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  Extra Virgin

  ANNIE HAWES

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Published in Penguin Books 2001

  31

  Copyright © Annie Hawes, 2001

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-194206-3

  for Joe Boatman

  and everyone who misses her

  Acknowledgements

  Special thanks to the families Arcà, de Giglio and Filiberto; and to all in the Diano valley who have so diligently kept me abreast of agricultural imperatives and local news. To Martin Lee for getting me started and my brother James for keeping me going; to Carmel Turner and Christina Weir for putting me on the right track; to Lucie Mathiszig, Lesley Katon, Terry Maguire and Martin Brolly, without whom anything might have happened… and of course to my lovely sister, without whom nothing might have happened. Lastly to Joe Walsh, Stefan Knight, Tom Brown and Ciccio de Giglio for putting up with the scribbler in the attic for so long.

  Prologue

  Hearing the racket from above, Franco wades through his pile of prunings and peers up through the trailing branches. A pair of foreign females, skin so white it’s blinding in the glare of the sun, are messing about outside Pompeo’s old place a few terraces uphill, shouting and giggling. Their upper arms are shamelessly bare. On their feet, absurdly, they have some sort of men’s working boots. One of them has found the broken shutter, looks like she’s about to climb in through it; the other is eating handfuls of cherries off the old tree by the door. Pompeo may not have used the place for years, but still, a bit of respect…

  Now the first one’s inside, opening an upstairs window; she’s leaning out and shrieking happily to her greedy friend below, pointing to the sea down at the foot of the valley. Both of them in transports of delight. Franco rakes up the last few branches with his billhook, pauses to stroke his moustache thoughtfully. Should he approach them right away? Maybe not. He scrambles down the half-collapsed terrace wall, heaving the pile of branches before him, towards the far end of his land where Iolanda is piling up the greenery ready to burn – only way to keep the olive-fly at bay. She’ll be cooking lunch over the embers. Nothing like a good fresh horse steak done over green olivewood: nothing like it.

  You can still hear them from right down here – singing now, and banging out the rhythm on something metallic. Pompeo’s old well bucket by the sound of it. A burst of mad laughter. Still, madness isn’t a drawback. Not at all. The Milanesi who’ve taken over the old stable at the head of the valley, and who think they can farm chickens up there, are certainly mad. So is the bearded German fixing up the abandoned olive mill down in the damp riverbed, turning the old millstone into a table, flagstones into seats. An artist. Franco shudders at the thought of the dampness in the bones, the risk of emorroidi from sitting on those cold stone benches.

  His wife, busy stripping the leaves off the stuff worth keeping for winter firewood, looks up as he delivers the tangled pile of branches, observes the calculating look on his face. Found some more of your stranieri, then, she says. Invite them down for lunch, why don’t you?

  Franco, unsure if this is irony, taps slowly and magnificently with a horny forefinger at a point just below his left eyeball: the sign for crafty intelligence, furbizia. First he will prepare the ground, sound out Pompeo. These must be Patrucco’s English girls come for the season. They’ll be putting up at the bar in the village; where else could they be staying? No trouble to find them when he’s good and ready.

  1

  Glamour, we soon spotted, was not the outstanding feature of the village of Diano San Pietro. As far as the crusty olive-farming inhabitants of this crumbling backwater were concerned, the Riviera, a mere two miles away, might as well be on another planet. Down on the coast, Diano Marina has palm-shaded piazzas and an elegant marble-paved promenade along a wide blue sandy bay. Diano San Pietro, on the other hand, straggles up the steep foothills of the Mediterranean hinterland, its warped green shutters leaning into decrepit cobbled alleys overrun with leathery old men on erratic Vespas who call irately upon the Madonna as they narrowly miss mowing you down; with yowling feral cats and rusty tin cans full of improbably healthy geraniums.

