by Annie Hawes
Less scarily, we will also discover, eventually, what Sergio meant by his mysterious remarks about dealing in gold: he has become a sales representative for a company that specializes in supplying gold to dentists.
*
Various of our Diano friends are unexpectedly, thanks to the reverse in the fortunes of the olive, beginning to fulfil their parents’ long-abandoned dreams and going back to the land. The family terreni are no longer useless encumbrances, oppressive parental emotional baggage, but a worthwhile job. Much respectable home-making and settling down and even a bit of reproducing is under way among the Diano company. The family olive groves are at last being nurtured and the orti cultivated. Fathers glow as their advice is sought at last, mothers finally get the chance to pass on their cantina-filling lore, motorino-ing up and down the villages demonstrating the once-dying skills of potting and bottling, jam-making, tomato drying, anchovy salting. The future seems not only settled and assured, but likely to be everything the long-suffering parents of San Pietro could have wished. They will see their grandchildren grow up after all, in the empty houses that are now (yes, even more builders’ lorries on our narrow hairpin bends) being Adjusted up and down the hillsides. True Ligurians find bits of neglected family property to reactivate, house prices in Diano being way out of the league of locals these days. Mulesheds and haylofts are transformed into kitchens and bathrooms, crumbling drystone walls reinforced and neatened with a nice dollop of rendering, drooping roofs are straightened out; not for holiday-home Germans and weekender Plainsfolk, but for another generation of olive farmers. A dream fulfilled; a cosy return to the past but with modern conveniences added.
23
We’ve escaped from the English Christmas hysteria. We’re going to lurk peacefully up in the hills, with calm and quiet and big wide views, blue skies and crisp winter air. Instead of last-minute present-buying panics, canned jingle-bells everywhere, days of stuffing ourselves with oceans of food and drink we don’t really want, we’ll get a bit of healthy exercise putting the nets out, and a quiet time working on the house and sorting out the vegetable garden, while waiting for the olives to finish their fattening-up for harvest. Fantastic.
We arrive in San Pietro to find that the Hand of Nature – or rather, the Hand of Human Intervention in Nature – has decorated the village most dramatically for Christmas. Whatever Nordic-mythological explanations we may have heard about the origins of the Christmas tree, we see at once that the splendour of winter citrus trees covered in these improbable-looking golden fruits must be what really lies behind our Northern bright-bauble-decorated trees: a tragic yearning for the warm abundant lands abandoned by our idiot forefathers at the dawn of history. Everything deciduous is faded and gone, the vines bare, a lot of brown naked earth and branches showing: but this just throws into three-dimensional relief the explosion of deep shiny luscious colours on the orange and lemon trees, the intense Day-Glo fruit bursting from every terrace between sea level and hilltop, every leaf gleaming an impossibly perfect green. Imagine the poor benighted travellers of yore heading for the warm South, the traders and pilgrims, thieving crusaders and what have you, trekking down from the cold colourless industrious climes they’d been lumbered with, seeing for the first time the Christmas orange and lemon trees around the Mediterranean. Their folk memories, assuming they had such a thing, must have lurched and buzzed at the splendour of it. They must have been gobsmacked. So are we.
Why, though, did we fantasize peace, quiet and solitude at Christmas in this land of compulsive sociability? I have no idea. We find that we are honour-bound, unless we want to offend everyone mortally, to go and stuff ourselves for days on end with everyone we know. We have escaped two days of force-feeding in the bosom of our own family only to find ourselves doing a whole week of it here. Moreover, at this time of year, filling in any small gaps between your full-time eating engagements, you meet the ubiquitous panettone. This thing, something like a huge and exceptionally fluffy Chelsea bun, the Italian equivalent of a Christmas cake, is the focus of an absurd ritual cake-exchanging extravaganza which now begins to take over our lives. Everybody has to visit everybody at this time of year: and no one is allowed to do so without bringing a gift of one of these things, which come in a huge cardboard box a couple of feet tall and take up half your kitchen once you’ve got a dozen of them lined up on the sideboard in various stages of eatenness. Neither of us likes panettone that much anyway – a small slice is OK for breakfast toasted with your coffee, but try munching your way through great dry chunks of the stuff in the middle of the afternoon, or, worse, after a voluptuous and many-coursed Christmas meal.
