Chapter 2 #3
The raccolta was an interruption not only of my intellectual pursuits but also of my sartorial ones—after weeks of being trained in pleated wide-legged pants and fitted shirts and jackets, I was now expected to produce a “country living” look in which to pick olives, an activity I imagined akin to picking berries, one by one, but on an enormous scale.
My arms ached in anticipation. I dressed in a sweatshirt from my college and jeans—precisely the kind of outfit previously found “too American”—and was told I had done well.
My second surprise was that there would be no “picking” in the olive picking.
Instead, I found Vinsanda had set up fine nets beneath the trees.
Ghazel was present to give us long-handled rakes and describe, in his usual gibberish Italian, how one went about using them.
Even the Baronessa took a rake. There was no wine; there were no songs.
Just the pleasing patter of the fruit dropping to the ground when one had found a particularly rich cluster.
The absurd rakes and nets turned out to be simple and ingenious methods for collecting olives, and once one of us had finished a tree, Vinsanda would gather up the nets and transfer the contents to a small plastic bin.
With so little to show, it seemed hardly worth the effort, as with so much of life.
But the Baronessa assured us we would make enough oil for the year if we did not miss a corner.
She was very good at pointing out where we had missed a corner, particularly with me, and when I tried to respond, she would loudly shush me.
“Cugino Giorgio! You are from Todi! You cannot be heard speaking English!”
The work itself was surprisingly satisfying: once I found a hearty clump of olives, I could rake a dozen together and hear them softly thudding to the grass.
A wild gust shook the trees and, all at once, it was like those globes of tiny landscapes where it is not snow but glitter or colored confetti, because the last leaves of autumn all flew into the air, shining, gray-brown, innumerable, swirling around us.
And when someone turned on the radio to Italian pop music, and the sunlight through the leaves tatted the shadows into lace over us, and smoke from the leaf fire blew our way, there was a soothing romance to it all.
I am not the first to comment on the poignant beauty of autumn, or the gold-edged pages of its days.
The next morning, a visitor did arrive, but not our friend Oscar.
I was still in the kitchen with Nimali, discussing the hardship of life; a knock at the outside door made me jump.
I opened it and was met by a sturdy middle-aged woman with a bent nose and wild black hair held back by a clip.
She had the sporting demeanor of a physical education teacher, and she carried a long canvas case.
Nimali chatted with her for a while and eventually gestured for the woman to come in.
The stranger went directly into the entrance hall and then upstairs.
I asked Nimali (in my improving Italian) if she had come for the Baronessa.
“No,” Nimali said matter-of-factly. From what I understood, she had come for my bed. But I was certain I had it wrong. Had the Baronessa really remembered our conversation from over a month ago? And where was the replacement mattress?
I headed out for another day of work in the olive groves. The Baronessa insisted that the “work cannot cease!” I remember her tapping her cane against the dirt road, and it might just as well have been the crack of a whip.
I wondered at the urgency, but my only companion was Ghazel, whose explanation was “PUTTA! MENTO!” Since this meant the chin of a whore, I waited until the Baronessa passed near our grove again for an inspection, and she made it clear it was an appuntamento: an appointment at the olive press in a week.
“It was the best we could get. You have to book in advance,” she said, raising a finger gravely.
“Like the Ritz.” Later I was also informed that storms were approaching from the west and it was no great treat working in a downpour.
But that day was fine—sun so bright I had to squint as I raked the upper branches, the sound of birds arguing like tourists whether to stay a few days more or move on, as planned, to a southern spot.
Soon the baker joined us, along with elderly Duccio, with the promise that they could share in the harvest. The one character not joining us for the raccolta was our neighbor Estelle.
Since everyone else, including neighbors, had been mustered (presumably pretending to be family), her absence seemed yet another of her innumerable mysteries, none of which revealed anything about another, like a crossword in which the answers you’ve filled in don’t connect.
