for passers-by to accost. Usually it’s hard to move a step in this country without half-a-dozen helpful bystanders doing a running commentary. Today, nobody. Of course; there’s nothing to go out of the house for. It takes a good five minutes for the customary knot of advisers to gather around us. When they do, their verdict is unanimous. No hope. Waste of time to look for anything around here: the strike is solid in Imperia, a town known for its militancy. But, the knot points out, in Diano Marina, where greed is often known to get the better of principle, and solidarity means nothing, we may well find the odd strike-breaker.
Quelling as best we can the shame of our association with a town so famous for its blacklegging treachery, we leap on to the next bus. At least the buses aren’t on strike. Forward to Diano.
As we lurch loopily down towards the bay, as Diano finally heaves into sight, an awful thought occurs to me. Would you call the desire to evade taxes a principle? No. Or at least, if it is a principle, it is one so closely allied to greed and self-interest that even the most apolitical, or indeed right-wing, of Diano’s blackleg types would likely be keen as mustard to support it. There is no reason why, in this matter, they shouldn’t be in complete agreement with the Left on the Oppressive Role of the State. Hope fades. Sure enough, the bus wheezes to a halt in a dead town, empty streets festooned with posters. The commercianti of Diano have become militants to a man. Now what are we going to do? Could we scrounge necessities off everyone, an item here, an item there? Exhausting thought; it’s late and we’re tired. Think how much socializing it would all involve. Can’t face it. We are, after all, English.
Next idea: stay, for tonight at least, at Luigi
and Maria’s. They will have been forewarned, and hopefully forearmed with victuals, against this shopless week. Unless, horror of horrors, they’re on strike too?
But no, a quick phonecall establishes that they aren’t. A quick detour to the Bar Sito to dig out Federico the cab driver, whose version of the strike turns out to be a sit-in in the back bar, and in no time at all we are dragging our baggage joyfully up the stairs towards those once-reviled hammocky chainmail beds.
Down at the bar, Luigi explains to anyone who cares to listen – mostly just us two, everyone else knows it already – that all this tax-rationalizing business is really down to the end of the Cold War. The only reason this pathetic, inefficient and ramshackle Italian State, run by bloodsucking criminals, has managed to limp along for the last few decades, he says, is that the United States has stuffed money into its pockets to keep it going. Loans, subsidies, billions of dollars, anything to fend off the Soviet threat. But now the days of the corrupt are numbered; now there’s no reason to shore them up. They’re a bulwark against nothing, and honest democracy’s got a chance at last in Italy.
Great, we say, we’re pleased to hear it. Is this why he hasn’t joined the strike?
It is easy, he says, ignoring the question and fixing us with an accusing eye, to go on about the Americans. But we British are just as much to blame as the USA for the sad state of his country. Did we know that?
No, not really, we say. Looks like we’re in for one of Luigi’s lessons. Here it comes.
Who, he asks, did our Allied Command put in charge of the liberated areas as we fought our way up Italy in 1944 booting the Germans out? Do we know that?
We admit, humbly, to having no idea. But Luigi is not going to tell us. Not yet.
We probably imagine, don’t we, that we would have chosen our allies, the Partisans? Firm democrats, people who had been risking their lives for years fighting the Fascists?
We might very well have thought that: something tells us we would have been wrong.
Mafiosi, that’s who. Corrupt local bigwigs with their bands of arse-lickers. People who had never lifted a finger against the Fascists; who had collaborated, even. Gave the bastards a leg-up when they’d been all but swept away. So obsessed with the Communist Threat that we preferred to re-install corruption and feudalism all over his country.
Not a good feeling, suddenly to find yourself responsible for the post-war renaissance of the Italian Mafia. Even if you weren’t actually around at the time.
Luigi takes pity on us. It doesn’t matter any more, he says. Now, at last, rational capitalism is on its way. Luigi, of course, does not like capitalism: but if he has to have it, he prefers the clean rational kind to the corrupt inefficient kind. That, of course, is why he didn’t join the strike of the Vile Petty-Bourgeois.
22
Inspired by the renaissance of the olive, and by the EEC money available for the regeneration of agriculture in decaying mountain regions, or some such thing, a course entitled New Techniques in Oliviculture is about to start, organized by the Comune, down at the Town Hall in Diano – a series of five talks from experts and a lovely fat illustrated handbook to go with it.
On the first night a good fifty people have turned up, among them a pretty healthy contingent of under-forties. Some have even managed to drag their aged parents along: Ciccio is a few rows away from us with a gloweringly reluctant Salvatore. He’s thinking of giving up his share in the restaurant and turning agricoltore along with his old dad, now you can make a decent living out of the land at last. No worries about taxes and Mafiosi and the discrepancies in taste between Germans and Italians. And he could work when he felt like it for a change. No you couldn’t, says Salvatore: la terra e bassa – the earth is low.
One of those beardy red T-shirty men – Ligurian Regional Pride styling – appears to start the class and nip family feuding in the bud. He has come right from the other end of Liguria – rumour has it, from somewhere past Genoa – to set us on the road to olive riches.
