Il dottore’s wife, with youngest daughter and smallest son, sat silently listening. This Doctor of Agriculture had given up state-salaried employment to set up in business on his own as an adviser to olive farmers from his region. Spain had scooped first prize with its production levels, but Sicily was determined to compete. These local farmers could not produce the same quantity of oil or olives but they could offer quality. The doctor saw his role as one of mentor. He could open doors internationally and guide the smaller producers towards standards they had never realised before. He had chosen olive oil because after he had become a taster, originally as a side interest, he grew impassioned by the shades and depth of flavours and perfume. Like good wine, it was a witness to its territory. This had been an awakening for him. His grandparents, who had built the original farm on this site, had been humble agriculturalists working in grain, cheese, almonds and a few livestock. Their olive oil had been for family consumption only. He remembered it from boyhood years, its crude aftertaste. In those difficult days, olives did not bring them an income and so eventually, when his father took control of the land, he felled the trees and erected plastic greenhouses for intensive vegetable production, which was more remunerative; the plasticultura revolution that I had seen all over southern Spain had taken hold of Sicily, too. They had dug for their own water, irrigated extravagantly, recklessly, and they made a very decent living selling to town and city markets. Also, back then, the mid-sixties, the European Union gave support to vegetables but precious little to olive oil. Olive oil was out of favour, unfashionable. Il dottore rose and beckoned me to follow. He drew the shoreline with his fingers. On three sides we were lapped by the southern Mediterranean, and in the other direction mountains and plains.
‘Look, see there,’ he said. ‘Only that one small pocket of plastic greenhouses remains, but if you had come here ten years ago, you would have been hurt by what you were looking at.’
Thirty years ago, and more recently, the view to the sea had been obliterated by plastic.
‘Farmers, indeed all Sicilians, are island people. We understand how precious our territory is. We are slowly coming to our senses and have pulled those monstrosities down. Plasticultura is on its way out. Folk are realising that they can make a living working with indigenous trees by producing top-quality products and with such a mindset our tourism is improving too. Eco and agrotourism will be our future.’
His vision was to transform his land as well as that of other producers within the region back to what his grandparents and those before them had worked with, except there was to be one remarkable difference: knowledge.
‘Sicilian oil was not special because we had no technology. The oil was crude and usually mixed with oils from other regions in Italy. It was good for the family or for canning tuna. Now we have the knowledge, expertise and the technology to compete internationally. We, in Mont Iblei, in fact, all Sicily, are a small participant in the international market but we intend to be an exceptional one.’
‘Do you use pesticides?’
‘All the farms Bernardo works with are organic.’
His vision, he confessed, was receiving resistance within certain circles in Sicily but, beyond the island, the reaction had been very positive.
Who were resistant? Why? Was this a Mafia connection?
The very mention of the word Mafia brought a grimace to the doctor’s face. ‘Yes, they took oil, pasta and tomato paste to the States. It proved to be one of the best marketing campaigns in history, but it had nothing to do with us here. All the business was with Corleone or Palermo. There was no Mafia here, not on the east side of the island.’
‘So what was here?’ I asked him.
‘Feudalism. Noto had been dominated by three aristocratic families. They owned all the lands as far as the eye could see and the people worked for them. It was so poor here under this feudalist arrangement.’
‘But feudalism was what bred the mafiosi?’
‘No, from this eastern quarter the people preferred to leave. They fled the island in boatloads …’
‘To the States?’
‘No, on this side of Sicily they emigrated to Canada and Argentina. It was only when Mussolini came along, divided up the land, gave it to the people and provided them with agricultural machinery that matters improved. Mussolini is a hero here.’
‘What happened to those three families?’
‘They are gone. Dead. The inheritors of one remain.’
This had overtones of the Florio story. ‘Gone, in what way?’
‘Those that were willing to accept change and work with the ordinary people …’ he stopped.
‘Are still living?’ I urged.
‘As I said, the descendants of one family have survived.’
‘And the others?’
‘They died’ was his bald response. Neither il dottore nor any of his family would elucidate.
