A Thousand Days in Tuscany (20 page)

10
Perhaps, as a Genus, Olives Know Too Much

So you really want to climb up into those trees when it’s colder than hell, a basket strapped around your waist, and pick those olives, one at a time? Is that what you really want to do?” Barlozzo asked every time I reminded him to include us in the
raccolta.
And now, plumped three meters up into the saddle of a hundred-year-old tree, my bundled torso pitched about in the gasping breath of early December, my wish is granted. I’m harvesting olives.

Ears tingling under my old felt cloche, my fingertips are white with cold as they slide in and out of Barlozzo’s gloves, which I’ve borrowed back from my husband. My nose runs. And all I do is send curses upon Athena. It was she who, posturing with Posiedon for dominion, sprung the first olive tree from the stones of the Acropolis, proclaiming it the fruit of civility. A fruit like no other. She said
the flesh of an olive was bitter as hate and scant as true love, that it asked work to soften it, to squeeze the golden-green blood from it. The olive was like life and that the fight for it made its oil sacred, that it would soothe and feed a man from birth until death. And the goddess’s oil became elixir. Soft, slow drops of it nourished ewe’s milk cheese, a ladle of it strengthened wild onions stewed over a twig fire. Burned in a clay lamp, oil illuminated the night and warmed in the hands of a healer, it caressed the skin of a tired man and a birthing woman. Even now, when a baby is born in the Tuscan hills, he is washed in olive oil, modest doses burnished into every crease and crevice of him. On his deathbed, a man is anointed with the same oil, cleansing him in yet another way. And after he dies, a candle is lit and oil is warmed and kneaded over him, a farewell bath—the oil having accompanied him on all his journeys, just as Athena had promised.

B
ARLOZZO HAS DRIVEN
Floriana to a doctor’s appointment in Perugia, and Fernando is at home by the fire, aspiring to the grippe, so it’s just me who’s come to pick. I look about at my fellow harvesters. Primitive ornaments they seem, hitched up in the glittery ruckus of the leaves. Wrapped in kerchiefs and shawls, a layer of woolies, one of skirt, one of apron poufed out from under two of sweater, the women are a sturdy breed of sylph. The men, in the
camouflage-green-and-orangeade regalia of the hunter, are less beautiful. All of them must be cold, bone cold, yet they banter and shout across winds, practicing a farmer’s rite, perhaps the most ancient of all farmer’s rites. They will have this year’s green-gold sap as those have had it for eight thousand years before them. Still I’m thinking it must have been warmer during the harvest on the Acropolis.

Steeped in thin morning tea is the winter light, and the air smells of snow as we work in this small grove of some two hundred trees on the land of Barlozzo’s younger cousins. Even in the teeth of the cold, I love my tinseled perch and the prospect over these lands. More even than vines and wheat, the olive is cherished here. From my high seat, I see far beyond the small estate where we work. I see the trees that plait the red earth of Tuscany, that climb her chalky flanks, flock fields and meadows, and roll over the hills of her. Loyal as the stars are olive trees. But even as they stand together, they are desolate, each one alone with some primeval keen. The old ones seem tortured, hulking grotesques. As though they’ve kept custody of too many stories, their chests are cleaved to bare their stalwart hearts. But even the young ones, new and slender and yet unwounded, are already marked with a tinkling wistfulness. Perhaps, as a genus, olives know too much.

A few kilos of each day’s bounty are carried into a stone barn
where a brunette donkey, harnessed to a rope, pulls seventeenth-century crushing stones round and round, her annual dalliance with show business. She whines and shrieks, flashing black velvet eyes on her adoring audience, which is made mostly of the very young and the very old. Round and round, she steps away the afternoon, turning the stones that press the porphyry fruit into a thick olive stew. The resulting mass is then spread between mats woven of hemp and crushed again, until the first reluctant drops begin to trickle into the old tub beneath them. This is a decidedly artisinal methodology practiced only as tribute to the past. Almost all of the olives are brought to the
frantoio comunale
in Piazze.

