by Annie Hawes
The next time we try to walk down to San Pietro, we find that the trench cuts straight through the muletrack; scaling it utterly ruins our tidy going-to-Diano outfits. We curse and sulk. Of course nobody will ever put our lovely path back together again, what with how it isn’t vital to anyone’s economy any more. But we are wrong; heritage awareness in this land has grown so dramatically over the last decade that the pipeline company has been contracted to put everything neatly back together again just as it was. A month later, there is the muletrack neatly cobbled again, the terrace walls replaced – although with huge inhuman-sized rocks shifted by bulldozer. We will find, next spring, that wild broccoli love nothing better than freshly turned earth. We, and everyone else in San Pietro, eat our fill; there are still enough flower-heads left to cut a great yellow swathe downhill and up again, once summer comes, right across the valley.
I, meanwhile, far from being modernized, have recently found myself being put through a typically Italian trauma of which, with my Anglo-Saxon background, I could never have dreamed: I have transmuted, inexplicably yet inexorably, from a signorina to a signora. Unprepared mentally for this event, which has no equivalent in my own culture, I have found this rather hard to handle. I have always been a signorina: I have accepted this word as somehow defining my identity. Then, from one day to the next, as it seems, I have been allocated, by a mysterious collective decision in which I have no say, a completely new definition. I am now a signora. Everyone in the world except me has apparently detected some huge change in my being which requires this adjustment. There is nothing for it but to embrace this unsettling transformation foisted upon you by unanimous public agreement.
The signora newly emerged from her chrysalis spends, I find, an awful lot of time in front of various mirrors in various bars trying to work out what it is exactly that has changed so drastically. Nothing, you say to yourself, I look exactly the same as I did a few months ago: and yet, here too, I have just been called signora. Is the change, perhaps, not in the outward aspect, but in the very essence? Traumatic, anyway: I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that more than one woman on the brink, having her identity suddenly snatched and swapped like this, has ended up on the analyst’s couch – if not in the clutches of Paletta’s Old Man from Borello.
Caterina tells me that signora-ing is only intended as a mark of respect, a courtesy title. You ought to be married by your age, and it would be rude to draw attention to the fact if you aren’t. Really! Join the twentieth century.
Patrizia tries another tack: feminists in this country, she says, of whom there are by now enough to be faintly noticeable, have been campaigning for all females to be called signora from puberty onward. A sudden overwhelming public response to this demand may have caused my overnight precipitation into signora-hood.
I mull this over hopefully, but in the end find it hard to believe. Sanpeotti, avid readers of l’Unità though they may still be, are unlikely to be much influenced in their daily lives by modern feminist theory. In Diano Marina, meanwhile, where most of these signora-ing outrages are taking place, the Gazzetta dello Sport is the only paper regularly perused. The Dianesi will never have heard of such a thing.
*
Luigi and Maria’s bar has moved upstairs to what was once the first floor, and these days you enter it from the bridge over the muletrack. The old downstairs bar, at muletrack level, has been transformed by an enterprising cousin of Antonietta’s, who rents it from Luigi and Maria, into a Saturday-only disco – a club which has become so popular amongst Italian under-twenties that, rather than opening for the tourist season, it keeps its doors firmly shut all through the summer, and only opens once the chaos is over. The strange habit of travelling hundreds of kilometres for a night’s partying is firmly established among the youth of this land, and as autumn weekends arrive and the tourists leave the coast, streams of teenagers from all over Italy converge on the Sulking Café for a night out in San Pietro. If the wind is in the right direction (and if we’ve managed to get home at all through the tidal waves of cars in which the convoys of youth travel) we can just hear a distant muffled thumping, a faint echo of the well-known Insistent Repetitive Beat, throbbing out through the valley till the place closes at four a.m. At which point its energetic habitués drive off another few hundred kilometres to some distant after-hours venue, in Pisa or Genoa, where they will keep on going till the early afternoon.
The once-a-week close encounter with the strange behaviour of modern youth has combined with the removal of the threat to their livelihood to broaden the horizons of the hanky folk out of all recognition. These days a good proportion of the denizens of Luigi’s bar are ready to chat cheerfully of matters agricultural and meteorological to all comers, in Italian, too, as if there was no reason necessarily to suppose that stranieri are off another planet, even when wearing outrageously revealing outfits. Stefano keeps the bar open till one o’clock on these nights, a thing previously unheard-of in early-to-bed, early-to-rise San Peo. The youth assembles up here before going downstairs to business: plumping up the fiscal till no end by consuming oceans of Coca-Cola, coffee and ice-cream. Stefano makes the fresh-fruit ice-creams and sorbets himself, so good they’ve made the bar an obligatory stop-off for gastronomic tourists.
I am still asked occasionally, at some distant festa, whether I know the other Englishwoman, the Mad Builder in the Hills with her two oppressed house-husbands and no proper toilet, who is probably a drug fiend into the bargain. This bogey of old folks’ legend, cunningly wrought out of a couple of decades of intricate gossip and calumny, will clearly live for ever, although the mentality that created her is, fingers crossed, rapidly vanishing.
