The Olive Tree (The Olive Series Book 2)

by Carol Drinkwater

  Unable to afford an extension on my luxurious if cupboard-size accommodation, I decided to set off round the island and hired a car for the purpose. I had instigated two meetings. The first was with a Sicilian American. Let us call her ‘La Signora’. She was the granddaughter of a Mafia mobster who had made his living, until he was bumped off, working as an enforcer for Joe Profaci and his ‘family’ in Brooklyn during the 1940s and 1950s. Born in Sicily outside Palermo in 1897, Joe Profaci was a New York Mafia racketeer. He was ‘Olive Oil King’ because he had fronted his activities by running a legitimate olive oil and tomato paste import business.

  Before checking out of the hotel, I left a message to say I was on my way to Scopello and suggested lunch. From our brief, rather oblique conversations I deduced she lived somewhere close to this seaside village. Driving out of the city along the coast road, it was easy to see very quickly how this seaside capital had thrived, perched as it was at the edge of a fertile plain called Conca d’Oro, Golden Shell or Horn of Plenty, with protective mountains either side falling directly to the beach. Passing through Mondello – seafront promenade and bathing establishment with huts dating from the beginning of the twentieth century. Three-wheelers everywhere along the coast road selling fruits and fresh fish. An ice-cream mood abounded on a soft day with louring clouds. An earlier spit of rain had ceased. As I approached the tongue of land where Scopello lay, my phone rang. It was La Signora. She was cancelling.

  ‘I cannot meet you.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘Talk to Coldiretti.’

  Months I had been working on this contact. She refused to reconsider and the line went dead.

  My second meeting was with an organic olive producer over on the south-east side of the island, outside Ragusa, not far from Siracusa, but I had several days to kill before that rendezvous. Coldiretti was the Italian Farmers’ Union. I had no contacts there. In any case, it was May Day weekend: all offices were closed.

  I pulled over and dialled the home of a writer I knew of living close to Palermo. Maybe she could help. Her answer machine informed me that she was off the island for two weeks.

  I had originally envisaged approaching the south-east by cutting right through the centre of the island and stopping en route at the small hilltop farming town of Corleone. I had hoped La Signora might accompany me. If Corleone was not the birthplace of the Mafia, it remained the location most closely associated with their nefarious carryings on. The novelist Mario Puzo took its name for his most celebrated characters, Don Vito Corleone, the boss of all bosses, il capo di tutti capi, in his book The Godfather, portrayed in the films by Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro, and son, Michael Corleone, played by Al Pacino. The fictitious Corleones ran their businesses behind the cover of the Genco Olive Oil Company. Coincidently, Al Pacino’s grandparents hailed from Corleone and had emigrated to the States at about the same time as fictitious Don Corleone had set sail.

  I shoved the gear stick back into first, deciding to cut inland.

  Long before the birth of the Mafia, the town of Corleone had been of strategic importance. It controlled an arterial route that intersected Sicily. For two centuries it was dominated by Arabs who knew it as Qurlayun, pronounced kerleon. I found no translation for this Arabic word, but it was easy to hear how the name had transmuted over the centuries to Corleone. As elsewhere round the Med, two particular agricultural gifts brought to the island by the Arabs were a skilled knowledge of irrigation systems and the farming of citrus fruits.

  In real life, several Mafia bosses had hailed from this rural town and from its altitudinous position these criminals ruled over the greater part of the island. Bernardo Provenzano, a recent real-life ‘boss of bosses’, son of peasant farmers, was born a Corleonesi in 1933. He was also arrested there on 11 April 2006. Said of him by a fellow Mafia member: ‘He shoots like a god, pity he has the brains of a chicken.’

  Today, the State of Sicily is confiscating much of the Mafia-owned lands and handing them over to small cooperative groups, such as Libera Terra, who are planting up the acres with wheat, wine and olives. I wondered whether the neatly kept groves all around me were these. Libera Terra have olive groves on what was Bernardo Provenzano’s private estate. Another coincidence: Provenzano is also the name of a variety of local olive.