I don’t know about the rest of Italy – I hear it’s different in the South – but here people seem to have used up all their culinary inspiration on the savouries and have none left over for the sweet stuff. The favourite local pastry, over which our friends here go into delirium, is a thing called the crostata, a close relative of the jam tart, but rather more like the bits of leftover pastry our granny used to spread thinly with jam and bung into the bottom of the oven for us kids so it wouldn’t go to waste. I daresay if this is all you’re used to in the way of baked sweetmeats, panettone isn’t too bad. Maybe, but we can’t keep up with the steady influx of the things, and by the sixth or seventh day of Christmas the boxes of half-eaten panettone sitting about the place have begun to mount up disturbingly. Even more annoyingly, since you can’t go to anyone’s house without one, we keep having to go and buy more of the things into the bargain. In desperation we come up with a cunning plan: we’ll recycle them. As each new one arrives, we pop it, still in its huge box, on to the shelf with its friends and relations, and offer chunks from an earlier one instead. Now we can take the unopened ones with us on our own calls, dramatically reducing the backlog and concealing our ungratefulness at a stroke. Clever.
Or perhaps not so clever after all: we soon find out that we are not alone in thinking up this solution to the overwhelmed-by-panettone period. One of our own recycled items reappears upon our kitchen table a week later, recognizable by a bit of my scribbling on its box. We can’t remember who originally gave it to us, or who we passed it on to, there being so many of the things flying about at the moment, but with the help of the shamefaced culprits Mimmo and Lorella we work out that it has visited at least four homes on its Christmas circuit without ever being opened so far: must have done, because it was given to them by someone we hardly know and can’t possibly have given it to. Food for thought. Can the whole panettone business be an enormous confidence trick? Are we the only people foolish enough to actually eat the things?
At every one of our Christmas eating marathons, the hot topic is the EEC. Will Italy be let in as a fully paid-up member on the latest European Economic Initiative? Is the country irredeemably backward, corrupt and debt-laden, or can it participate as an honourable, reliable and solvent member of the industrialized modern nations?
Antonietta is finding some consolation in the thought that if only it all works out there will be jobs for everyone here like there are in Germany or England, and Maurizio’s future will be safe: he won’t need to go and leave San Pietro.
Maurizio, a big boy now, sits glued manfully to the television screen, dauntless among the looming cupboards, while we three women squeeze into the tiny kitchen, where Antonietta kneads and chops and stirs and talks about Domenico and cries and cries. Maurizio has found a crackly old audio cassette we all made on a decrepit ghetto blaster one summer afternoon years ago while we were making lunch up under the olive trees, chopping salad and cooking sausages over our bonfire. We put it on while we sit over this sad winter’s meal – Antonietta insisting everyone else eat, not touching a thing herself – and listen to ourselves chatting, to Domenico teaching us to sing a silly song in Ligurian, in the days when our Italian was a joke in itself: Caterina sull’ articiocca, che non ne posso ciü… ‘Caterina’s sat on the artichoke, can’t stand it any more…’ Lots of laughter from Antonietta and
Maurizio as we mess up the dialect bits, Domenico correcting us: no, ‘carciofo’ is Italian, you have to say articiocca in Ligurian.
Maurizio listens to his five-year-old self demanding to sit on his dad’s lap while he eats his lunch – Domenico asking how he’s supposed to eat his with a great boy on his knees – and can’t handle being manful any longer. He leaps up to shut himself away in his parents’ bedroom where he can sob in peace. Us women sit around the table telling our best Domenico stories. The time he strimmed our garden out of existence… his hand-in-marriage trip to Calabria…
Domenico, says Antonietta, was sure the EEC would bring him a brand-new crusher lorry instead of the old tip-up truck: there was talk in the Comune meetings of a modern wheely-bin system, a proper rubbish deposit in line with the advanced North, where apparently we would burn our garbage neatly in huge furnaces instead of untidily in the open air. He thought there was a chance of subsidies for olive farming – loans to help get your fallen terrace walls put back up, maybe, or a nice new Rotavator that doesn’t break down every five minutes. That would have been great. But without Domenico…? Do we think a woman can officially be an olivicultore?