  The lodgings in which we are doomed to spend the next ten weeks – in the hands of Luigi, walrus-moustached landlord of the village’s only hostelry and liveliest spot in town – have turned out to be a tiny pair of echoing tiled rooms above a barful of peasants who take thriftily to their beds at about ten-thirty. Our own beds are made of some kind of weird hammocky chainmail that droops horribly under your mattress, squeaks and gibbers at your slightest movement, and are only yards from the village campanile, whose great wheezing bell rings each and every hour, each and every half-hour, shaking the whole building to its roots. Only a masochist, or someone who was born and bred here and had been heaving sacks of olives since daybreak, would try getting to sleep before the midnight-thirty extravaganza was over. Twelve long-drawn-out gut-vibrating bongs and, after a short pause, a rusty, breathless bing. One a.m. is music to our ears.

  Down by the sea Diano Marina folk have consorted openly with visiting strangers ever since the elegant days of Wintering on the Riviera. No terrible retribution seems to have fallen upon them: in fact a century or so of this wanton behaviour has left them looking rather sleek and prosperous. Up on the hillside though, the grimly fascinating folk of Diano San Pietro prefer to meet the eccentric behaviour of strangers with a united front of appalled incomprehension. In San Pietro a woman does not wear shorts and a T-shirt. Not unless she wants to face a barful of seriously quelling looks over her cappuccino. No: she wears an apron, a calf-length tube, ankle socks and slippers. Her menfolk go for the faded blue trouser held up with string, the aged singlet vest which is not removed in the midday heat – certainly not, we’re not in Diano Marina here – but rolled up sausagewise into a stylish underarm sweatband, leaving the nipple area modestly covered while the solid pasta-filled midriff is exposed to the pleasantly cooling effect of any chance bit of aria that may waft by. Naturally, a large and well-worn handkerchief always protects the head during daylight hours; knotted at the corners for men, tied at the nape for ladies. Our slinky holiday gear languishes in our bags, untouched.

  Still, since barefaced lying has brought me here, board and lodging paid for, wages (barring detection as an impostor) in the offing, there is perhaps a certain poetic justice in the severe lack, in my immediate vicinity, of bright cosmopolitan life, of frivolity of any kind or, indeed, of anyone under forty apart from the occasional babe-in-
arms. Maybe also in the fact that my ten-week stay in Diano San Pietro will end up stretching on into infinity.

  Ten weeks’ work on the Italian Riviera, board and lodging included, my sister had said, waving the job description at me. Mediterranean fleshpots, sparkling seas, bronzed suitors with unbearably sexy accents, wild nightlife… Why didn’t I come too?

  What about the bit about being able to graft roses to commercial standard, I asked, examining the document. Was this not of some importance to my putative employer? Would I not find it hard to conceal my ignorance of such matters? Of course I wouldn’t, said Lucy. Not with her at my side to coach and camouflage.

  After a long and gloomy winter of angst and form-filling I’d firmly established that I had absolutely no chance of getting a loan to buy the home of my dreams. I was, I now knew, a Bad Risk. The sister was doing her best to save me from despair. Enough lurking in the London gloom, skidding home exhausted through greasy city dark and drizzle. What did I care about a career? Or real estate, for that matter? Freelance horticulture would do very nicely. So here I am, middle of February, in Italy and ready to graft. San Pietro may correspond hardly at all to any idea I have previously formed of the Italian Riviera, but it is undeniably a great improvement on London. No more miserly damp horizons stopping twenty feet away at the nearest office block. Here they stretch up into the misty foothills of the Maritime Alps on the one hand, down into the intense blue vastness of the Mediterranean on the other. The sun shines warmly even at this unlikely time of year; the sky is blue; and I am seeing plenty of both.

