A Small Place in Italy (15 page)

I was trapped. I should have taken refuge in the lavatory, the one that at that time was in the open air, hidden, as ours was at I Castagni, in the midst of a plantation of
canne
, and only emerged when Tranquillo had found someone else to do the job. Perhaps I could even have offered to do the washing up – there were no washing-up machines, even ten years later – which would effectively have queered me with the whole Dadà clan. They would have thought I was the sort of
Inglese
who wears a ballet skirt in the privacy of his home. Men simply did not wash up in any part of Italy I had ever visited, and many of them still don’t, except in television commercials.

It was not that I objected to carrying heavy weights – anything in a rucksack or a pack or lashed to a pack frame was fine. What I didn’t like carrying were weights not really adapted to being carried, such as sacks filled to the brim with Australian grain, as I had had to when I was a sailor in 1939, or, what was worse, carrying a sack of rice across a ridge of the Apennines in the winter of 1943, which almost finished me off, or in 1941, helping to carry the corpse of an enormous member of the Indian civil service to a cemetery beside the Ganges when the temperature was up in the hundreds.

However, I could scarcely fail him, especially after eating such an enormous, delicious lunch.

‘Lei, soffre d’ernia?’
he asked. It seemed a bit late in the day for him to ask if I suffered from hernia.

‘Not up to now,’ I said.

There were three of us who were going to be involved with the
bigonci
, and the crushing of the grapes, now that the other lot had been stood down, four with Tranquillo. One was a deceptively fragile-looking man of about sixty; the other was a boy of about twenty, a Dadà nephew, bursting with energy, who looked like an advertisement for Shredded Wheat.

Looking at them I wondered if they had been subjected to some kind of medical examination before being pronounced free of hernias. If so, why hadn’t I been given one? Why hadn’t I simply said that I had a hernia? No one could prove it either way without undressing me. The questions came crowding in.

I soon discovered that when we weren’t slinging
bigonci
around, or feeding grapes into the crusher up at the house, or those already crushed into various barrels, we were expected to carry on cutting grapes down in the
vigneti
and putting them into the baskets and the boxes and transporting them to the sorting tables. We did this
until such time as Tranquillo, who was also doing all these things except lifting
bigonci
, gave the order to begin the loading operations.

The
bigonci
were slightly oval in shape and were made in the same way as a barrel, using staves. Just like the barrels, they too had to be thoroughly soaked in water for at least a couple of days before the
vendemmia
began, but unlike barrels they could be made to nest one inside the other when empty. Because of this they had no handles, which made them slippery things to deal with when fully loaded. In fact, all in all, they were not very well adapted for the purpose for which they were constructed, as empty they weighed about as much as their contents; but there was no doubt they were picturesque.

Soon these wooden
bigonci
would begin to be superseded by plastic ones which were much lighter and didn’t have to be soaked in water before they were used, as they were pressed in a mould, just as the straw covers that had been used to cover the wine
fiaschi
since time immemorial were being replaced by plastic ones. Nevertheless, it says something for the innate conservatism of most
contadini
that wooden
bigonci
still continue to be used in many parts of Italy to this day.

By the time we reached the next
vigneto
, having loaded the empty
bigonci
on to the trailer up at the house, those who had set off before us had already got quite a lot of bunches on to the sorting tables, and as soon as we got there we dumped a number of
bigonci
as close to the tables as we could, before picking up the secateurs and setting off with our baskets to start cutting.

As soon as we had done this the women working at the tables began to fill the first of these
bigonci
with grapes, while one of the men, to make room for more, squashed them down into them using a piece of wood for the purpose.

By the time we got to the end of this particular
vigneto
, a large
number of
bigonci
had already been filled and were ready to be taken back to the cellar.

