In Maremma (14 page)

 

The Kitchen, Podere Fiume, “Our” Olive Oil on the Counter to the Left
(Photo by Simon McBride)

In Maremma no one picks olives before November 2 (All Souls' Day), by which point the green has begun mottling into black. This is why Tuscan olive oil is so justly famous; Umbrians and Apulians, by contrast, wait for the fruit to fall before they gather it, which makes their oil more acidic. Usually it took us about three weeks, working six hours a day, to harvest our olives. Once we were done, we'd pack them in plastic crates and haul them to one of the two
frantoi
(olive presses), this one located in a warehouse behind the
consorzio agrario.
In the room through which you entered, tons of olives, either loose or in burlap bags through which a little moisture was already seeping, waited to be weighed and pressed. There would be at least one truck parked outside, bearing the immense crop of one of the larger
aziende,
a thousand kilos in comparison to which our five crates seemed meager. Still, we gave them to the
frantoiano
to weigh, and he told us to how much oil we were entitled, using as the basis for his calculations a
mysterious algorithm that took into account not only the quantity of olives but their relative oiliness in comparison to other years (on average, about twenty percent of the weight of the fruit). We'd nod acceptance of his terms. Then he'd take our olives and throw them onto the pile with all the others, for generally speaking only huge crops were pressed individually; in the case of small harvests, the olives of several different families would be mixed together, which meant that one could never say truthfully, “This oil is
mine,”
though of course everyone said it anyway.

Having deposited our olives, we followed the
frantoiano
into the next room, where the machinery itself was located. This consisted of a huge tub and a stone grinding wheel, operated not by hand, as in the last century, but by a sophisticated system of gears. For sheer scale, it was daunting. The wheel was easily twice the size of the Bocca della Verità in Rome.

As for the tub: if you fell into it you would certainly be crushed in a matter of seconds. At the bottom, a muddy sludge of olive residue shifted and churned, while from its side a stainless steel pipe led to a series of distillation tubes and then to a tap from which a stream of oil was always pouring. The oil was such a deep shade of green that you could not see light through it unless you held the bottle up to the sun. It gave off a slightly mulchy odor. This was the cold-pressed “extra virgin” oil for which Tuscany is famous. Later, the pulp would be pressed a second time, producing a paler oil; later still, the crumbly residue, by now the texture and color of potting soil, would be forced, thanks to the addition of certain chemicals, to yield yet a third grade of oil, almost colorless and used chiefly for deep frying.

 

Next the
frantoiano—
Paolo) who in the summer worked at the Bar Sport, and in the spring did construction at the Terme—asked us if we wanted to take our oil then or wait until “our” olives were pressed. We told him that now would be fine, at which point he began to fill our thirty-liter stainless steel oil urn. One of our neighbors, a farmer with a lot of land, walked in and greeted us. We would have felt intimidated by his bigger harvest (this is the curse of masculinity) had not a tiny old man followed him in. In his right hand he held a straw basket
containing at most twenty olives, in his left a
biberon
—a baby bottle.

“Buona sera.”
Jovially the old man greeted our neighbor, Paolo, and us. (Like the Olivone he was indiscriminate in his beneficence.) And who was he? An inmate at the local
casa di riposo
(rest home), tending for memory's sake a single, potted tree? Perhaps. We never asked. Instead we admired the aplomb with which he handed his basket to Paolo, who weighed the olives before throwing them onto the heap. In a few hours they would lose all identity, they would be ground along with ours and our neighbor's and a dozen other people's, pulp and stone, into the great democracy of oil, and the old man would hand Paolo his
biberon
to be filled: just a few drops, mind you, yet enough to remind him of that green mother whose milk tasted of pepper, and whose blighted home now smelled of smoke and gasoline.

24

THE LAST CHRISTMAS of the 1900s was a quiet affair in our part of the world.

In Semproniano, the only public decorations were a modest tree in the piazza, elsewhere a few lights, a nativity scene. Most of the shops put up decorations, but not too many; Brunella, who ran the frame shop, had made a charming tree of gilded chicken wire covered with gold bows and white lights for her window. One exquisitely blue morning, a few days before Christmas, we were in town at about ten o'clock, and as we were walking to the Bar Sport, a Christmas tree made of persimmons at Carlucci's collapsed. All the good citizens in the Piazza del Popolo at once fanned out to catch the fruits as they rolled hither and thither. The next time we went to town, the persimmons—which in Maremma were eaten with ricotta and shavings of dark chocolate—were gathered in baskets festooned with red bows.

