The dinner parties were disconcerting. There would always seem to be one person who could not speak the language of the table. If there were eight guests, seven could speak Italian and English, but one only French. All her guests having arrived, Aina would disappear for long tracts of time to put the “finishing touches” to the dinner. Since the dining room and living room were downstairs, and the kitchen upstairs, there was much social awkwardness. Her dining room chairs were the most uncomfortable in Christendom, conceived, it seemed, to induce flatulence.
At some point we had a falling out with Aina. It may have had to do with the fact that when at last we invited her to dinner on King’s Day (January 6, 1999, at 7:30), when DL’s father and stepmother were visiting, she arrived wearing a gorgeous black dress and exquisite—really magnificent—pearls. She had a gash on her head—she had fallen, she said—inexpertly bandaged.
According to a Tuscan tradition, on King’s Day a witch called La Befana brings coal to the children. In fact the coal is trompe l’oeil, hard lumps of blackened sugar. In her black dress and bandages, Aina was La Befana that year, bringing not coal but a bag of her household trash that she asked if we’d be good enough to take to the poubelle when we went in to Semproniano the next day. Since she was so pressed for money, she said, she had to ration the gas in her old Range Rover.
21
ONE AFTERNOON IN May—DL had just woken from a nap, and was getting a glass of water—Tolo, who was outside, started barking with uncharacteristic persistence and agitation. DL walked into the garden and found Tolo poised in front of the grate that covered the main gas pipe. A noise like that of steam escaping made DL wonder whether perhaps the pipe was leaking or had burst, yet there was no smell. Instead an enormous snake sat behind the grate (if “sit” is the right verb for what a snake does when it is not in transit), hissing with all its might.
“Oh my God,” he muttered, in that eerily calm, toneless voice that terror elicits, which brought MM to the window The snake might have been a frustone—a large but harmless species that eats mice and things of that sort—or it might have been a viper (although in Tuscany vipers tend to be small and slow, which this snake clearly was not).
We put Tolo inside and called Ilvo: having lived in Maremma for more than seventy years, he knew which snakes to give a wide berth. “Aha,” he said. “Non è un frustone. È un aspide.” An asp. Heretofore we had understood that the only snake in Maremma besides those mentioned above was the enormous viper that fed by wrapping its body around the back leg of a cow and drinking her milk, leaving her calf to starve. In John Cheever’s story “Clementina,” the Italian donna of an American family tells the children in her charge a folktale:The story they liked best was of the young farmer in Nascosta who was married to a beautiful woman named Assunta. When they had been married a year, they had a fine son with dark curls and a golden skin, but from the first he was sickly, and he cried, and they thought there was a spell on him, and they took him to the doctor in Conciliano, riding all the way there on an asino, and the doctor said the baby was dying of starvation. But how could this be, they asked, for the breasts of Assunta were so full of milkthey stained herblouse. But the doctor said to watch at night, and they went home by asino and ate their supper, and Assunta fell asleep, but the husband stayed awake to watch, and then at midnight he saw in the moonlight a great viper come over the threshold of the farmhouse and come into the bed and suck the milk from the breasts of the woman ...
The asp was more than a meter long. After we dispatched it, Ilvo invited us over to his house for a grappa. He told us that once, many years ago, he had encountered a pregnant viper on his doorstep. No sooner had he killed it with his pitchfork than it burst open and thirteen cuccioli (babies) writhed out. Viper cuccioli are so venomous, Ilvo went on, that their mothers, in order to avoid being done in by their offspring during labor, climbed into the trees and quite literally dropped them onto the ground or onto the heads of unlucky passersby. This was why you had to be sure to wear a hat when you took a walk in the woods.
One windy June afternoon when we were still living in Rome, we were walking through the Forum when we found ourselves being rained upon bywhite myrtle flowers. Another afternoon in the Forum, during the winter, we had seen half of a smallbronze-colored serpent twisting furiously upon the ground. There was something in both happenings that evoked Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Was the serpent from the union of the copulating snakes that transformed Tiresias into a woman? Were the myrtle flowers transformed lovers’ tears?