The doctor and his wife offered to guide me to the road that would lead me to Siracusa. Before we set off, I found myself alone for five minutes with a couple of younger members of the family, cousins, nephews, a boyfriend of one, who had dropped by when they had heard there was a guest from ‘off the island’. The boyfriend, shoulder-length hair, on crutches due to a football accident, was hoping to open up a modest hotel with spa but he was having tremendous difficulties with planning permission, he confessed. ‘My uncle is well known. Not everyone favours his dreams …’
‘And?’
‘There is a great deal of corruption.’
‘Mafia?’
‘They’re everywhere. Don’t let anyone persuade you otherwise.’
‘Are they still involved in olive oil?’
‘Sure.’
‘What’s Coldiretti’s involvement?’
‘Food products are big business for the Mafia these days. Coldiretti claims the Mafia is cutting the oil with colza and selling it internationally as Italian olive oil. Or worse, they just add flavouring to the colza oil. It’s a big scandal.’
‘Colza? Rapeseed oil. It’s used to lubricate machinery?’
‘It’s also a lesser cooking oil. They’re not poisoning people, just cheating them. Listen, my uncle is wise. He understands what counts and he’s fighting to protect it. We Sicilians have olive oil in our veins, not colza. It’s in our blood.’
After fond farewells, before Siracusa, I made a brief detour towards Capo Passero where the remains of the tuna fishery at Portopalo still stood. Here, the waters of the Ionian Sea meet those of the Sicilian Channel, on a southerly cape more frequented today by surfers than fishermen. It was a flourishing centre for bluefin tuna fishing right up until the 1970s. A hundred years ago there were dozens of tuna canneries all around the island’s coastline but due to overfishing and huge demands from Japan, resulting in depletion of stock, the fishing rights were regulated and much of the twenty-first-century activity takes place out at sea on Japanese factory-boats, many of which are illegal. (A single bluefin fetches a hundred thousand dollars at the famous Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo, so prized is its meat.)
Today, the Portopalo fishery lies idle, a monument to a past and a fishing method that has lost its place. Everything was closed up, due no doubt to the holiday, but il dottore had told me that on an ordinary day it was still possible to visit the factory. Before it had shut up shop, the factory with its storehouses, furnaces and fishing fleets had sprung into life each spring in early March to begin seasonal reparations: maintenance of the machinery as well as the great oak boats that a couple of months later would be setting out to sea to catch and slaughter the fish. The heavy chambered nets needed attention, too. When the mattanza was over, the boats returned to shore and the slaughtered fish were transported on trolleys to the factory where they were cleaned and gutted. The next stage was the boiling of the flesh and afterwards its conservation in olive oil. As in Favignana where the Florios created the tuna fisheries, here the factory was built by one of the princely families from Noto, who owned vast olive
estates that provided the required gallons of oil. The factory closed its doors almost half a century ago, leaving unemployment and depleted seas.
The mattanza had been a vital source of work for the local population, for the small settlement that had sprung up around the Portopalo fishery. Today, those inhabitants, men with the sea in their veins, earn a meagre living off low-key tourism, and, to a smaller degree, the neighbouring saltpans, while their women continue to tend the family lands alone, bringing in the harvests of olives, almonds, carobs, medlars and citrus fruits. Olives, modest harvests, transformed to oil that, when the fishery was operative, could have been sold, ensuring their income. A way of life that had existed since the Phoenicians.
I found an albergo overlooking the water on the island of Ortigia, an island within an island attached to the mainland by three bridges. Within this historical heart of Siracusa, during my first hour, after a stroll round crumbling streets as narrow as zips, medieval palaces, Baroque churches, the mind-blowing columned Duomo and its piazza, I had been irretrievably seduced. I lost my heart to Siracusa’s decaying beauty and I threw my schedule to its eastern winds. I stayed on because I wanted to. I wrote up notes, ate ice cream in the hot sunny afternoons, read and settled to being a foreigner, a tourist who longed to see all that was on offer. I telephoned Michel, wishing he were with me. Having seen Sicily, I told him, having traversed its coasts and mountainous interior in springtime, I could easily contemplate selling our own, very special olive farm to settle here where there were olives aplenty, organic, too, a burgeoning awareness of the riches their fruits contained and a sense of history that imbued every brush stroke of the island.
