On Persephone's Island Read online

  Sometimes I am tempted by the idea of a solar greenhouse, summer all year long, but then I envy the gardeners in my American gardening magazines, who can rest and plan and pore over seed catalogues in the winter months, while I must spend all my Sundays battling to keep up with a week’s accumulation of weeds no matter how cold and rainy it may be.

  This weekend I am in luck, with two days of sunshine and warmth, perfect for working the soil, softened now after a summer of dry rock-hardness but not yet waterlogged and congealed into heavy clay. I have with me a package of flower bulbs that has just arrived from Holland. Each year I add to my much-beloved collection of narcissus and daffodils, and this year I put in a large order of grape hyacinths, encouraged by the success of the ones I planted two years ago. But the latter have already sprouted all their leaves, and I am assailed by doubts that I am putting the new ones in too late. It is difficult to know where one is at on this island, perched on the edge of the subtropical.

  As I work in my flower beds I can hear sounds of conversation and laughter, punctuated by whacking noises, which drift down to me from the olive grove. November is olive time, and the harvest has begun. The harvesters spread nets out under the trees, pick what they can reach from ladders, and beat the rest of the olives down by hitting the branches with canes. Even with the help of the nets it is backbreaking work; many of the olives were flung to the ground by the October storms, and the workers must gather them one by one as they crouch over the cold damp earth. Yet the olive harvest is one of the few occasions in the year when the women go out to work in the fields alongside the men; this unaccustomed company, in marked contrast to the normal routine of long and solitary hours behind plow or hoe, leavens the work, especially when the sunlight filters down through the branches and there is no wind to bite the groping fingers.

  The olive harvest has a particular personal quality that the wine harvest has lost, now that most of the growers confer their grapes to the big cooperative wineries. Olive oil is the soul of Sicilian cooking; butter and other vegetable oils are a recent introduction, whereas olive oil has traditionally been used for everything: eaten raw on pasta, salads, and boiled vegetables; used to fry fish or sweet fritters and doughnuts; as a cure for squeaking hinges; or beaten up with lemon juice and rubbed into chapped hands.

  I was startled and slightly revolted the first time I saw Tonino rub olive oil onto his skin, for somehow I had never quite focused in on the fact that the oil with which all those classical Greek athletes massaged themselves was the same that I was accustomed to eating on my salad. And yet it would appear that in antiquity, olive oil was prized above all for cosmetic purposes: Psalm 104 speaks of “wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil to make his face shine, and bread which strengtheneth man’s heart.” The oil from the sacred olive groves of Athene was perfumed with volatile oils and awarded to the victors in the Panathenaic contests.

  It was the Greek colonizers who brought cuttings of cultivated olives with them to graft onto the wild oleasters of Sicily, and the Sicilian today preserves the greatest respect for this mainstay of his household and goes to great effort and expense to insure his family their year’s supply of good, unadulterated oil, preferably grown on trees he knows and processed in a trustworthy press.

  Small farmers usually have a few trees, enough for family needs, while even the bigger producers in this area, which does not specialize in olive growing, still operate very much at a personal level and sell their excess production to friends and relatives. It is common for peasants who own no olive trees to sharecrop someone else’s, thus buying their annual supply with a few days’ work, a habit that persists even when they have become prosperous enough to have acquired their own land.

  It is not enough to know which trees your olive oil comes from, unless you also know where and how it has been pressed. Most presses are fairly small family affairs, with five or six men working the machinery, located in barns in the countryside or, more commonly nowadays, in warehouses on the edge of town. We have our own, a country press that was started by my husband’s eldest brother, Stefano, shortly before his death, and has been kept going mostly through inertia and the good offices of a friend who is willing to run it for us: “This way I know what oil I’m getting.”