What with the extra business from the ice-cream, the clubbers and the olive-oil tourists, and with their regulars’ disposable income having risen comfortably, Luigi, Maria and Stefano naturally feel no temptation whatsoever to open their restaurant to the public. It remains a private, bookings-only affair.
Patrucco and the miller between them now keep a small fleet of two-, three- and four-wheeled vehicles cluttering up the space between the frantoio and the bar, very much annoying Luigi, who needs the parking for his regulars. They too, thanks to the renaissance of the olive, have gleaming new conveyances to show off In spite of the parking problem, glowering, once a full-time occupation in the bar, has tailed off to virtually nothing. Everyone’s too busy up in the hills to bother. The sad songs of wasted lives, abandoned land, and evil lifeblood-sucking cities are sung in San Pietro these days, when they are sung at all, with a cheerful gusto that rather undermines their tragic lyrics.
The Lord’s great foresight in the matter of the dozen tight hairpin bends that carry the asphalt road criss-crossing through the heart of the village is now clear for all to see. Here in San Pietro there are hardly any houses you can’t reach within twenty-odd yards on wheels. No one in their right mind would choose to rebuild and refurbish in a place where they had to carry all their shopping up and down a long steeply stepped pathway. (Except, that is, for romantically minded German holiday-home owners, who are at last getting the praise they deserve for preserving the old housing stock so meticulously.) But refurbishing your old family home, one of the ancient houses that cluster round the muletrack, is perfectly feasible here, unlike many of the other villages in these hills, whose old central alleyways are being left to slowly biodegrade. Here in San Pietro there is no need to leave it all to fall down. Not that there isn’t quite a bit of building on the periphery too, with all the returning Lost Generation; square chunky villas, faintly 1930s looking, have appeared on every hairpin bend, squeezed in among the old barns and vaulted cantine. But the tastes of the San Pietro young are not too different from those of their parents, and the new buildings are smothered in such an array of twisting and twining plant life that they are hardly distinguishable from the rest. Just leave the road and go off up the steep track which is still the heart of the village, and you find the old folk sitting and gossiping under the a
ncient archways of an evening as they did when we first met the place, as they have done for centuries. Nowadays, there are children playing noisily on the terraces above and below them, football nets strung between the olive trees. Hope for the future: infinitely better than picturesque decrepitude.
These kids have appeared in such numbers that a big new primary school, a chunky oblong in ice-cream stripes, has been built between the village and Patrucco’s rosebeds, thanks to Mayor Ugo-from-the-shop; a school to serve all the newly repopulated hillside Dianos, and preserve the youth of the valleys for as long as possible from contamination by degenerate Diano Marina. Signor Ugo has also had a lovely new enamelled road sign put up at the entrance to San Pietro, with a map of all the townships in the valley – excluding, naturally, Diano Marina – and the bold Legend ‘Communita Montana dell’ Ulivo’: Mountain Community of the Olive. Just in case you couldn’t guess.
The San Pietro riverbed is these days festooned with ‘No Dumping’ signs, and has been dredged clear of all old ironmongery. Giacò has retired, his chaotic bit of riverbed cleared and ploughed smooth, abandoned to the tall waving clumps of wild canes: he still asks after my marble sink-and-drainer whenever I bump into him. Several families of ducks have taken over the newly clean riverbanks. This year there is even a pair of large and elegant swans with a fluffy young family, whose choice of San Pietro as home has caused some hard feeling in Diano Marina. They were purchased last year by Diano’s Comune to beautify their river and entertain the tourists, but almost immediately left to entertain the unkempt peasantry of San Pietro instead. Even more entertainingly, this summer a huge and spectacular temporale filled the torrente to maximum capacity, drowning several hundred vehicles and rather a lot of stock in the basement stores of Diano’s shop owners whilst leaving San Pietro unscathed. Guffaw. The money-grubbers of Diano Marina had caused the catastrophe themselves by gradually cementing bits of the riverbed over to get more space for their tourists. Worse still, during the exciting flood-event the Mayor of Diano Marina sent a carload of carabinieri to remove a pair of children to whom he was related from the new San Pietro school, which is right next to the riverbed, for fear the flood might get them. Righteously outraged by this appalling piece of behaviour – either all the kids were in danger, or none of them were; and San Pietro is quite capable of taking care of its own, thank you, and wouldn’t be so stupid as to block the torrente – Signor Ugo is now punishing his rival Mayor by taking him to court for Misuse of Public Servants.
The Comune of San Pietro has at last got itself the crusher lorry Domenico dreamed of, official recognition that the good old days when all rubbish was either burnable or biodegradable have long gone; and the horrible smoking eyesore on the side of the mountain is no more. A pair of those big wheely rubbish bins has appeared on each of the village’s hairpin bends, and Domenico’s replacement whizzes to and fro emptying them into a fabulous modern rubbish-compacting purpose-built jobbie by automatic grabber. Out of respect for his father, Maurizio, now a tall gangling youth, has been told that a job in rubbish collection is his for the asking as soon as he gets his driving licence. He is not sure about this. He is training at Dario’s dad’s place to be a baker. We can see at last, too late, alas, for Domenico, that Maurizio was the right sort of baby after all: not only has he not left San Pietro, but he is often to be seen Aping his way uphill at Antonietta’s side, off to help with the campagna. Better still, with his very first wages he bought his mother that last word in oliviculture gadgetry, the hand-held net-sewing machine. When Maurizio is not available for peasanting work, being too busy at the baker’s, a certain courteous and behankied gentleman named Ettore is to be seen accompanying Antonietta up to her campagna in his own Ape. A suitor, we suspect, judging by his immensely solicitous behaviour.