‘It’s time for you to come home!’ he retorted jovially.
I paid a visit to the catacombs where Lawrence Durrell concluded that a coalmine would have been as spectacular, but I did not care. I was deeply content just to wander, to study the wild flowers and natter with or observe the Siracusans. The May Day festival was over and the city, the island, had settled back into itself. People had gone, tranquillity returned, disordered order. The waiters laying the tables or sweeping the terraces were humming or singing softly in this miniature Venice where the lagoon waters lapped the salmon-coloured walls and played percussion to the activity, where the hotels and street cafés had laid out brimming baskets of oranges, for the taking. I whiled away hours in a local bookshop where the exquisitely painted frescoes on the ceiling might have been an adjunct to the Sistine Chapel. So, too, the car hire office where the mundane business of extending my rental agreement was elevated to a joyful interlude while I stood in the queue, lost to time, drinking in the ceiling’s fading artwork. I watched two cars screech to a halt by an open-air bookstall. Six ruffians, thugs, stepped out and harangued the bookseller, threatening to close him down for an offence that I could not follow. Unpaid protection fees? I found a London bus, a red double-decker, parked at the waterside, number 85a to Stamford Bridge, converted into a Snackeria selling pizze and patatine. At dusk, after following the passeggiata, on this occasion a mere handful of grannies in black idling along the ramparts of the old city overlooking the waterfront, I drank a glass of crisp white wine grown at the sooty feet of Etna. It was accompanied by a saucer of green olives, a pair of grissini in a sealed packet and a little dish of anchovies. Beneath me, high stone walls enclosed the Fonte Aretusa. Here, ducks paddled serenely surrounded by papyrus. This freshwater spring dated back to antiquity and was said to be the living embodiment of the nymph Arethusa. It had been an important water source for Siracusa’s earliest Greek settlers, the Corinthians, who dropped anchor around 734 BC and soon turned the island-city into a glory that rivalled, indeed equalled, Athens. Then came the Carthaginians. This attracted the attention of the power-grabbing Romans who did everything to squeeze Siracusa’s influence until in 213 BC they sacked the city and proclaimed it a part of their Province of Sicily. Hundreds of years later, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its Spanish period, much of the city’s fabulous architecture was destroyed by an earthquake.
After failed negotiations with a trio of seadogs, salt encrusted into their crow’s feet, getting quietly sozzled at the water’s edge, captains of ageing, tethered tour boats, I cut a deal with Giuseppe for a mezzo giorno, a half day of his time, with his freshly painted emerald-green boat. He was a Siracusan fisherman. His work completed before I had even digested my breakfast, he promised to take me on a tour of the surrounding waters, in and around Ortigia island, beneath its bridges so that I could get a better sense of its aquatic layout and the generous harbour waterways that encompassed it. From this perspective, it was certainly a miniature, sweeter-smelling, slower-paced Venice and for the first time since I had arrived in Sicilia, I had the sense that I was in Italy. Business was not brisk and Giuseppe had nothing better to do with his day so I was given a generous outing. Although his accent was thick and we had difficulties understanding one another, he was more open to conversation than any other islander I had passed the time of day with.
Siracusa was strangled by Mafia, he said, spitting overboard to express his contempt. ‘You do what they tell you.’ Fear of the Mafia had kept organised tourism off the island until recently and for that the place had remained unspoiled. Crumbling, poor, lacking facilities but quite its own Sicilian self, he felt. As we circuited, he pointed out to me ornate palaces, a high-security prison, hospitals; all dark and empty, staring lifelessly out towards the open sea. Each had recently been sold to undisclosed purchasers for sums of money not even breathed. And the city’s prison had been relocated forty kilometres into the countryside.
