‘Does it really matter?’ I asked him over dinner that evening. Bureaucracy leaves me exhausted.
‘If we continue to produce no fruits, press no olives, then we will eventually lose our right to an AOC rating. It has taken us a very long time to achieve all this, Carol. Consider our options. Luke delivered no predator, which in any case has been judged ineffectual, and the one “organic” alternative seems to be fatal for bees. Chérie, I was behind this transition but if there is no possibility of making it work, what do you want us to do? Give up on olive farming altogether? And then what? Let the fruits rot and live here like tourists?’
Here lay the problem.
‘We need larger premises if we want your daughters—’
Michel shook his head. ‘We are not moving. We are laying the groundwork now for an extension.’
‘Then, I don’t know.’
‘What would you say if we chose to continue with one of the chemicals for the time being – wait, before you argue! – choosing the most benign, the least offensive, and we work with the agricultural organisations, taking a responsible and active role in pushing this issue forward? The trees are budding. We have to make a decision.’
His words were fact. A decision had to be settled on within the coming weeks. I simply did not know. My instinct was to let the fruits drop, but on the other hand it struck me as a shocking waste of an excellent comestible product. I was caught between a rock and a hard place and I did not know where to turn to for advice.
‘Perhaps you have a point,’ I conceded though I did not believe my own words. ‘Maybe we will have to spray just one more time.’
‘We can try the American product,’ smiled Michel.
I nodded despondently.
Serendipity had been a major player in my life at Appassionata. Once the estate had been purchased and the olive trees had revealed themselves, René appeared, a chance encounter, and offered to teach us how to husband them; Quashia walked into our lives when I most needed him. On my travels circumnavigating the Mediterranean, the discovery of the six thousand-year-old Lebanese trees had been a masterful stroke of good fortune, setting me off on journeys that had changed me, my perception of the world …
Yet, now, I was ready to stand defeated while the land was treated with products I strongly opposed. We were set for a good harvest, judging by the quantity of buds on the trees, but I had failed to find an alternative method of protecting them. Michel informed Quashia the following morning that we had reconsidered our position; we would be cleaning up the spraying machine ready for its summer work. From the balcony above, I saw the smile burst across our old Arab’s face.
I returned to my desk, unable to juggle the choices any longer. The chateau near Avignon with its convoluted water issues might not be our answer, but that was not the only property available. I booted up my computer ready to go to work, to re-immerse myself in my travels, in the sandy deserts of elsewhere. And there it was: a response from the States.
The email read: Our technical people will be in Sophia Antipolis at our offices this coming Wednesday. They would be happy to meet with you and to answer any questions you might have about the mouche d’olive in general as well as specifically about our product.
Yours.
This was the firm that had patented the organic product I, along with others, deemed dangerous to bees.
I tapped an answer immediately. Please, send me the address of your offices and a time of appointment. I will be there.
Gentle spring rain fell overnight. Still, the Portuguese were cracking on in spite of the long lunches and the crates of emptied wine bottles. A sight to behold. A trio of them, all the Josés seated on our upturned dustbins, secured with a plank, at a small garden table covered over with a discarded wooden door to create extra length. Bottles and food aplenty, the dogs forever at their heels.
‘Please don’t feed the dogs.’ My daily mantra repeated later from the balcony.
‘Si, si, Madame’, pouring yet another litre of red wine into three plastic goblets.
From the other side of the cypresses, up a ladder, climbing about within the canopy of one of the elderly olive trees, was Quashia, completing the last of the giants for this year, throwing disapproving glances towards the masons.
On my way to the washing line, I spied our two Alsatians chewing contentedly. ‘What are they eating?’ I called to anyone who would listen.
‘Just a small portion of fromage, Madame.’
‘But I asked you, please, not to feed them.’
‘It was nothing, just the remainder of the cheese.’
I had failed to make these men understand that feeding the dogs encouraged the beasts in their belief that every comestible mouthful on the estate was theirs by divine right.