An hour later, I saw the mattress woman’s car sputtering up the road before me. She passed with a wave, her mysterious case strapped in the back. I went immediately to my room, where Nimali was quietly remaking my bed. She raised her eyebrows and shook her head.
“It is a very old horsehair mattress” came a voice from behind me. I turned and the Baronessa was there in a white wool sweater and pants. Her hair had three olive leaves resting in it. “Only a few people know how to redo them. It has to be done,” she said ominously, “from within.”
“What was in her bag?”
“A pitchfork. She attacked that bed like it was a wolf!” She strode into my room and imitated attacking a mattress with a pitchfork, though she was a poor mime and it came across as someone fishing.
“You have to have it in your soul, to fix a horsehair mattress! Of course, we won’t need to fix it again for another hundred years.
” She paused for a moment in the hallway, then added with a smile: “I suppose we leave that for the next owner?” It was the first time she implied she might not live forever.
After two days of labor, the olive groves were barely a quarter done.
I thought this was great progress, but my employer did not.
“Ghazel is worried about the storm,” she told me at dinner.
Her expression was grave. “And your spirits seem to have suffered. I would like a pleasant dinner companion. So I have called in reinforcements for you both.”
The weekend arrived.
And so did her cousin.
Giacomo’s return to Villa Coco was after lunch, and this time he came in his own car, the lizard-green Fiat, which he parked in the olive grove where we were working; he stepped out of the car, rolled up his sleeves, and, after he had delivered his Asiago to the kitchen, was put straight to work.
He was in baggy tweed trousers, a blue-striped shirt, a sweater vest patterned like an argyle sock, and a kerchief tied around his neck.
Again the good husband from Milan. His blond hair, straight and fine, was staticky and floating above his ears.
“Buon giorno,” I said. Giacomo nodded at me, then turned away to ask Ghazel for a cigarette.
We had of course not spoken since Comacchio, and this turning away seemed to signal how things would be.
We worked separate quadrants of the grove for the rest of the day, as clouds blocked out the sun and distant rumblings joined with the constant patter of olives on the nets.
I tried to put our past out of my mind—but then my eye would be caught by something bright, and I would turn to find it was always his blond head, toiling beneath a tree.
He was set up in the room beside mine—“la Camera Gialla,” as I heard the Baronessa describe it to Nimali—and, before retiring to her television shows, the Baronessa kindly asked if I would mind sharing a bathroom.
I did mind; within an hour, I discovered on my white oval bar of soap a blond hair bisecting it.
I extracted it and tried to deposit it in the sink or trash, but it clung to me like a living thing.
I began to wish I had never thrown my hat upon that bed.
Life with this bathmate was more awkward than our eel-town fling; the first morning of his stay, I heard shouts from the bathroom and he ran out in his towel, complaining that I had used all the hot water.
But his childish, infuriated expression faded when he saw me.
“Sorry, sorry,” he said, shivering among the painted vines.
“This isn’t how I want things…eh, ahem, between us.
” I noticed he had wrapped himself in a hand towel that barely encircled his waist, and we both began to laugh.
We arranged a bathing schedule: I was to take the mornings and he the evenings, and when I went to bed, I could hear him in there, splashing away and singing.
Later, I heard a knock on my door and he entered, now wrapped in a larger towel, and quietly said he had been thinking about it, and we should keep our friendship as it was: “I am here for my cousin and the harvest.” He said this with a stiff formality I did not recognize; he went so far as to offer me his dampened hand to shake.
I understood we had had what his cousin called a “story.”
He was polite with me, but I was shocked to find him speaking briskly with his cousin.
“What am I doing here?” he would shout to her as he passed her in the field.
“What am I doing here?” This despite the fact that it seemed he came every year for the raccolta.
The first night, the Baronessa turned to me at dinner, leaning over her porcini and grilled polenta, beginning a tale about her time in Manaus—but he broke in, saying, “I’ve heard this story before.
She ends up seeing a pink dolphin.” I was surprised when my employer chuckled with delight.
“You never know!” she said to him. “I change my stories every telling!”