Of course you can, says her son, who has reappeared and plonked himself in front of the TV again, giving every appearance of not listening. We agree: EEC equal rights legislation, we say. She doesn’t look very convinced. Anyway, she says, giving him a big squeeze from behind, it won’t be long now till Maurizio’s big enough to take over, will it? Maurizio pats her hand but gives no reply, just goes on staring intently and adolescently at the telly.
Will he? Won’t he? Nothing much seems to have changed since he was three months old: everyone’s still on tenterhooks about his Attitude to Olives.
Sergio, on the other hand, is very annoyed about the Europe thing. As Lilli, back from her nunnery and being the perfect housewife again, rushes to and fro with course after course, we hear that in a desperate last fling to balance its books, to look economically viable in the eyes of the EEC, the Italian State has been pestering Sergio for several years of back tax payments, even threatening him with legal action. He is, naturally, outraged.
He is also outraged, as it happens, at the way Lilli has done the chestnuts. They are no good at all done in the oven like this, but his wife is too lazy to light a fire outdoors and cook them over the brace so they get that essential smoky flavour. She just can’t find the time. Even though there are no chickens to look after any more, thanks to her going off for her nice long holiday with the nuns. Lilli flutters and giggles, doing her best to make out that this is just jolly banter. Alessandra and Paola roll their eyes.
Sergio has actually had the Finance Police up here demanding to look at his books, he says, wanting him to prove where he gets his money from! Never happened before, and still wouldn’t, according to Sergio, if it wasn’t for Europe. But, he says, he doesn’t blame Europe alone. If it wasn’t for the South, for the Roman Mafia, the country would be perfectly solvent. One day the North will have to break away; there’s no other answer. Viva Padania!
A groan of despair rises from all our throats. Not that again!
Sergio fixes us with a baleful glare. What’s the point of trying to talk reason to a gaggle of ignorant females?
At Ciccio’s house we hear from Salvatore, who has been working hard at the wine bottle over the first half-dozen courses, that this United Europe business is all a load of nonsense. Don’t his offspring realize that the whole world’s run by the USA already? The thing’s a farce. Europeans all hate one another anyway: what’s the point of them trying to unite? Look at the English and the French. Or at the Germans and the Italians. Salvatore once did a spell as a migrant worker in Germany. In this tiny buco-del-culo arsehole town where he was based, there was a notice on the bar door saying ‘No Dogs, No Italians’. United Europe! Pah!
Uproar breaks out round the table. Salvatore’s son and all four daughters, his two sons-in-law and his two eldest granddaughters, all talk, or rather shout, at once. His three grandsons are too small to care about Europe, but they are already deep in noisy disagreement about whose turn it is on the Gameboy. It is unbearably loud in this small packed room. The daughters, we gather, are all keen Euro-enthusiasts. Rosi can’t see why the rest of Europe should want to take on Italy’s stupid problems though. Nothing has changed, in spite of all the Mani Puliti, anti-Mafia, judges and the anti-corruption campaigns. She should know; her work is split between France, Germany, and Italy. This country is the only one where backhanders are still the norm. A disgrace.
Ivo, husband of Rosi’s sister Giusi, and the only real Northerner round the table, has a better solution to that problem. It is, sad to say, one we have heard before. The North, he explains, should simply expel from the body politic the feckless Mafioso South. There is an unbridgeable cultural difference between the two: Separate Development, old South Africa style, is the only answer. Ivo has not chosen quite the right audience for this speech – he seems momentarily to have forgotten that he has married into a family of Southern origin. The response is spectacular. Giovanni, husband of third sister Grazia, and a Sicilian to boot, goes wild, struggling to his feet, shouting so hard he goes purple, and sticking his face right up to Ivo’s across the Christmas fare. Grazia, too, leaps up, trying to calm her husband before his blood pressure goes through the ceiling. The volume rises to an impossible crescendo, menacing fingers jab at Ivo from all around the table, angry forearms slice the air around him as the decibel count goes off the Richter scale.
