‘Anything else?’
I shook my head, still wondering about him. ‘One question, perhaps, if it’s not too indiscreet.’ Michel, if he had been at my side, would have chastised me.
‘Sure, fire away.’
‘Why are you called the Hairless Goat?’
Mark threw his head back and his Adam’s apple rippled with delight. ‘Ha! That’s a good one.’ He swung round to one of the men working behind the orders desk. ‘She thought I was the Hairless Goat!’
‘Ha! Ha! Pierre, did you hear that? Well, some might think of you with certain tendencies associated with that old beast …’ The word had spread. A mixture of merriment and lewdness had ignited the routine of the morning.
‘When did you last see a hairless goat?’ Mark asked me, eyes glinting, still enjoying the joke.
‘Never.’
‘Precisely.’
My goods had been parcelled up and Mark handed me my bill. A grand total of fifty-seven euros.
‘A little better than seven grand, eh? We aim to please.’
‘I’m sorry to be stupid, but I don’t get the joke.’
‘My job,’ he said, spelling it out to this dimwit, ‘is to find the impossible for our customers. If you need or want a hairless goat, we’ll find it for you. I am not the Hairless Goat. The department is. We serve our best and most long-standing customers. We make sure we find them everything they need, whatever it is, no matter how difficult or impossible. So now you know where to find me, next time you’re stuck. Good luck with the asbestos.’
He was walking me to my car, carrying the heavy package.
‘Interesting, the song and dance the authorities make about this material, isn’t it? Yet, years ago, when folks like my dad were working on the sites and people shouted that asbestos was toxic and was damaging their health, no one listened. I knew loads of blokes when I was a kid who got sick from being around it, inhaling it, ended up with lung cancers. The authorities tried to cover it all up, until it all came out and they were forced to admit the facts.’
‘Yes,’ I nodded, opening the car, shaking his hand and thanking him for his help. ‘I think it’s rather similar to other issues we are fighting today.’
The nuisance roof measured a mere five metres by three and a half. It had been battened down with nothing more durable than a series of securing bolts, which Quashia and Michel managed to release without any difficulties whatsoever. It was a bright, warm Saturday morning and once the sheets were untethered we lifted them away with caution. It was vital that they did not crack or crumble. The dust particles from the asbestos were the danger, I had been warned by Mark. We managed the process between us without snapping any of them. The men then lugged the sheets across the parking and placed them, one neatly on top of another, on to a wooden palette beneath which four layers of plastic grey sheeting lay, in readiness, once the stacking had been completed, for the water-tight sealing of the shipment.
‘Look at this!’
I was still over by the stables staring into a gulley within the brickwork, laid bare by the removal of the roof. There, a thousand lives had been exposed, rendered vulnerable and homeless. Geckos, scurrying in every direction. I had frequently noticed them breasting the walls, pausing cautiously mid-step, when I had been inside this space loading or unloading the washing machine, but I had never been aware that here thrived an entire community. Secreted within these cracks and crevices were several dozen individual nests, each with three or four eggs, round, small, white, perfectly formed and without markings. The parents had fled. Families broken. At first, I thought that all the eggs had been hatched but on closer inspection we found dozens that had not yet opened. It stopped us in our work.
When Quashia went off to his cottage to grab a spot of refreshment and Michel was up in the greenhouse cutting us a salad, I hurried into my den and dug out an animal encyclopaedia. Ours were Mediterranean House Geckos, Hemidactylus turcicus. Over lunch on the terrace, I suggested to Michel that, if it were at all possible, we might try to incubate the eggs of these orphaned creatures.
‘I wouldn’t have a clue how to go about it, but I agree it’s a pity to let them die if there’s a way to save them.’
The gecko holds a very special place in the Olive Farm hierarchy. It was not unusual for these reptiles to make their homes within cracks, fissures, substrate of human habitations, and man and these squat little lizards with their splayed suctioning feet are able to live together in perfect harmony. It is a mutually beneficial relationship. Geckos feed off insects and we have always been delighted to have them trekking across the ceilings, targeting the mosquitoes, padding back and forth – slow, slow, quick, quick, slow – or bedding down throughout the daylight hours in the cupped wall lights. Since our earliest days here, when we had not a centime between us and slept on a lumpy mattress on the floor in front of the fire in the grand salon, I would watch them, clamping their finger pads efficiently against the chimney plasterwork as they shuttled up and down its breast. I listened to their squeaking. Such a force of sound emanating from a being so small. Back then, our very first winter here, I pronounced them our lucky mascots and, ever since, there had never been a time when I have not encountered them secreted between walls and open shutters, keeping cool in the shade.
On many occasions, I have almost trodden on one of their minuscule babies, the texture and shade of worn rubber or plasticene, lurking within the furling corners of our antique Turkish rug, skedaddling for dear life, fearing the fall of my giant’s step. But what I had never come across before was an egg, a breeding site. This heretofore invisible space between corrugated roof and plastered walls constructed out of aerated bricks was the hub of their colony, judging by the number of unhatched eggs.
While Michel and Quashia secured the asbestos, I did a little research, hoping to learn how to hatch the unborn creatures.