  Moreover, the Board makes up twice over for any small defects in the Lodging chosen for us by our boss to be, Signor Patrucco, whose rose nurseries lie a couple of hundred yards down the road, just past the olive mill. In under a week the lugubrious Luigi and his statuesque wife Maria have transformed us from just-give-us-a-sandwich philistines into budding gourmets, agog to meet whatever they’ll be putting on our plates tonight. Or more accurately, into budding connoisseurs of antipasti. It has taken us some time to learn that you’re meant to start with a few of these delectable antipasti things, then move on to your primo piatto of pasta. Next, the focal point of the meal: your secondo piatto of meat and vegetables or salad. Followed, if you want, by fruit or cheese. This, to locals, is so obvious that it needs no explaining: just part of the bedrock of civilization. But with no menu, no ordering, only Maria or ten-year-old Stefano, her son, appearing with serving-dish after serving-dish of delicious stuff and doling it on to your plate unless you told them not to, how were we going to work all that out? Conceptually challenged, we saw only a deliciously haphazard abundance, tried a bit of everything – or two bits of particularly good stuff, when the dish did its second round – and stopped, naturally, when we were full up. Usually before we’d even got on to the pasta course, and only, as far as our hosts were concerned, a third of the way through our meal. Causing immense consternation all round.

  Maria mills in and out of the kitchen, serving course after course, neatening and tidying, prodding and petting us and the dozen men she feeds every evening, dour hanky-headed folk who, like us, have somehow found themselves short of the womenfolk you need to fix you a decent twenty-course dinner of an evening. Our fellow-diners sit in twos and threes commiserating with one another sotto voce, only livening up when we, or any other stranieri who happen to be about the place, do something particularly bizarre.

  Have some stuffed zucchini flowers, says Maria. A tiny pie filled with broccoli? A few frisceüi of borage leaves in crispy batter? Now, oven-roasted baby onions, stripy-grilled slivers of peppers and aubergines with a dash of Maria’s anchovy laden bagna cauda. A couple of fat slices of rich red tomato under a big dollop of pesto – the oil from Luigi’s own trees, the basil from the vegetable patch round the back. Some little squares of fresh herby cheese tart?

  How would you guess that all this was just a starter? We know it now, thanks to Luigi, whose training in abstract thinking (he is San Pietro’s answer to Antonio Gramsci) alerted him to the fact that our eccentric eating behaviour was not due to a wilful refusal to conform, but to the lack of a whole framework of reference. We have much to learn. Tonight we obligingly horrify everyone by putting salad on the plate with our pasta. Salad, of course, is not eaten with the pasta. Salad comes afterwards. It could easily, Maria explains, snatching it back off again with her serving tongs, make the pasta curdle in your stomach. A lot of wise noddings and a chorus of Ah, sì, sì’s rise from the surrounding hoary heads, confirming her words. (Nowadays, with years of experience, we know that you can get around this annoying convention by casually spearing bits of salad out of the bowl as you eat your pasta – the important thing is not to put it on your plate.) Next, as if the salad offence wasn’t enough, we give in at the end of the pasta course. No secondo? Again? Can’t we even fit in a taste of the great sizzling piles of meat that have now appeared? The secondo is the whole point of the meal!

  No, we can’t. Maria is most put out. Unfair, since it’s at least partly her fault; she’s so entertained by our antipasti addiction that she can’t help egging us on to try more and more of her tasty titbits. Still, at least we’ve made it past the pasta course tonight before falling by the wayside. Our hosts are on our case, and have, they say, great faith in our potential. We will need all our strength, according to them, to deal with the monster Patrucco, our employer-to-be. By the end of our first week’s work, we will be begging for seconds.

  Our attempts to join in sociably with the chat in the bar using our halting Italian haven’t so far been a great success. The taciturn and weatherbeaten card-players who more or less live in this bar, only abandoning it momentarily for home at mealtimes and returning within the hour for the obligatory immensely strong teaspoon-sized espresso, chat away to one another in dialect, not Italian, as they cut, deal and shuffle. We may as well be speaking a foreign language. No: we really are speaking a foreign language. Official Italian is for uncomfortable and probably expensive dealings with policemen, tax-collectors and their ilk, and though everyone here can understand the language perfectly well, actually to speak it out loud in front of your cronies, who are bound to snigger and cackle as you do so, is another matter entirely. It is embarrassing for our poor victims, and utterly disrupts the cosy downhome atmosphere. If we’re in luck, someone will make the odd one-sentence contribution in the national tongue for our benefit. Mostly, though, they cunningly evade this ordeal by determinedly avoiding our eye.