The first thing was to get the
bigoncio
up on to one of my shoulders, which in my case was insufficiently covered in flesh to support it in anything but acute discomfort, in one hoist from the ground. This was the first of three or four moments in which the possibility of getting a hernia seemed to me to be really quite high. Well, it felt quite high. The next was when you walked with the
bigoncio
to the place where Tranquillo had parked his tractor and the trailer. Sometimes, if you were lucky, there would be Tranquillo or Signor Modesto or another member of the
bigoncio
party to help you transfer it from your shoulder up on to the floor of the trailer.

Then, when the
bigonci
were all loaded, Tranquillo started up the engine and we all three, the fragile-looking man, the boy who looked as if he lived on Shredded Wheat and myself, scrambled aboard and set off, thrown from side to side of the trailer, on the rough ride to the cellar. As soon as we reached it, the sides of the trailer were lowered and Valentino switched on the current and either the so-called fragile man or the young one poured the contents of a
bigoncio
into the jaws of the crusher which squashed them and then let them fall into another
bigoncio
which was set up underneath it. When it was full Valentino switched off the current. The third man, who I couldn’t help noticing, always happened to be me, lifted the loaded
bigoncio
which contained the crushed grapes on to his shoulder with the aid of one of the others, first replacing it with an empty one, and then tottered up a rather unstable wooden ramp to where, overhead, the barrels were set up, and poured the contents into one or other of them, depending on whether they were black or white grapes. What the punishment was for getting mixed up and pouring black grapes into a barrel with white ones already in it was unimaginable.

The afternoon seemed longer and harder and even hotter than the morning had been because most of the
vigneti
were planted in the modern way and, as a result, the terrain was much less shaded. And there was no five o’clock tea break, as there used to be in England before the war at harvest time, although wine was still available.

Sometimes we found ourselves toiling up long lines of vines and down again in the next parallel row at an angle of about fifty degrees. At least here, unlike working in the
pergole
, you could see and talk to your neighbours or the persons working on the other side of the vines.

Often the conversation became lubricious. It was usually the most strait-laced-looking elderly characters, like the old lady who had been so interested in the postman’s equipment, who had the most hair-raising repertoires, but those at the Dadà
vendemmie
were mild compared with what was on offer at some others. Some of them sounded like excerpts from some hitherto unpublished work,
The Sexual Life of the Contadini
, with chapters such as ‘Fun in the Loft’. But mostly it was all good, straight, missionary position stuff: no incest, no bestiality. It was nice to be in a place where even the animals felt safe.

We worked on until the sun went down as a blood-red orb behind the Cinque Terre, the coastal area beyond La Spezia where those who were engaged in the
vendemmie
were doing the most difficult work of all.

Difficult, because their
vigneti
were so steep to the sea and the vines grew so low that they required the expenditure of an enormous amount of energy to harvest them. There, at that time, it was quite common to see men and women carrying
bigonci
on their shoulders for long distances from the
vigneto
to the nearest road. This wine of the Cinque Terre was, if genuine, almost impossible to find in commerce.

Another few days and it would already be dark when Italian
wintertime, which began earlier than it does in Britain, came into force; but now it was still only dark around seven. That day we had succeeded in clearing all the Dadà grapes from the valley west of the road. The following day we would clear the ridge on which their farmhouse was situated, all the way up from the seventeenth bend where the shops and the communist cell were. That was if it didn’t rain; but not even the most pessimistic amateur meteorologists, even Signor Giuseppe, could really prophesy that.

Back at the cellar, another half-hour was to pass before we had finished emptying the last of the
bigonci
into the barrels, and when we had done so Tranquillo dished out drinks to his hernialess helpers, and no one said anything about the dangers of drinking on an empty stomach.

I was done-in, and so was almost everyone else, including Wanda. Suddenly we felt very cold.

Dinner was not for another half-hour. There was just time to slip down the hill to I Castagni and have a shower under our wonderful Velodoccia, the replacement model for the one Signor Bergamaschi, the plumber, had blown a hole in, change our clothes and get up the hill again for dinner.