The olive mill is small, servicing only the local farmers or
padroni,
each of whom might have three or four hundred trees, less, perhaps, as Barlozzo’s family does. The farmers often help each other to harvest, but there the sharing stops. Every farmer wants to be assured his olives—coddled and cared for better than anyone else’s olives, harvested only at the moment of perfection—are pressed and returned to him as the jade fortune he deserves more than his neighbors do. And so he carts his own olives to the mill, sets them in
un posto tranquillo
, a quiet place, where he can guard them, protect them from ruffians while waiting his turn at the press. Finally, with a probing scrutiny he watches—as though he could recognize them—as every last one of his beloved purply fruits is heaved into the crusher
to be pummeled and split between blocks of granite. He watches still, as the pulp is funneled into a vat to be agitated by steel paddles, to be warmed by friction so that the oil will drip less grudingly in the phase of
spremitura
, the pressing. Then the resulting paste must be forced through the mats, the debris left behind, so the oil can, at last, flow freely. Still he watches, until his blessed oil is funneled into bottles, which he will most often cork with his own hands, the very same hands that carved the corks, picked the olives, pruned the trees. The cargo is loaded into his
ape
—a three-wheeled motorized vehicle in which farmers are wont to terrorize back roads—or hauled up onto his tractor. Toward home now, he escorts his oil with the pomp of a crusading
cavaliere
returning with his spoils into a reddening sun. If I squint just so, the tractors fade, and I replace them with horses and wagons—a gentle tuning to turn things back half a thousand years or so.

During what can be hours and hours of waiting for his own moments at the crusher,
il frantolano,
the olive mill owner, ministers to his clients. The mill is built for business: cement clocks and corrugated roofing, a dirt floor in part, smooth white tiles paving the machinery areas. Yet, in the end farthest from the fray, there is a great fireplace. Flames leap in the hearth and under the raised and burning logs rests a contraption that catches the white-hot ash. Over the gentle heat of this ash is laid an old grill. On a nearby oilcloth-covered
table there are several kilo-rounds of country bread, a great-bladed knife, a dish of coarse sea salt, whole cloves of peeled garlic speared onto several branches of rosemary. There is a demijohn of red wine cuddled up to a stone sink, on whose draining board wait thirty or so tumblers, turned upside down to drain from frequent rinsings under the tap. The farmers keep watch over their waiting olives, breaking the vigil with ritual refreshment. One whacks off a hunk of bread, roasts it on both sides over the embers, rubs it then with the garlic-rosemary branch, carries it, in his hand and with some ceremony, to the grunting press and holds it under the spigot for a few seconds to let drip a thick sort of cream composed of the crushed but not yet pressed fruit. One carries his treasure, with some ceremony, back to the fire, to the demijohn, filling his tumbler with the thick, chewy wine of the countryside. He quaffs with unhidden pleasure, eats with a burly hunger, returning to his surveillance, comforted. This solace might endure as long as a quarter of an hour before the next inclination for succor.

And so we sit together, the farmers and their families and I, as if in the waiting room of a wizard. And all we talk of is olive oil. At one point, looking to build a bridge between the old world and the new, I open discourse about America, saying that the medical community advises the consumption of extra virgin olive oil to help lower the evil side of blood cholesterol.

To a person, the circle looks at me with something near to mercy, and so I scurry on with news of the American posture that touts “the Mediterranean diet.” “Constructed as it is of the freshest fruits and vegetables, complex carbohydrates, freshwater fish, sea fish, and a modicum of animal flesh—all of it laced with generous pourings of just-pressed olive oil and honest red wine—many American doctors call it the earth’s healthiest eating plan.”

Under darting gazes and fidgeting hands, I continue. “Of course everyone knows that eating this way discourages heart disease and obesity, chases free radicals, and promotes longevity,” I say, but there is no one even pretending to hear me. My recital has fizzled as would a Tuscan’s who, in the locker room of a Gold’s Gym, tells his mates that lifting weights builds muscle.

The mill owner has wandered over to the fire and caught the last of my feeble delivery. “
Ah, signora. Magari se tutto il mondo era d’accordo con noi.
How I wish that all the world agreed with us. Here people die of heart attacks, but most often in their beds and long past their nintieth birthdays.”

Chuckles bustle through the crowd.

“But you have some experience with olive oil. I can see it,” he says.

In reflex, my hand reaches up to touch my face. Are there telltale marks of last evening’s supper?