22
TOLO WAS BORN in Scansano—in Maremma—on August 18, 1997, and spent the formative first months of his life in Rome. Notwithstanding his having an English father, Champion Harrowhill Hunter’s Moon, he was an Italian dog. There just were three puppies in his litter (his mother’s first)—two males and one female. Tolo’s brother died shortly after being born.
If we had not been about to move to Maremma, we would not have felt that it was right for Tolo to come live with us—which he did on November 29, 1997. A fox terrier deserves better than life in an apartment. These dogs need scope. From The New York Times (February 9,1908):Inspired by the recent attempt of robbers to effect an entrance to the famous Apollo Gallery of the Louvre Museum, the Directors of that institution have decided to follow the example of the Paris police and organize a special corps of trained watch dogs... “We shall, in all probability, use fox terriers for the purpose” [said M. Homolle, Director of the National Museums], “as they seem to be the most alert and sagacious.”
For the first few months of his life, however, life in the caput mundi was okay with Tolo. There he learned to be a cane signorile.
Tolo in Maremma: La Caccia (Photo by MM)
Once we settled in the country, Tolo became the doggiest dog in the world—patrolling the olive grove, chasing wild cats up trees, barking at the sheep, fighting with weasels, murdering hedgehogs, following the shadows of butterflies across the lawn. When he was about a year old, he disappeared. We drove along every road for kilometers looking for him, called neighbors asking them to be on the qui vive, and prayed. Our greatest fear was that he had been poisoned: people who own sheep, in order to protect them from the predations of wolves, will put out meat laced with poison. Many blameless dogs have died from getting to this meat before the wolves. A couple of days later, one of the neighbors did call: Tolo was at his house, along with a gang of other male dogs, since there was a female Maremmana sheepdog in heat. The next morning, we took Tolo to Marco, one of the veterinarians in Semproniano, to be castrated.
He was a perfect traveller and a welcome guest at places where many people were not. Among the hotels at which he stayed were the Principe di Savioa in Milan, the Villa d’Este in Cernobbio, and the Villa Cipriani in Asolo. Sometimes meals were delivered to him by room service at the hotel’s initiative—a cotoletta milanese or fegato alla veneziana. He went to Vienna and to the South of France, to Amsterdam and Brussels, and to America.
What Christopher Hibbert wrote of King Edward VII’s fox terrier, Caesar, could be written of Tolo:Despite the ministrations of the footman whose duty it was to wash and comb him, Caesar ... was often to be seen with his mouth covered with prickles after an unsuccessful tussle with a hedgehog. The King loved him dearly, took him abroad, and allowed him to sleep in an easy chair by his bed ... He could never bring himself to smack the dog, however reprehensible his behavior; and “it was a picture,” so Stamper, the motor engineer, said, “to see the King standing shaking his stick at the dog when he had done wrong. ‘You naughty dog,’ he would say very slowly. ‘You naughty, naughty dog.’ And Caesar would wag his tail and ‘smile’ cheerfully into his master’s eyes, until his Majesty smiled back in spite of himself.” Devoted as he was to the King, though, Caesar showed not the least interest in the advances of other human beings who bent down to fondle him, disdaining to notice the staff when he accompanied the King on an inspection ...
Tolo was happy in Maremma—in many way
s happier than we were. He took his days and his dreams as a birthright.
23
Trama di Maggio, olio per assagio.
Trama di Giugno, olio per lavarsi il grugno.
Olive blooms in May, oil just to taste.
Olive blooms in June, oil to wash your face.