My meeting with the two specialists from the American agrochemicals company was to be held at their regional offices, spitting distance inland from our property. They were situated on the outskirts of Sophia Antipolis, a city constructed ex nihilo in the heart of what had been sprawling forestlands of cork, evergreen oaks and Mediterranean pines. It had been conceived and hailed as France’s answer to Silicon Valley. Both were situated in similar close-to-coast locations, but the French version was on a more modest scale.
Its nomenclature was derived from Sophia, the Greek word for wisdom, and Antipolis, the original name for the trading harbour founded by the Greeks somewhere around 500 BC and annexed by the Romans in 43 BC, what today is Antibes. One of the websites for Sophia, as it is known down here, claims it to be probably the ‘most cosmopolitan spot in the whole of France’ with thirty thousand inhabitants gathered from sixty countries on twenty square kilometres. The companies based here, predominantly American (English is the lingua franca in Sophia not French), tend to be working in research and development, specialising in technology: computing, electronics, and pharmacology and biotechnology. The place is also a telecoms hub. This was the high-tech Côte d’Azur, corporate Europe par excellence, stowed within a maze of science parks and endlessly circling, figure-of-eight roads that seemed to lead back to the same manicured roundabout planted with olive trees and colourful flowers. In fact, there are a number of these roundabouts within its radius and they all looked identical.
I set off early, ridiculously so, because I always found myself lost whenever I ventured into this curious, rather troubling zone of our coastland nestling within the silent but not necessarily acquiescing pine forests. My meeting had been fixed for 6 p.m., after the two men had completed their day’s work. They were ‘fitting me in’, staying late to meet me, I had been informed, and I did not wish to keep them waiting or to lose out on this unlikely and rarely granted audience. I crawled the roads slowly, impatient cars edging up my backside, true road manners of the French, obliging me to pull over to the gutter every few minutes to let them pass. The journey took me fifteen minutes because their beige, smooth-stoned complex of buildings turned out to be a short distance outside the techno city’s central hub. Surprisingly, there was no gated entrance, no guard control to quiz me before I descended a steep asphalt lane and swung left into a car park where each space was numbered, reserved.
One did not just happen here, did not just drop by. You drew up here because you had business with the international firm whose logo, as tall as any man, stood resolutely in a grass patch outside the doors of one of two separate buildings.
It was the end of the working day. I slid into bay fifty-two, the first free slot, switched off the engine and drew out a book, but I was idling, not really reading, feeling unnecessarily anxious.
The park’s vibe rattled me. It was still, too still, until a man with a red paisley bandanna tied round his forehead, Corsican pirate-style, materialised from the surrounding pine woods, puffing, exercising himself and a big black-and-tan dog. He was followed shortly after from the opposite direction by another fellow, grey-skinned in floppy grey shorts. This one jogged the pavement past the bonnet of my car, but did not register my presenc
e. These corporate employees, their exercising, struck me as incongruously ordinary for this patch of techno parkland. Yet the denizens of Sophia lived hereabouts. Not in these neutral blocks outside of which I was marking time, but elsewhere, secluded within the forests, in gated, guarded and alarmed villas and apartment house complexes. In fact, no other single influx of foreigners aside from the new Russians, with their bootloads of illegally earned dollar bills, had contributed to the healthy upsurge in the property market down here as effectively as the multi-national dollar that financed the white-collar expats who had swarmed into Sophia and populated this backwater, occasionally descending to the coast for leisure activities such as sailing, golf and expensive meals.
At a quarter to six, unable to sit composedly any longer, I stepped out of the car, flicked the lock and strode in through the sliding doors of Bâtiment 1 to reception, on the ground floor at the rear of the building. A young, dark-haired woman behind a counter greeted me, requesting my name and business. She looked semi-deranged with a slick of orange lipstick that had escaped her lower lip and smeared her chin, with hair drawn into a chignon falling untidily about her face.
‘Business card, please?’
I shook my head. ‘Sorry, I don’t have one.’
This puzzled her. ‘Appointment?’
