by Annie Hawes
Lucy and I are thinking longingly of a quiet place up a mountain, a place where people only speak one at a time, and in English. We need to rest our reeling brains. But it is not to be. Either more food, or more drink. Francesca is only reconciled to the idea of our leaving for a food-free zone when Ciccio, inspired, claims to be fearful of a panettone-shortage at the party. Perhaps she’s got a spare one we can take?
She certainly has. We get three of the things for good measure – who knows how many people may want some? We might, as Francesca points out, be left with none for ourselves if we only took one. Maternal honour satisfied, at last we make our escape into the quiet darkness of the street, dragging our giant boxes. Which, as soon as we’ve got round the corner, Ciccio and Marisa insist on loading into the boot of our car: of course we won’t need them at the party, which is bound to be heaving with the things.
Yet more panettone. There also turn out to be yet more days of Christmas business here in Italy: first the festa of Santo Stefano, St Stephen, and then just when you think it’s all over, the day when the Befana, a sort of white witch, delivers presents to the kids. Even more presents. Or, supposedly, a lump of coal if they’ve been bad. We stoutly maintain that we’ve never heard of either of these personages, ever, until we remember whose feast it was the day Good King Wenceslas Looked Out. And discover that the Befana is just a corruption of the Epiphany.
We manage to escape to the hills anyway to celebrate Saint Stephen and the Epiphany quietly, by dint of confusing everyone into thinking we’re at someone else’s place. It is wonderful and peaceful up here: the sun shines, the sky is blue, birds twitter wildly everywhere now that what hunters there are left are busy being force-fed panettone, unable to get out and about. The temperature is just right for wandering about up muletracks to use up a few of those million extra calories we’ve consumed recently, or along terraces to do a comparative study of olive crops. Our drastically cut ones aren’t quite as good as Domenico’s yet, nowhere near the obsessive Nino’s, but rather a lot better than the more laid-back Ugo’s. We can hold our heads high in San Pietro.
Evening draws in early and we go indoors to light the wood-stove. We won’t need to bother cooking for weeks, while the Christmas fare works its way through our systems. The panettone collection alone will last a month at least. Toasted on the stove top, it’s not bad at all. We settle down snug and smug with a bottle of last year’s grape wine. At last, the Christmas we’ve been imagining.
A week or so later, we are still breakfasting, lunching and occasionally even dining on panettone. Venturing downtown now the festive season is safely over, we bump into Francesca who tells us, diplomatic as everyone always is round here, that she has given the rest of our gingerbread to the chickens because no one would eat it. So much for a United Europe.
24
Everyone has already forgotten the days when half the hillsides were abandoned, left to the encroaching wilderness. Now they feel about unloved and uncultivated olive groves the way you might feel about watching someone absent-mindedly shredding a bundle of ten-pound notes. Bad feeling is beginning to grow over the now-multitudinous German-owned olive trees in the area, which still go unpruned and unharvested, as they have done for years. To the holiday home owners they are just part of their gardens. Often they have very large gardens, because another bit of that wishful land-consolidation legislation says that the more land you own, the more you are allowed to add to your house. Instead of attracting olive farmers to gather large holdings and go and live on their land, as it was intended to do, this has just meant that holiday-home buyers with no interest whatsoever in farming buy up as much land as they can so as to be allowed to enlarge the house. An awful lot of terraces have ended up lying terminally derelict: and now hanky-headed peasant and designer-clad Diano son alike glower and Porca-Miseria away at the sight of all those olives going to waste.
Why don’t the Tedeschi just offer a deal whereby the trees are pruned in exchange for firewood, like any local would, and an arrangement to give oil in exchange for help with the harvest, like we’d done with Domenico, if they can’t be bothered doing it themselves? Magari! They are so perverse they would rather see their trees go to rack and ruin than give someone a load of free firewood. And so rich and selfish that they don’t care. Why don’t they let someone collect the olives at least, instead of just leaving them to fall off the trees and rot?