The Beard From Beyond Genoa begins by lulling us into a false sense of security by telling us no end of interesting facts, such as that the olive is not really a tree, but technically speaking a bush since it will sprout branches all the way up its trunk if humans don’t stop it. (I suppose that’s why everyone round here calls it a plant, not a tree: probably not much of a surprise to them.) Then, having established his expertise, and gained everyone’s deep interest by telling us that by the end of the course we’ll be able to make twice as much olive oil with half the labour, he launches a swingeing attack on the Good Old Ways.
The terraces in this area have been planted too thickly with olive trees, he says; our grandfathers, good Ligurians (speak for yourself, says Salvatore sotto voce) couldn’t resist squeezing an extra plant in wherever there was a bit of space. But this means too many trees have to share what nutriment and water there is. We will find we actually get more quintali of olives, says our Beard, if we simply eliminate every second or third tree. A wave of horrified muttering goes round the room. He’ll lose his audience in no time if he goes on like this. Sacrilege! Destroying olive trees is not a subject to be lightly bandied about this valley. Your man is clearly from some spendthrift wastrel type of a place, even if it is notionally in Liguria.
Moreover, says the vandal, the trees round here have been left to grow excessively tall, and thereby waste a lot of olive-producing energy. Being too close together to start with, they compete pointlessly to get the most out of the available sun. The local pruning technique – maximum height, maximum width and openness – may be ancient and customary, but it is wrong.
Rebellious muttering breaks out again: the lecturer presses inexorably on with his revolutionary thesis, ignoring all.
Tall, wide trees may have been fine in the days when people could count on a big extended family at harvest time to clamber about up ladders beating at endless high branches: these days, though, when a lot of family members have other jobs, you want to reduce the essential workforce to just one or two people. He will be showing us how to do this and at the same time get more, not less, oil from our trees. (Good job he keeps emphasizing this: it seems to have a calming effect.)
He will, he says, show us a series of slides to introduce us to the main point of the course: the taglio drastico, drastic cut. We are plunged into darkness, and the show begins.
Slide One: its owner stands proudly by a huge and noble-looking tree, wide and spreading and tall as a house. There is a small outbreak of excitement: someone recognizes the man.
Yes, says the lecturer, this is in the Imperia valley; he and his team have (cunningly) been trying out their new techniques on a terrace or two in each of the Provinces of Liguria, so people can go and see the improvement for themselves; you don’t have to take the word of a sconosciuto, an unknown, for it…
Slide Two: the owner poses, wooden-faced now, with his chainsaw next to a tragic-looking stump. His prize tree is now only a foot or so taller than him, with a few sad little tufts of skinny young branches left popping out at the top and sides. It looks utterly ridiculous. A deathly silence falls.
Slide Three: later that summer, and the tree has recovered a bit, trailing tufts of new green growth all over the place, which do indeed seem healthier than the original version, springier and sappier and bursting with fruit… but alas – Next Slide: the poor tree has been pruned drastically again. Only downward-pointing young branches must be left, we are told sternly. Ones that point upwards don’t bear fruit and just waste energy. The victim is looking terrible again, the fat gnarled trunk totally out of proportion to weedy dangling fronds. The older members of his audience are suffering terribly – it is more than they can stand to see such treatment of their beloved olive. Ciccio is practically holding Salvatore down in his seat; much Euh-ing is going on, hushed yet appalled, among the true-bred Ligurians. Miraculously, by year three the poor tree – or rather, bush – has become a wildly energetic-looking dark-green weeping willow, every
dangling twiglet positively bursting with fat healthy olives. And, says our lecturer triumphantly, it has produced six kilos of oil – as much as it did in the last year of its former incarnation, when it was ten times bigger.
The class comes to an end amidst much discussion: the man who recognized the owner of this tree, a man called Orlando Bellicoso (really), insists that Bellicoso is such an incompetent that practically anybody, including bearded ignoramuses, could have made it produce more oil than he did.
Anyway, says another of the old guard, they will have paid him to let them experiment on his campagna, won’t they, so he’s bound to stick by their story: he’s not going to let on if it doesn’t really work, is he?
Nearby the lecturer’s political allegiances are being debated. Maybe he was owed a favour by the Left Alliance, under whose auspices he has come here, and they had to let him come, no matter what nonsense he was going to spout? Some of the older men decide to have no more truck with these politically motivated classes. Never mind the supposed alliance of the Left under the Olive Branch symbol; this is clearly a crafty Socialist plot to ruin good Communist olive plants. Others look at the question from another, perhaps more Freudian, standpoint: the bigger your tree is, the better it must be. Everyone knows that: and there’s an end to the matter.
In lesson two we move on to harvesting techniques, where we are told not to batter our trees with sticks the way we always have done. It damages the bark and makes them more liable to fungal attack. Instead we should buy an extremely expensive rattling machine, or at the very least a kind of vibrating comb contraption, to get the olives off the branches and into our nets. This will also mean less bruising to the fruits themselves, and a higher quality oil. Several of the few remaining members of the older generation in the class conclude that our teacher is in the pay of some agricultural-equipment manufacturer, and propound this theory with much passion at the end of class. An American multinational – or maybe a Tuscan consortium? Someone has heard that in Tuscany they use these absurd contraptions…