Now we all sat down again, this time in the kitchen, with Rina’s son Paolo, who would be taking part in the
vendemmia
the following day because it was a Saturday and there was no school. We ate homemade
ravioli
; then more meat and chicken – for some reason there was never pork. Usually there would also have been a dish of
funghi in umido
, but the hot, dry weather that was so good for the grapes was no good for
funghi.
And there was a lot of wine drunk, red and white. Then there was cheese and lots of walnuts, with which we drank some of Signor Modesto’s stronger, sweeter wines, and coffee.

The following day proved to be a boiling hot twin of the previous one; and as we climbed rather stiffly up the hill to report for duty at the Casa Dadà, we heard excited cries of ‘Signora! Signora!’ from the field below the track, at the point where I had contrived to get one of the hubs of the Land Rover stuck on the tree.

Thinking that something was seriously amiss we looked over the edge down to where a magnificent, jolly-looking, black-eyed, black-haired girl was rinsing sheets in the
vasca.
(Later, Signor Giuseppe built us one too, and I dug a long trench to connect it with a spring.) She introduced herself as Signora Franca, the wife of Dadà Nino, son of a Signor Dadà Armando who was a member of a collateral family of Dadà. They had only been married comparatively recently and from this time onward we both knew her as ‘The Young Bride’.

She was the bearer of a message to us from Signor Armando.

‘They have sent me,’ she said, ‘to ask you if you would like to come and assist at their
vendemmia.
It is beginning tomorrow morning and will only last a couple of days.’

‘I don’t know what you think,’ I said in English to Wanda, who had already admitted to suffering from various aches and pains in parts of her anatomy which had been completely pain-free up
to now. I myself was surprisingly well, apart from my right shoulder blade which felt as if it had been hit with a sledge hammer. ‘I think we should have a day off. It isn’t only the
bigonci
. It’s all the food and drink.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ Wanda said, ‘that you’re worried about being given too much drink. I simply don’t believe it. I know it’s hard, the work with the
bigonci
, but they are doing us an honour by inviting us.’

‘It’s also something to do with me not having a hernia,’ I said.

‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘I think we should say “yes” we would like to do their
vendemmia
,’ and before we could even discuss the subject a bit more she had done so. I was quite glad really, apart from the
bigonci
.

Up at the Dadà house we again borrowed a couple of pairs of secateurs and set off for the final assault on the Dadà
vigneti
which were disposed in large numbers across a gently sloping plateau.

There were no steep bits but there were still lots of
pergole
situated in places that were difficult to get at: over ditches with water in them; around the walls of barns, and around the shed in which Rina kept her cow. It was a Saturday, and lots of children were in the fields with their parents, the larger ones sliding down the banks of the
pergole
, sometimes hurting themselves a bit, the smaller ones getting lost when about ten feet from their mothers and rushing off in search of them in the wrong direction, mooing.

In spite of having done what I considered to be my stint with the
bigonci
, I still found myself a member of the party dealing with them; but this time I only had to hoist them on to the trailer and when I did this I made sure that someone else, such as the Shredded Wheat boy, gave me a hand. The rather fragile, elderly man who had been part of the team the previous day got the job of pouring the grapes into the crusher and then the squashed ones into the barrels, but he seemed completely indestructible.
This time the
merenda
took place, as did lunch, back at the house, in the shade of the big pergola.

That evening, when it was almost dark, the last grapes of the Dadà
vendemmia
were harvested from this same pergola. And then there was dinner, with, just as the lunch had been, a completely different series of dishes from those we had eaten the previous day. What Rina and Signora Maria had accomplished was a remarkable feat but no one said,
‘Brave le cuoche!
’ (‘Well done, the cooks!’) And that was it for another year.

Everything was as safely stowed as it could be in the cellar, unless a hurricane took the roof off. Like everyone else the Dadà could only hope for a successful outcome to their labours; but in the event there was no cause for alarm. It was a good year for everyone, even the Newbys with their mini
-vendemmia
.