Sergio and Lilli, sadly, no longer live up past our place: their chalet-balanced-on-a-rustico has been sequestered by the Finance Police for non-payment of debts. Alessandra and Paola are rather pleased with this outcome: the family have found themselves in a civilized little flat in downtown Imperia at just the right age for all that essential teenage socializing and clubbing, and the girls can gyrate happily with their compagnie of friends without worrying about the dozen hairpin bends to home. We often bump into them outside the bar in San Pietro of a Saturday night, looking very cool. Lilli is no longer Sergio’s isolated prisoner; not being able to drive makes no difference in Imperia, where you just step out of the door to find great flocking masses of humans. And of course, great flocking masses of bars and supermarkets laden with alcoholic beverages. Alessandra says that this sociability and availability treatment has worked wonders on Lilli’s alcohol problem, which now hardly exists. Oddly – or perhaps predictably? – it is now their father, no longer lord of all he surveys, who has the alcohol problem. Sergio, we have been told at Luigi’s, amid much snickering, has been visiting San Pietro a lot recently for the purposes of litigation. He has unearthed some ancient San Pietro by-law according to which the Comune is supposed to contribute to supporting its indigent citizens, and is doing his best to prove that he is owed a monthly dole. He has managed to get about fifty thousand lire out of them, we hear: twenty pounds or so. The case will no doubt drag on for years.
Meanwhile Franco is now reconciled with his son, who has produced a granddaughter, the apple of Franco’s eye. With the help of his nipoti and the EEC, he has succeeded in conquering his aversion to new technology, and expanded his activities to take account of the explosion in world demand for pesto: the land to the hillward side of his house in the village, where his old wooden basil-greenhouses once stood, their glass whitewashed (or was it limewashed?) against the sun, has been re-terraced into much wider and higher-walled fascie, on which proudly stand a whole series of modern steel-framed greenhouses, all automated air-flaps and humidity controllers. Eat your heart out, Patrucco. Here, instead of the small amounts he and Iole used to grow for local shops, are great green forests of basil, collected weekly by some factory above Imperia to be made into potted pesto for export. He has not, of course, thrown away the old wood-frame sections of his earlier low-tech greenhouses: they live in a pile on his bean terraces up above our house, just in case.
Franco is busy these days doing up an old cowshed high in the hills, near Sergio and Lilli’s chalet. This place is, he says, going to be his retirement home: we know, don’t we, he adds, fixing us with that bright-blue gaze, that like us he is happier away up in the hills than down in San Pietro. This is certainly true at the moment: he is banned from Luigi’s for the rest of the year for having caused great chaos and destruction when he decided, in his cups, to repeat one of the triumphs of his youth and ride his horse into the bar. Stefano’s ice-cream counter required major repairs. We aren’t sure we believe the retirement-house story: would Iole stand for isolated country dwelling? Is Franco capable of retiring? More likely, we think, under cover of the special building dispensations for Adjusting your own home, Franco is secretly planning yet another coup among the stranieri, a last property speculating fling. We will wait and see. Only time will tell.
Ciccio meantime still hasn’t decided whether to dump the restaurant and devote himself to the olive groves. Salvatore, worn out by modernity, has offered to pass on the family lands to his son; but only on condition that he finds himself a good woman to settle down with – a woman who will of course contribute a respectable number of her own trees as dowry. I am seriously considering the proposition.
Nowadays in the nineties our once-isolated retreat among the olive groves is at the heart of a hive of industry. The hills are alive with the sound of the myriad tiny petrol-driven agricultural implements without which these narrow strips of terraced land would never have been worth bringing back into cultivation. Up and down the valley cement mixers rumble as the crumbling terrace walls are rebuilt with (thanks to the roses) a nice dollop of concrete concealed at their core wherever possible; one more never-ending, back-breaking job eliminated. The valleys resonat
e to clangings, roarings, strimmings, sawings and blasphemous calls upon the Madonna from dawn till the twelve o’clock bongs and hoot from three in the afternoon till seven on the dot, when the rush-hour down the hairpin bends to the village begins – praise the Lord for the delicacy of the peasant digestive system, which still requires pasta at seven-thirty sharp, or else – and all is peace again.
Everywhere around us the wilderness is being reclaimed. Mankind has returned to the trees. And our illiterate impresario neighbour, evidently not so close to retiring as he led us to think, has just offered to buy up our house and groves for many times what we paid. We know him well now, and of course there’s a catch somewhere. We wouldn’t dream of it anyway. We like it here.