OF THE MANY agricultural rituals that defined the Maremman year—the cutting of the hay in May, the threshing of the wheat in July, the vendemmia (grape harvest) in the autumn—none meant more than the November pressing of the olives. Oil, after all, is the foundation of Maremman life; unlike their cousins to the north, the people here almost never used—indeed, barely comprehended—butter, which no doubt contributed to their famous longevity. (Rosaria told us that heart disease was almost unknown in Semproniano.) Nor did the making of the oil lack its element of pageantry. When the young oil arrived, the people of Semproniano would greet it with the sort of exuberance that the French save—inexplicably—for Beaujolais nouveau. Because it had such a peppery kick, the new oil was never used for cooking but instead drizzled over a salad or a bowl of zuppa di ceci. The best way to serve the new oil, however, was to pour some onto a piece of grilled, unsalted bread that had been rubbed with garlic: this was the famed bruschetta, so commonly imitated and so rarely gotten right, even in Tuscany. For bruschetta must be subtle, which is the point so many restaurateurs miss. The fact that the Florentine version is known as fett’unta—“greasy slice”—attests to its comparative coarseness.
For a long time, Semproniano had one tourist attraction, the Olivone, an immense olive tree more than two thousand years old. Before Podere Fiume was finished, we visited the Olivone twice, sitting each time for a few moments under its capacious and maternal limbs.
We spoke of how, when we lived here, we would bring all our friends to see it. Then on May 10, 1998—the evening of American Mother’s Day—someone torched the Olivone, burning it to the ground. The town went into mourning. In particular the children, who had a tradition of walking to the Olivone for a picnic on the last day of school, grieved the tree’s passing. Ettore, Sauro’s nine-year-old son, asked if he could borrow one of our computers to write an essay called “The Olivone, Burned and No More.” For months afterwards, every time we ate at Il Mulino, Martino urged us to write a book about the Olivone. (The arsonist, alas, was never arrested, though his identity is known.)
In Italy, politics often matter on a local level far more deeply than they do nationally. Almost immediately after the Olivone burned, dark rumors began to spread that one or another of the two political parties vying for control of the town (it was an election year) had been responsible for this barbarous and selfish act. As it happened, the mayor, who had won the previous election by one vote, was a member of the far right Alleanza Nazionale. One afternoon (Friday, November 13, 1998), to our great surprise, he knocked at our door and introduced himself. For about ten minutes he outlined his plans for the coming year: the new library to which he hoped we might donate some books, the new sports ground, the roads he was going to have paved (ours included). Apparently he didn’t realize that while we were residents of Semproniano, we were not Italian citizens and therefore could not vote. Afterwards, rather delighted by his visit (there is always something grand about a mayor), we walked over to tell Delia and Ilvo that he had been by to see us. (He had not been by to see them.) “Fascistone,” Delia said. As we soon learned, they, like all our friends here, were lifelong Communists, and were worried lest the mayor, with promises of paving, should lure us to his side.
DL at the Olivone (Photo by MM)
In the end the mayor won the election—by far more than one vote. Our friends said that he had done so by spreading lies throughout the countryside, telling the farmers that if they voted for the Communists, the ambientalisti (environmentalists) would set wolves loose to kill their sheep. Then the whole area could be made over into a preserve. Some hinted that it was in order to head off such a transformation that the Olivone was burned—a scenario we thought paranoid at the time, but that now seems highly probable.
Oliveto, Podere Fiume (Photo by MM)
To Ilvo and Delia, the burning of a two-thousand-year-old olive tree was murder. In a town where oil was life, this great mother of a tree was looked to not only as a source of sustenance but a force of good. When Pina offered us oil made from the olives of the Olivone, we accepted it with an almost mystic wonderment, not because the oil tasted any different from any other local oil but because it came from the Olivone, which was born before Christ.
Afterwards we tried to console ourselves with the knowledge that each of our own trees, though mere striplings, had the potential to grow into an Olivone. We had thirty-eight, which was just enough to produce a year’s worth of oil for two hungry people and a dog.