  The building is big and rambling, typical of the farmhouses around the Gulf of Castellammare, although “farmhouses” is a misleading term, since they are more like minor fortresses, a series of large one- or two-storied buildings with storage, stables, and workers’ quarters on the ground floor, and the apartments of the padrone on the piano nobile above, with a balcony from which he could keep a watchful eye on the doings down below. In the course of time the buildings have reached out to embrace a courtyard from which a big gate with enormous iron doors heavy with irons and padlocks gives guarded access to the outside world. Both our house at Bosco and the house at Finocchio where the oil press is located follow this pattern. Finocchio, which is the bigger of the two, belonged to three brothers who divided it up among themselves, and the share that went to Tonino’s grandfather and now belongs to his brother Turi includes the oil press on the ground floor and upstairs a tiny apartment, two rooms and an alcove for the bed, plus half the courtyard. The apartment, now completely abandoned, was never used except during the olive harvest: my in-laws would stay there in aid and comfort of Stefano while the press was running, and indeed my widowed mother-in-law gave up going out there for “the season” only when she turned eighty.

  I had my unforgettable first view of Finocchio only a few days after I arrived in Sicily. The Dolci Center organized a symposium on irrigation in a town on the southern coast of the island, and it was there that I met Tonino. (Only years after we were married did I learn that his presence there was neither professional nor fortuitous: in a period in which Sicilian girls were still very strictly chaperoned, the foreign girls who came to the Center were hotly contended, and Tonino decided to get first crack, much to the chagrin of the Partinicotti, who lamented that Alcamo got more than its fair share.) Tonino had arranged with the friend who was giving us a ride home to be dropped off at Finocchio, where we arrived at dusk only to find the great gate locked and bolted. Stefano had gone to Alcamo and had locked his parents in for safekeeping, which surprised nobody but me. It was apparently unremarkable that one should have to scale the wall to get home. I learned later that there were bandits operating in that area then, the “gang of Highway 113,” and for the first few years that I knew Tonino we never traveled the road between Partinico and Alcamo without first emptying our pockets and hiding our cash in my bra.

  The olive is a capricious tree: for every year that it bears a heavy load it takes a couple of years off to rest. In the lean years the press opens for only a short time, operating on and off as the meager harvest dribbles in. But in the good years it will open for I Morti and keep going until Christmas, often working round the clock. Finocchio is alive and humming then, the courtyard choked with tractors, cars, and trucks, with brown gunnysacks of olives piled up in the bins along the wall, and with groups of men, peasant and landowner alike dressed in rubber boots and coppola, the flat golf cap that in various tweeds (and black for mourning) is the most common note in any southern Italian street. It would be unthinkable for anyone to leave his olives at the press and go home until it was time to come and pick up the oil. The journey from tree to oil jar must be accomplished under the padrone’s eye to insure that no olives are exchanged or subtracted, nothing added. And so while the olive sacks stand in line, their owners gossip, play a hand of scopa, stretch their legs along the dirt road that leads to the highway, or catch a nap in their cars.

  They are attentive when their turn comes, however, adjusting with the utmost precision the great brass weights on the scale where the olives are weighed and following the olives around the big barn as they pass from machine to machine. The sacks are emptied onto rollers that separate out the bitter-tasting twigs and leaves and carry the olives through a spray of w
ater and into a mill that gives them a first coarse chopping. From there they pass into an enormous steel bowl in which two giant stone wheels, perhaps five feet in diameter and two feet thick, revolve in opposite directions as they rotate in a hypnotic and inexorable dance that grinds the olives, pits and all, to a smooth paste. This is squeezed out in a glistening pale brown ribbon onto woven wire disks, which are piled one upon another on wheeled dollies, interspaced with heavy steel disks, and rolled into the presses where they are slowly compressed so that the juice runs out, like maple syrup running down the sides of a stack of pancakes. The juice goes from the presses through the centrifuge and comes out in a thin stream of cloudy green oil, ready to be funneled into plastic jugs and loaded into the cars.