The Mediterranean gecko is a reptile native to southern Europe and, interestingly, is believed by scientists to be resistant to pesticides. Clearly, it was not endangered by the toxicity of asbestos! I read up on incubation tanks, correct temperatures, but to my unscientific mind it seemed rather complicated and I was uncertain whether I was really capable of orchestrating the birth of hundreds of geckos! I returned outside to count the eggs. There were one hundred and eleven, white and round as peppermints. Was this a feasible exercise? Delicately, with enormous care, in between fingers, I picked one up, like a mothball, but it instantly disintegrated and out of it fell dust.
With every single egg I lifted from its carefully hidden cache, the same story. They crumbled to sandy dust.
‘And to my amazement,’ I was recounting my discoveries to Michel over lunch, ‘I’ve unearthed internet clubs, societies of people all over the world, who breed geckos. I watched a couple of short videos on how to care for them when they are sick, but none explained the sawdust substance.’
‘You know who would have been fascinated by your find,’ said Michel when I told him. ‘Marley. When I was babysitting him recently, I noticed his fascination for dragons, dinosaurs, the mystical lives of creatures. Next time I have a free afternoon in Paris I’m going to take him to the Natural History Museum.’
After lunch, when Quashia came up with the post he handed me just one letter. It had arrived from an agricultural syndicate whose function had never been entirely clear to me though, for over a decade, since we had registered ourselves as olive farmers, we had been paying them bi-annual union fees. After several visits from one or other of their experts, we had been admitted to this mutuality. Allegiance, membership, was obligatory if we were to remain eligible for our hard-earned AOC. Their missive stated in two very bald sentences that due to our lack of olive crop the season before last (their books always seemed to be about one year behind real time), therefore no oil and, more importantly, no litres put forward for an annual quality-control rating, we had been dismissed from the association. No warning. No ‘regretfully’ … Simply ‘Disbarred’.
> Michel was not pleased. He asked me to file this communication with its companions and he went off about other farm business. His parting words were ‘it took a great deal of time and effort to get ourselves accepted by that crowd. If one doesn’t play the game, Carol, you get nowhere in France.’
And that was the crux of this issue. As far as everyone was concerned, I was not playing by the rules. The Luke episode was the perfect example. I had attempted to circumvent the system and it had backfired. I called his number one final time and found the line had been disconnected. His story must have been a fabrication.
Organic farming is a lonely road. It is becoming less so but for the time being it belongs to the 2 percenters: mavericks, visionaries, those who are not only passionate about the virtues of their food but also about the future of the planet. Organic farms represent a mere 2 per cent of all French agriculture. Even given that this country is the biggest producer and exporter in Europe, that is a very small fraction. Organic olive farming was a lonelier path still, because there were no solutions. It was not simply more difficult and painstaking, in our coastal region of France it was virtually impossible and fraught with obstacles; the olive fly was resistant to everything except chemicals. But I remained determined to find a solution. My hopes were now pinned on the efficacy of the chrysanthemum though I had still not traced it. Of the five garden centres I patronised, not one had heard of it and no one could furnish me with its name. Handsome Alexandre though, who ran the farmer’s cooperative I frequented, a passionate hunter and acquaintance of ours, was able to tell me that, although he did not know anything about it, he had heard talk of this flower and he believed it was endemic to the Dalmatian coast. He promised to find out some facts for me.
‘Still chasing the elusive, are you, Carol,’ he winked as I stepped into our van. Such a flirt he was.
‘The elusive?’
‘Just spray the trees, sweetheart.’
Daffodils were pushing up through the newly laid paving stones down around the cottage. The bell birds were in fine throttle. We had been dreaming of achieving the first stage of this extension before summer, as an incentive for the girls and their babies to holiday with us. The days were marching on. Spring would soon be on its way. In the hope that it would considerably reduce the exorbitant quotes we had been receiving, when Michel was home at the weekends he and Quashia began digging out the area beyond our bedroom, above the garage, foundations for the new roof spanning garage and stables on to which a fine terrace was to be laid.
Still without hopes of construction afoot, we were now living with a trench, expanding by the week to its full seventy-five metres, right outside the bedroom doors. Our two stables, where the dogs had slept and laundry room was still situated, were roofless. Michel rigged up a temporary cover for the washing machine area, the dogs were given a warm, dry home up in the hangar, but the garage was beyond all solutions. Every time I entered there, another portion of ceiling hit the deck, frequently damaging whatever remained beneath. Holes were being revealed in the rear wall where plumbing and electricity pipes protruded from every crack and crevice. It was a disaster.
Our aspirations lay with the Portuguese and, while Michel haggled over prices, I concentrated on the olives. The Chambre d’Agriculture represented the conventional guys, the official bodies, and I felt beholden to touch base with them. I wanted to find out how they were getting on with the battle against Dacus and to learn of any new developments in the world of olive farming. Might they have come across the Dalmatian plant I was searching for? How were they responding to scientific reports such as that published by Greenpeace? Due to all my travels, it had been close to two years since I had last contacted them and I was now informed that the splendid young official we had always dealt with in the past had left the organisation. In his place was a female technician, Maude, who invited us along for a day of formation. I smiled, picturing all those knotty, dyed-in-the-wool Provençal farmers who were now obliged to deal with a woman, and, what was even more challenging, a woman in her mid-twenties, judging by her delicately light voice.