  The birth, and the ascendance, of the Mafia came about during the long and bloody years of Unification, known in Italian as Risorgimento, or the unifying of all states of the country and its islands into a single nation, Italy. Loosely speaking Unification began in 1815, after Napoleonic rule, and began to cohere around 1860, though multiple outbreaks of insurrection continued right up until the end of World War I. Sicily was brought into the new Italy after the arrival of Garibaldi and his thousand-strong Redshirts who took the independent island and declared it part of the new mainland power, in 1860. The peasantry supported this move; they hoped to rid themselves of the landowning classes and the mafiosi and share in the profits of the earth.

  After decades of struggle, in 1860 Italy became unified. Still there remains, both in mind and spirit, two Italys: the more prosperous, industrialised upper half of the country, and the south, the Mezzogiorno, Land of the Midday Sun. Sicily and the foot of southern Italy are a distance from Europe. Here, in this poorer fraction, where crime and unemployment figures are double, lies a tempestuous sea-girt world where earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and Mafia are ever-present ogres.

  During its Roman occupation, Sicily fell victim to the latifundia system. Expansive estates, producing wine, grain and olives, were owned by noblemen or senators and operated by slave labour. This practice of land reallocation had proliferated throughout Magna Graecia (the Greek states in southern Italy), Sicily, Andalucía and North Africa. Pliny the Elder reported that at one stage only six landowners possessed more than 50 per cent of Roman North Africa. These estates had been confiscated as war spoil, but once inherited the farms stayed in the hands of the entitled few and, what is more, these privileged paid no taxes, so their wealth accrued. Most were involved in the long-distance shipping of wine, garum (fish paste), cereal and olive oil. The latifundia paved the way for the European feudal systems.

  By the nineteenth century Sicily found itself oppressed by feudal law, where the great estates were owned by absentee landlords. Bailiffs, known in Sicily as the gabelotti, leased large tracts of land from rich property owners and then divided up the plots and rented them on to poor peasant families who toiled over what little they had in a struggle to survive. From these smallholders the bailiffs extracted exorbitant ground rents. To assist the gabelotti in the collecting of their rents, they enlisted the help of local gangs who took on the role of arbitrators. Self-appointed intermediaries, they regulated the bailiff’s affairs, frequently through the use of violence. These individuals became known as mafiosi. They operated in small territorial gangs drawn up along family lines. Out of this rural role of fixers and rent collectors grew the Mafia, mini crime cartels, gangs of men who took the law into their own hands and snatched what they believed was rightly their due or the due of those who had gun-hired them.

  Since that time, of course, the Sicilian Mafia, operating under the infamous sobriquet the Cosa Nostra, has spawned extensively, creating both urban and rural ‘families’ and has infiltrated itself into politics, governments, importation, exportation, extortion rackets, drugs- and arms-running on both sides of the Atlantic. Today, the Mafia in its various incarnations holds power over a great deal of the Mezzogiorno. The Cosa Nostra is exclusively Sicilian while in Puglia there is the Sacra Corona Unita, in Naples they are the Camorra while the Calabrian network is the ’Ndrangheta.

  The Italian olive oil business may no longer serve as a screen for money laundering, but it remains clouded by corruption. I had hoped that La Signora, the deceased mobster’s granddaughter, whose identity I had promised to keep secret and who had, before I landed on the island, seemed willing enough to meet, would help me to understand how and why olive oil h
ad been chosen as the ‘clean’ product and how Sicily and its oil businesses had changed, moved on. But without her to connect the dots, I was a little lost. I feared that whoever I tried to approach would not speak, would protect themselves behind walls of silence and suspicion. In any case, I doubted whether I could instigate introductions at this late stage. It had taken me months to track her down.

  So engrossed was I by my dilemma and the beauty of the surrounding nature – it was full-blown spring and the immaculate sloping fields and hillsides were carpeted with yellow and pink flowers – that I found myself not on the road to Corleone, but somewhere around Salemi, pootling along a pretty lane in the direction of Marsala. Without La Signora, I had given up on Scopello, much as I had been looking forward to seeing its converted tonnara, tuna canning factory, a fishing station where writer Gavin Maxwell had lived a while. And as Corleone was these days the main point of interest on the American Godfather trail, I decided then to continue along in my present direction and make an anti-clockwise island circuit.