For two years in a row, we had lunch with Ilvo and Delia on Christmas Eve: a soup of chickpeas and
tagli-olini,
then fried
baccala
(salted cod). The third year, however, we had lunch with them a few days before Christmas, and on this occasion, DL helped Delia in the kitchen, since he was keen to learn how to make
gnocchi. For a second course, there was baked chicken and rabbit; and then, as always, dessert, coffee, and grappa.

On Christmas Day, we went to Semproniano. Usually the townspeople dressed up and turned out in the piazza. This year, however, Christmas morning was cold and wet, and the only people at the bar were the old men who had no family; or at least no family who wanted to celebrate the holiday with them. Loando's son lived in Vienna. Rather than Christmas music, Stefano was for some reason playing techno.

Later on, the day got better. At Pina's, our Christmas lunch began with
fettuccine di pollo
(ribbons of chicken breast “cooked” by being soaked in lemon juice) and a salad of radicchio and apple. For the first course, there were Pina's classic
tagliatelle
al
ragú
(the pasta flavored with bitter chocolate) and
tortelli di baccala
dressed with clams and herbs; then capon stuffed with prunes and chestnuts. All the while, the fire roared in the fireplace, and Martino, who had recently turned nine, told us that
he
would take the order for dessert. He did, and we were served a nest of fried chestnut tagliatelle dusted with powdered sugar and pomegranate seeds.

Lunch lasted from one o'clock until five o'clock (the so-called “blue hour” here during the winter). Back at home, we called our families across the ocean.

Before we moved to Podere Fiume, we spent several Christmases at the thermal spa in Saturnia, soaking in the mineral waters with their delicious stink of sulfur. We always played the
tombola,
which, because it is Italian, you can win in many more ways than you can win at
Bingo. In those days, the
tombola
was played at Saturnia every night between Christmas and New Year's, and if truth be told, it was probably the thing we liked best about going there.

To play the
tombola,
you rent cards on which are printed twenty numbers from one to ninety. These cards have little plastic doors over them that as the numbers are called you either flip open or slide down. The scoring is as follows: the first person to get two numbers on the same line calls out
“ambo”
and wins a prize; then the first person to get three numbers (
terno
); four numbers (
quaterna
); five numbers (
cinquina
); and finally the whole card (
tombola
)
.
The calling goes on until a second person covers all his numbers, and this prize is known as the
tombolino
—the little
tombola
. At Saturnia you played not for money but things: the grand prize was a six-kilo Maremma ham.

In preparation for the
tombola
, we settled ourselves and our cards at a green felt-covered pentagonal table. Our nearest neighbors were two elderly ladies who were playing the
tombola
simultaneously with an interminable game of gin rummy.

The calling began. One number, two numbers. Suddenly MM leaped up and called: “
Ambo
!”

Expressions of slight resentment greeted this amazingly quick victory, in particular from our elderly neighbors. MM stepped up to the podium, where the master of ceremonies (actually the bartender) confirmed his numbers and announced that for the
ambo
, he had won a bottle of suntan oil and a body.

“A body?”

“Yes,” one of the ladies said in English. “A body is ... a leotard.”

The calling started up again, and as swiftly as MM had won the
ambo
, a pretty young girl sitting with her mother won the
terno
. Her prize consisted of a wild-boar salami and two bodies.

“The bodies are really piling up tonight.”

Two numbers later, MM was leaping up again.
“Quaterna
!”

“You very lucky tonight,” the bartender said in English, as he reeled off what MM had won: a
panforte,
another bottle of suntan oil, a book of photographs of the Maremma, and a body—“but a different body from the first one.”

MM sat down. Another number was called.
“Cinquina
!” he shouted.

No one showed much in the way of good tidings as the bartender recited MM's latest round of prizes: a
pan d'oro
(a variety of Christmas cake), a
torrone
(a variety of Christmas candy), a jogging suit, another bottle of suntan oil, a jar of sunblock, and a bottle of dessert wine. (No body this time.)

Fortunately his luck degenerated after that. When the
tombola
was called, the winner was an old man referred to by our neighbors only as “the engineer.” Because he had won the
tombola
both the year before and the year before that, some corruption was suspected. Might the infamous
tangenti
(bribes) that had brought down the Christian Democrats have also affected the innocent
tombola?

As for the
tombolino
, it was a tie between a gentleman in a black suit (“part of the Swiss contingent,” one of the ladies remarked derisively) and a young girl who was at the hotel in the company of an extremely aged
man—whether her grandfather or lover no one could quite determine.