This other Dadà family lived in a tall, old, grey stone farmhouse that had never been given the
sangue di bue
treatment. It was built over a cellar that, although cavernous, was above ground and it stood on a sort of headland, on which a grove of cypresses flourished. You got to it by continuing downhill on the track from Signora Angiolina’s place without turning off to the right on the curve that led down to I Castagni. If you continued on down this track beyond this Dadà house you reached the back road which eventually led to Sarzana. This was the one which Attilio used to zoom down on foot on market days, refusing all offers of lifts – ‘
Ho già avuto una macchina’
(‘I have already had a motor car’), was what we always expected him to say on these occasions, just as he used to say
‘Ho già mangiato’
or
‘Ho già bevuto’
(‘I have already eaten’ or ‘I have already had a drink’), when offered any sustenance at unscheduled hours of day or night. The only real exception to this rule of his was when he was telling his stories, when he enjoyed a drink or two to keep him going.

Signor Dadà Armando was a strikingly handsome man.
Whenever we met him, whether indoors or out, he always wore a very battered brown felt hat which he changed from a rather unremarkable piece of headgear, by an expert twist of the brim, into something very debonair, in rather the same way as Fred Astaire, when setting out for an encounter with Ginger Rogers, was able to give an inimitably elegant air to the wearing of a top hat, simply by giving it a light tap.

It is probable that Signor Armando wore his hat all the time because he was bald; but we never found out whether this was so because he never raised it to us, or took it off in our presence. For all we knew he might quite well have worn it in bed. If Attilio went to bed with his umbrella up it was not difficult to imagine Signor Armando in bed with his hat on.

But this business of the hat was not the only resemblance Signor Armando bore to Fred Astaire, otherwise it wouldn’t have been worth mentioning. It was because Signor Armando was renowned in the neighbourhood as a marvellous dancer in the way of
ballo liscio
, an expert in the waltz. In fact he was so adept that it was said that he could waltz on a table, providing he had a partner of sufficiently strong nerves. Subsequently we met many by then elderly ladies who, when asked about Signor Armando’s capabilities as a dancer, still smiled dreamily when they recalled the blissful times they had spent in his arms, careering around the wooden dance floors under the trees, as Italy’s answers to Ginger Rogers.

Signor Armando’s wife was small and a great talker. It must have been a difficult role to sustain, keeping up with her husband in the particular role in which he had cast himself.

Their son, Nino, had spent his years of obligatory military service in the Customs Service, on various remote and what sounded like thoroughly unpleasant frontiers of Italy, before returning home to start a watch and clock repairing business in Sarzana. He really wanted to be a farmer, and would have been
if his father had not suddenly decided to make a will in which he left the farmhouse and a large part of the land which went with it to a sister, who was not much interested in farming. At the same time Nino and his wife had to be content with a picturesque but uncomfortable barn across the yard which needed a lot of money spent on it to make it habitable and from which he had to commute by bus to Sarzana each day.

Armando’s most distant
vigneti
were even further away down the valley than his namesake’s. It took a long time to reach them. Some of his vines had stems that were the thickness of small trees. There was no real
merenda
on this first day of their
vendemmia
, but there was plenty of wine and very good bread which was cut up for us on site by Signora Franca. This absence of a
merenda
was not because of any meanness on the part of the
padrone
but simply because these distant
vigneti
were too far from the house to make it practicable for three women to carry a
merenda
down to them on their heads which, altogether, would take more than an hour there and back.

But lunch was memorable, served in a high-ceilinged, austere room, its walls lined with big, framed, black-and-white photographs of the family, dead and gone, which looked as if they had been processed in embalming fluid.

And that evening, while Franca cooked the evening meal, because it had grown cold again, a fire was lit in a fireplace that resembled a railway tunnel, a resemblance that was heightened by two parallel lengths of real railway line which protruded from it and acted as fire-irons; so that when the fire started discharging smoke into the room I half expected a miniature steam engine to come puffing out of it.