We know that, like us in earlier times, the Germans see the olive trees simply as a bit of romantic woodland that happens to come with the house. They’re psychotherapists and graphic designers and suchlike: why would they know anything about olives? We’re sure they’d be happy to let some local have the firewood, we say, and probably the crop too, if anyone went and actually spoke to them instead of just muttering away behind their backs. They don’t know, for example, that everyone uses olive wood for their stoves, that the wood’s worth enough to cover the cost of the pruning work. They’re bound to think they’d have to pay someone to do it. And to harvest the crop. And they’re as paranoid about being ripped off by some cunning peasant as you lot are about Germans. So they just do nothing.
Euh! says Pompeo in his most disbelieving tones. This is (more or less) the response we’ve had every time we’ve made this speech to anyone. How come you know so much, then? he asks, looking round at our neatly spread olive nets, evidently having completely forgotten his own part in our learning process. If it took us years to get to this point, we say, when we’re here for a good half of the year and speak Italian, what hope has a six-weeks-a-year non-Italian speaker got? Why don’t you try explaining it to them instead of just fulminating under your hanky?
But of course this sensible suggestion flies in the face of all received peasant wisdom: what fool would tell someone they were sitting on a gold mine if they hadn’t noticed it for themselves?
The German Olives Situation reaches a crescendo of absurdity when the manoeuvrings of cunning peasants lead to the destruction of the home of poor Uli, the newest German arrival, an excitable Beethoven-haired red-faced music journalist who is hardly ever to be seen entirely sober. Just as his new upper storey, which is, naturally, being put up by our old friend and enemy Franco, is almost finished and ready to be plastered, the official decree comes through. No ifs, no buts: it must be demolished forthwith.
Uli’s tiny bothy is not even one up, one down – the lower storey is only half a room, a cave-cantina built into the side of the small cliff which forms the foundation for the large upstairs room. But it comes with an enormous piece of land, on which stand a couple of hundred olive trees, under one of which Uli sat happily and innocently all summer at a small plastic table with matching chairs in tasteful and apt olive-green, with a large bottle of wine and a lap-top computer, looking down hopefully on the building-site which would one day be his home, practising his Italian on Franco, banging out articles on the Nice Jazz Festival and suchlike. We have befriended Uli, who is a sweetheart, and have helped him find someone to clear the land around his house, which is choked up with waist-high brambly stuff. Mimmo and Paletta have agreed to do the job for nothing, in exchange for the olives, which won’t be a lot because the trees are a bit neglected, but still two or three hundred pounds’ worth, decent pay for a few days’ work. They will also, after the harvest, do the pruning in exchange for the firewood. I am very proud of this achievement – at last one step has been made towards international harmony: one German will not be seen as a money-bagging wastrel.
Antonio, the ex-owner of the land, is the wild card that causes the catastrophe. He is annoyed with Franco, who he feels, probably rightly, has made a lot more out of the deal than he has. He is angry that he sold the land just as the price of olives was on the turn, and now, we gather, wishes he hadn’t. Antonio has already been seriously put out by Franco leaving piles of building stuff all over the place, blocking the access road to what’s left of his own land several times, once for over a fortnight, and forcing him to carry his oliv
e nets on foot the last hundred yards. And when nets appear spread out under his ex-trees he concludes that this too is Franco’s handiwork. Being as convinced as everyone else round here that no German would never agree to anyone working their olives, he is now certain that, adding insult to injury, Franco is unlawfully appropriating olives which, if they are to be harvested at all, ought by rights to be Antonio’s own.
How to punish Franco? Antonio decides to denounce Uli’s building as ‘abusivo’ – unauthorized. He only wants to inconvenience Franco, get the building work halted for a few months. If you take the cellar-cave as ground level – and why not, on a terraced hillside? – then the building is now three storeys high. Houses restored and Adjusted in these hills must not be more than two storeys high. The Comune has another look at the paperwork: Antonio is as surprised as everyone else when things get seriously out of hand, and the order goes through to demolish the top storey.