‘We are keen to work with farmers such as yourselves,’ she explained on the telephone, ‘those who are not full-time agriculturalists, but who see olive farming as more than just a hobby and who are committed to producing fine table fruits and oil on an annual basis.’
Michel and I agreed to attend their one-day seminar due to take place the following Saturday, though I found it a bit curious that we should be perceived as part-timers given that we were registered, proven olive growers and had been designated an AOC for oil excellence.
‘You don’t seem to have understood, Carol. It’s because we have been struck off their lists,’ emphasised Michel. ‘No doubt, they will re-enlist us at some stage, but it will be a slow-moving ship and, undoubtedly, we will be expected to jump through the same bureaucratic hoops all over again.’
‘But why? We produced a perfectly decent harvest and pressing this last winter and it will be on file up at the mill where they are obliged to declare their daily returns.’
‘Those figures will not be in the system until next autumn, when all the papers have been filed. We are not allowed to register them before May, as you know. For at least the next year we are off the agricultural radar screen and that’s a fact. Our farm does not exist as far as any of these organisations are concerned and it is up to us to turn that around, again.’
The first part of the day’s tutoring was held at an agricultural research centre built within allotment lands on the banks of the Var river, nestling in between hills and overlooking a vast industrialised plain behind Nice. It was the tail end of February and the sun had broken through. Signs of early spring, although the morning lectures were taking place indoors in a makeshift lecture unit. These were to be dedicated to the olive farmers’ fight against les ravageurs, the insects and fungi that played havoc with the trees themselves as well as the crops. The position of our property, so close to the sea with a south-westerly aspect, was in many ways a blessing because it provided us with full sunshine from an hour or so after sunrise all the way through to sunset and offered us plenty of air and light, distanced as we were from mass construction and far removed from any other farm. The downside was that the fly hit us first. The warmer it was, with plenty of saline humidity, was just how Dacus preferred it. The little beast thrived in such climates. Only those holdings set at altitudes above six hundred metres were free of his antics. And with climate turbulence on the increase, those establishments might also soon be threatened. Meanwhile, we were right at the top of his hit list. Almost no other olive farm in south-eastern France sat as close to the sea as ours did.
Since the unfortunate incident with Luke, I had been trying to nail down a contact at INRA, the National Institute for Agricultural Research. Somewhere behind their closed doors, the fly Psyttalia lounsburyi was residing in quarantine and I wanted to know how realistic was the possibility that he would soon be at liberty and out in the fields. I was hoping this information would be available to us on this Saturday morning. I did not doubt that this exotic would be on the agenda.
The lectures were being conducted by Maude, who was indeed in her early twenties, and her colleague, a slender dark-haired woman of similar age. Both were employed by conventional agricultural organisations under the auspices of the Chambre d’Agriculture. There was no voice, no method proposing the organic route. The products on display were those that had been on the market for a number of years. The only lip service paid to the growing demands for a greener alternative was the recommendation to the farmers in the audience to show greater caution when dealing with pesticides containing high levels of toxicity. Slowly, these were to be withdrawn, both women informed us.
But when and to be replaced by what?
Until the previous year, certain of the products had been enthusiastically recommended, including dimethoate (I never received a response from their manufacturers in Belgium), and we olive farmers had been
actively encouraged to spray our crops five times throughout the summer months, the season of fruit maturation. Diazinon was another product in question (also on Greenpeace’s blacklist). Up until the previous year it had been recommended by the Chambre d’Agriculture, then farmers were requested to limit spraying to once a season. Now Diazinon, as a pest control, was being phased out of many international markets. Outlawed, marked as ‘entirely unsafe’. It decimated bird flocks (no mention of human risk). We ourselves had used it several years back, until, after a little home research, I had rejected it.
So, at what stage, I was silently asking myself, do we stop listening to these people? With certain products such as our dimethoate-based chemical, a maximum of three times a year was still permissible. (‘You sprayed with this product five times last year, and it was deemed safe,’ I whispered to Michel.) And next year, or the year after, when they have discovered some horrific side effect, or are publicly admitting what they must already know, what will they propose then? Was not asbestos a clear example of such mismanagement?
Not one single item on the agenda for that morning was now legalised for five sprayings in a season.
Products, including dimethoate, were still on the market, still available, but we were advised to use them ‘with greater caution’, to exhibit awareness of their negative properties. I recalled the proposals set out in the previous November’s manifesto by the Minister of Agriculture: to create awareness among farmers. Was this the sum total of what had been intended by that declared goal?
The second compromise of the morning: it was now illegal to harvest crops during the twenty-one days that followed a spraying. In other words, farmers were obliged to hold off gathering their fruits until the toxic residues in the olives had diminished.
But it had always been twenty-one days, I grumbled under my breath.
We were also advised by these two young female technicians that the use of products should become less habitual, if possible. ‘Don’t go for the gun, as a matter of course. Think first, do I need to kill? Use only for remedial purposes rather than preventive.’
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