  The steady grinding of the great wheels, the whirr of the presses, and the clanking of the steel disks drown out all but the loudest conversations. An invisible brush has painted every surface, each machine, each wall tile and bench with a thin patina of oil, and the workmen place their feet warily on the slippery floor. The very air is permeated with the smell of the new oil, which clings to one’s clothes and vies with the perfume of the jasmine vine on the courtyard wall. Strong and harsh and ever so slightly bitter, but with all the flavor and the color of the olive intact, Sicilian olive oil is a far cry from the pale insipid stuff that is exported to the States, and a slice of freshly baked Sicilian bread, sprinkled with oil and salt and preferably still hot from an oven that has been fired with almond shells, would beat ambrosia any day. To eat it with the first oil of the new crop assumes the solemnity of a ritual. One November my husband and I happened to drop by the house of a peasant who worked for us just as his wife was taking the week’s supply of homemade bread out of the oven. She made us the present of a loaf; Tonino whipped off his sweater, wrapped it carefully around the bread, shoved me and the bread in the car, and made for Finocchio at breakneck speed to get to some new oil before the bread had cooled off.

  It is satisfying to see that Francesco and Natalia, despite intimate acquaintance with potato chips, ice cream cones, and all the other enticements that their father’s wartime childhood lacked, still have the greatest appreciation for these rituals. Francesco ends every meal, no matter how fancy or filling, with bread and oil, a sort of cork to insure that there are no air bubbles from which horrible hunger pangs might spring, and both children depend on bread and oil to get them from one meal to the next.

  The sun is quite low in the sky as I tuck the last of the bulbs under its cover of earth for a very brief sleep and spread the bed with mulch. I must hurry if I am to reach the olive grove before it gets too dark to distinguish the dark brown olives from the earth, and the peasants drive off to town for the night. Etiquette requires that I go to say hello, and although I am genuinely pleased to see the Pirrello family, this rather feudal mantle sits most uncomfortably on my American shoulders.

  The nuances and contrasts that color our relations with the various peasants who work for us are a capsule history of Sicily in the last fifty years. The people who are picking our olives—they own no olives themselves and sharecrop a part of our olive grove rather than buy oil for family consumption—are all related to the three Pirrello brothers whose father was a sharecropper for Tonino’s grandfather. They are tireless workers—at the grape harvest it is hard to find other people who are willing to work in the same crew with them and maintain their murderous rhythm—and have managed with great sacrifice and frugality to accumulate a certain capital: some of the land they cultivate now is their own, and each brother has transformed his small one-room house in Alcamo into a two- or three-storied building. Cicco still keeps a mule, but more out of habit than necessity, since he has a car now for going out from Alcamo to the fields to work, and Nito has a tractor.

  Apart from harvesting the olives, they don’t really do very much work for us anymore: as one by one the old vineyards on the property that had come into the Simeti family together with the Pirrellos as part of my mother-in-law’s dowry ceased to produce, the sharecropping contract was abolished, and now the peasants work only on a daily wage basis, pruning and tying up the new vines on the land that now belongs to my brother-in-law.

  Cicco, the eldest of the Pirrello brothers, is small and white haired, prematurely aged and bent by a lifetime of hoeing under the Sicilian sun and wind. Whenever I see him out of his element, seated at home during a visit or in church during a funeral, I am struck by his awkwardness in repose, his inability to relax in a chair, his very limbs expressing their impatience to be back at work. Nito once drove our tractor from one vineyard to another for us at the end of a long day of grape harvesting. A flat tire delayed us, and when we finally arrived to pick him up, we discovered that while he waited he had cut down all the weeds around a deserted barn, “just to pass the time.”

  Centuries’ accumulation of work and technique and know-how is ending with these three brothers. They have several sons, none of whom wants to go on in agriculture. Emigration and the postwar Italian economic boom, which filtered down to Sicily only in the sixties and seventies, have emptied the countryside of labor, for the young men refuse the endless hours and thankless conditions under which their fathers labored. The few who remain command handsome salaries, and soon there will be only small farmers who do all their own work, most of it mechanized, helped out by family and friends at peak moments like the grape harvest, and large-scale capital-enterprise farmers who can afford to hire labor on a year-round, full-time basis. Tonino’s race is dying out too; the middle-class farmer who is really just a small-scale absentee landlord has little place in Sicily’s future, and Francesco and Natalia will face some difficult decisions when they inherit the farm.