The point being made by the participants in this uninterrupted interruption is, we gather, that the North’s much-vaunted prosperity is all down to the labour of poor migrants from the South anyway. Mamma Francesca appears with a bubbling-hot oven-tray of lasagne, weaving nimbly through the flailing limbs, signing to us to ignore her family and get on with eating.
By now Ciccio is on his feet, too, shaking his napkin and loudly threatening to leave: he is not putting up with this. Why should he have to listen to a snake of a racist coglione in the bosom of his own family? Why doesn’t Ivo come straight out with it and just call them terroni? In the nick of time, his wily mother slaps a plateful of fragrant lasagne on to the table before her only son, pressing a fork into his hand. He subsides, muttering evilly. Giusi, flicking her hair contemptuously, dissociates herself from her husband and edges round towards our side of the table, squeezing between the heaving bodies and her mother’s many cupboards (which almost outdo Antonietta’s for size and cumbersomeness) to apologize for her husband’s lunatic outpourings.
A dozen or so courses later – each of the four daughters has cooked and brought enough food for the whole family, just in case the others failed in their duty – there is an unexpected audibility gap. We seem to have got off politics at last; and Grazia is telling the tale of a parking ticket she got recently. For some reason she’s managing to do it without being interrupted. Everyone’s busy digesting, probably.
She arrived as the traffic cop was starting to write out the ticket, she is saying, and naturally couldn’t help but mention that her husband was himself in the traffic police – ‘uno del mestiere’, ‘one of the trade’, as she puts it. Ah, said your man, putting his pad away, OK then: no fines, of course, for wives of the mestiere.
We English take this to be an illustration of the corrupt old-Italy style behaviour she was criticizing earlier, and nod encouragingly. Did she tear him off a strip? Send him away with a flea in his ear?
No. We have completely missed the point. A week later, says Grazia, lo and behold, the demand for payment of the fine arrived in the post anyway! He hadn’t annulled it at all! What is the point of being a married to a policeman? There is no sense of brotherhood left in the Polizia Stradale these days!
The whole table is shocked at such a betrayal of professional honour, and poor Giovanni is red with shame. Rosi doesn’t seem at all comforted by this evidence of modern incorruptibility either. I look expectantly over at Ivo: he, at least
, is bound to seize the chance to accuse his Southern kin of shameful backward attitudes, support the non-corrupt parking-ticket-man… No, he too is nodding away in outrage, in perfect agreement with the Calabrian branch of the family. No unbridgeable cultural difference on this one, then.
As the meal draws to an end, ominous references to panettone begin to surface in the hubbub. We are not afraid: we have a defence against panettone attack – a delicious gingerbread cake we have made ourselves to our granny’s recipe. (Though we’ve had to use honey instead of the golden syrup and treacle, which no one has ever heard of in this backward and corrupt land.) I open the tin in which I have carried the cake down the mountain with a flourish, put it proudly on the table, and slice it up: the sister hands it round. Oddly, though, gingerbread turns out to be about as appealing to our hosts as panettone is to us, and after a polite tasting session and rather a lot of bits left on the sides of plates, the panettone gets brought out anyway.
We are rescued from yet more food – eating is due to start up again as soon as the family gets back from a stomach-clearing walk along the seafront, and we are being insistently invited to stay – by Ciccio and his youngest sister, Marisa. They are, they announce boldly, going to take us off to a party instead.
Francesca is deeply perturbed by this madcap scheme, her usual puzzled look turning to one of downright anxiety. What, no Christmas supper?
Her offspring point out that we have been sitting at table for almost four hours so far today and give her a series of simultaneous lectures on healthy eating. Francesca’s worried look deepens by the second. Eventually she manages to get a word in: there is still tons of food to be got through. Are we absolutely certain we don’t want to take the other trayful of lasagne to protect us against Night Starvation?