  It meant that I was also to miss 3000-year-old Trapani. An important port even today, it had been an entrepôt for the Phoenicians, known back then as Drepanon. Drepanon, meaning sickle, describing the shape of the little peninsula upon which it sits, had held a key position for defence of the island against the Romans, who eventually captured it in 241 BC and allowed it to drift into a long, slow decline. Today, it ships salt to Norway.

  There was not a soul on the roads, more an assemblage of rambling bridle paths. I pulled over at a lane’s edge, listening to the almost inaudible hiss and buzz of insects foraging the wild flowers all around me and refilled my water bottle at a roadside source. Green lizards, bigger and greener than ours at home on the farm, darted to and fro, in and out of the terraced walls. Even a snake slithered in between the stones, shy of me, not looking for trouble or confrontation. The day promised all the heat of summer. Even then, at the tail end of April, there was a tangible sense of the desiccation that lay ahead, burning up these sandy, winding paths and prickly weeds, of the blistering heat of the months to come. In this season, though, it hid its sunburned ferocity. I sipped the water; it tasted good. All around me were flowering olive groves, exquisitely pruned, each tree a work of art. These groves were clean, cared for but, unlike Spain, the soil had not been denuded. Wild flowers sprouted insouciantly at their bases.

  Italy, right across its peninsular mainland and islands, farms 250 million olive trees and, after Spain, is the second largest producer in the world. However, due to its international reputation carried to the States and nurtured by the Mafia, the demand for Italian olive oil far exceeds its 600,000 metric ton production. Recent figures published suggested that 50 per cent of all olive oil sold worldwide under the label Italian Olive Oil had been grown and pressed outside Italy, usually shipped in, in tankers, from Tunisia, Spain and Greece. And the net was widening …

  Was this the issue La Signora had been referring to when she advised, ‘talk to Coldiretti’? I was still smarting from her change of mind.

  After the silent beauty of the countryside, my arrival into Marsala, thirty kilometres south of Trapani, felt disappointing. Everywhere was closed up and it seemed that I was penetrating a decaying ghost town to reach its port. I headed directly for the Cantine Florio, its Marsala wine outlet, founded in 1833. I was hoping to find a living family member who could fill me in on their ‘decline in fortunes’, but unfortunately it had closed its gates and would not be reopening until Tuesday of the following week. I parked the car and kicked my heels down by the water. Still frustrated by missing out on El-Oued and now La Signora, I was wondering where to go next.

  Marsala was founded by the Carthaginians in 379 BC. Their colony was relocated here from the small offshore island of Mozia when Mozia was destroyed by the Siracusans. Under Carthage control, Marsala, or Lilibeo as it was known then, quickly grew into an important and vital naval base. It was the last Punic stronghold to fall to the Romans who rechristened it Lilybaeum. When the Arabs arrived, it re-emerged as Marsael-Allah, or Port of God. It was here that Garibaldi landed with his thousand-strong army to take the island. I decided, after a spot of lunch at a restaurant converted from a waterside home once inhabited by an Englishman, Charles Gordon, who had sailed here to manage the Florios’ wine businesses, to go in search of the archaeological museum. I had noticed a sign to it on my way through town.

  Fish couscous was the dish of the day. A thread to Sicily’s Arab past. Still, I ordered pesce spada alla Siciliana. Sicilian swordfish.

  Carlo, who served my lunch, told me that the Florio family, ‘due to a lack of male heirs’, had sold its wine interests in the twenties to Cinzano and that today the business was owned by a consortium. I was disappointed not to take their story a little further.

  ‘But if you are interested in that family you should make a trip to the island of Favignana and witness the mattanza firsthand,’ he suggested. ‘It’s not far off this coast.’

  The slaughter of the bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus), which takes place in the spring when the huge fish swim by these western Sicilian waters, was about to get under way.