I took a walk to the Parco Archeologico della Neapolis, to the Greek theatre first where rehearsals were in progress. Music, lights, electrics, actors limbering, then drum rolls and a scene began to unfold. Evening was falling. In the distance beyond towering pines and cypresses was the milky glint of the Ionian Sea. I pictured the arrival of fleets of Phoenician galleys, Greek warships, sun-crusted men disembarking on to these pebbled shores, and then I caught the word ‘Graecia’. A Greek drama, the words of mighty Aeschylus, performed in Italian, here in what was once the pulsing heart of Magna Graecia. Finally, a marriage of two great empires. I recalled my visits in my twenties to the Odeon of Herod Atticus, situated on the south slope of the Athenian Acropolis. This city of Siracusa with its vast Teatro Greco cut directly into the rock was built half a millennium earlier. I sat down on the curved stone bench and watched the players enact their drama, intoning, prancing and playing dead operatically. For a short while, it made me long to be that young actress again, a life before olive oil, who had slept illicitly at Epidavros, had woken at dawn and trilled out voice exercises, running up and down scales, playing with the acoustics, puffed up with the promise of the future. Fleetingly, I felt saddened by the passage of time. I recalled aspirations, loves lost, continents crossed, the transformation of broken dreams. In reality, I was already pining for this island with its interweave of civilisations and the fact that it would soon be time to leave.
As with my first sighting of the Sierra Nevada, I longed for Michel at my side to share Etna. Etna, from the Greek ‘to burn’. To the Greeks also, ‘Pillar of Heaven’, was this seething cone. As I approached its cracked, purpled feet, like the scaled tentacles of an octopus where great clods, deformed aubergine rocks, lava from its ruthless fallout in the 1960s, threatened to overrun the strada. I pulled over, heard a donkey bray its lonesomeness, and sat watching the red giant smoke. Wispy exhalations, but this was a deceit. Fissures striate its muscled skin, threatening to expel hot fury. On its upper north side, snow fell; pistes of ice cream melting. Three-thousand-metred Etna, the wicked witch, the fabled home of the Cyclops where today scruffy olive trees were growing alongside burned-out shells of properties, classical façades high up above the sea, blackened, dry-throated, gutted.
The careful agricultural techniques which had transformed the lower slopes of Etna into an arable garden must be attributed to the Ar
abs. Nature throws up its promises everywhere.
I spent my last night in Taormina, ancient Greek Tau-romenium, dramatic, magnificent and dripping in high-priced tourism. It could have been the South of France. I drank a heady red wine from the slopes of Etna, listened to dogs barking beneath the stars, the roar of a Ferrari or two descending the steep-tracked cliff face, and felt my heart crack. Across the Strait of Messina, the toe of the mainland lay waiting and Michel would soon be arriving into Milano to greet my arrival into the grey industrial north, but I could have stayed forever. Forever on this island, crammed with feasts and festivals celebrating traditions of agriculture. Artichokes, medlars and mulberries, ears of corn, wine and, of course, olive oil, all were celebrated. I loved its wheaty springtime hues, its soft, steep or jagged surfaces, was intrigued by its sulphurous secrets, its midnight profiteering, its generosity. Oh, it was hard to say goodbye to this volcanic isle of the Mezzogiorno, but, andiamo!
MEZZOGIORNO
The spring went away. Along the strip of land where the road by the sea had been drawn, the beaches grew black and then blacker as though Etna was casting its shadow upon me, clawing me back. An angry louring sky greeted my arrival into Messina. Busy town, grey as pewter, fast-paced honking Italy – not the laidback Sicilian approach of lemon groves and olive trees pruned to perfection – battered by rattling winds that grounded the ferries. I kicked my heels till evening, then proceeded aboard with a dozen other cars. The sea, this measly strip of a strait with its swells, glared back at me with a seismic fury. I watched the crossing from an upper deck, clouds hanging low, wrapped like skirts around the mountains. Beneath me, beside my hire car swimming in bottled olive oil, was a heavily armed and guarded navy-blue prison van, belonging to the Polizia Penitenziaria. It was surrounded by police officers, some paunchy, others lean, and men in khaki uniforms all wielding machine guns. Who was their cargo, I wondered. Mafia to the mainland?
The Olive Tree (The Olive Series Book 2) Page 34