However, of all the
vendemmie
we took part in during the following years the Bs’ was the most memorable. They were never ready to start work however late the helpers turned up at their property,
which was some way uphill from I Castagni. It was a big property from the point of view of wine production of which they were still
mezzadri.
With the Bs there was always some disaster either impending or happening. Either they had failed to invite sufficient people to help them do the job, which meant that their
vendemmia
went on for longer than it needed to, or they had asked them for the wrong day, or else had forgotten to ask anyone at all. Whatever it was they had omitted to do it always led to a lot of screaming from the open windows of their house to those of their potential helpers, which were dotted about the hillside, in the course of which the Bs attempted to rally their forces and get the show on the road.

‘GIUSEEPPE!
DOVE SEEI?
’ (‘Where are you?’) ‘MARIIA!
PERCHE NON SEI VENUUTA?
’ (‘Why haven’t you come?’)

Or sometimes they didn’t allow enough time for the barrels and the
bigonci
to be soaked with water, and as a result the wooden staves hadn’t swelled sufficiently, and there was nothing to put the
vendemmia
in. Or else the tractor broke down, or they forgot to ask the tractor driver to come. Or, most awful of all misfortunes which once befell them, when the bottom of one of their biggest barrels fell out of it and the entire contents were lost. Fortunately it was only a quarter full. The Bs were not only accident prone, they were lucky too.

Yet in spite of being almost impossible to work with they often made some of the best wine in the area. A lot of drink was drunk at the Bs’
vendemmia
when it finally got going. And the conversation was pretty wild.

If it rained during the
vendemmia
, and sometimes it did for long periods, it was hell. If it rained heavily the
vendemmia
had to stop because too much water got on to the grapes and into the
bigonci
and from them into the crusher and from that into the barrels with disastrous results.

When it rained a sack was the best thing to wear over the head and shoulders; wearing a waterproof coat in such conditions, long before the days of Gore-tex, was like being in a portable Turkish bath.

If the grapes were more or less a write-off, as they were in some years, and it rained heavily as well, it was indeed lugubrious. There was no
merenda
, one’s boots got clogged up with great lumps of clay and if the rain did stop for a few minutes, enough time to fill a
bigoncio
or two, nothing could be done because the rain usually began to fall again, by which time the grapes were so wet that the whole business had to be abandoned for the rest of that day, and possibly the next and the next one, too.

The worst rain we ever experienced was during a
vendemmia
with the Cani family, who had a farm down the hill towards Caniparola beyond I Pilastri, the farm which had stone pillars to support the vines. This family was regarded locally as being almost as foreign as we were because they came from a place called Castelnovo ne’ Monti on the other side of the Apennines in Reggio nell’Emilia, where a vast rock looms over the town, the Pietra Bismantova. Signor Cani, the father, died not long after we got to know them and the two sons became expert tractor drivers who used to hire themselves out to the local farmers, and had the reputation of being very hard workers. Signora Cani, known as ‘La Cani’, was a wonderful, dynamic woman who used to sit on the roadside in season selling flowers and vegetables, as did many other ladies in the neighbourhood. She had a daughter named Alice, pronounced ‘Aliche’, a good-looking girl who remained unmarried although she had a number of admirers. She was a highly skilled dressmaker and made things for Wanda. It was a strange sensation sitting in her workroom leafing through
L’Officiel
and French
Vogue
in such a rural spot.

The first year we were invited by the Cani family to help with
their
vendemmia
, it rained for three days and altogether took five days to complete. It was the
scirocco
from Africa that was to blame. Great forks of lightning hurled themselves down from the sky into the
vigneti
, as if trying to impale us where we crouched in terror under the
pergole
, too far from any human habitation for us to make a run for it, while the rain poured down and the thunder rolled. Soon we were forced to abandon the
pergole
when the rain came sweeping down over the steep banks in a series of coffee-coloured waterfalls and make for the Cani farmhouse, soaked to the skin, where a big fire had been kindled to dry us out. This
scirocco
caused a good deal of damage; but not half as much as it would have done if there had been hail, which could ruin all the grapes in a
vigneto
in a matter of minutes; but it never did in all the years we were at I Castagni.