Uli, who knows nothing of the olive wars raging around his property, is even more surprised than Antonio at this news, and hotfoots it back from Frankfurt. But there is nothing to be done. His new storey is knocked down – by Franco himself, who charges him almost as much for demolishing it as he did for putting it up – and he has to wait till next year to have it approved again and rebuilt. By which time the once-beautiful land around his house is a rubble-strewn wasteland. And it is Franco who puts it back up again: Antonio’s revenge has backfired, and Franco has got three times the work for nothing. Driven to distraction, Antonio, who belongs to the Oliveculture Classes are a Socialist Conspiracy clique, now manages to convince Uli that Mimmo and Paletta’s pruning – semi-drastic only, for efficiency combined with beauty – is the work of lunatics and incompetents. All my international harmony work utterly undone.
We clamber about in the trees, rattling at their loaded branches with canes and broomsticks to get the olives to fall; nobody has got round to getting one of those sissy Tuscan electric combers-and-shakers yet, so we are all trying to be delicate, now we know about the fungal diseases we might be exposing the poor trees to. All except Paletta, that is, who refuses to believe a word of it and whacks away with a seasoned olivewood shillelagh and all his might. Now we heave at the nets, roll the olives down terrace after terrace. Tiring business: you have to get right under the nets half the time, bent double, for a good rolling position. Then shovel it all up, with wide-mouth rubbery builders’ buckets so as not to rip the nets.
We are working mob-handed, with the help of Patrizia, Mimmo, Lorella, Caterina, Alberto, Anna, Dario the baker, Testone (apparently heroin-free these days), and of course the Two Cousins Ciccio and Paletta; and we are doing Antonietta’s olives first, along with Compare Gianni and Maurizio. This plan, at least, has worked; Maurizio, finding that strong young men – including ex-football heroes – are happy to be peasanting about up here, is joining in with a will. Suddenly it seems a skill worth having. Antonietta is overjoyed.
We get their crop into Compare Gianni’s Ape and arrange to meet them next week to do the Castello olives, which aren’t as ripe as on this side of the valley. Eventually our own fifteen lovely big sackfuls, after much painful wheelbarrowing to and fro along the evil path, repose on the back of Paletta’s lorry. Even with these impressive results from our drastic cut, though, there is still plenty of space left on our oversized transport. We wonder whether to round up our quintal quotient, since we’re overflowing with manpower, by stopping on the way down the hill to collect some abandoned German olives.
With just a small detour we will pass the lands of a pair of amiable gay doctors who haven’t shown up at all, to our certain knowledge, for a good four summers. Sure though I am that if the owners by some unlikely mischance were to turn up unexpectedly on this particular February evening they would be positively charmed to find us industriously making sure that their olives don’t go to waste, I can’t convince my accomplices of this. As far as they are concerned, we are launching a daring raid on German terrain: stealing, in fact. It makes no difference that the olives would only go to waste if we didn’t take them. Maybe they’re right to worry: perhaps the doctors would not give a bunch of unknown locals a rapturous reception if they were unaccompanied by known and respectable English neighbours. Still, here we are, respectable English neighbours. We insist.
We throw our nets down any old how under the Germans’ trees – not so easy on overgrown land that hasn’t been Cleaned for years – and as the sun begins to go down behind the ridge opposite, doing one of its over-the-top orange- and purple-stripe performances, we start rolling and heaving: much harder work when your nets aren’t stitched together and you have to do each tree individually, but we’ve soon got another five sacks loaded up.
Now, though, our fellow olive thieves refuse point-blank to go with our haul to either of the mills down in San Pietro in the morning. We are too well known there, they say; we will have to go to the frantoio – oil mill – in the Faraldi valley, the one in San Bartolomeo, where the owner’s son is a friend of theirs. And where people won’t be sure how many olive trees we own.
Are they seriously telling us that if we went to a frantoio in San Pietro our fellow customers there would be so well-informed about the exact number of trees we’ve got, the amount of olives they’re likely to have produced, that they will actually spot half a dozen extra sacks and suspect us of misdoings?