  Meanwhile Tonino and the Pirrello brothers move tentatively about amidst echoes of former relationships. Having known Tonino since he was a baby, the Pirrellos have always addressed him with the familiar tu form. He refused to do as his mother wished and ask that they give him the formal address when he assumed direction of the farm, and he often greets them half-jokingly in the same manner that they, out of habit ingrained by centuries of servitude but also courtliness, often greet him: Baciamo le mani—We kiss your hands. He feels guilty because he has neither the time nor the natural inclination to control and to discuss at length their work, but they tend to take this as a sign of neglect and indifference rather than as evidence of his trust.

  Tonino at least grew up in a world in which this relationship was still natural. I have no such past to temper the awkwardness I feel in coming on them like the lady of the manor as they work, and the hoeing that seemed arduous while I was planting my bulbs now appears a capricious fancy, decorative and unproductive. Consider the lilies of the field, I tell myself as I approach the olive trees. The Pirrellos quickly allay my discomfort with the warmth of their greetings, their expressions of wonder at how tall the children have grown (Francesco overtook them all by the time he was twelve, and Natalia is headed in the same direction), and their concern for my mother-in-law’s health. I navigate safely the perilous waters of their kinship, linking the right wife and children to each brother, and remain there picking and chatting with them until they decide to stop for the evening.

  The next morning the children and I go down with baskets to the vineyard where the red grapes grow. Tonino planted this piece of land about ten years ago, experimenting with table olives interspersed with red-grape vines. Olive trees are slow growers, so it will be a long time before these trees are big enough to need all the land for themselves, and in the meantime the grapevines have come into full production. Bosco lies in an area that is famous for its white wine, the Bianco Alcamo D.O.C., and Sicily has never produced much red wine, so the choice of red grapes was a whim on Tonino’s part anyway. In the beginning the vineyard produced only a small keg of very strong vinegar each season; we have a photograph of the children in bathing suits and rubber boots stamping on the first year’s harvest, enough to fill a plastic baby bath. Once, in a moment of bitter di
sappointment, Tonino told the children that the vineyard was theirs—a rash move, since it now produces excellent wine—but fortunately they have never taken their proprietorship very seriously.

  The grapes have long since been harvested, however, and it is the olive trees that demand our attention. There aren’t very many olives, since some trees don’t bear at all yet, but patient searching fills up two baskets with large olives ripened to a dark reddish purple that will turn black in the curing. The olives I picked early in October when they were still green were soaked in water and then put down with oregano and fennel seed in a brine salty enough to pass the universal test of floating an egg. These I will spread in fruit crates and sprinkle with coarse salt to make the bitter juice drain away and then, next Sunday, I will dry them off one by one and put them into jars to be covered with newly pressed oil.

  Outside the kitchen door two quince trees grow, a reminder to me each time I look out that the jam season is not yet over. Each fall I struggle against the wind, the passersby, and the suspiciousness of my mother-in-law (she would much prefer me to pick them green and useless than to see some thief enjoy them ripe) to keep the big fuzzy quinces on the trees until they have properly ripened to a bright yellow. This year I have won, and the ripe quinces are transported to Palermo with us to be turned into jam and into cotognata, a thick paste that is dried in molds and then cut into slices, a favorite Sicilian sweet. One of the prettiest products of the Sicilian ceramic tradition are the cotognata molds, shallow pottery bowls with designs in relief on the bottom—fish, flowers, or a fancily decorated M for the Virgin Mary. I like them so much that I use the ones I have all year round as ashtrays, and my cotognata has the simple flat form of an ordinary dessert plate.