I nodded. Behind her, a pair of glass doors were open with a muslin curtain floating lightly in the wind. There was something ephemeral about it, ghostly, quite out of keeping with the hard-nose business that the occupants of this place were involved in.
One of the company’s promises: Helping Growers Sustain the Soil.
‘Well, who with?’
I reeled off the names of the two directors. She seemed perplexed, had never heard of them, picked up the phone and dialled an extension, asking what she should do. Had I made a mistake? At that moment, a middle-aged man was at my side. From where he had come, I had no idea. His arrival had been as silent, as stealthy as that of a cat burglar.
‘You must be Madame Drinkwater?’
I nodded.
‘You are early.’
I found myself apologising, offering to wait on the seat close by the open door that I could now see led to nowhere but a high stone wall. Dead end, I thought.
He smiled a smile that I could only describe as American although he was French. It was full of even white teeth and signalled assurance, ease, success. It was a well-practised smile, lighting up steel-blue eyes and metal-grey hair, neatly barbered. ‘I’ll just collect my briefcase and then we can make our way to the salle de réunion.’ He was gone and back in an instant, carrying a black leather bag the size of hand luggage. He escorted me to the end of a corridor and we turned left into a conference room furnished with an oval wooden table about six metres in length with fourteen chairs spaced around it. Spewing out of its centre was a spaghetti of wires, a pair of microphones, leads for broadband connections to laptops and two glass jugs of cloudy water. At the end of the room, dominating like a schoolteacher, was a blank rolled-down screen.
He pulled out a chair for me, but without thinking I chose another and he settled on the one he had already drawn out. His pose was relaxed. He leaned backwards into the seat, one leg crossed over the other, in a wide-open manner. He wore a light blue cashmere sweater slung over his shoulders and loosely knotted over his darker blue linen jacket. Immaculately pressed slacks led the eye to expensive loafers and diamond-patterned Burlington socks (of the sort worn in certain Parisian circles as a trademark of class, of aristocracy, of leadership).
‘Let us take the time to introduce ourselves while we wait for my colleague, who, like me, is also christened Jean-Christophe. He will be with us shortly.’ He gave me a very brief introduction to himself, saying that he was the boss in France of the technical division of the company specialising in agricultural sciences and that he was not only responsible for the marketed products but in certain instances had created them. ‘Now, tell me who you are.’
I was surprised that he did not know, given that his firm had contacted me in the first place. He shrugged dismissively, saying that he and his associate, the second Jean-Christophe, who had just telephoned to say that he was on his way down, had received a message from head office in the States via a technical director in Spain, requesting that they meet me and assist me in every way possible with products for my olive farm.
‘I have no idea who you are,’ he smiled.
I gave what I judged to be a truthful assessment of myself and finished with the fact that I wanted to be frank, that I was looking for an organic way forward, not a path that was pesticide-driven.
There was just a fleeting hint of mocking amusement in his expression.
At that instant, Jean-Christophe Two appeared. (I smiled silently to myself, recalling the three Josés.) Marginally younger, open-neck white shirt, no jacket, black Armani jeans, expensive loafers. He, too, possessed one of those wide white smiles with a full deck of teeth beneath a healthy shock of dark hair. He was a little podgy. We shook hands. He sat alongside his colleague and the two men grinned at one another and then at me.
‘You haven’t missed anything. Madame Drinkwater and I were just doing the introductions. She’s looking for organic products.’ The way he spoke this last sentence, I felt it might have been a code.
The technical director, Jean-Christophe One, laid on the table a small brochure of the product that had brought them organic recognition here in France. ‘If you are looking for organic, here’s your answer,’ he said, pushing the leaflet in my direction across the polished surface. He was trumping, playing his winning card.
This was the product that had been talked about by the Agrivert team I had spent the afternoon with a few weeks back, the very same spray that Vincent had admitted to me, when we were alone in the café in Avignon, had been given its ticket as a trade-off, a compromise.