Yes, that is precisely what they’re saying. I realize how far I still have to go before I plumb the computer-like depths of the olive-farming mind. And, points out Patrizia, you can’t very well stand about in the mill saying, don’t worry, we didn’t nick the olives off a Sanpeotto, just off some Germans, can you? You’d be under suspicion of olive thieving in the village for the rest of your days. Steal from one, steal from all, they’d say. Your names would be mud…
Moreover, says Paletta, coming at the thing from the supernatural angle as usual, stolen olives are known to bring sfiga. Someone in my position shouldn’t tempt fate.
What does he mean, my position?
Have I forgotten the Curse of the Broken Demijohn, which may come upon me even now?
The lorry gets settled down for the night well away from prying eyes, lurking – very noticeably in my opinion – on the bend at the end of our path. Its owners get a lift home in Dario’s car, while we stomp off to bed muttering about how absurdly complicated life in this country is, and how deranged its inhabitants.
Our drivers arrive by Vespa at dawn, keen to get moving before other olive harvesters start Aping nosily past the lorry counting our sacks. Paranoia is such that Ciccio takes the bike down separately, while Paletta drives our dodgy load not along the normal road through San Pietro and along the Via Aurelia, but by a series of long, slow and hair-raising detours over dirt-tracks as yet unknown to us in spite of our intensive explorings over the years. We follow in our latest vehicle, a perfectly ordinary looking Fiat Uno whose plain and simple exterior conceals a highly exotic defect. For inscrutable Italian reasons, it was made in Brazil and then re-exported here. This means that all its components measure just a millimetre or so more, or occasionally less, than the Italian version, and finding spare parts for it is almost impossible. This annoying machine has recently begun to develop a thing called (the experts tell us) ‘windscreen, cancer’, a strange bubbling effect in the glass as if someone had been sticking sheets of clingfilm on to it. But the bubbles are actually sandwiched, by some fabulous Brazilian process, right inside the glass, and they do not improve visibility. Quite the contrary, they make Paletta’s secret route to the mill even more hair-raising than it really is. Naturally, the windscreen, too, is a couple of millimetres out, so we can’t buy a new one; while along with the rest of the interference in people’s private lives engendered by this modernization of Italy business, there are now MOT requirements here, too. Gianni the mechanic is scouring the scrapyards of Liguria for another Brazilian-sized windscreen: if he hasn’t found one by June, our car is dead.
Our convoy arri
ves just as the San Bartolomeo mill is opening – and we find great commotion at its gates. An ambulance is pulling out of the yard, and Apes full of olives stand about at odd angles, knots of hanky-headed men and bescarfed women deep in agitated conversation. Paletta’s fears of sfiga have come true; someone, we are told, has tried unsuccessfully to commit suicide, and is being taken off to hospital with a broken arm and leg.
Paletta climbs down from his lorry and nudges me in the ribs: see? That broken demijohn. Very likely there will be no milling this morning.
But who could have tried to kill themselves, and why first thing in the morning? In an olive-oil mill of all places? How would you go about killing yourself in an oil mill? Head under the millstone? Is it the miller perhaps?
No: the miller comes out of his buildings now to join the onlookers, all in one piece, if a little pale and shaken, ready and willing to tell the tale all over again.
Arriving half an hour ago to start up the machinery, he says, he heard strange groaning noises coming from the back of the building where he parks his lorries – one an open-bed lorry for hauling away the sansa, the greasy sawdust-like remnants of ground-up olive stones left after the milling, the other an oil-tanker (new take on oil-tankers here; never thought of an olive-oil version). Going to investigate, he saw a big chunk of rooftiles smashed in, then heard groaning coming from inside the sansa lorry. And there was this man lying half-buried in the sansa. Serves you right, said the miller, convinced he had caught a thief who had slipped and fallen while trying to break in through the roof. There’s nothing in here to steal anyway.
But the man, dazed and semi-conscious, managed to say that he was not stealing; he had jumped off the motorway above, trying to kill himself. The worst of it, says the miller penitently, is that I didn’t believe a word.