The Kitchen, Podere Fiume, “Our” Olive Oil on the Counter to the Left (Photo by Simon McBride)
In Maremma no one picks olives before November 2 (All Souls’ Day), by which point the green has begun mottling into black. This is why Tuscan olive oil is so justly famous; Umbrians and Apulians, by contrast, wait for the fruit to fall before they gather it, which makes their oil more acidic. Usually it took us about three weeks, working six hours a day, to harvest our olives. Once we were done, we’d pack them in plastic crates and haul them to one of the two frantoi (olive presses), this one located in a warehouse behind the consorzio agrario. In the room through which you entered, tons of olives, either loose or in burlap bags through which a little moisture was already seeping, waited to be weighed and pressed. There would be at least one truck parked outside, bearing the immense crop of one of the larger aziende, a thousand kilos in comparison to which our five crates seemed meager. Still, we gave them to the frantoiano to weigh, and he told us to how much oil we were entitled, using as the basis for his calculations a mysterious algorithm that took into account not only the quantity of olives but their relative oiliness in comparison to other years (on average, about twenty percent of the weight of the fruit). We’d nod acceptance of his terms. Then he’d take our olives and throw them onto the pile with all the others, for generally speaking only huge crops were pressed individually; in the case of small harvests, the olives of several different families would be mixed together, which meant that one could never say truthfully, “This oil is mine,” though of course everyone said it anyway.
Having deposited our olives, we followed the frantoiano into the next room, where the machinery itself was located. This consisted of a huge tub and a stone grinding wheel, operated not by hand, as in the last century, but by a sophisticated system of gears. For sheer scale, it was daunting. The wheel was easily twice the size of the Bocca della Verità in Rome.
As for the tub: if you fell into it you would certainly be crushed in a matter of seconds. At the bottom, a muddy sludge of olive residue shifted and churned, while from its side a stainless steel pipe led to a series of distillation tubes and then to a tap from which a stream of oil was always pouring. The oil was such a deep shade of green that you could not see light through it unless you held the bottle up to the sun. It gave off a slightly mulchy odor. This was the cold-pressed “extra virgin” oil for which Tuscany is famous. Later, the pulp would be pressed a second time, producing a paler oil; later still, the crumbly residue, by now the texture and color of potting soil, would be forced, thanks to the addition of certain chemicals, to yield yet a third grade of oil, almost colorless and used chiefly for deep frying.
Signorina Ivana Kislingher (Miss Argentina 1954) at the Bocca della Verità
Next the frantoiano—Paolo) who in the summer worked at the Bar Sport, and in the spring did construction at the Terme—asked us if we wanted to take our oil then or wait until “our” olives were pressed. We told him that now would be fine, at which point he began to fill our thirty-liter stainless steel oil urn. One of our neighbors, a farmer with a lot of land, walked in and greeted us. We would have felt intimidated by his bigger harvest (this is the curse of masculinity) had n
ot a tiny old man followed him in. In his right hand he held a straw basket containing at most twenty olives, in his left a biberon—a baby bottle.
“Buona sera.”
“Salve.”
“Buona sera.” Jovially the old man greeted our neighbor, Paolo, and us. (Like the Olivone he was indiscriminate in his beneficence.) And who was he? An inmate at the local casa di riposo (rest home), tending for memory’s sake a single, potted tree? Perhaps. We never asked. Instead we admired the aplomb with which he handed his basket to Paolo, who weighed the olives before throwing them onto the heap. In a few hours they would lose all identity, they would be ground along with ours and our neighbor’s and a dozen other people’s, pulp and stone, into the great democracy of oil, and the old man would hand Paolo his biberon to be filled: just a few drops, mind you, yet enough to remind him of that green mother whose milk tasted of pepper, and whose blighted home now smelled of smoke and gasoline.
24
THE LAST CHRISTMAS of the 1900s was a quiet affair in our part of the world.
In Semproniano, the only public decorations were a modest tree in the piazza, elsewhere a few lights, a nativity scene. Most of the shops put up decorations, but not too many; Brunella, who ran the frame shop, had made a charming tree of gilded chicken wire covered with gold bows and white lights for her window. One exquisitely blue morning, a few days before Christmas, we were in town at about ten o’clock, and as we were walking to the Bar Sport, a Christmas tree made of persimmons at Carlucci’s collapsed. All the good citizens in the Piazza del Popolo at once fanned out to catch the fruits as they rolled hither and thither. The next time we went to town, the persimmons—which in Maremma were eaten with ricotta and shavings of dark chocolate—were gathered in baskets festooned with red bows.
In Maremma Page 8