“No, no, signora,”
says a man, perhaps the oldest one among the
group. “There is no stain. He refers to your complexion. You have what we call here
pelle di luna,
skin like the moon. Your skin is illuminated.
È abbastanza comune qui,
it’s fairly common here among the country women. It’s the light that comes from eating olive oil all one’s life. But is there olive oil in America?”

“Well, yes, there’s olive oil in America, most all of it imported from Mediterranean countries, but I haven’t really eaten olive oil all my life, unfortunately,” I say. “But since I was a teenager, I’ve been washing my face with it.”

This humble revelation of my toilette animates them. Six or seven stories are shouted out into the warm, winey, smoky precinct by the fire. One about a grandmother who died with skin sweeter than a baby’s bottom is outdone by the telling of a great-grandmother who wore hats against the sun, cleaned her face with olive oil and rose-water, and died at 110 the day after someone mistook her at mass for her own granddaughter.

I’m on a roll here, feeling part of things, and so I venture further. “And I also make a pap with coarse cornmeal and olive oil and spread it on my face and décolleté, leave it to work like a mask, and then rub it off.”

This inspires an even more vividly screeched series of stories.
Gesti di bellezza,
gestures of beauty, one of the women calls them. And almost to a person—the men included—each is willing to part
with the most guarded, most effective, most ancient prescription for skin care that ever graced a countrywoman’s face and body.

One cure asks that skins of just-crushed wine grapes be applied to the skin and left to repose for an hour or more, twelve days in a row. This makes sense to me, as I consider the current rage for alpha hydroxy acid, which is the chemical version of fruit acids, used to brighten and tense the skin by ridding it of dead cells. But there is another directive in this remedy, they say. One
eats
only wine grapes for the twelve days. One subsists on wine grapes, mineral water, and bed rest. The cure detoxifies, purges, purifies. And not only the skin, they say, shouting that fancy clinics up in the Alto Adige on the Austrian border offer the very same cure plus an hour’s daily body massage and ask $10,000 a week. There’s a great shaking of heads.

I listen intently to all the recipes for endless youth. I am entertained and informed by them, but one becomes my instant favorite. A gentleman who introduces himself to me as an “available widower” of eighty-eight years tells a story of his mother. “From a two-kilo round of bread held tight against her breasts, she’d cut thick slices, pulling the knife in a sawing motion, closer and closer in, putting my infant brother’s nutritional future in great danger. She’d take the trenchers and soak them in fresh ass’s milk. And, when they were wet with it, she’d take the mess to her bed on which she’d lie perfectly flat, make herself comfortable and then press the dripping
bread to her face, over her eyes, finally covering the whole operating area with a small linen towel. She’d rest away the afternoon like that, quiet in her shuttered room, staying still as death, rising only when it was time to prepare supper. She performed this cure every time she had her monthlies, but of course I didn’t understand that until much later, after she’d passed on the recipe to my wife. It didn’t take much time before I began to make the associations between the ass’s milk cure and my bride’s weeklong cold shoulder.”

“But did they both have beautiful skin?”

“The most beautiful of all, I’d say. Angels’ faces, if not angels’ dispositions.”

Of both truths, there is a murmur of accord.

A
FTER AN HOUR
or so spent around the fire in the mill, I catch a lift home from someone who is heading into town and return to Fernando by about five. Gloating in insolence, he is where I left him, holding court before his hearth. And with not even a suspicion of flu about him. His cough is his habitual cigarette hack, dramatized now by melancholy. A Venetian prince protesting the winter, he sits primped on the sofa, his neck swathed in a fine, fringed woolen scarf, his body in a red silk quilt. How he hates the cold. And this is only the beginning of the dark, at least four months of it still ahead. But I know all will be well. Didn’t Florì tell me it would?
“Tutto andrà
bene, Chou Chou, tutto andrà molto bene. Vedrai.
All will go well. All will go very well. You’ll see.”

She’s not been here for the past six or seven weeks, not since there’s been some trouble in the family for whom she works. She stays all the week now in Città della Pieve, coming home only once a week for a few hours to take care of things here. But I haven’t caught a single sight of her. Barlozzo says she just whisks in and out, that she’s distracted and disturbed by the events in this family. I take to leaving her notes in her mailbox, which are always gone a day or so later but which she never answers. I miss her.