  Ligurian, a tongue somewhere between Italian and Provençal French, is what the hanky-on-the-head folk speak for sociability, gossip and pleasure. Work, for example, is called travaio, not lavoro, round here. Not too surprising, since Liguria lies between Tuscany and the South of France, filling the mysterious gap which has existed till now in my mental map of this part of the world: a narrow strip of rugged stony foothills thirty or forty miles wide that stretches lengthwise on down the coast past Genoa, widthwise from the seashore to the high Alps of the Piedmont. We are right up at the French end, in the Province of Imperia; a province whose every scrap of steep hillside is terraced to within an inch of its life, and whose every scrap of terrace is packed to bursting with olive trees. And February has turned out, surprisingly to us novices, to be the height of the olive harvest in these parts. A topic which, when we raise it in the bar, is a big hit: so much so that one of the more daring card-players is moved to speak to us voluntarily, and in something quite like Italian.

  The days when a hundred trees meant security for you and your family have gone, he announces, fixing us with a doomladen eye from under his grimy knotted headgear. Once upon a time five hundred was the sign of a rich man. A thousand and you were made. But no longer. The price of olives is so low that most of the harvest is being left to fall off the trees and rot. For the third year running.

  A ragged chorus of grim Ah, sì, sì’s from a barful of hankied heads backs him up. Positively Cold Comfort Farm. We gather from the unusually animated debate
that follows – not too easy to keep up with, alas, because in the excitement people tend to forget our presence and meander off into dialect – that only the mad optimists among the contadini of San Pietro are pruning and ploughing, husbanding their resources for next spring, convinced that better times are just around the corner. Waste of energy, say the doom-merchants. It takes eight years of neglect for an olive tree to dry out and end up barren for ever. Harvest and be damned. Plenty of time yet. Do your chickens, your vegetable garden, leave the trees to their own devices. You may as well come to the bar for a game of scopa instead.

  How come, we wonder, if there’s no money to be made from the stuff, the bar is always packed solid at six-thirty in the morning with horny-handed folk taking their breakfast espressos before rushing busily off to get on with Important Olive Work? Best not to ask. Probably olive farmers just enjoy a bit of wailing and teeth-gnashing of an evening.

  The only customer left in the Café of Doom, now that the dawn espresso rush-hour is over, is one extremely senior citizen who is standing at the bar over a nice breakfast glass of wine, communing in companionable silence with Luigi. We are sitting in the farthest corner by the window as usual, busy decoding the bar’s copy of l’Unità, the Communist daily, with the help of Maria, who has come out of her kitchen to keep us company while she shells her broad beans. Despite the total collapse of the olive-oil market, tiny three-wheeled trucks are buzzing to and fro past the window as usual, some heading off up to the groves to get in the crop, others hairpin-bending down from the hills above the village, already full of bulging greasy sacks of olives, their suspensions groaning under the weight as they round the tight bend in front of the bar and make for the olive-oil mill. You can just see the mill from here, a hundred-odd yards down the dirt-track that runs alongside the river, the back road to Diano Marina. It looks as old as the hills, four foot thick walls and low arched porticoes, crouching plump and turreted over the riverbed. A three-wheeler edges out of the yard, grinds slowly past us, heading back up the hill, loaded down with the new, thick, golden-green oil in its great straw-padded glass demijohns. It all looks fine to us, positively picturesque. Now there aren’t any olive farmers left in here to be offended, I ask Maria why everyone says their olive oil is worthless, and still does all this work to harvest and press it.