  ‘These days it’s a dying tradition, still played out but it’s principally for tourists.’

  On this western coast of Sicily, tuna fishing, the most lucrative of all Mediterranean fishing concerns, had been dominated by the Florio family, I was learning. They had owned the island of Favignana as well as its water’s fishing rights and, having dedicated the island to this purpose, had also constructed its tonnara.

  I asked the waiter if he knew anything of Favignana’s history.

  ‘During the Punic Wars, Carthaginians and Romans fought for its dominance, but it was the tuna fishing that gave the island its notoriety.’

  Hunting the bluefin dates back to the Phoenicians and those eastern navigators were almost certainly responsible for an earlier style of trapping and slaughtering of the huge fish, though this annual event was eventually perfected by the Arabs in the ninth century. The Arabic word rais, meaning head or boss, the name given to the chief fisherman, is testimony to their involvement in this ritual pursuit during their Sicilian years.

  Mattanza grew out of the Spanish matar, to kill, though in Spain the killing ritual is almadrába, also the Andalucíans’ name for the nets. Matar, in turn, is a derivative of the Latin mactare meaning to honour or kill. A perfect example of the mix of Mediterranean cultures.

  Favignana’s position was ideally situated close by the breeding grounds of the man-sized creatures which migrated in large shoals from the Atlantic Ocean, swimming through the Strait of Gibraltar to these warmer waters, for the purposes of reproduction.

  The fish were trapped within a complex atrium of underwater nets. Each grew smaller and more restrictive until the creatures found themselves bumping up against one another in la camera della morte, the death chamber. Once sufficient tuna had been imprisoned – and this could take days – the rais called for the mattanza, the slaughter, to begin. The colossal nets were hoisted – each fish can weigh in excess of 200 kilos (bluefins are the world’s largest tuna) – and hauled aboard the boats by the manpower of the tonnarati, the specialised fishermen, under instructions from a hollering rais who remained in a separate boat. The fish were then slaughtered with harpoons and iron hooks while the fishermen chanted and sang songs of ancient superstitions, the scialome, and the sea turned red with the beasts’ spilled blood.

  ‘Even today,’ said Carlo, ‘the lyrics are a mix of Sicilian and Arabic.’

  The entire ritual followed strict practices and was very much a team effort. The vessels had no engines, gave off no sound to alert the prey.

  ‘In 1874,’ he continued, ‘the Florio family introduced a method for conserving tuna fish in olive oil and thus created a vast production process that made the Favignana tuna fishery the only one of its kind in the world.’

  I smiled at this. In fact, antique jars, possibly Phoenician, were discovered by archa
eologists in Benidorm. These were believed to have been used for the storage of chopped and filleted fish conserved in olive oil.

  The Florio tuna fishery shut its doors in the 1970s, closing down with it a way of life. Since antiquity, the tuna hunt had provided work and sustenance for thousands of Mediterranean families. Today, organisations such as Greenpeace are calling for a halt before the bluefin becomes extinct. Overfishing and illegal fishing are fast depleting the Mediterranean of its tuna schools.

  Beyond the restaurant, I considered what I had just learned. It seemed that I was fortuitously in the right place at the right time, if I wished it. Should I search out a boat and go to witness the slaughter of these tunas, be a silent party to the historic mattanza?

  Aristotle had described the migratory habits of the bluefin tuna. Homer had written of it in the Odyssey, Pliny had prescribed various parts of the tuna as homeopathic remedies for humans. The fish carried a wealth of Mediterranean material in its wake. Like salmon, bluefins return annually to their original spawning grounds and for many this is the southern Mediterranean, either here in Sicily or through the Strait of Gibraltar along the African coast of Spain. Within the annals of olive-oil history, this would represent a page or two and a ferry across to the Egadi Islands, conquered by the Romans from the Carthaginians in 241 BC, was an inviting option. I strolled alongside the sea, the breeze playing on my face. I had time to spare now, but I decided that I would not go. Tradition it might be, but I could not face its gruesomeness and settled for the museum instead.