I picked up the leaflet and studied it. It showed a rather gruesome series of photographs detailing the detrimental effects on olives caused by Dacus, our destructive fly, in essence a fruit fly like any other, which lays its eggs in the pulp of the growing fruit. It displayed in graphic detail the cycle of the fly’s life. The female rises up out of the earth and lays her eggs, anything up to four or five hundred in as many olives. After an incubation period of two to four days, those eggs hatch into larvae. Thirty to ninety days later, the next generation of fly emerges. This process of egg-laying and birth takes place three to four times a year. Four generations of flies emerge to propagate once more.
The men were watching me while throwing occasional glances, triumphant smiles, at one another.
I was studying the leaflet silently, staring at photographs that told a horror story. These images had been selected purposefully, chosen to represent the gruesome enemy of man at its most destructive. I am the least tactically driven person I know. I live by my emotions, my passions and all my decision-making comes from my heart, but I was fully aware that I had to tread carefully. I was in the company of two highly skilled individuals, trained to sell, to market and to ward off, iron out all doubts and concerns. Their company policy was about peddling solutions. They were committed to ‘shaping the future of agriculture and pest management’. Their products were deployed for use as ‘weed, insect and pest management’.
It was not my place to humbly suggest that perhaps the world, the growing, producing earth, did not need to be shaped and managed.
What was to be gained by perceiving the natural world as an enemy?
The answer was, plenty.
I reminded myself silently, still perusing the leaflet, that, after Monsanto, theirs was one of the most influential agrochemical firms on the planet and these two were power players within it. I wondered again why they or colleagues of theirs had offered to donate this time to me.
I began slowly, warily. I was nervous and quite unskilled in this game. I told them that another of their products, not the organic one the leaflet was describing, but also containing a base of
Spinosad, had been proposed to me by their headquarters, but when I had studied its properties carefully, I had found that it was highly toxic to bees. And I believed that this product, the one detailed on the leaflet, based on the same composition, was also dangerous for honeybees and without honeybees, I said, the world would be facing an economic as well as ecological disaster. The value of honeybee pollination to US agriculture alone was more than fourteen billion dollars. Orchards in which honeybee hives are kept always produce more fruit than those in which there are only visiting pollinators.
The older of the two, the technical expert, waved his arm, assuring me that the possible risk to bees was negligible.
‘How do you arrive at that conclusion?’ I asked.
‘Honeybees don’t frequent olive groves.’
‘It is a fact that the olive flower is not pollinated by any bee, honey, bumble, feral, or a wasp. The tree is auto- or self-pollinating or pollinated by the wind. So, you are correct in saying that bees do not search out the olive tree’s tiny white lace blossoms. However, in a healthy grove where wild flowers have lodged themselves and have not been wiped out by weed management products, where the grasses around the feet of the trees have not perished due to herbicides and where the soil is fertile, there are wild flowers in abundance, ergo there is pollen and nectar, sustenance for these endangered arthropods.’
The gentlemen before me dismissed this argument.
‘Oh, so few as to make no difference’ was their response. ‘Certainly, if a bee happened along and was attracted by the globules of sprayed product – because this product is an attractant so that when the insect seeks it out and makes contact with it, it is poisoned – the bee would be killed almost instantly.’
‘So, it does act as an attractant to honeybees?’
‘Listen, our company,’ chipped in the other firmly, ‘is dedicated to the environment. The substance that this product is based upon comes from a plant, it has been created by a natural process of fermentation. This stuff is good for the farmers. We have spent a great deal of money getting this file through here in France. To register a product is exceedingly expensive and every country demands that it is registered with their own governing bodies before it can be sold in their territories. In terms of the olive market, France is peanuts for us. It has cost us more than we will recoup.’ He flicked open his computer to confirm the hectares in France growing olive trees: ‘less than two hundred thousand’. Compared to Italy or Spain, or indeed almost any other oil-producing Mediterranean country, the figure was very modest.
Return to the Olive Farm (The Olive Series Book 4) Page 22
